There is a startling intimacy in reading a poem aloud, for if poetry is a way of speaking (it is), then a poem can only be fully appreciated by reading it aloud, and as the American poet, Jane Hirshfield advised, “[by] voicing it repeatedly, feeling its weights and measures, sounding its vowels, noticing where in the body each syllable comes to rest, tasting the consonants’ motion through lip and tongue. Then saying it again, this time hearing the meaning, and hearing how music and content not only support one another but are indistinguishably one.” (Jane Hirshfield, from Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, HarperCollins, 1997).

With this in mind, I present three poems, two by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Mary Oliver, read by Oliver herself, and one by J.R.R. Tolkien, read by the British actor, Tom Burke.

Mary Oliver, ‘Wild Geese’ (read by herself)

Mary Oliver reciting her poem, ‘Wild Geese’ (1986), at a live poetry reading in 2012. Mary Oliver sadly passed away in January of 2019.

Mary Oliver, ‘When I am Among the Trees’ (ready by herself)

In this poem, Oliver shares her love of the natural world. She does not see this attachment as a diminishment of her self-sufficiency. Instead, she says that in presence of nature, among the trees, there is a magical sense of mutual giving in which attentiveness is recompensed with the sheer generosity of nature in all her beauty.

J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘All that is Gold Does Not Glitter’ (ready by Tom Burke)

We have a few earlier versions of this famous poem as Tolkien was drafting it. These are recorded within The History of Middle-Earth, in The Treason of Isengard. As far as I know, this is the original version of the poem:

All that is gold does not glitter
all that is long does not last;
All that is old does not wither;
not all that is over is past.

And then later the last verse was added:

Not all that have fallen are vanquished;
a king may yet be without crown,
A blade that was broken be brandished;
and towers that were strong may fall down.

Tolkien made changes along the way and was apparently pleased with the final version, which we appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring. Here is the poem, read by Tom Burke.