LibriVox volunteers bring you 15 recordings of:
“The Smoke Upon Your Altar Dies” by Rudyard Kipling (1868-1936).
This was the weekly poetry project for January 6th to January 13th, 2013.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kilping was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined. (Summary from Wikipedia)
This project is catalogued at:
LibriVox and Internet Archive.
The poem text can also be found at this address.
My recording of this week’s poem has a running time of 1m 16s.
You can listen to it now, by clicking the following play button;
or feel free to download it in a choice of 3 formats:
mp3 128kb : mp3 64kb : ogg vorbis
The entire project, featuring all 15 readers of this week’s poem, is also available at this link.
The zip file size is 7.9MB with a total running time of 16m 29s.
All the files contained inside the zip are mp3, all with a bitrate of 64kb.
In addition to the readers, this audio book was produced by:
Book Coordinator: David Lawrence
Meta-Coordinator/Cataloging: David Lawrence
The Smoke Upon Your Altar Dies
(To whom it may concern.)The smoke upon your Altar dies,
The flowers decay,
The Goddess of your sacrifice
Has flown away.
What profit, then, to sing or slay
The sacrifice from day to day?“We know the Shrine is void,” they said,
“The Goddess flown—
Yet wreaths are on the Altar laid—
The Altar-Stone
Is black with fumes of sacrifice,
Albeit She has fled our eyes.“For it may be, if still we sing
And tend the Shrine,
Some Deity on wandering wing
May there incline;
And, finding all in order meet,
Stay while we worship at Her feet.”
