Our choir is currently practising All in the April Evening. This is a poem by Katherine Tynan set to music by the Scottish composer Sir Hugh Roberton and popularised as the song "All in the April Evening."
Katharine Tynan was born 23 January 1861 in Dublin and "Sheeps and Lambs" (which are the words of All in the April Evening) is probably her most anthologised work.
She was a friend of the poet W B Yeats and her influence on Yeats should not be underestimated; they corresponded closely during their formative years as poets, and Tynan's commitment to a simple, natural, distinctively Irish poetics was both informed by and a shaping factor in Yeats' poetry.*
Yeats commented that her poem "Sheep and Lambs, (or All in the April Evening) has "the naïveté of mediaeval song . . . a product quite as much of art as of impulse." Like Blake's "The Lamb," Tynan's lyric transforms a pastoral motif into an epiphany.
You may hear our choir sing All in the April Evening at the 11.00am Mass on Sundays during April.
Our choir always welcomes new members. If you would like to join us, then check out the contact information on this web log.
*Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 240: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets.
