Audiobook · read by volunteers
Song of Wandering Aengus
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Curtis Brown, Chip, Caroline Morse, Dilini Jayasinghe, Erica Kuntz, Gail, Graham Williams, Ted McElroy, Kristin LeMoine · 18 chapters · 25 min
About the book
A young man goes out to the hazel wood because a fire is in his head, catches a little silver trout, and sets it down to cook, only to find a glimmering girl calling his name and vanishing at dawn. William Butler Yeats turned that brief fairy encounter into one of his best-loved lyrics, a poem of longing that ends in a lifetime of seeking. In this collection, LibriVox volunteers read it eighteen times, recorded for St Patrick's Day in 2006. Every voice brings something different, a softer hush, a faster pulse, a more wistful ending, and together they show how a few short stanzas can carry so much. Roughly twenty-five minutes of Irish enchantment, made for listening again and again. Gentle, strange and beautiful. A true gem.
Introduction
William Butler Yeats, who lived from 1865 to 1939, was an Irish poet and playwright and one of the central figures of twentieth century literature in English. He was a leader of the Irish literary revival, a movement that drew on the country's myths and folklore, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. His early poems, collected in the 1890s, are full of fairies, wandering heroes and a dreamy longing for a world beyond the visible one.
The Song of Wandering Aengus belongs to that early phase. It was published in 1899 in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds and takes as its hero the Irish god of love and youth, a figure from Celtic mythology. The poem is brief and simple in form, but it is built so cleverly, with its mix of concrete detail and dreamlike transformation, that it has remained one of the most popular poems in the language. It is also a favourite for musicians and composers, who have set it many times.
This recording is a multi-version collection from the weekly poetry project, made for St Patrick's Day in March 2006. Eighteen readings of the same poem fill separate chapters, and the total running time is about twenty-five minutes. The range of moods from one reading to the next is part of the charm. You might listen to a handful, or work through all eighteen as a kind of miniature festival of interpretation.
It is an enjoyable way to spend a short break, and a lovely introduction to the poet's early manner. A single hearing may be enough to remember the shimmering girl and the apples of silver and gold, but the variations from one reader to the next reward every extra listen.
Public domain
William Butler Yeats died in 1939: 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