I’ve worried a bit lately that I’ve been doing too many Parlando pieces presenting sad poems. It’s likely that mood is part of my nature despite living a life I’m grateful for — perhaps even more so because I live a life I’m grateful for, and I’m therefore aware of its temporary nature that I cannot keep. Because of this, I’ve kept a quote, a suggestion, from Kurt Vonnegut close to me:

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

Vonnegut wrote this in one of his last books, one that might again speak to my mood in this state of my nation and its ideals, A Man Without a Country.

At my age, it’s no longer morbid to think about death. This past weekend my wife and I went on a goth date, and visited one of the fancier local cemeteries. We mostly went for the 1910 main chapel building full of early 20^th century William Morris/Pre-Raphaelite derivations which echo back to the start of the era I mine for a lot of the poetry here.*  The cemetery was taking part in a special open-house event held around the Twin Cities offering more access for the public to “behind the scenes” parts of the facilities.

We walked by famous early citizen’s gravesites, some elaborate with statues and such, and then too the many small vaults with names and dates on their file-cabinet sized faces. One room’s space was maximized with rows floor to ceiling across the room — so much like a library, even up to having a rolling metal staircase that would facilitate viewing the topmost. Instead of spines one views in those tall rows names, and partner’s names, and those bookend years. Every one of them, like every book I suppose, expects that there’s someone left to see and remember them, and I paused to consider that that wasn’t always so.

In another part of our tour, another portion of my nature was stoked. Walking by the cemetery’s crematorium, I noticed this homely implement hanging on the wall. As the old prayer book has it: ashes to ashes, dust to dust — and that passage now had a corollary: and dust to pan.

Part of the main chapel: tiled mosaics, stained class, intricate motifs, capitol mottos. Crematorium: clean, professional, and an inexpensive hanging broom and plain white plastic dustpan, the same model as hangs in our home pantry.

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Oh, it was a beautiful Spring day, full of decoration, full of evidence of grief, inscriptions of loss — and to the puritan, evidence of vanity. Life is so big, or so small, we must laugh at it.

Which brings us to today’s poem I’ve performed with music: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.”   I had finished this piece earlier this Spring, but at first held it back because I feared it was too much like some other musical pieces I was working on — and then after those coincident issues expired, I started to worry that it was too much-more sadness. Revisiting it this week, I now think no, it’s not just bleak — it’s a bald-faced statement of honest feelings about death and loss. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem.

In writing music and preforming this poem, am I disrespecting the author who titled her poem “…Without Music?”   I think Millay’s intent here was to speak against sentimentally decorating loss. Loss has patterns, resolutions, codas, and rests — and music too, even if it has repeat marks, has an ending measure — but music’s part of the equivalence is so often beautiful. In such ways fine poetic word-music, as well as that with express melodies, may speak over loss, interrupt it. Perhaps my rough-hewn voice with its limits and plainness, its lack of precise or elaborate lyricism, is apt for Millay’s mood here?

You can hear that musical performance of Millay’s poem with the audio player below. What if you see no player? That’s likely because some ways of reading this blog suppress showing it, but this alternative highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*A few years back here I did a series on “before they were Modernists” with early poems by some Modernist figures. More than a few had roots in those retro-hipster movements of the late 19^th century, and many a free-versifier had carried around a Swinburne volume in their youth.