Audiobook · read by volunteers
Secret
William Cosmo Monkhouse (1840–1901)
Read by Ancilla, Brian J. Witt, Caliban, icyjumbo (1964-2010), Clarica, Cory Newb, David Barnes, Ezwa, Glamour Diva, JemmaBlythe · 17 chapters · 29 min
About the book
A short poem called The Secret, by William Cosmo Monkhouse, a Victorian poet and critic, comes to us here in seventeen different recordings. Each is the work of a LibriVox volunteer, and each reader makes their own choices about pace, pauses and emphasis, so the same lines can take on a slightly different feeling every time. Hearing the versions side by side shows how much a reader contributes to a poem. The collection was made for the weekly poetry project of November 2007. Every reading is brief, and the whole collection lasts only about half an hour, so you can listen to a single version or to all of them in turn. It is a pleasing choice for anyone who enjoys Victorian verse, short poems read aloud or the quiet game of comparing performances.
Introduction
William Cosmo Monkhouse lived from 1840 to 1901. He was an English poet and critic who worked for many years at the Board of Trade, wrote a life of the painter Turner and published several volumes of verse. His poem The Secret is a short lyric, and its title promises something quiet and personal. Monkhouse is little read today, which makes a recording like this a quiet way to meet him.
Because the poem is brief, it suits the format of the weekly poetry project that LibriVox volunteers run. Each week a short poem is chosen, and many readers record it independently, so the result is a group of separate versions. In this case there are seventeen, each labelled with the reader’s initials, and the whole set lasts about half an hour. The week in question was that of 4 November 2007, when LibriVox, founded in 2005, was only two years old.
The pleasure of such a collection lies in comparison. The same lines, read again and again, take on different shades according to the reader’s pace, emphasis and tone. A listener may notice that familiar words acquire new meanings on repeated hearing. For those new to poetry read aloud, it is a gentle lesson in how performance shapes interpretation.
The poem belongs to the Victorian tradition of short lyric verse, and its brevity makes it easy to follow on first hearing, and easy to hear again. Today it is worth hearing as a chance to discover a lesser-known poet, and for the pleasure of listening to one text through many voices.
Public domain
William Cosmo Monkhouse died in 1901: 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