Audiobook · read by volunteers
Saint Distaffs day, or the morrow after Twelfth day
Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
Read by Caitlin Teresa, Betsie Bush, Sarah Jennings, Kristin LeMoine, Sibella Denton, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Jc Guan, Mary Mac, Esther, Lee Ann Howlett · 14 chapters · 12 min
About the book
What happens on the day after Twelfth Night? In the old English calendar, it was the time when the Christmas festivities ended and people went back to work. Robert Herrick, the seventeenth-century poet of country customs, wrote a lively poem about this day, with its playful rivalry between the spinners and the men who tried to set fire to their flax. Here fourteen recordings offer the poem, each in its own way, bringing out different shades of humour and warmth. The poem is short and brisk, in rhymed couplets, so each version lasts under a minute, and the whole collection runs only about fifteen minutes, but it is full of the sights and sounds of a long-vanished rural holiday. Listening to the voices in turn, you can enjoy Herrick’s sly wit again and again.
Introduction
Robert Herrick was born in London in 1591 and died in 1674. He was an English poet and a clergyman, who served for many years as the vicar of Dean Prior in Devon. His only major collection, Hesperides, was published in 1648 and contains more than a thousand poems. They cover love, religion, the changing seasons and the customs of country life, and are written in a light, elegant style.
Herrick belonged to a group of poets known as the Cavaliers, who wrote with grace and wit and who admired the older poet Ben Jonson. His poems often celebrate the rituals of the year, such as May Day, harvest and Christmas, and Saint Distaff’s Day is one of these. According to tradition, the day was named for the distaff, a tool used for spinning, and it marked the point at which women returned to their work after the holidays. The poem pictures mischievous games and a good deal of gentle teasing.
This collection is part of a weekly poetry project at LibriVox. In each project, volunteers record the same short poem, so that listeners can compare their readings. The present edition brings together fourteen versions and lasts only a few minutes in total. It is a good way to enjoy an old English custom, to hear a delightful seventeenth-century poet and to notice how different voices make the same lines new.
Do not expect solemnity. Herrick enjoyed the rituals of country life and the humour in them, and his lines run along like a rhyme. Whether you listen to one version or all fourteen, you will come away with a small but vivid picture of a world in which even the end of the holidays was celebrated with a joke.
Public domain
Robert Herrick died in 1674: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text