”The Song of Wandering Aengus” by William Butler Yeats
Though I am old with wandering
through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her
hands;
and walk among long dappled grass,
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
and the golden apples of the sun.
……………………
https://www.openculture.com/2012/06/rare_1930s_audio_wb_yeats_reads_four_of_his_poems.html
The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats was born on this day in 1865. To mark the date we bring you a series of recordings he made for BBC radio in the final decade of his life.
“I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm,” says Yeats in the first segment, recorded in 1932, “and that may seem strange if you are not used to it. I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage out of some lecture hall, where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse!’ It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.”
Yeats made ten radio broadcasts between 1931 and 1937. In the first reading, from 1932, Yeats begins with his famous early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which he once called “my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. ” He recites his verse in a somber tone that contemporary poet Seamus Heaney once described as an “elevated chant”: