The Poet’s Life
Music: Edward Elgar (1857–1934) · Words: Sophie Jewett (1861–1909)
A poet sang, so light of heart was he,
A song that thrilled with joy in ev’ry word:
One press of Sing plays this song on this device (2:19) and stops after the last: the piano and the words come from the score, so a key change or a slower tempo changes no sound file.
The microphone is asked for only when you press its button. What it hears is measured and scored on this device and never leaves it; nothing is kept unless you record and save the file yourself. What is kept, and where.
The words
A poet sang, so light of heart was he,
A song that thrilled with joy in ev’ry word:
It quiver’d with ecstatic melody;
It laughed as sunshine laughs upon the sea;
It caught a measure from each lilting bird;
But, though the song rang out exultantly,
The world pass’d by, with heavy step and loud,
None heeding,
save that, parted from the crowd,
Two lovers heard.
There fell a day when sudden sorrow smote The
poet’s life. Unheralded it came,
Blotting the suntouch’d page whereon he wrote
His golden song. Ah! then, from all from all
remote, He sang the grief that had nor hope nor
name In God’s ear only,
In God’s ear only; But one sobbing note
Reached the world's heart, And swiftly,
swiftly, in the wake Of bitterness and
passion and heartbreak, There follow’d fame;
One sobbing note reach’d the world's heart,
There follow’d fame and swiftly,
swiftly
follow’d fame.
About this song
- Music
- Edward Elgar (1857–1934) (dates as OpenScore states them)
- Words
- Sophie Jewett (1861–1909) (dates as LiederNet Archive states them)
- Language
- English, as its source states it
- First published
- in or before 1907, as IMSLP states it
- Length
- 2:19
- Its source files it as
- 7 Lieder
- The score
- OpenScore Lieder Corpus; CC0 1.0, as its source states it. OpenScore Lieder Corpus (CC0)
- Offered in
- the United States, the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Canada, Australia, Jamaica, Colombia, India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand, Malaysia, Russia, Ukraine, Türkiye, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Peru, Switzerland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, Morocco, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen and Syria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, Madagascar, Venezuela
- Not offered in
- France, Mexico, Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Bangladesh, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the member states of the Bangui Agreement (OAPI), Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea, and wherever the site has not read the law
Songs to sing here are made from public-domain scores: the OpenScore Lieder Corpus (CC0), the Mutopia Project (each score's licence as Mutopia states it) and the scores in Japanese Wikipedia's articles (CC BY-SA 4.0, by each article's contributors); dates and first publications as IMSLP, the LiederNet Archive, Mutopia and Wikidata state them. Karaoke videos play in YouTube's player; live channels from the iptv-org database on their own pages; stations from Radio Browser. The piano is the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0). “K-pop” and “anime songs” are said only where a source says so. Where songs from scores are offered.