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:
Warm summer sun, shine friendly here;
Warm western wind, blow kindly here;
Green sod above, rest light, rest light,
Good-night, Annette!
Sweetheart, good-night!
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.