The Yak

Listen to:

The Yak (:43)

by Hilaire Belloc 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

The Yak

          As a friend to the children

                             commend me the Yak.

            You will find it exactly the thing:

          It will carry and fetch,

                        you can ride on its back,

          Or lead it about

            with a string.

          The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet

            (A desolate region of snow)

          Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,

            And surely the Tartar should know!

          Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got,

            And if he is awfully rich

          He will buy you the creature--

          or else

                  he will not.

          (I cannot be positive which.)

The Fiddler of Dooney

Listen to:

The Fiddler of Dooney (:56)

by William Butler Yeats

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,  

Folk dance like a wave of the sea;  

My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,  

My brother in Moharabuiee.  

  

I passed my brother and cousin:          

They read in their books of prayer;  

I read in my book of songs  

I bought at the Sligo fair.  

  

When we come at the end of time,  

To Peter sitting in state,  

He will smile on the three old spirits,  

But call me first through the gate;  

  

For the good are always the merry,  

Save by an evil chance,  

And the merry love the fiddle  

And the merry love to dance:  

  

And when the folk there spy me,  

They will all come up to me,  

With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’  

And dance like a wave of the sea.  

Speak the Speech

Charles Cattermole, Hamlet and the Players (1878)
Folger Digital Image Collection

Listen to:

Speak the Speech (3:09)
Hamlet's Advice to the Players

from Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Hamlet Act III, scene II

Hamlet advises the traveling players on how to perform the speech he has written for them to insert into the evening’s entertainment, The Murder of Gonzago.

HAMLET 

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to

you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,

as many of your players do, I had as lief the

town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air

too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;

for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,

the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget

a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it

offends me to the soul to hear a robustious

periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to

very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who

for the most part are capable of nothing but

inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such

a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it

out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

...

HAMLET 

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion

be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the

word to the action; with this special o'erstep not

the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is

from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the

first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the

mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,

scorn her own image, and the very age and body of

the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,

or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful

laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the

censure of the which one must in your allowance

o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be

players that I have seen play, and heard others

praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely,

that, neither having the accent of Christians nor

the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so

strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of

nature's journeymen had made men and not made them

well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

And let those that play

your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;

for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to

set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh

too; though, in the mean time, some necessary

question of the play be then to be considered:

that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition

in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.

The Mad Gardener's Song

Listen to:

The Mad Gardener's Song (2:10)

by Lewis Carroll

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

He thought he saw an Elephant,

That practised on a fife:

He looked again, and found it was

A letter from his wife.

'At length I realise,' he said,

The bitterness of Life!'

He thought he saw a Buffalo

Upon the chimney-piece:

He looked again, and found it was

His Sister's Husband's Niece.

'Unless you leave this house,' he said,

"I'll send for the Police!'

He thought he saw a Rattlesnake

That questioned him in Greek:

He looked again, and found it was

The Middle of Next Week.

'The one thing I regret,' he said,

'Is that it cannot speak!'

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk

Descending from the bus:

He looked again, and found it was

A Hippopotamus.

'If this should stay to dine,' he said,

'There won't be much for us!'

He thought he saw a Kangaroo

That worked a coffee-mill:

He looked again, and found it was

A Vegetable-Pill.

'Were I to swallow this,' he said,

'I should be very ill!'

He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four

That stood beside his bed:

He looked again, and found it was

A Bear without a Head.

'Poor thing,' he said, 'poor silly thing!

It's waiting to be fed!'

He thought he saw an Albatross

That fluttered round the lamp:

He looked again, and found it was

A Penny-Postage Stamp.

'You'd best be getting home,' he said:

'The nights are very damp!'

He thought he saw a Garden -Door

That opened with a key: 

He looked again, and found it was

A Double Rule of Three:

'And all its mystery,' he said,

'Is clear as day to me!'

He thought he saw a Argument

That proved he was the Pope:

He looked again, and found it was

A Bar of Mottled Soap.

'A fact so dread,' he faintly said,

'Extinguishes all hope!'

Never Give All the Heart

Listen to: 

Never Give All the Heart (:43)

by William Butler Yeats

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

Apostrophe to the Ocean

Listen to:

Apostrophe to the Ocean (1:36)

by George Gordon, Lord Byron

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

    There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

    There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

    There is society, where none intrudes,

    By the deep sea, and music in its roar;

    I love not man the less, but nature more,

    From these our interviews, in which I steal

    From all I may be, or have been before,

    To mingle with the universe, and feel

  What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

    Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!

    Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

    Man marks the earth with ruin--his control

    Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain

    The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

    A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,

    When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,

    He sinks into thy depths, with bubbling groan--

  Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

    Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

    Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

    I wantoned with thy breakers--they to me

    Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

    Made them a terror--'twas a pleasing fear;

    For I was as it were a child of thee,

    And trusted to thy billows far and near,

  And laid my hand upon thy mane--as I do here.

The Windhover

Listen to:

The Windhover (1:08)

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

The Windhover:

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning's minion, king-

     dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Fal-

          con, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and

     striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstacy! then off, off forth on swing,

     As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:

          the hurl and gliding

     Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the

          thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a

          billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

     No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down

          sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.