Songs of a Wayfarer


Songs of a Wayfarer is a song cycle for baritone and piano composed by John Ireland 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:
  1. "Memory" ; "Memory, hither come", from Poetical Sketches )
  2. "When Daffodils Begin to Peer"
  3. "English May" ; from The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vol. I )
  4. "I Was Not Sorrowful" ; "Spleen", from Verses )
  5. "I Will Walk on the Earth"
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 and Alan Rowlands 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".