In my Human Seasons, I awoke to the first cold morning of fall, and I thought that this just completed Edna St. Vincent Millay musical piece would be just the thing to release and write about today. Oddly, I had started working on the music for this in the midst of summer. Millay’s poem is one of those that sits up on the page asking to be sung, and from such temptation I’d worked up the basic musical idea back in a time when I could hop on a bicycle just wearing the clothes I was wearing around the house. This morning I needed a wind-proof beanie, three layers across my torso, and I had to wiggle into tights. An old man getting into tights is a rickety procedure, a vignette unfitting association with carefree bike rides.

I asked myself yesterday “What did this song need?” How dressed? How many layers? I have been presenting a lot of songs recently featuring acoustic guitar, and the tracks I had from summer were just my voice and guitar – acoustic, yes, but at least there was some variety in that it was my large-bodied 12-string. I pick the 12-string harder than most, hitting the strings with more of the flat-pick surface. This produces a bell-like clang, and I thought I’d underpin that sound with some gamelan gongs. I then added a bass line and thought about a top-line riff. For some reason – woodwinds,* and I played the left-channel part using one of my sampled “Virtual Instrument” libraries with my MIDI pickup guitar. I tried to mix this oboe part to a realistic level as it would be if this was an actual acoustic ensemble playing this live instead of myself playing track by track in a “one-man-band” format. The gamelan gongs? I wanted them distant, as if they were outside the tavern window in the scene of Millay’s poem. The final mix of the song works best on headphones or modern ear-buds, so go ahead and put those in your ears if you have a set handy when you listen.**

If you’d like to read the full text of Millay’s poem, here’s a link to that.

In these musical choices I was trying to bring out the mystery I sensed in Millay’s words. “Tavern”  could be read superficially as a desire to run a bread-and-breakfast or the like, perhaps somewhere in the Maine of Millay’s childhood. A nice enough way to understand the poem, but Millay put in something that undercuts reading it as a New York Times style section feature on charming getaways: a repeated reference to this inn she envisions being specifically for “grey-eyed people.”

If one searches for what “grey-eyed” might signify, you’ll get the usual cold under-contextualized information that search engines offer up. Grey is a very rare eye color. OK, is Millay saying she’s going to market her inn with some “Think Different” focus on gathering unusual people, perhaps the artists, writers, and bohemian figures of her youthful 1917 Greenwich Village times? Not impossible, but why then does she write about learning from the grey-eyed “long ago.” Is there something else about having grey eyes? There are results that say that eye color is supposed to be a sign of wisdom, including some that report it as an epithet applied to the famously wise Greek goddess Athena. OK, she learned something from the grey-eyed, but that seems an obscure way to say that, though evoking an air of generalized mystery with this grey-eyed matter seems to be part of her intent. The whole casting of her tavern in the poem doesn’t seem selective. It’s near the top of some mountain, but it would seem to be a welcoming place for all who come upon it. Is the voice in her poem going to ask everyone to take off their sunglasses or tinted contacts to see if they’re allowed in “Tavern.”  I don’t hear those that arrive pleading at the door: “Look, my fake ID says my eye color right here!”

Another sense I got from this poem is that it was possibly in conversation with another poem, one by Christina Rossetti, her poem called “Up-Hill.***”   I don’t know if Millay knew this poem, but it’s not so unlikely. In this case then the grey-eyed are the souls ascending up some mystic mountain toward a heaven or afterlife. They are grey-eyed because their eyes are clouded in the moments after death. One other, allied, possibility for why grey-eyed: her mid-19^th century ancestors might have been pictured as early photographs, faces whose colorful eyes would all be rendered in shades of grey. Our poems, our songs, our memorialization, our celebrations around a table – these are to bring colors back to the grey eyed.

Grey-eyed in Carl Van Vechten’s photo, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Tavern”  with the audio player below. No player on your mountain? Damn your eyes, or rather the way you’re reading this blog which might suppress showing a reader – but this highlighted link will open the door, or new browser tab, with its own audio player.

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*It would have been subconsciously, but perhaps the mixture of oboe, 12-string guitar, acoustic bass, and unusual percussion may have been a ghostly presence in my mind from the times I saw an admired the musical ensemble named Oregon that used that mix of instruments.

Which reminds me of a tavern joke: An ego and a super-ego walk into a Freudian bar. The bartender says, “I’ll need to see an ID with that.”

**I used to have time and opportunity to check my mixes on various ways to listen to them. I particularly miss my old car for this, as it had a great stereo for revealing aspects of a recording mix. In my current living situation I often have no opportunity to mix my recordings on external speakers, much less give them a quality check with these extraverted noisemakers. A check I still do before release: listen to a new song on at least one pair of mobile-device ear-buds, which I assume are the most typical “hi-fi” system for modern listeners.

***If you have the time, the song version I made of Rossetti’s poem is a favorite recontextualization of mine. You can see and hear that at this older post from the Parlando Project at this link.