Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

Mingled the moonlight with daylight—the last in the narrowing west;
Silence of nightfall lay over the shallowing valleys at rest
In the Earth’s green breast:
Yet a small multitudinous singing, a lully of voices of birds,
Unseen in the vague shelving hollows, welled up with my questioning words:
All Dorsetshire’s larks for connivance of sweetness seemed trysting to greet
Him in whose songs the bodings of raven and nightingale meet.

Stooping and smiling, he questioned, “No birdnotes myself do I hear?
Perhaps ’twas the talk of chance farers, abroad in the hush with us here—
In the dusk-light clear?”
And there peered from his eyes, as I listened, a concourse of women and men,
Whom his words had made living, long-suffering—they flocked to remembrance again;
“O Master,” I cried in my heart, “lorn thy tidings, grievous thy song;
Yet thine, too, this solacing music, as we earthfolk stumble along.”