The great American poet Emily Dickinson writes about death a lot, so maybe I should pause for a moment to mention how inescapable the living’s experience of death was in her time and place, what with disease, injury, a deadly Civil War, graveyards within the city limits, and approaching death happening often at home.
Because I lived across the street from death? When a child, Emily Dickinson’s family did not live in the Dickinson Homestead (now the Dickinson Museum), but at another house, located across the road from the town cemetery where she would later be buried. A child is born, plays, grows up, and crosses the fence.
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The poem I’ll sing below today speaks to that. If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of “As far from pity, as complaint.” This poem is more than its message —most good poems are — but let me write down here a sentence to summarize what I read this poem as saying: rather than pity, dread, or anger toward death, a result we cannot change, we should emulate the dead themselves who demonstrate that life is not everlasting — but the predicament of dying, and the predicament of living, are everlasting.
That’s a worthwhile thought, and poems in Dickinson’s time and place were often expected to deliver a lesson. But why is this a poem, why is this an Emily Dickinson poem? An essay, a sermon, a sympathy card, a letter, a conversation all could deliver this message as well or better as 12 lines not even pentameter-long and broken with the skeleton spaces of the pervasive Dickinson dashes (as if her “trade was bone.”)
Because it sings this situation, even silently on the page. There’s a dancer’s force, a singer’s force, an instrument’s augmented force in this way of telling. If death is inevitable — as is also meter, repetition, rhyme, the flow of sound into shapes — might we be comforted by these shapes? We live. We die. The shape of life continues. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, thus it is demonstrated.
When encountering this poem earlier this summer I sensed an intra-poem image-rhyme in this poems 7th and 8th lines. A better-known Dickinson poem which attracts us with what seems like mundane charm, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose,*” has summer children playing from dawn — and at the end, disappearing over the horizon’s fence-line at sunset. That’s the continuing shape of our lives.
You can hear my musical performance of “As far from pity, as complaint” with the audio player below. If your way of reading this blog is numb to that revelation, don’t complain, I offer this highlighted link as a way to open a new tab that will have its own audio player so you can hear it.
Here’s another example of a short Emily Dickinson poem that seems in some facets simple, and yet when examined more closely still shows her uniqueness. On first reading it reminded me of a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin* “Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged at dawn.”
One might read this poem from the start as a restatement of that Franklin quote — except, Dickinson may be saying this isn’t someone’s last day, she wants to set down the situation someone’s next-to-last day. In the first stanza, it is sunrise, and the poem says that the doomed person has delight. Why? Because there is one more day before their death at the dawn.
Chord sheet in case you’d like to sing this one yourself.
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This idea is clearer in the second stanza, where again, death is clearly due — but tomorrow. There the doomed man is listening for the bird that will likely sing at the next dawn. Perhaps he’s listening to the Meadow bird in the day-before dawn more intently, knowing the next time he hears that song it will be his execution, and this is his last day to hear it in the more generally hopeful context of introducing a day, not an execution. He might choose this — after all, if he knows he’s to die tomorrow, he can be somewhat assured he will not die in that present day as the bird sings the day to begin.
The final stanza may be the oddest, but indicates that this is so. It twice tells us the mood is joyful, which would indicate that the condemned does feel assured of, and is in love with, this day — the full day before. There’s a somewhat ambiguous word-choice in the last line: “ought.” The word can be a stand-in for zero, for nothing, but it’s primary meaning is more at obligated. If we take the zero/ought meaning, or the obligated meaning, Dickinson’s poem is saying the poems doomed subject is joyful though the next-to-last morning Meadow bird has a duty to sing nothing but elegy, because the poem’s subject will accept the day with joy.
So, this is goth-mode Emily with death certain, but this is also certainly the day before the last day.
Musically I had to throw this one together quickly, but it came out OK. Though in a minor key it’s somewhat jaunty. You can hear it with the graphical player below, or if the Meadow bird’s audio player isn’t visible, you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*There’s a similar quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, and there’s this later extension authored by Terry Pratchett “They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”
I’m continuing with my examination of a pair of 1920s poetry anthologies aimed at children: 1922’s The Girls Book of Verse and the following 1923 The Boys Book of Verse. Since you’re getting so much of me this month, you may welcome a short break from my singing voice today. In its place, you’ll get the voice and guitar of a singer-songwriter from The Sixties: Phil Ochs.
Despite its 18th century setting, Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” wasn’t all that old a poem when the anthologist chose it for one of our pair of books. It was first published in 1906. As I write a bit more about the poem, and give you this link to the full text of it, you may choose to play along with the little game I’ve been suggesting as we look at this set of gendered poetry books: was this poem in the girls or the boys volume? The answer is below.
The poem is a highly romantic though tragic tale of a mysterious but altogether gentlemanly armed robber and his devoted landlord’s-daughter sweetheart. I’m unread in modern romance fiction for young adults, but the general characterization there strikes me as surviving into the present day in such genre novels. I’ll also say that I don’t know how many current young adult novels deal in deaths of the main characters, particularly violent deaths with a strong overtone of chosen death. I knew this poem as a mid-century child, and loved its rush of alliterative language, but I’d suspect that modern American sensibilities might find it’s death-wish problematic for younger readers. “The Highwayman” seems to have retained some general esteem in Great Britain at least through the end of the 20th century when it placed 15th in a 1995 survey of that nation’s favorite poems. One other late 20th century piece of evidence: a favorite singer-songwriter of mine, Richard Thompson, wrote a somewhat analogous death-of-a-romantic-robber narrative into one of his best-loved songs: “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” which was released in 1991 and is an obligatory part of his performances to this day.*
Speaking of death wishes, guitarists who hear Thompson play may be tempted to self-harm.
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Roughly midway between our anthology of children’s verse and Thompson’s song, American Phil Ochs set Noyes’ poem as a song he’d accompany with only his acoustic guitar. Ochs had made his way to the East Coast scene during the Cold War “Folk Scare” where he made his specialty the topical song. As one of the “sons of Pete Seeger” then, Ochs’ songs often commented on social issues and expressed left-wing viewpoints, and a good case can be made that Ochs was the purest expression of that. Yet, it was just such a summary that eventually would stunt his continuing reputation. His compatriot Bob Dylan could write songs like “Oxford Town” or “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” that overlap with the kind of songs that Ochs was writing at the same time — but alongside his advantages of untouchable charisma, Dylan had a knack for writing more abstract songs with a longer shelf-life, even early on.
Ochs did work on developing other modes of his songwriting. Near the end of his active recording career he demonstrated some achievements there — but The Seventies, that decade that took Americans from Nixon to Reagan, troubled Ochs greatly and made is New Frontier persona seem yesterday’s papers. The endgame of Phil Ochs is as tragic a story as “The Highwayman,” but the details aren’t ballad material, and they are everything but romantic.
But if I step back to 1964, I’d guess that Ochs recording Noyes poem was a way for him to buffer his branding as just a topical lefty songwriter. The rest of the LP it appeared on, “I Ain’t Marching Any More,” otherwise showcases those strengths that would be seen as limitations later.** I remember hearing that record in The Sixties, and I’m sure I filed the tactic it demonstrated — that you could set literary poems to music with only an acoustic guitar — away to later become an influence on this Project.
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OK, you’ve either heard Ochs sing Noyes or read the poem — maybe both, and it’s time to finalize your guesses: girls or boys book? Today’s answer: boys. I think this shows one marked difference between Noyes’ 1906, the anthologists’ 1923, and even Ochs’ 1964, Are young American boys or teens connected with anything like this level of romantic outlook today? That’s a honest question — I can’t say I’d know — but I suspect the answer is almost never. I can’t assay what’s good or bad about that change, it that’s so, without adding a thousand words to this post. Consider it amongst yourselves.
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*This is of course a side-point regarding a cracking good song, but has Thompson ever said (or has anyone ever asked) about Noyes’ poem (or Ochs setting of Noyes’ poem) as an inspiration for this song? As a mid-century-born British songwriter, Noyes might have been known to Thompson — and his original UK band’s USP was (at first) performing works by the North American singer-songwriters of Ochs generation.
**Other reasons Ochs might have chosen Noyes’ poem? Noyes was a life-long antiwar man, and in 1940 he even wrote a science fiction book with a prescient trope of a weapon that could — and did in the story — wipe out nearly all humankind, leaving only a handful who were under the surface to survive.
It’s been too long since I’ve presented a poem by Carl Sandburg here, and awhile since I had the time to make one of my “punk orchestral” pieces accompanying one of the poems.
Carl first. Unlike Frost (birthday boy today, happy birthday Robert!) I appreciated Carl Sandburg as a young person. A poem like today’s “Cool Tombs” doesn’t appear to truck with irony or express its perceptions subtly. It appears to say what it means to say. Those schoolchildren sure that poets and their literature teacher accomplices are seeking to make fools of us dense and under-lived students can rest easy with what this poem seems to be. Here’s a link to the full text of the poem, if you’d like to follow along.
I’ve made my point elsewhere in this Project that Sandburg, likely with intent, had other poetic modes. Like Frost (which Sandburg was once considered a peer to in literary merit) he’s always plain enough speaking that one can be fooled into thinking his thoughts are always straightforward. Read quickly enough, seeing only the plain-talking, “Cool Tombs” has just one thing to establish: that our selves lose and are left-loose from our deaths. Great accomplishments, great enemies, great failures — eventually, nothing.
Where’s the ambiguity? Where’s the deep reading that great poems reward?
My answer, my reading of Sandburg here, is that is to be found in American history — that history a denser poem full of every Empsonian ambiguity — and Sandburg clearly is roping in American history here. Are his choices incidental/accidental? Well, they do include things that disappear, even if like love they remain inescapable, returning things.
Other than American historians, few readers today will understand what a “copperhead” is referring to when Sandburg speaks of Lincoln, other than perhaps knowing it as a species of poisonous snake. That it was, and is — but in the American Civil War those in the North opposed to fighting the secessionist slave-holding rebels took to using an incised liberty head carved out of the mid-19th century American penny coin as an emblem of their sentiments. If you reach into your pocket now and note who’s on the current copper penny, you’ll see the head of Lincoln.* Did history write some irony there?
Civil War hero and post-war President Grant suffered from corruption among businessmen in and surrounding his administration, details now lesser-known outside of historians today. The Sandburg that wrote this poem, ex-political operative and then still daily newspaperman, knew that government corruption hadn’t disappeared conceptually. Perhaps he also knew that Grant intended to — to some degree did — try to set up a fairer settlement to those newly emancipated from slavery. In the cool tombs of history, perhaps we remember Lincoln and Grant for those efforts, even if imperfect and eventually abandoned, they were.
Pocahontas’ story, as much as can be deduced from records and oral histories, is complex, and subject from the beginning to substantial romanticization by English settlers.** An indigenous American, she married an early English-American settler, and legends of this marriage and other friendliness of Pocahontas to the English settlers are the prime reason she became a historical character to the eventual conquerors. From the First Nations standpoint, one can easily see this story rests on a vibrating matrix of love, coercion, or treason. As her story leads into Sandburg’s voice claiming for the lovers in the concluding section, perhaps Sandburg holds primarily for the first of that trio — but he and I were not there, we cannot really tell. I also don’t know Sandburg’s intent, but the previous two situations are suffused with crimes and evil: slavery, murder, corruption, and greed. Is Pocahontas’ story contrast or continuance? The poem’s text allows either reading. Perhaps the fairest reading, the one that was in my sense as I read it, is that Pocahontas’ love was tragic given how the conquest continued with so much killing and subjugation. Note too that Sandburg says a hail-the-conquering-hero parade (perhaps to the tomb?) should be examined as a vainglorious exercise.
Lincoln’s tomb in Illinois, Grant’s tomb in New York, and Pocahontas’ burial site in England.
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Is all this external exegesis based on unintended things that I’m artificially assigning to a simple or at least single-minded poem? Most modern academic readers of Frost understand him to be a poet comfortable with intentionally invoking subtext. Certainly, if this were a set of incidents in a T. S. Eliot poem with reference to metaphysical poetry, with passages in Latin and Greek referencing classical history and legend, we’d know he wanted us to consider those connections.***
But Sandburg? I’d caricaturize my sense of how Sandburg’s viewed today like this: he’s written off as a superficial popularizer of unremarkable intellect and talents. He fooled some folks earlier in the 20th century into thinking there was something there, but now we have a better vantage point.
I obviously don’t see it that way. I could be mistaken — in which case it’ll be forgotten in the cool tombs.
Carl Sandburg’s grave in Illinois. Not so grand, but it also asks us to add history to the grave. There’s a little plaque on the footing bearing the legend “For it could be a place to come and remember.”
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Alas, now again I spent more time spent writing on the words, leaving less time for the music. I recently had enough energy and assured time to try to do something with a larger group of orchestral instruments. Let me be brief. I wrote this originally as a non-harmonized melody, but transformed it into a harmonized piano part via some software that extracts harmonic ideas from a monophonic line, choosing the one that interested me the most, and tweaking it from there. The piano part then became the orchestration by another translational process of placing the piano’s range of notes with various other instruments.
If I had the focused energy or assured time, this could be a movement of a larger piece with other themes, variations, contrasts in color — but that doesn’t fit my life. I’ve come to call these short pieces, often expressing a simple musical idea by whatever means I can bring to hand “punk orchestral.” You can hear the recording of my performance of Sandburg’s words with this orchestral music using the audio player gadget you see below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*That liberty head cent had been replaced with a new design just as Lincoln was elected, though still in circulation. The new 1859 design replaced the classical liberty head profile with what? An American Indian in native feathered headdress. The current Lincoln profile penny was adopted in 1909, less than a decade before Sandburg wrote his poem.
**A couple of obscure horticultural details occur in the Pocahontas section. “red haw” is a tree that produces a crab-apple in Autumn. So too is the pawpaw, a fruit widely raised and eaten by native Americans. Sandburg oddly refers to the “pawpaw in May” which would not be a sweet, edible fruiting time for the plant in North America. Is there intentional metaphor there, or a mistake?
***I don’t know if Sandburg had this poem by Thomas Campion, which in turn was a loose translation of Catullus — but the lovers getting as much as they can while tomb-wise element was brought to mind as I newly considered Sandburg’s tomb poem.
I’m going to start off the new year 2024 with something I do less often, presenting a new piece that uses my own words. I give myself permission in part because it was engendered by thoughts of another poet, Robert Okaji, who I’ve considered as something of a kindred spirit to my efforts here since this Project began 8 years ago. Like most every blogger I can’t help but talk about myself, but when I do that I fear I become a spendthrift of boredom, so one of this Project’s mottos has been “Other Peoples’ Stories.” Yet, for all that, this isn’t Robert Okaji’s story in any summary — he’s his own poet, his own writer. I’m presumptuous, but I won’t go there. I don’t know him, though I’ve read his blog, his poetry, seen him read online once. Is that like knowing him in some way?
Many of us poets could admit that we see ourselves in a timeless guild. Homer, Sappho, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Du Fu, Yeats — they’re our co-workers. We flatter ourselves at times that we now occupy their offices. By the same conceit, I could think of Okaji as a compatriot. We live in the same country at the same time, we’ve exchanged the customary short notes over the Internet. At least once before today, something he wrote caused me to write something myself. I think I started writing translations/adaptations of classic Chinese poetry before reading his, but his approach (we both need to start from literal English glosses) ratified mine in effect.
So we poets, at the moments our heads swell up so that poetry can burst forth,* may think it’s as if we know each other, because we think we know each other in poetry. To say then that it’s like companionship, that it’s as if, is to do that thing that’s called in poetry a simile.
Every simile when examined harshly knows it’s pathetic. Every poem is not the thing it represents — even the great poems that change how we look at the thing they represent. Let all in the poetry guild admit this to each other within the walls of the guild hall.
I started writing today’s words on one of my more-or-less daily bicycle rides. In spring there may be many kinds of birdsong in my well-forested city, but in winter it may be only crows — which, as the poem describes, are quite vocal about a solitary early morning bicyclist in their midst.
Crows, ravens, big dark birds, are a death symbol of long repute. And it struck me that while we might chide ourselves for not having sufficient knowledge or understanding about death, we could just as well say that death doesn’t understand us. Living in our consciousness as if the present continues indefinitely, we don’t understand death, but death doesn’t understand that moment either. And then, we poets think we can capture the flow of consciousness and preserve it in poems. Today’s poem carries on in a series of similes and then makes a final summation of the series.
Okaji has written a group of poems over the years featuring the character of a scarecrow. Perhaps he too is riffing on crows as the death symbol, but his scarecrow is at times a comic figure too. A scarecrow is just another simile, a sort of, an as if symbol for us — and so I speak of Okaji’s scarecrow in my poem.
Scarecrow rides a bicycle in early winter mornings, and the crows object. (a note: I begat these AI illustrations with Adobe Firefly, which claims it doesn’t use uncompensated artists’ work to train itself)
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I said my poem isn’t Okaji’s story — it’s more mine partway — but if you’re like me in some ways, particularly if you want to consider those of us aged to where a compatriot’s death seems next door, then it might be as if it’s partway yours too. The admonition in the poem’s title is therefore not addressed impertinently to Robert, but to myself and perhaps others who might read or listen to this.
Woody Allen wrote a great line: “I don’t want to be immortal from my work. I want to be immortal by not dying.” We write poems, we make those “like a” statements by writing poetry. As if: in our minds we walk into those poetic offices, write our metaphors, our similes. And some day, we must clean out our offices, leaving on our desks a few sheets of paper, maybe enough to stuff a scarecrow.
Today’s performance started with two electric guitar lines I recorded early on New Year’s Day, following the tradition of trying to do things on that day that one would like to continue to do regularly the rest of the year. The two somewhat irregular riffs were spontaneous,** thinking that promise to myself required doing as much as planning. The bass line was laid down almost a day later to try to hold things together, and the decoration of the keyboard parts arpeggiating the spontaneous chord changes which had started things off, were the final tracks. Those things done, I had my rock band to declaim my sonnet “To not be scared of death that doesn’t understand us” over.
You can hear that with the audio player you should see below. No player? This highlighted link is a back-up method, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*A metaphor that sounds more like a sneeze than Athena’s birth when I re-read this.
**I fancy the right channel line played on my Telecaster has some crow-call-like moments.
Here’s another piece that has been in process for nearly a month. It’s also another that I’ve held back because I feared it would be either disturbing or unattractive. It should be apparent by now that this Project doesn’t exactly pander to an audience — what with its inconsistency and stubborn variety — but I do sincerely appreciate those who take some of their time to read or listen to it. So let me explain.
Sara Teasdale’s “Since There Is No Escape” is a piece of gothic romanticism. Since my tastes are wide-ranging, it’s not the first time I’ve touched on that strain of expression — “The Dark Cavalier” from earlier this month would be another example. These are pieces with a kind of dark beauty to them, and therein is the danger. For, at least to some, there’s a simplifying morbid pull to that kind of thing.
Do gothic pieces impel that kind of response? They have a defense. I wrote that “The Dark Cavalier” implies skeptical elements while expressing the dank promises of death. “Since There Is No Escape” might be said to go further, presenting itself as a memento mori exercise, a way of praising life by starkly expressing the inevitability of death. As an old person I’ll frankly acknowledge that the ending of any expectation of unlimited numbers of years ahead of me motivates me in getting on with what I do. At my age, my cohort of fellow art-workers near and far from me are dying off. Yes, that’s inevitable, but I’m not going to put on a big black-crepe production about it either. Let it get me off my butt and onto my work — but beyond that, those concerns could just get in the way and constrict my vision.
Teasdale means to say nearly the same thing, but with poetry it isn’t so much about what is said (unlike a book or essay) but more about what it feels like to say it. The emotional moment in this poem is stuck a bit — and it’s a short poem which contains only a moment — in the contemplation of death and the romanticism of life and song against it. If “The Dark Cavalier” sees death as a lover who promises to be faithful, a quality many lovers promise with crossed finger bones, the “Since There Is No Escape’s” singer sees death as a chief magnifier of the author’s art.
Maybe that’s so. Maybe there’s no escape from that: that we value the transience of life, love, and art because it’s transient. Memento mori is a motivator, as I acknowledge, but it can get in the way of living, which has a right to the flavor of the inconsequential and the illusionary non-obsolescence of the present.
An oft used picture of Sara Teasdale. I’m struck by the enigmatic expression.
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All this sounds like I’m dragging on Teasdale, whose word-music pulls me in, and whose poetry is worthy of greater attention. It’s not that simple. The poète maudit stance can be overvalued as the only true outlook — it’s not the only way to frame life and living — but poetry and song that expresses those emotions allows us to examine those feelings in ourselves, in others. That then is my explanation: those who believe life is richer and stranger can find value in examining and acknowledging that gothic outlook.
A few words on the music for today’s audio piece. I’d like to give a romantic explanation for the elaborate ensemble you’ll hear when you listen to it: three (count’em) three pianos, two Mellotron parts, organ, upright bass, drums, and a large mixed chorus of voices. I could write about the music trying to express the richness of life that Teasdale says she’ll miss, or that those are the choral voices of sweet and solemn death angels singing above us temporary earth dwellers.
Don’t let anyone else know, but that fair field full of folk set of sounds is due to my setting up a new more powerful audio production computer because I’ve finally started to run into issues with larger numbers of more demanding virtual instruments in some of my arrangements. This music was motivated by me layering in a bunch of those VIs to see that I’d successfully reauthorized them, and to test that the upgraded computer was able to run them at low latency settings without glitching. Perhaps this is a parable: that you can find substance while you are only concerned with the mundane, since it was freeing to play the various lines on these instruments on my plastic piano keyboard unconcerned with their lasting success.
To hear my performance of Sara Teasdale’s “Since There Is No Escape” you can use a graphical player you should see below. No player? There’s still a way, this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player. Those wanting to follow along with the text of the poem can find it at this link.
Long time readers here will know I’ve referred several times to an observation by former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall that I’ve called Donald Hall’s Law. Here’s how I’ve recorded what Hall wrote:
The majority of poets who receive prizes, notice and ample publication in their time, will be unread 20 years after their death.
If they are unread at 20 years post-mortem, their fate beyond that rarely changes, save by scattered efforts like this weird Project and its versatile readers and listeners. So, today’s piece is by one such awarded and forgotten poet, Margaret Widdemer. I can’t really claim that Widdemer is a great talent awaiting rediscovery. I fear some antiquated elements in her poetry make reading her in large doses more of an academic exercise. As an indifferent scholar with many other tasks in this project, I can only say I’ve skimmed her work. Yet, per Hall’s Law, she was a prolific oft-published prize winner. Widdemer was first published as a novelist in 1915, and in the silent film era several of her novels were adapted into movies. Her poetry has several modes and subjects, and she wrote selections dealing with social issues, including child labor and women’s suffrage. Perhaps the height of her prize-winning resume came fairly early, when she tied Carl Sandburg in the voting for the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, becoming the co-winner that year. Anyone who knows me knows I maintain that Sandburg is due for a reappraisal — but if Sandburg’s undervalued, he at least has a current value. If Widdemer was his peer in 1919, her stock has long ago dropped off the literary stock exchange.
Widdemer’s Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection was The Old Road to Paradise, and it contained a representative mix of what I’ve seen while skimming her poetry. She writes rhymed verse, and her poems often seem to have music implied in their structure and prosody — you could class many of them as literary ballads or songs. Despite this structure, I’m unaware that she’s been commonly set to music by composers.*
At least to me, the most interesting of Widdemer’s work combines that “just asking for a musical setting” structure with strong fantasy elements.** Given that fantasy literature retains cultural interest in the present day, these Widdemer poems are the ones that might have revival interest. Today’s selection “The Dark Cavalier,” included in her Pulitzer book, is one such poem. Furthermore, if it was written more recently and set to music, we’d easily see it genre-wise as Goth. It certainly risks being disturbing, the poem being spoken by a seductive Death who wishes to lure the weary or troubled listener to settle for his stable and grave-set romance. The poem’s outlook is such that one could feel that reprints should have footnotes about the 988 number established for those dealing with suicidal thoughts. Yet it seems to be one of the relatively-known of her nearly-unknown works, and it was selected in 1958 as the title for a late selected poems collection.
I didn’t know Widdemer married a cellist when I composed this, but this setting is acoustic guitar with a simple string quartet accompaniment.
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In musical performance I tried to undercut the poem’s speaker’s luring spiel, to bring out a little of the subsumed caddishness in a suitor who offers an everlasting relationship, when we know, that even for prize-winning poets, their attention will quickly fade.
You can hear my performance of the musical setting I did for Margaret Widdemer’s “The Dark Cavalier” with the audio player gadget you may see below. No player to be seen? Some ways of reading this blog will suppress that player, so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Widdemer married the year she received the Pulitzer. Her husband was also a prolific author, but it’s also said he was a proficient cellist who wrote book-length biographies of composers.
**One recent reader noted that she wrote a poem about a “Gray Magician” in “Middle Earth” before Tolkien, which indicates that Widdemer may have had some knowledge like JRRT did of Old English. I also suspect that she must have been aware of the revival of interest in older British Isles folk-music by Cecil Sharp, Francis James Child, et al.
Yesterday in our Halloween Series I mused on the appearance of ghosts in a garden with Millay’s blithe apparition. As I present today’s musical piece adapted from literary poetry, Thomas Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone,” let me start by asking questions. Many others will follow.
Do you want to see a ghost? Is that wanting part of what makes it appear?
Hardy’s poem is poised in that first question. As I have performed it as a song with music that I wrote for it, I should wonder if the words are clear enough in themselves to tell us what the situation is. Looking at the text of Hardy’s poem, I think it’s mostly self-sufficient in that regard, though some mystery (possibly useful mystery) remains if nothing else is explained.
When I first presented this in 2021, I went into the biographical specifics that engendered this poem, but for today let me just say that the “she” that the ghost is supposed to be is Hardy’s dead wife who was completely estranged from him before her death. Nothing in the poem spells that out, nothing tells us that when living she had grown to find Hardy completely unsuitable. Well nothing, save for a line that we can hear as modern idiom that Hardy may have intended only as a brief metaphor: “Her behind me throwing her shade.”
Ghost from a machine: illustration from Adobe Firefly, the AI engine that proclaims it doesn’t use uncompensated artists work.
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Such a complex ghost, or a wish for a ghost, this is!
Does Hardy want to see the ghost? Does Hardy fear to see the ghost? Can either of them speak? Are either of them changed from what they once were? Is he haunted by her, or haunted from her? All the answers are all the answers here. The curly shape of the question mark the shifting curve of an ghost manifesting.
Spontaneously when doing the vocals for this piece I decided to throw in some more answers at the end of my song in the form of “inline epigraphs” that Hardy didn’t include with his poem, but this performer did.
You can hear my performance of Thomas Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone” with the audio player gadget below. You don’t see a player? This highlighted link will make one appear in a new tab.
This is a modest little piece — a small number of words, a simple musical setting — so it may seem odd to choose it as the 700th audio piece from this Parlando Project. Well, this whole project is odd, isn’t it? You, for reading this and listening to the audio pieces are unusual. I’d say I’m odd too for taking the uncounted hours this Project has taken: looking for available words that strike me as worthwhile for performance, composing the music, performing most of the instruments, recording them, and figuring out what to briefly say about my experience of these words.
I plan to say more about reaching this milestone in a follow-up post, but I will put that off so that we can get to American author Mark Twain’s words without overwhelming them with my particulars.
I came upon this as if it was a poem written by the famous novelist, something I took immediate note of. Poets who publish novels at least once or twice aren’t extraordinarily rare. Established novelists who take to writing poetry may be slightly more unusual, but there are examples. The two arts are unlike enough that the list of those whose expression in both fields remain worth considering exists, but that list isn’t likely to take more than one page. But Twain’s poem was specifically unexpected. If you have followed this Project completely for a while you will have encountered most of what might be considered poetry by the great novelist Twain. One was a little monolog that performs easily.* That piece is a still-acute skewering of poète maudit literary stances. Twain’s other poem used here was a satire produced by a character in a novel who wrote rafts of terrible elegies, a poetic form that Twain’s era loved more than any other: Tennyson’s book-length, multi-part, In Memoriam elegy was a Victorian best-seller. Twain’s USP while he worked in the book trade was instead books full of life and absurdity written in garrulous American vernacular. Yet, here’s a poem by Twain that is:
Heartrendingly sincere
An elegy
Short enough to be engraved on a headstone
Where did this come from? It has both a biographical and literary inheritance. The biographic one: the headstone it was engraved on was for Twain’s beloved eldest daughter, a talented young woman who died at age 24. If you’ve got a few minutes, click this link and read her Wikipedia entry, so that you can mourn along with Twain. The literary antecedent, who Twain credited on the headstone as the author, was a contemporary poem written by an Australian expat-to-Scotland named Robert Richardson. Richardson is next to unknown and I’ve only glanced at the collection in which his poem titled“Annette” appears. He was a newspaper and periodical poet who wrote (as did Twain) for popular audiences — but unlike the Twain we best remember today, he is (at first glance) conventional in his literary diction and full of the usual Victorian sentiments. Richardson’s “Annette” takes up three pages and many stanzas, and Twain’s adaptation uses only the final stanza. Twain’s poem is 27 words long. Only 20 of those words come from Richardson’s stanza.
Here’s Richardson’s stanza followed by Twain’s poem as it appears on the headstone:
Here’s a link to a page where I found this picture of Olivia Susan Clemens’ headstone in Elmira New York. The link also includes the full text of Richardson’s Annette.
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What are the alterations, which I’ll presume to be Twain’s, and which I assume are changes, not Twain using a different version than I found in an 1893 Richardson poetry collection?
“Friendly” is dropped from the description of the sun. “Kindly” is moved to the sun in Twain. “Softly,” a more objective adverb is used for the wind by Twain. Imagists (who’ll arrive only a decade after Twain’s poem) would have preferred kindly to be dropped entirely for an objective word, but on balance Twain is just slightly more modern. “Southern wind” not western may be localizing weather patterns between Richardson and Twain’s locales, but making this change shows a careful choice is being made.
Both Richardson and Twain make the choice to move from the above world of the living to the below ground world of the buried in their stanzas. Richardson has the sod “resting,” personifying in Victorian fustian. Twain has the weightier and more objective “lie.” Small difference, but I hold with Twain’s choice.
“Dear heart” for “Annette” removes the inapplicable specific from Richardson. In the final phrase Twain again adds power in my judgement by refraining “good night” rather than using the specific Victorian term “sweetheart.” Although Twain intended his poem as an inscription, the refrain adds to the effect when sung in performance.
Tiny poem, tiny changes, but of course the greatest difference, one made by a novelist (of all trades) was to presume that these spare 27 words from the end of Richardson’s longish poem make an apt summary of the situation: a beloved, talented daughter struck down by illness in her youth. This may have been a practical choice: carving it on a headstone (though larger headstones with longer inscriptions are found in Victorian graveyards). Intent and practicalities aside, I was moved.
You can hear my performance of Twain’s epitaph/elegy with the following audio player. No player? This is a backup link that will open a new tab with it’s own audio player. As I said, simple music today. Just me playing a nylon string “classical” guitar, the kind of instrument that I first played when I started out.
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* Besides being credited by Hemingway as the progenitor of “All modern American literature,” Twain pioneered what today we’d call standup comedy.
Death is a funny thing, mainly because dying is treated so damn serious. Have you ever asked yourself this: are you afraid of death or are you afraid of dying? If you answer, “Well I’m afraid of death.” I ask you to further question yourself. Non-existence is easy, a gimmie, a non-task. Dying on the other hand? You can fear pain, suffering. You can fear what is left unremedied, unfinished, left undone. One can fear you will not do it well. That you will show too much or not enough emotion. You can fear you will do it too slow and draw out suffering — or have it happen too fast before one can set an agenda for the occasion.
This weekend is the anniversary of the official launch of the Parlando Project in 2016. This weekend is also the anniversary of my late wife’s death decades ago. Last weekend I learned that a poet/blogger who I’ve followed through much of the seven years of working on the Parlando Project has received one of those months-to-live diagnoses.*
In-between those weekends, someone posted the text I’m going to present today by Aldous Huxley. Here’s a link to where I saw it. The poster knew it as if it was a poem titled “Island.” Instead, it’s a passage from Huxley’s last book, a novel called Island. In using this as text I decided to call this short excerpt after a repeated invocation in the passage: “Lightly.”
I’m not very well-read when it comes to novels, but as a teenager I read Huxley’s best-known book Brave New World. I loved the SF world-building of it even if I likely missed good portions of the satire at that young age. After that I tackled Island as well, promoted on the paperback cover as an updated companion to Brave New World. I don’t recall much about Island, certainly not this passage. What could I remember? That Island had a bunch of ideas to present, but since I read it so long ago and so young, I retained nothing else. Looking at synopsis’s online this week, it appears that Huxley was trying to synthesize a long fascination with Asian spirituality and philosophy and apply that to his contemporary mid-20th century Western world.
I think this is the edition I read as a teenager
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Today I was able to look at a copy of Huxley’s novel, and the passage, presented as I first saw it in broken lines as if it was free verse, is indeed a block of prose within it. I said Island was Huxley’s last novel. He died of cancer a year after it was published.** I don’t know if Huxley had received one of those “months left” estimates as he worked on Island, but the passage spoken by a character in his final book could be the author speaking from, or to, himself — a reminder of how he felt he should approach dying.
In the book it’s spoken to a woman who is dying, attended by her husband and family. As I read the larger section the excerpt was from, I thought of being beside my late wife as she was dying. Yes, in essence, the teenage me with my youthful experience, could not have read the same book.
I was only able to do that reading for context this afternoon, a day after I had already completed the new audio piece. Maybe that’s of little matter. After all, even shorn of context as I saw it online, it immediately resonated this week with my thoughts for my distant faintly-colleague. Perhaps you will find resonance as you hear it too.***
I made a couple small alterations to the excerpt to generalize it. Then I composed the music for it on acoustic guitar, playing that instrument in a somewhat pianistic style,**** and then combined the two in the performance you can hear using the graphical audio player below. No visible player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*This poet and blogger, Robert Okaji, has been mentioned elsewhere here in the Parlando Project blog. Besides being a fine poet in general, Okaji helped me by example and brief comment to continue developing my penchant for freely translating classical Chinese poetry, something he also did. Sometimes we would adapt the same poems from the same literal glosses, producing two facets, two impressions, of the Tang Dynasty masters. I never met Okaji, though I’m glad I got to see him read his work online once during the pandemic.
**A darkly comic touch to Huxley’s death. His fame from Brave New World was still considerable in the Sixties. After all, in many ways, his book was more relevant to the US/British culture in that era than its quasi-competitor 1984. Another late work of his, The Doors of Perception about the benefits of psychedelic drugs (also a subplot in Island) was a pioneering examination of that idea — and the source for a Californian rock band’s name a few years later. But instead of Huxley getting the few days of reassessment that would normally have attended his death, he got bupkis. You see, he died on November 22nd, 1963, the day the American President was assassinated. The world’s news-hole was filled with non-literary matters.
***As it turns out, this excerpt has been shared numerous times that I found when I searched for information about the words this week. Sometimes the passage retains its prose layout, other times it’s presented as if it is a poem. A small point, but most of the online quotes have slight wording differences from what I saw in a 1975 edition of the book I looked at today.
****By using the whole neck of the guitar and alternate tunings, one can expand the pitch and timbral range of the acoustic guitar beyond that of the more folk-song style pieces I present here otherwise.
