faery

The Hawthorn Tree

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

You could put Willa Cather within a group: writers known as novelists who also wrote some worthwhile poetry. I didn’t know she wrote verse, but this poem of thwarted love, “The Hawthorn Tree”  charmed me when I read it in an anthology this summer. Furthermore, I had sense immediately that it wanted to be sung.

Cather’s best-known prose deals with European immigrant pioneers settling in the rural American Great Plains; but though they’ve been recommended to me, I’ve never read her novels.*  Cather’s family moved to Nebraska when she was 9 and she attended college there. After college she moved east, and she lived most of her long life in New York, where she wrote of Nebraska while living far from it – a distance that has fueled many a novel.

willa-cather-when-she-was-a-student-everett

The young Willa Cather in her student days

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“The Hawthorn Tree”  poem doesn’t tell us where it takes place on any state map — it refrains instead on the titular tree somewhere, a location of a tryst between two people that the poem’s voice will tell, and not tell, us about. Since the hawthorn tree is a very widespread species, it’s not a clue about what state or time it occupies – but let’s ask: why is it a hawthorn, not an ash, maple, or apple tree? Perhaps it’s an accident of biography – a specific tree in some incident Cather herself experienced or knew of. I can’t rule that out, but it’s given such importance within this short poem I think the author made a choice to name it.

Here’s a link to the text of Willa Cather’s poem.

As the name implies, a hawthorn has thorny branches, a prickly botanical feature which is a common trope in poems and songs of thwarted love. Likewise, it has blossoms and sweet fruit in season, more reasons for it to be in a love poem. Not knowing Cather’s work, or much detail of her life, I can’t say what she might know about the myths, legends, or herbal-medicine knowledge regarding the hawthorn. I read that it’s a tree sacred to fairies, it’s thought to be a sentinel or guardian of gateways between worlds, and that the fruit can cure a broken heart.**

So, invention or memoir incident? That mystery accompanies the mysteries in this story’s telling. It could be rendering the common folk-song plot of a couple who briefly meet (and perhaps make love) somewhere while out in nature, and who are then parted. Cather could be taken with such folk songs and tales, could be writing her version of that – or it could be autobiographical.***  One other thing: we’ve been exploring poems of the faery world recently, it could be slyly fantastical – the unnamed creature who meets the poem’s singer from out of the mist could be from the faery realm. Cather’s poem happens in spring-time, another marker found in many of the folk-songs – which often start with some variation of “one morning in May” or the like – but Cather’s mysterious tale says its tryst happens in the night-time.

Whatever the exact and unsaid details, the poem had captured my attention, and those references to folk-song elements drove me to write music for it. I used an unusual open tuning here, one called Csus (CGCGCD), and the lower pitch of the tuning and the chord voicings I used caused me to break out my less-used larger-bodied dreadnaught guitar for this one.

I followed Cather’s text for the resulting song, but then at the end of the performance you can hear with the audio player below I adlibbed my own short variation expanding on the mysterious details of the meeting under the hawthorn tree. What ho? There’s no audio player for you? Ah, I have provided a gateway to a dimension that will show the audio player that’s hidden to you, mortal – likely due to the method you’re using to read this blog. Use this hawthorn branch – no, this highlighted link – which will open a new browser tab manifesting its own audio player.

 

 

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*I’m far from well-read regarding novels. Poetry captured me in my youth, and that art meshed so easily with my love for music that I can easily be embarrassed in any literary crowd which takes “literature” to largely mean “fiction.”

**Besides folk-medicine, there’s been some modern pharmaceutical investigation of the hawthorn fruit’s ingredients. This video explains a bit about the hawthorn and the beliefs surrounding it.

***Cather’s love life is not an open book, but her life partner was a woman. The one from the mist who the poem’s voice meets under the hawthorn tree is a “he.” I made a choice not to alter the genders here, perhaps because this spring my home has been full of gender-dynamic visitors and residents. Or perhaps I’m following the example of famous gender-crossing singers like Eric Burdon and Ringo Starr.

Elinor Wylie’s “Escape”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The process of creating music/recording performances of other people’s poetry as part of this Project usually leads me to some deeper understanding of the poem’s text. It’s not something I have to try to do, some preliminary task I need to check off to complete a Parlando Project piece. What kind of music? Who is the person in the text that I will give voice to, even with my limited vocal talents? What is the original, if page-silent, person seeing, feeling? Why are they paying attention to that? What might these things, shared by expression, mean to you and I?

I did write “usually” up there in that paragraph. I found this short poem by early 20th century American poet Elinor Wylie late last winter, and it’s one of those texts that at first glance you want to make it sound – a literary poem that begs to be sung. But if you’d asked me, what does it mean then, or even after I composed the music, even after I’d completed the simple acoustic guitar and voice recording you can hear below, I’d have said: “Well, not much. It means to evoke a sort of beauty I guess, and that may be enough for a few minutes of song.”

My situation right now makes it harder for me to get opportunities to record new things, but I had this recording of Wylie’s poem (like the Claude McKay poem from last time) from a session in my studio space last March. I did the final “mastered” version to distribute* yesterday morning, and then wondered what I’d write about it. Just say: “It’s pretty. That may be enough?”

Wylie's Escape

Besides Yeats, when Wylie mentions “the last white antelope is killed” I thought of this Edwin Ford Piper poem.

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And then my wife came home, dealing with some highly distressing information secondary to her mother who’s been in dementia care for the past decade or so. There’s no easy solution, perhaps no solution, to the problem that news brought. I could only listen and share her distress.

As I tried to go to sleep after holding my wife close, this occurred to me, so late in the process with this poem of Wylie’s: had it attracted me in part because it reminded me of a beloved William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree?”   Like Yeats, Wylie imagines a cabin enshrined in a nature scene – but Yeats, even though a practicing mystic, described a realistic cabin, one not unlike the one my wife and I just spent a blissful week in earlier this month.** Wylie’s cabin is not real, it’s a tiny faery house that she will need to transform herself to step inside. The nature around Wylie’s little house is drenched in esoteric symbols. Like Yeats’ Wandering Aengus, in another of that great Irish poet’s poems, with his silver and gold apples; she has apple-scented rain, golden grapes, and silver wasp nests. Yeats wrote his poem living in urban London, but he could go and live where he wrote about in “Innisfree.”   Wylie’s cabin is entirely one of imagination.

Suddenly, without planning, and after I had completed the musical piece you can hear with the audio player below, I understood this poem that Elinor Wylie titled “Escape”  in a fuller way: imaginative escape can be from dark and intractable life – a habitation in a glittering bubble floating briefly in heavy, toxic, air.

If for some reason your way of reading this post can’t imagine the audio player gadget, I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab which will have its own audio player.

 

 

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*”Mastering” is the making the final adjustments to the audio levels and frequency spectrum of a recording so that the resulting recording will sound within expectations in the context of other recordings. This is also a good place to remind readers here that if you want a way to receive or share the audio pieces I present here, without my little essays writing about my encounters: all the Parlando Project audio pieces are available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts or most of the other podcast catalogs/distributors. These are not hour-long chats about the poems and the music – they are just the musical performances themselves, typically 2-5 minutes in length.

**Our recent north shore of Lake Superior cabin wasn’t of clay and wattles made, but cabins in rural Ireland during Yeats’ time certainly were.