My wife remarked this morning that nature is often more beautiful than it needs to be—and if you need a testimonial to that, I present butterflies. What a marvelous structure their wings are, as if the most intricately colored flowers could fly. And fly they do—and unlike birds, they often seem to have no compunctions about flying near us oversized and under-winged creatures.
This is a prelude to today’s diversion from our usual practice here of using “Other People’s Stories,” other writer’s words, for these encounters and performances. Since I wrote the words this time, I’ll have less to say about what I’ve found out about the author and how I react to their experience. Not that creative writing doesn’t lead to that sort of thing—far from it—but in a way I’ve already chosen how to present those things inside the poem that is today’s text.
I will say this instead: the course of this project, though it takes energy that I might apply to my own writing, as helped my own poetry. As a chronic and justified self-doubter, finding the variety of strengths and weaknesses in a range of others’ work gives me hope in my own attempts—but more importantly, each time I figure out how to present and perform the variety of words (mostly poetry) for the Parlando Project, I must find what is worthwhile, what is valid, vivid, and engaging. It’s a commonplace that reading and studying poetry helps figure out how you may write it, but performing it helps you understand how to advocate for it, how to let its soul out.
In recent years I’ve increasingly watched other poets read their work. Regardless of the level of accomplishment I might recognize in their words, it’s not uncommon on all levels to hear them read it as if apologizing for the interruption, as if they themselves aren’t sure what to advocate for in what they wrote. Some do this because performance isn’t easy for many people (let me present another testimonial: my singing voice). I believe some do it because to fail with a level of over-florid reading, with too much Am-Dram-Ham, would be such an embarrassing failure. Even to purposefully aim for some anachronistic disinterested beatnik cool could be an unforgivable mistake.
Well that danger is there. I’ve heard poets read with an attitude that what they are reading is important that I don’t share.* That disconnect doesn’t make me like the poet or poetry in most cases either—but think of the automatic failure of not claiming the worthwhile nature of what we do. A danger of failure is not a license to aim for it. If performing your work as if it isn’t worthwhile is your defense, consider changing what you write so that you can more unabashedly attempt to claim an audience’s attention.
Yes, a great many poets (I’m one) are driven by doubts. Perhaps you are too. Poetry, like nature, like butterflies, is writing that is more beautiful than it needs to be. That beauty is there to illuminate those limits and doubts. Are they, limits and doubts, ugly? It depends, but illumination changes them.
Attentive readers might connect this breakfast scene with this summer’s earlier piece “Breakfast in a Pandemic.” Yes, same outdoor seating. City Lights Books is welcome to contact me for a potential chapbook “Breakfast Poems.” This month I think of the woman in that earlier poem who stoppeth one of three to ask “If you had to choose between Trump and Covid, which would you choose?” Now? We don’t have to choose!
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There’s little room left to talk about my poem, but hopefully it speaks for itself. The poem expects the reader to know two pieces of information: the proverbial “Butterfly Effect” where small things like the flapping of an insect wing can change complex systems, and the metamorphical life stages of butterflies where the lithe butterfly begins life as a devouring worm-like caterpillar. The player gadget to hear my performance is below.
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*My teenager, a Douglas Adams reader, has asked when I’ll feature Vogon poetry here, but then they think most of what I present here is close enough to Vogon poetry in effect. Poetry audiences, or those that fear being press-ganged into being part of a poetry audience, often recall Adams satire—but yes, many of us writers of poetry think of it too.
I don’t know if this is still so, but in my mid-20th century youth it wasn’t unusual for children to read some of the American 19th century worthies in ways not unlike the Young Adult books of today. So before I was old enough to take drivers ed, I’d read Tom Sawyer and a smattering of other Twain, some shorter Longfellow poems (the epics didn’t attract), and lots of Edgar Allan Poe. In a year or so I would start to read Keats and Blake and move on to literature as school assignments.
Other than availability, I’m not sure what drew me to the Poe. The gothic stuff may have attracted me for its examination of human oddness, and I recall the hyper-rational side of the detectives or adventure stories like “The Descent into the Maelstrom” pleased me. His poetry worked well enough, though I was not yet committed to poetry.
Did the antiqueness of the settings and language bother me? I don’t remember that being an issue. No, the world of Poe or Twain wasn’t the world of colorful tailfins and gray TV, but it seemed tolerably close to my own.
My Poe phase didn’t last long, and even finding out that some of the French poets who would intrigue me in my 20s had first or second-order influence from Poe didn’t make me want to re-read him. My casual judgement that I’d rather read something else has continued, and so today’s piece, “A Dream Within A Dream” is Poe’s first appearance in this project.
Mad, bad, and daguerreotype to know. Edgar Allan Poe.
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“A Dream Within A Dream” is not overly florid nor is it chained to a too-simplistic, toe-tapping rhythm. Grains of sand and tormented seashores may be over-used tropes, but this poem doesn’t pass these off as priceless revelation, only handy counters to make the poems stark point: that since life is transitory itself, those things that one creates within it, however placed in the scale from practical to fanciful while alive, are in a final judgement as substantial as dreams. It’s implied that—like many a poet, writer, or artist—the poem’s speaker’s life work was judged while alive pretty close to the not-useful, fanciful side. The poem’s tone seems sad about that, but then it has that subtle valedictory dig: the same holds true for those who think they are doing more important things.
This poem was first published in the last year of Poe’s life, and as Poe struggled to earn enough as a professional writer, it’s ironic that the Wikipedia article on this poem says that the next month the owner of the publication ceased paying writers.
This Wednesday, October 7th is the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death under mysterious circumstances where he was found dazed and confused in Baltimore and died after a short hospitalization there. Oddly, I didn’t know that I would be writing this on the eve of that anniversary, so maybe some of Poe’s sand grains have washed up here?
Poe still attracts musical settings, so maybe it’s time for me to weigh in with my efforts. It’s been awhile since I ventured into the world of synth created sounds, which are the dream created inside the dream of music. So, today’s piece let me use some weirder analog synth sounds that make no claim to reality. Though the featured sounds today are entirely digital, created inside a modern computer, they are imitating analog synthesis waves with grains of ones and zeros, and I got to wiggle knobs to control parameters in real time just as the early analog synth players did.
Silicon music, like Poe’s grains of beach sand, the anonymous Internet sea will take almost as quickly as they are made. So before they slip away, you can use the player below to hear my performance of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream Within A Dream.”
My time and energy is short tonight, so this post will reflect that, but I wanted to present this supple poem by William Butler Yeats written near the end of the 19th century, but, I think, applicable in our American year 2020.
How many of us as couples, as friends, as families this year have felt the need to be support and comfort for them; or in return, needed that from others? A year of shocks, changes, challenges, revelations, of noise and force. Cold deaths, hot fires. This past Tuesday’s national image of that televised, trampled talking over, the faulty assay that volume and audacity can just as well substitute for truth. That absurd equation that one can talk the longest and take the least responsibility. Is that what words are for, is that all they are for?
Two images, one with physical mass, one auditory are weaved through this short poem. The massive one is the horse and in its plural sense, the Horses of Disaster. In Yeats’ 19th century the horse was still a large part of military force* and one of the largest animals that would be encountered daily in much of his British Isles. Our age may reduce that intimate knowledge. Someone like me, never part of the horsey set, who kept his small purse away from horse racing stakes, and rural in his youth in a tractor and truck sense, can only rely on fairs, events, and exhibitions to feel something of what Yeats’ horses meant to his contemporary reader. To stand, as I have, near a draft horse or to watch horses run at full gallop, and to imagine in my sparser memory that collection of momentum and force, is to feel something Yeats intended to convey.
But there may be accrued in the sparcer memory, that lack of daily familiarity something too. The horse, the Horses of Disaster, are more mysterious, more occult in daily fact than they may have seemed to a reader in 1896. One can often get out of the way of an actual run-away horse—our modern Horses of Disaster, not so much.
“Vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire” The picture is “Self Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)” by Leona Carrington, a Surrealist who deserves to be better known.
The other image, the auditory or conceptual one the poem weaves, is tumult—uproar, confusion—by definition, unpredictable, illogical, chaotic, the body and hooves one cannot sidestep easily.
So, I read this poem as a spell—and Yeats artistry is striking regardless of the efficacy of magical beliefs or practices.** There is after all, the spell we cast with those we love and comfort. Come, the world will carelessly or concertedly hurt you, but I will not.
The player to hear my performance of Yeats’ “He Bids His Beloved Be At Rest” is below. Don’t see a player? Then you can use this highlighted hyperlink. Wishing you justice and mercy.
We’re going to travel some ground today, so hang on, it’s a longish post.
Today’s piece has an anonymous author. I’ll write a bit about what I can determine about it later on below, but a lot of the time when I write here of my encounter with the words I use as part of this project, I’ll write at least something about the author. Best as I can determine, I care some about who wrote the words.
I write myself, I know the particulars of my life, my outlook and working beliefs, my location in geography and society enter into what I create—but on the other hand, I don’t seem to care overly much about what these largely dead (and sometimes forgotten) writers believe. I’ve performed religious pieces infused with a variety of religious belief, and writings from Romantics, Stoic Classicists, and Modernists from a range of tribes. As I mentioned recently when I performed a piece unconcerned with matters of ethnicity by odd-ball all-purpose British racist Charles Kingsley: I seem open to occasionally read and perform work by writers whose political and social beliefs are for good reasons widely objectionable, and in that Kingsley post I brought up the foremost case in literary English-language Modernism: Ezra Pound, a man who became an overt fascist,* and who aided the other side in one of the most clearly-cut good guys vs. bad guys wars in history.
Would I choose differently if I was presenting work by living writers? Well, I have used words here by folks who are my contemporaries and whose personal lives include considerable faults and whose politics do not align with mine—evidence there again that I may not care enough to exclude the work that seems of interest and worth because of the author’s lack of personal rectitude. I certainly understand why someone would choose to boycott a living artist for unacceptable writings, beliefs, or actions. Once I accept that, it’s an easy extension to extend allowances for boycotters to advocate for others to do the same. Fair enough, even if the specter of blacklists and non-persons can be said to follow. I do worry that the slippery slope tends to flow more forcefully from the heights of power and can be lubricated with money or blood.
But mostly my choices here are selfish. If a work pleases or interests me, if it works for the purposes of this project, I’m likely to favor it regardless of its author. It’s unlikely that I could imagine a work that itself frankly advocates racism, homophobia, or sexism** as having any pleasure for me, while still I know the authors of the words I use are not unfree of those faults. And yes, I worry that some of the tracks of those faults carry into the work I use. Often when I write about those faults in my reactions to the pieces used here, I caution the reader, as I caution myself, that for what we see clearly as condemnable in dead writers, the future and others will potentially find justifiably equivalent wrongs and faults in us.
But then I also believe, roughly, in the progress of civilization. If we find it unlikely that any fault of our time could be equal to the evils of slavery, near chattel status for women, or human sacrifices for religious beliefs, I ask you only to note that intelligent people, capable of creating art that still pleases us, believed or tolerated such things, and we must consider this part of what humans are capable of—even us.
So, what about “Truth Never Dies?” Well, it doesn’t advocate for any particular thing. It does make a claim that activists or advocates who have lost a battle or a war might find comforting, and in its own non-specific way it’s similar to a contemporary motto suitable for coffee cup or t-shirt and attributed to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe it.” And so even for activists working in expectation or demand for immediate action, a Plan B of some future realization of the truth of their request is not unwholesome. No effective movement can exist that can only live and breathe in the environment of success or potential success at hand, it must endure and continue after defeats.
Kenne Turner’s blog will show you some fantastic color photography. The early 20th century Adventist publications which featured “Truth Never Dies” made do with monochrome.
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As best as I can tell, this poem was likely written in the first decade of the 20th century. It seems strongly associated with American Protestant Christian circles at the time of its writing. The earliest appearances of “Truth Never Dies” I have found are in a 1909 copy of The Northern Union Reaper an Adventist quarterly from Minneapolis, a Seventh Day Adventist publication from Maryland, and several other Adventist publications from that year.*** I’ve also found it in the Adventist The Sabbath Recorder of 1915, a New Zealand based Adventist magazine of 1917, and another Adventist book of 1917 which associates the poem with the visions in the book of Daniel chapter 8.**** A Carolina Mountaineer newspaper from 1917 includes it, and it appears as a prominent embroidered forward to an 1914 issue of Sky-Land, a North Carolina magazine replete with Lost Cause Confederate reverence. The Scientific Temperance Journal quarterly printed it in Boston in 1918. The Bottle Maker, a 1921 trade union publication for yes, bottle makers, (motto: “Labor Will Not Be Outlawed or Enslaved”) features it. A 1922 issue of The Railway Expressman from Wisconsin, another union publication, does so too. A 1941 The Preacher’s Magazine from the Church of the Nazarene in Kansas City includes it. An Ohio-based United Brethren church bulletin of 1947 has it too, and attributes it to another, Methodist, publication.
The poem appears as from two to five stanzas in these publications, and sometimes it’s subscripted with a note “selected” that indicate that it may be a longer poem. I chose to perform just the first three stanzas, if for no other reason than length today.
From the earliest appearances, and some of the imagery of the poem, my guess is that the author was associated with the Adventists. The Venn diagram of Adventist practices and beliefs, temperance, early union movements, and the connections between Nazarene, United Brethren and Methodism fill in the edges.
The most surprising appearance of “Truth Never Dies?” Easily, the November 14, 1981 episode of Saturday Night Live. In a skit with Joe Piscopo and Mary Gross. Piscopo plays Nick the Knock, costumed as if a puppet, in a sort of a riff on the casual comic violence of the Punch and Judy sort of puppetry. After smashing a music record playing the skit’s opening music, he’s visited by a fairy played by the meek voiced Gross who tells him “I like to think I see beauty in you that others are too busy to notice. So I have brought you this: The gift of truth.” The fairy then speaks two entire stanzas of “Truth Never Dies.” The puppet Nick ends the skit by exclaiming to the poetry fairy “I know what I’m gonna do to you, you little thing! I’m gonna eat your spine!” Which he does as the fairy screams. Rather than Daniel 8 or temperance, I’m going to assume that cocaine had something to do with the inspiration of this skit.
In the end, because we don’t really know who wrote “Truth Never Dies” and because the author doesn’t feel that they need to outline the particulars of a Truth they feel will become self-evident, the poem remains a statement that can be applied quite broadly, and with an effectiveness that remains more than a hundred years after it was written. Readers will not know if they agree or disagree with that unknown author’s vision of Truth, which brings me to one of the things I think I’ve discovered about poetry during this project: that though ideas, including controversial ideas, may be presented in poetry, poetry is more about the experience of ideas than those ideas themselves. So this poem works, not because it’s a religious catechism, a political platform, or a sophisticated philosophical treatise, but because we can read or hear it and share with it’s unknown author the feeling of a truth that will prevail even if it seems underrepresented among the powerful in the world today, or if there are acceptable substitutes for truth that can be endlessly manufactured for short-term tactical benefit.
The player gadget to hear my performance of “Truth Never Dies” is below. Don’t see the gadget. Well, you can then truthfully hear it with this link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Oh, there are mitigating factors if you had to defend Pound in some debate for points. It was the messier, less efficiently genocidal Italian brand of fascism he aided. It’s sometimes claimed it was all caused by a misunderstood dilettante’s interest in fringe economic theories. And there’s the “everybody was doing it” defense too: he’s not the only literary person of his time to have connections and sympathies to fascism. But let’s face it, if there’s a mid-20th century cancel culture, Pound would be someone we’d want to de-platform. Right now I happen to be reading his ABC of Reading, a book he wrote in the 1930s largely about poetry, coincidently the same time he was finding or writing about his fascist affinities. He has a number of insightful things to say about the art of poetry and the enjoyment of it in this book so far, and I’ve come upon more than one thing where what Pound writes is simply a clearer statement of things I’ve discovered in my own life and during this project about the art of poetry. But he’s also repeatedly making a point I disagree with: that it’s imperative to choose the good art from the bad, and he’s going to tell you how to tell. It’s easy to think that a stubborn insistence in a singular insight into things leads one to larger distrust of democracy along with the ability to hold contrary opinions based on a fixed hierarchy of value.
**Authoritarianism or calls to the purity of violence are heavy lifts for me too.
****Besides Biblical prophecy of the fall of nations, another reference I found to a similar rhetorical flourish was from a 1841 abolitionist speech by Thomas Paul in Boston where he, responding to the notion that abolition’s cause was dying out, said: “Dying away?….Truth never dies. Her course is always onward. Though obstacles may present themselves before her, she rides triumphantly over them….”
Forever and Crumbling. So if I disregard the outsized number of listens Hopkins’ poem got, this summer’s most liked and listened to was another Emily Dickinson-based piece where I joined two short and somewhat abstract Dickinson poems into what I thought was an interesting combination. I called my combination “Forever and Crumbling.”
“Forever” talks about the localized instant we all live in, that Dickinson lived in too. “Crumbling” talks about decay happening from a chain of those instants. In theory the two pieces, that Dickinson wrote separately, change/enlarge when related to each other. That and my musical performance of them is my contribution. Your likes and listens say that some of you found that worthwhile.
I’ve sat here most of the morning and now into the afternoon trying to write something useful in addition. If we are charged to “live in the moment,” 2020 makes that especially challenging. If we seek to halt and reverse the cobwebs and rust on our ideals and nation, like Dickinson’s “Crumbling” it will take more than an instant’s act. Nothing I wrote today brings what I can believe adds anything to our instant in time or repairs our current state of dilapidation. When I first posted this piece in the first week of June, I felt the same awkwardness. I have faith (or is it only habit?) that art and beauty have worth, but it takes a lot of faith some days.
Wishing all of us justice and mercy, and some wisdom to see a balance of those.
4. A Mien to Move a Queen by Emily Dickinson. My teenager, who suspects my musical output as being less than relevant, taunted me gently by asking as I started writing this post if I was presenting Winnie the Pooh. By “Pooh” we may decode: something simultaneously old and immature.
“No I said. I’ve never done any A. A. Milne.”
“Who’s A. A. Milne?”
“He wrote Winnie the Pooh—oh wait, I have put Milne in a post. I was comparing an Emily Dickinson poem to Sixties psychedelic rock lyrics. I compared a poem of hers to a Milne/Pooh poem that was used by Jefferson Airplane in a song: ‘If I was a bird and flew very high…”
“Bored already.” He playfully rejoindered.
I can’t quite give you the flavor of this, but there’s a quicker wit in my house than mine even when my wife is out of town.
Well that post just happens to be the one that introduced the 4th most liked and listened to piece here this summer: Dickinson’s “A Mien to move a Queen.” And yes, it is a strange poem, though it draws me in none-the-less. It may be one of Dickinson’s riddle poems, like “May-Flower” though I can’t solve its riddle. Dickenson may be looking at another flower, or a bird or insect.
Well sometimes one can just let the mystery be.
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3. Long Island Sound by Emma Lazarus. One of the least-famous poets with one of the most-famous poems ever presented here, Lazarus is the author of a sonnet associated with the Statue of Liberty: the “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” one. That was a poem of hope, and I’d say to, so is this one that she also wrote. Therefore, I made “Long Island Sound” into a happy little summer song.
Did a carefree song seem out of place in our 2020 summer? Or was it something we wanted to visit, if only for the minute and 46 seconds the performance lasts? Well, in any season there is happiness. Seething anger, somber reflection, these may seem to be the noble emotions this summer, but joy is not an ignoble emotion.
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The American Midwest loves lawn signs. I ride by many each morning in my neighborhood: election candidates, Justice for George Floyd, roofing contractors, high-school sports teams, and a couple of these too.
2. The Poet’s Voice from speeches by William Faulkner and Bob Dylan. Our current American age is suffering much from insufficiency of empathy. What kills or mutes empathy? Fear is one thing. One sentence in William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech struck me so strongly when I read it this year. Not the one I was quoted so often by teachers then my age now, back when I was nearly 20, the one that went: “Man will not merely endure: he will prevail”—this, somehow, they seemed to be saying would come from literature, of all things, stuff written largely by dead men. Thanks pops. Now let me return to being worried about which of us is going to run out of tuition money or the will to continue this hidebound education, and get drafted. No, that one was Faulkner’s hopeful future, a future we haven’t yet made obsolete. Instead, it was this sentence, earlier in the speech, the one that should make you sit up and take notice:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”
Old man Faulkner, though he may be as imperfect as the brightest and most perceptive person today, is really saying something there. In the context of his entire speech he appears to be referring to the particular fear of a nuclear war, but then how strange that he calls this “so long sustained” when nuclear arms were around the age of our current Presidency’s term when he gave this speech in 1949.
So, if fear mutes empathy, let us acknowledge that carrying someone else’s song in your ear, your mind, your mouth, is the pathway through which it can infect your heart with empathy.
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I’ll return soon with the post revealing the most popular piece here this past summer. That’s going to be a somewhat complicated story.
Maybe it’d be a good time to remind new readers what the Parlando Project does. We take various words, mostly poetry, and combine them with original music. Because seeking allowance for performance of words still under copyright is difficult,* we tend to use words in the public domain.
One common response to this capsule description is, “You mean songs?” And yes, sometimes there is singing of words. When I say I compose music for this, particularly when I use orchestral instruments, there’s an expectation of the general field of art song. And when I say a particular performance is me speaking the words in front of a, sometimes live, band, there are generational expectations from the beatnik to the hip hop.
The Parlando Project is not solely any of those things, and in the midst of the various combinations it comes up with, I’d say I’m still seeking, even now after hundreds of pieces and more than four years, for new ways to combine music and words. Song, art song, and the wide range of spoken word with music all seek this too. I just try to do it allowing for exploration of all three.
So, let’s get on to the continued countdown from 10 to 1 for the most liked and listened to Parlando Project pieces last summer.
7. Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Just like with music-music, word-music is a subjective thing. One person’s sublime poetry for sound and flow may not please another at all, and one person’s favorite recording or performance might be torture or boredom to the next listener.
I can sometimes be both persons above, one day liking the complex, the next the simple, in one mood seeking sweet consonance and another day a rich bitterness, or bursts of enormous energy sometimes and then expository slowness other times. It is a good thing that I have access to a range of musics.
But even if for sound alone, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins tends to please me. It may help that it’s not an overexposed sound. Most modern poetry has an easy conversational feel with underlying iambs, while Hopkins feel for stresses with varying valleys and rills between loosens the lockstep yet retains a home footfall.
A great many of you listened to and liked my performance of Hopkins’ “Inversnaid” this past summer. As I mentioned in the original post, this is not a poem that is easy to understand through and through for meaning, but the sound of it can carry one over the spillway of it’s wilderness waters.
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A falls at Inversnaid. There’s a hotel right next door to these. Hopkins’ nature was to well, use nature to represent things. Sandburg often chose to use human-made things to explain humans.
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6. Good Night by Carl Sandburg. I remain immensely comforted by the range of Sandburg’s poetry. His concern for the commonality of people echoes one of this project’s goals: “Other people’s stories.” His eye for injustice is clear. Modernism has a reputation for solitary individuality, but in his best short poems he harnesses the continued freshness of Imagism with these concerns.
In times like these I can find in Sandburg the things I need, the necessary skepticism, the necessary hope, the indispensable love that allows endurance and asks for change.
One thing I’ve encouraged during this project’s presentation of Sandburg is to assume that he, no less than other Imagists, deserves deep reading. Obviously, many current aesthetic theories say this is true of anything, but I think for whatever it’s worth that it’s likely part of Sandburg’s intent in his best early work too. If he wrote in a garret in Paris. If Sandburg never achieved any of the general renown he accumulated (renown the times and mores eventually spent down during the 20th century) scattered scholars might look for that.
Is there something below the surface of his “Goodnight?” I think he, the artist, chose the trains and steamboats as the leaving things of sleep and its longer analog rather than conventional poetic things from a palette of sur-human nature. Now technological progress has added a nostalgic note to his specifically steam-powered leaving. That may be an accident the author didn’t intend, giving this poem an extended feeling, extending out down the track, down the river, over the horizon.
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5. The Workman’s Dream by Edgar Guest. Does deep reading of poetry tire you? It does me sometimes. Does the chance that you’re missing the “real” meaning of some piece embarrass you once, and once is enough? Are you brave enough to laugh at Dorothy Parker’s smart-set summation** of the coolness-factor of “The Workman’s Dream’s” author and still listen to him today?
Like Sandburg, Guest was a working journalist. Unlike the entire Sandburg, Guest’s poetry retains a certain work for hire desire to please over the coffee. Can we allow poetry to do that (sometimes) and not harm it? Well for Father’s Day I performed this one. The bold-face heading to each top ten listing will open in an new browser tab the original post I wrote, where in this case you can get the chords I used if you’d like to sing this one yourself.
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*My estimation: mostly because the poetry rights holders don’t care to seek this—and even when asked. This indifference is also mixed with some concern that it could reduce their control over how the material is presented and any (improbable) revenue.
**”I rather flunk my Wasserman test then read a poem by Edgar Guest” said Parker.
Emily Dickinson didn’t mind at all being strange or odd in her poetry. For example: today’s poem, which after an opening line quickly goes off to a strange place and then stops at eternity in less than 40 words. In one of her best-known poems, “Because I could not stop for Death,” she saunters at a mid-19th century horse-drawn pace to eternity. But with today’s poem, rocket ships couldn’t leap as fast. Here’s a link to the text of “As if the Sea should part” if you’d like to follow along.
It’s not only pace that separates Dickinson’s mode of expression in these two poems. On the face of it, “Because I could not stop for Death” begins as a somewhat friendly and homespun gothic, a tale of a clearly metaphoric trip told with homey touches in its imagery: children playing at recess, harvest-ready fields, the early chill of oncoming autumn night. “As if the Sea should part” starts with a miracle which might draw us in, as if we’re to be following Moses across a divinely separated sea. But it’s not exposed seabed and astonished crabs we’ll see as the sea parts. It’s “a further sea.” And we’re off!
And then that further sea parts, and reveals another sea. This is all beyond the speed of even these few words, it’s almost beyond the speed of thought or revelation. Li Bai’s mental presumption conjured up some drinking pals here a few posts back, but Dickinson’s poem progresses too fast to present itself as mere fancy. Dickinson had a famous two-factor definition of poetry: a goose-bump chill that would make any clothing as insufficient as a gossamer nightgown outdoors in autumn—or the top of one’s head being taken off. This poem intends or portrays the later.
I get the impression, the three seas are only a start, this first parting of the waters to reveal other waters which also then part. Why does she stop at three, other than it being the minimum to establish the pattern? I found one reading that thought the capitalized “Three” in the poem may be intended as the Christian Trinity,* the three-form God-Head. Many of Emily Dickinson’s family and cohorts took to revivalist Christianity, something that Emily specifically resisted. We also know that she knew of and may have had an affinity for Transcendentalism, an American movement that sought a more immanent, first-hand spirituality based on the soul of humanity and the revelations of the book of nature. The experience in this poem seems more the later than the former, but “presumption” is a key word at the center of the poem. After all, the poem begins with “As if…” telling us this is imagined, not direct observation. This entire poem is her mental flight, and not a meditation on the seashore, which after all would be a hundred miles from Dickinson’s Amherst.
The final stanza is extraordinarily difficult to follow. “Periods of Seas” starts out gnomic, and the best I can extract from it is that Dickinson’s mental traveler is now also seeing not just the measure of oceans’ surfaces, but the measure of time when seas might dry up or form—but all those eons are being seen in a measure of three words. Even at the speed of her vision she realizes that there is no way to reach all the shores of seas in this infinity, for at the greatest speed of mental travel they will part and show new seas.
Am I reading too much into this? And is this just so much mystical “Oh, wow man, I just realized the universe is like infinite, ‘cause even if you reach the edge of it, what’s beyond would be just more different universe still forming, you know!” Well serious cosmology and humankind’s sobering spiritual awe at nature, or its foggy analog of too many bong hits, Electric Kool Aid, and cups of Chinese wine, it’s all a little too much. Dickinson had a garden to keep, food to prepare, poems to write and sew into little books. Why did she write this down? To briefly remind herself of what happens when the top of her head lifts off perhaps. She may never have intended it be something for us to read and understand, though we might still hear it, somewhat muffled, over the roar of parting seas.
“I believe I’ll go out to the seashore, let the waves wash my mind, Open up my head now just to see what I can find” are not lines from Dickinson’s poem. Also kids: drugs and vinyl are both overrated. Sarcastic political activism is too, but which of these are necessary?
A tip of the hat (or is that the top of my head?) to the Fourteen Lines blog where I came upon this Dickinson poem for the first time. Today’s audio performance of Emily Dickinson’s “As if the Sea should part” relates to the particular foggy analog of mid-1960’s psychedelic music, a little like something that Country Joe & the Fish would fry up back then. The player gadget to hear it is below for most of you, but if you don’t see the gadget this highlighted hyperlink will also play the piece.
*This reading then has the “presumption” as the poem’s speaker scoffing at the presumptive idea that the God-Head could be limited to merely three manifestations.
My teenager asked me what I’m doing, overhearing me test-shouting the text of today’s piece Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England 1819.” Here’s a link to that text if you want to follow along.
“Shelley, the perfect English Romantic Poet, might have been the most radical poet of his time. In matters of sex, religion, politics, aesthetics and philosophy he was explicitly in opposition, and he was chased out of England for it. But still he was capable of being driven to a new level of outrage by events.”
“The ruined statue in the desert guy?”
“Yeah, that’s him. And some readers forget that as beautiful a poem as “Ozymandias” is, that there’s real anger behind it—but you can’t miss the anger in this one.”
So, once more I’ll write today about the process of translation. Not from some other language to English, but from perfectly fine English and a past you may not know, to our time. “England 1819” is 201 years old, and some superficial particularities could make it seem a little antique. It wasn’t so when it was written—and it just so happens that the rhymes of history may make some other specifics in the poem ring out to a reader or listener today.
What was it that set Shelley’s anger to a new heat point? In August 1819 a large meeting was planned by reformers in Manchester England. The organizers seemed to take care that it be a powerful but peaceful demonstration. Chief among the subjects of the event: the granting to ordinary people the ability to vote.* On the appointed day, tens of thousands turned out, including whole families. Many were dressed in their “Sunday best” to hear speakers in St. Peter’s field, an open space in Manchester.
I’ll summarize the brutal details of what happened. Given that it’s 1819 there are no photographs, no bystander cell-cam video: one has to read and use imagination to picture it. Mounted police were sent to arrest the speakers and organizers on a temporary stage in the midst of the large field while the event was happening. Their horses were slowed and tangled in the crowd (described as so dense, that the hat brims of the attendees touched one another). This led to additional mounted militia and eventually regular soldiers that had been held in reserve to be sent against the crowd. Sabers were used as the horsemen struck out at those surrounding them, and of course the horses themselves were trampling on those who fell or were in the way. In some ways it seems miraculous that “only” eleven were killed. Hundreds were injured: men, women, children. The organizers were arrested, convicted, and jailed.
Wikipedia says the banner the woman on the left is holding that day would say “Let us die like men and not be sold as slaves.”
One of those who was injured, and who died a few days afterward from his wounds, was a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, the famous British victory of four years earlier. With bitter irony this event was called “The Peterloo Massacre”
It took a few weeks for the news of this outrage to reach Shelley who was in Italy. That September he wrote today’s sonnet, along with a longer work “The Mask of Anarchy” and a third poem in a song form. Despite that he was already a self-exile abroad, none of them were published during his lifetime. There was a reason for that: merely publishing an account of The Peterloo Massacre was considered sedition and libel. He asked his friends to not publish them, for there was a real risk of imprisonment for them to do so. The poems were circulated informally, and finally published over a decade later after Shelley had died.
“England 1819” then has some specifics. The stabbed in line 7, the army in line 8, and the sword in line 9 aren’t only metaphors—they are, albeit second-hand, reportage. Adjusted for the speed of communication in Shelley’s time, they are roughly as immediate as a blog post, just in the form of a sonnet.
What about the possible correspondences of history/rhyme I mentioned? I could write how in some way that the charges laid out against the 1819 English government power structure and the insidious way they used their power could be compared to my country in 2020. I almost wrote just such a section—but anyone who remains in my audience can likely do that for themselves. I personally found some of them as bitterly ironic as the decision to call the 1819 event Peterloo. You may think otherwise. Feel free to do your own translation today. As to prophetic Shelley’s concluding “glorious Phantom,” the Phantom that may emerge from the graves created and filled by those that then recognize they are dying themselves: what tempest will that day bring? A cleansing, nourishing rain, applauded in the leaves of trees, or a hurricane?
The player gadget to hear my performance of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England 1819” is below.
*For over half-a-century in my life, voting is something that would seem uncontroversial—at least since the heroes of the Civil Rights movement, some of whom died to make that mundane. Indeed, how many radicals have I met who invoke the saying that if voting could really change anything, they’d make it illegal. Now I hear that statement backwards. If there are current efforts trying to impede voting, reduce it, and denigrate it—there must be powerful people afraid of some change it could bring.
This Monday is American Labor Day, so here’s a poem about work from Robert Frost: “Mowing.” Like a lot of Frost’s early poetry it’s an example of words that want to sing, and so I’ll sing them today. Also like a lot of Frost’s best poetry it seems simpler than it means. It doesn’t scare the reader or listener away with its surface, but if you really stop to ask why it says exactly what it says, a more complex and subtle work emerges. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem if you want to follow along.
That about scythe’s it up. NC Wyeth’s “The Scythers”
On first reading this poem is a description of mundane work, mowing a field with the time-honored hand tool: the scythe. How old is that tool? It goes back to the pre-historic days of agriculture, to the making of the first blades for that, and then for the battles over that. It was still in use in Frost’s youth, in the late 19th century. And in the house I grew up in, in the mid-20th century in Iowa, in the crook of a tree in the big back yard there was a scythe caught there, high above my head, stored, captured, put away until it seemed as natural as any other part of the tree.
So, the poet or his speaker counterpart is mowing with a scythe. And since that poet is Frost, we get sound imagery regarding that work. The Imagists contemporary with Frost didn’t require their images be visual, but as a practice they strongly preferred them to be. Frost, on the other hand was the audio guy, not the word painter. The scythe as it swings and cuts, punningly sighs, but Frost has it as a whisper. About this, the poet is curious: if it’s whispering, what’s the scythe (and by extension, the work the man and tool are doing) saying?
The maker of this video on Frost’s poem demonstrates the sound
Frost’s poet says he doesn’t know. Interestingly he speculates it might be talking about the heat of the workday, and the phrase he uses “The heat of the sun” may well be reminding him of a poem from Shakespeare we recently featured here: “Fear No More.” Shakespeare’s poem and the connection with the scythe has with the “grim reaper” brings in an overtone of death.
And then he speculates it may be about why it’s whispering, why it’s not speaking something out-loud and plain.
Next the poem moves on to the realness of work inherited from its physicality. It’s not a dream or imagination without consequence. And it’s not some fairy story. Gussying it up with such trappings or comparing it to mental work with no embodiment would be enervating it. The poet instead calls this work “earnest love.*” This isn’t some secret crush, even with the whispers and all, this is actually sweaty stuff.
Frost then drops one of his better-known mottos: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” That line is end-stopped with a period, and set off that way it’s a statement that real work on real things is superior to mere fancy. But this is Labor Day, so I performed it as if there’s a colon after “The fact is” and that its meaning carries on through the period and into the last line. The sweet dream then is the scythe whispering and the concluding matter of the hay.
What is the scythe whispering?
Because after all, there’s an unanswered question from the poems opening. What is the scythe whispering? It’s something intimate it wants to say, that good work says, but doesn’t say. It says it is—paid or unpaid, self-employed or employed, the labor of a poet or of a farmer, done grudgingly or with joy, appreciated or overlooked—it says it is done with love. Not the magic love, not the imagined love. The earnest love.
Happy Labor Day to the readers and listeners here. Wishing you good work and earnest love.
The player gadget to hear my performance of Robert Frost’s “Mowing” is below.
*This section of the poem, lines 10 through 12 in this unusual sonnet, is the most mysterious. I had to perform it before I could figure it out. There may be an overtone here (something that English folksong often made a practice of) of farm work being used as a metaphor for sexual lovemaking. There are snakes, flowers, and then named flowers that are “orchises” which are a genus of flowering plants and also etymologically testicles. Frost made a choice for what flowers he names, and his poet/scyther could have scared off a field mouse or chipmunk not a snake.
On the other hand, he may be just saying that like all artists his work will fail, some flowers get scythed. And the snake could be a Garden of Eden thing.
Or the flowers and snakes may be the beauty and the evil of what we do, that the Grim Reaper scythe will cut off.
Frank Hudson 