Listening time: under 3 minutes. 

The first time I heard this poem was when my mother recited it to my step-father in the kitchen. She had tears in her eyes but I wasn’t sure if it was because she was moved by the poem, or by the fact that it manifestly fell on deaf ears and that her dreams had been trodden underfoot. I suspect both.

I later heard a friend recite it to me after one of her parents had sent it to her by letter in Taiwan.

It’s one I have learned by heart and the first of a series of poems I have begun sending to family, by post, handwritten with a few notes added for context or for the non-native English speakers among them.

Source: W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) – The Cloths of Heaven

Photo credit: FelixMittermeier at pixabay