The Song of the Old Mother by William Butler Yeats
For Christmas my dear sister made me a gift of Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006. I have listened to a track here and there, but didn’t want to immerse myself until I had time to really savor. Perhaps I just needed to make time. I’m feeling lazy and it’s cold outside so I’m holing up to enjoy the poems. So far I’ve made it to tracks 5 & 6 on disc 1, and I have to post the PotD already. I may have mentioned how I love Yeats’s poetry (ha!), but I am blown away to hear him express his poems. I don’t merely say read because he gave an introduction, in which he said that he’s deliberately not reading them as prose because it was very hard to get what he wanted to say into verse form. There are recordings of The Lake Isle of Innisfree and the one below. His renditions are somewhere between speaking and singing and are really quite amazing, to me. I feel like I’ve taken something new and different from these poems now. I want to hear him read (only for lack of a better descriptor) all his poems!
The Song of the Old Mother
By William Butler Yeats
I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,
And their days go over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress:
While I must work because I am old,
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.
Wonderful!
I love those recordings, too, though to my ear not all poets are equally skilled at making their verse sing. Still, it’s fascinating to listen to them give voice to their words.
One of my favorite singers round about my parts mentioned at a recent concert that she’s in the midst of making a record devoted to new musical settings of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems. Talk about intriguing!
You must keep me posted about the ESVM album! What is the singer’s name? Does she have a website? She must be fabulous!
I don’t think it will be available until February 24th! Ha.