Tag: poetry

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Something for Thursday

Sticking with the theme for this month (which I’ve only just now decided was a theme for this month), here in National Poetry Month, I’ll continue exploring the intersection of music and poetry. Back when I was a serious music student, I sometimes thought about setting favorite poems to music, including what is likely my favorite poem of all time, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. This complex and meaning-laden poem has thrilled me ever since I first read it, likely in 11th grade:

It was many and many a year ago,
   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.
 
I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
   I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
   Coveted her and me.
 
And this was the reason that, long ago,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
   And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
   In this kingdom by the sea.
 
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
   Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
   In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
 
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
   Of those who were older than we—
   Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
   Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
 
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea—
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

So when I went searching for settings of “Annabel Lee”, one of the first ones I discovered was…a bluegrass setting.

And it works. Listen for yourself!

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Tuesday Tones

In keeping with National Poetry Month, here is one of my favorite poems: “The Splendour Falls” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who also happens to be my favorite poet.

The splendor falls on castle walls
   And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
   And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,
   And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far from cliff and scar
   The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
   They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
   And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

I don’t remember not loving that poem. And here it is, set for chorus by Frederick Delius. I love the way the setting captures the repeated “dying, dying, dying….” with falling chords and delayed resolution.

 

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National Poetry Month, 1

April is National Poetry Month. I can’t promise I’ll share a poem every day, but I’ll give it a shot. First up is a short poem that packs quite a punch the more you mull it over:

The Lover in Winter Plaineth for the Spring

Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

 

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An Irish Poem

For St. Patrick’s Day, obviously.

All the words that I utter,
    And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
    And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
    And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
    Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

–William Butler Yeats

 

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“Returning feet and voices at the door”

A poem by JRR Tolkien. This appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, recited by Bilbo just after he has given Frodo his old sword and his old shirt of mithril. Remember that when Bilbo left The Shire, early in the book, it was in hopes of venturing far and wide again, perhaps as far as Laketown and the Lonely Mountain again, places he had visited in his earlier adventures. But once he was past the influence of the One Ring, all of his accumulated years caught up with him and he lived out most of his old age as a guest in Rivendell.

This poem speaks to me a little more each time I encounter it, and I consider this any time anyone questions JRRT’s skill as a writer.

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So much depends upon a red cableknit sweater

I don’t know
about a wheelbarrow

but

things also depend

on a red
cableknit sweater

old and worn
and soft

like the blue-and-white
striped overalls
paired with it

(Apologies to William Carlos Williams)

There used to be a store in the malls, back in the 1990s, called Britches Great Outdoors. I didn’t shop there often, which I kind of regret because the two things I own from that store, I like a great deal. One is a pair of overalls that is among my favorite pairs of overalls ever, and I periodically look on eBay to see if any are hitting the market (no dice so far, ever). The other is this red cableknit sweater.

Sweaters are always amazing and wonderful, and everyone should own a few, as far as I’m concerned. Sweaters are kind of a “workhorse” article of clothing, in that they serve multiple functions, being both warm and usually looking good. But an old cableknit sweater is a special pleasure. In truth it may not be so warm as it used to be, as the sweater ages and the knit starts to loosen ever-so-slightly, so more air gets through it than before. And maybe there are starting to be a few fraying spots, only really noticeable if you’re the one who has worn the sweater a lot and you know how it used to be. Maybe around the bottom it’s given way a bit and maybe the collar and the cuffs aren’t as tight and neat as they used to be. But that’s OK.

And maybe the sweater itself fits a little bit strangely on you now. Mine certainly does: let’s just say that I filled it out quite a bit more tightly back when I bought in the 1990s. I suppose, by definition, the sweater is “vintage”, and it feels it: there is certainly a lot more room in it, and when I wear it under a pair of overalls, it balloons out from beneath the denim more than it did years ago.

Come to think of it: there’s something to be said for your soft and aged cableknit sweater being a bit too large, too. After all, one of the under-remarked qualities of overalls is that they can give new life, through covering and restraint, to tops that might otherwise not work as well on their own anymore.

If you don’t have a slightly oversized and old cableknit sweater, get one. And if you have a cableknit sweater that you’ve been considering getting rid of because it’s not what it used to be, maybe wait out that instinct a bit. It might just age itself into a new life…especially if you’re inclined to wearing overalls.

(I wanted to take a photo for this post of me holding a poetry book open to William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”, with the sweater and the bib of my overalls showing beyond, but it turns out that I only own one poetry book with that particular poem in it, and that book splits the poem between two pages. Alas! Betrayed by kerning!)

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Edgar Guest on Taxation: a poem

Today is April 15, Tax Day! And it’s still April, National Poetry Month, so after a few minutes of Googling “poems about taxes”, here’s one that’s actually not entirely pessimistic about whole affair. I could go on for a bit about Americans and their attitude on taxes, but I won’t, except to note that somehow American conservatives have managed to convince a great many Americans over the last few decades that the thing holding them back is what government takes out of their paychecks, which is a handy way of also getting Americans to now wonder what their employers aren’t putting in those paychecks in the first place.

Anyway, here is “Taxes” by Edgar Guest, a poet once called “the People’s Poet”, and whose work isn’t highly regarded these days, if indeed it ever was; Dorothy Parker once quipped, “Id rather flunk my Wasserman Test than read a poem by Edgar Guest.” Ouch. (Yes, I had to look up what a Wasserman Test is.)

When they become due I don’t like them at all.
Taxes look large be they ever so small
Taxes are debts which I venture to say,
No man or no woman is happy to pay.
I grumble about them, as most of us do.
For it seems that with taxes I never am through.

But when I reflect on the city I love,
With its sewers below and its pavements above,
And its schools and its parks where children may play
I can see what I get for the money I pay.
And I say to myself: “Little joy would we know
If we kept all our money and spent it alone.”

I couldn’t build streets and I couldn’t fight fire
Policemen to guard us I never could hire.
A water department I couldn’t maintain.
Instead of a city we’d still have a plain
Then I look at the bill for the taxes they charge,
And I say to myself: “Well, that isn’t so large.”

I walk through a hospital thronged with the ill 
And I find that it shrivels the size of my bill. 
As in beauty and splendor my home city grows, 
It is easy to see where my tax money goes
And I say to myself: “if we lived hit and miss
And gave up our taxes, we couldn’t do this.”

(Text via)

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National Poetry Month begins….

A Ballad of Baseball Burdens

The burden of hard hitting. Slug away
      Like Honus Wagner or like Tyrus Cobb.
Else fandom shouteth: “Who said you could play?
      Back to the jasper league, you minor slob!”
      Swat, hit, connect, line out, get on the job.
Else you shall feel the brunt of fandom’s ire
      Biff, bang it, clout it, hit it on the knob—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

The burden of good pitching. Curved or straight.
      Or in or out, or haply up or down,
To puzzle him that standeth by the plate,
      To lessen, so to speak, his bat-renoun:
      Like Christy Mathewson or Miner Brown,
So pitch that every man can but admire
      And offer you the freedom of the town—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

The burden of loud cheering. O the sounds!
      The tumult and the shouting from the throats
Of forty thousand at the Polo Grounds
      Sitting, ay, standing sans their hats and coats.
      A mighty cheer that possibly denotes
That Cub or Pirate fat is in the fire;
      Or, as H. James would say, We’ve got their goats—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

The burden of a pennant. O the hope,
      The tenuous hope, the hope that’s half a fear,
The lengthy season and the boundless dope,
      And the bromidic; “Wait until next year.”
      O dread disgrace of trailing in the rear,
O Piece of Bunting, flying high and higher
      That next October it shall flutter here:
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

ENVOY

Ah, Fans, let not the Quarry but the Chase
      Be that to which most fondly we aspire!
For us not Stake, but Game; not Goal, but Race—
THIS is the end of every fan’s desire.

By Franklin Pierce Adams.

(I chose a baseball poem because as I write this, the Pittsburgh Pirates are 4-0 and are clearly on their way to their first World Series Championship since 1979. Go Bucs!)

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“My City”

I read the poem below yesterday, and its simple theme resonated strongly with me. The poet, the great James Weldon Johnson (perhaps best known for penning the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the hymn that has come to be known as “the Black national anthem”), is expressing the awful fact that death means that we will never get to see and hear the things we love again. Death doesn’t just rob others of us, it also robs us.

“My City”

When I come down to sleep death’s endless night,
The threshold of the unknown dark to cross,
What to me then will be the keenest loss,
When this bright world blurs on my fading sight?
Will it be that no more I shall see the trees
Or smell the flowers or hear the singing birds
Or watch the flashing streams or patient herds?
No. I am sure it will be none of these.

But, ah! Manhattan’s sights and sounds, her smells,
Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes
From being of her a part, her subtle spells,
Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums–
O God! the stark, unutterable pity,
To be dead, and never again behold my city.

That poem speaks, to me, a real and very sad truth. I sometimes wonder if there will come a time when I know that I’ll not hear Rachmaninoff or Berlioz again….

 

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“I will seek not the shadowy region”

In her review of a new movie about Emily Bronte, titled Emily, Sheila O’Malley cites two lines from one of Bronte’s poems:

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide.

Somehow I’d never seen that poem before, so I tracked it down. Didn’t take long: I have it in several anthologies. Here it is, in full:

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

I find myself returning, time and again, to the English Romantics and their ability to create deeply evocative and specific visions and feelings with a relative economy of words. “Grey flocks in ferny glens” conjures such a perfectly precise image in my mind in just five words, and the last stanza seems a perfect encapsulation of the smallness of the single human in the face of universal nature.

 

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