An Audio Guide to Poetry Recitation - 4. “The Lake Isle of Innis

Audio Source:
   http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems-and-performance/listen-to-poetry


Here is poet David Mason.

[voice of David Mason] "It seems to me that there is a lot you can do when you're performing poems. There is a lot of range you can have. But you got to listen the poem for a while for a few readings and decide for yourself if it's a quiet poem,  or if it's a voicetrous poem, or if it's a fast poem, or if it's slow poem, and something of that has written into the poem itself. For example, there is a famous poem by William Butler Yeats called The Lake Isle of Innisfree, or Innishfree as some Irish people say, and it always seemed to me that whatever else you can say about this poem, it's  not a loud voicetrous poem. It's probably a quieter poem. So when you try to say it, you might want to say it with some sense of the quietness of the language."

Now the actor Anthony Hopkins reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree".

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
by William Butler Yeats
[Read by Anthony Hopkins]

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.