NOT SINCE Dylan Thomas read his own work has there been a voice as compelling as this. Long Live Jeremy Irons! And Thanks to YouTube…

Perfect read! Thanks for sharing!

Wonderful Jeremy ,you capture the essence of the poem. You must have Celti blood in you!!

Great jeremy

WONDERFUL❤❤❤❤❤
BEAUTIFUL POEM🏆🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

What a beautiful reading of this poem. I think W.B.himself would have responded, as he did on news of his Nobel award, "How much is this Irons chap going to pay me, and what is it worth!!

Love this man's voice!

Irons is always so good.

Poetry always delivers the message. Much to think about and spoken eloquently by Jeremy Irons......I actually own a pastel of a Fisherman smoking his pipe and seemingly deep in thought, done by well-known South African Cartoonist Victor Ivanoff.....Mrs. Rosa Larsen....wife of Peter in photo, left...Perth Australia

Although I can see him still—
The freckled man who goes
To a gray place on a hill
In gray Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies—
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped it would be
To write for my own race
And the reality:
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved—
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer—
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelve-month since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face
And gray Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark with froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream—
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, “Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.”

This is for “Gerry” below. You don’t make sense. I think you don’t know what a cadence is. You certainly don’t know apostrophes or their appropriate use. A display of ignorance like this is not a recommendation of your wit. I’m betting you never read a poem out loud for any audience anywhere. If you had you would have acknowledged this quite beautiful reading by Jeremy Irons.

This is his pennance for messing with Kung Fu Panda.

There’s a habit amongst poetry readers of imposing this curious  mournful tone and misplaced lilt to poetry.
No matter the poets intent or the readers interpretation, that cadence is employed. Then lauded, as automatically, by those who ‘enjoy that type of thing’.
I wonder did Jeremy muse quietly about the psyche of a man near daily death yet who spurns the cloying sanctuary of small minds in a small village. And why.
Or maybe his ‘one size fits all’ cadence is a comment of itself.

Not a good reading, Mr Irons does not seem to understand what he is reading, so disappointing

I found it easier to listen with my  eyes closed, so as to be less aware that Irons is reading, not declaiming.
Disappointing.