''Songs of a Wayfarer'' is a

song cycle A song cycle (german: Liederkreis or Liederzyklus) is a group, or cycle (music), cycle, of individually complete Art song, songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a unit.Susan Youens, ''Grove online'' The songs are either for solo voice ...

for baritone and piano composed by

John Ireland John Benjamin Ireland (January 30, 1914 – March 21, 1992) was a Canadian actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in ''All the King's Men'' (1949), making him the first Vancouver-born actor to receive an Oscar nomin ...

(18791962) between 1903 and 1911, and published in 1912. It consists of settings of five poems by various poets. A performance takes about 12 minutes. The songs are: # "Memory" (

William Blake William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...

(17571827); "Memory, hither come", from ''

Poetical Sketches ''Poetical Sketches'' is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mat ...

'' (1783)) # "When Daffodils Begin to Peer" (

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

(15641616); from ''

A Winter's Tale ''The Winter's Tale'' is a play by William Shakespeare originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, many modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some criti ...

'', Act IV, Scene 3) # "English May" (

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhoo ...

(182882); from ''The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti'', Vol. I (1886)) # "I Was Not Sorrowful" (

Ernest Dowson Ernest Christopher Dowson (2 August 186723 February 1900) was an English poet, novelist, and short-story writer who is often associated with the Decadent movement. Biography Ernest Dowson was born in Lee, then in Kent, in 1867. His great-uncle ...

(18671900); "Spleen", from ''Verses'' (1896)) # "I Will Walk on the Earth" (

James Vila Blake James Vila Blake (18421925) was an American Unitarian minister, essayist, playwright and hymn writer and poet. Blake was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 21, 1842. He graduated from Harvard College in 1862, and from Harvard Divinity School ...

(18421925)) In 1919, Edwin Evans described the cycle as being "of unequal merit but containing at least one song worthy to rank with its successors". In 2007, Richard Nicholson in a review of the recording by

Benjamin Luxon Benjamin Matthew Luxon (born 24 March 1937, Redruth, Cornwall) is a retired British baritone. Biography He studied with Walther Gruner at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (while working part-time as a PE teacher in the East End) and est ...

(baritone) and

Alan Rowlands Alan Rowlands (1 March 1929 – 2 January 2012) was an English pianist (though born in Swansea, Wales) who made notable contributions to British musical life both as a teacher and as a performer. He obtained a degree in chemistry at Jesus Col ...

(piano) (1972 or 1973) remarked that the songs "clearly have a foot in the nineteenth-century, with the influence of Brahms and Stanford acutely felt, but they show any amount of artistic promise".

References

Song cycles by John Ireland Classical song cycles in English 1912 compositions {{classical-composition-stub