fate

An Irish Airman foresees his Death

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The song below using the words of William Butler Yeats had a direct, contemporary inspiration: John “Paddy” Hemingway died this St. Patrick’s day. He was Dublin born, and in Dublin he died — and he was in the news because he was the last surviving RAF pilot from the Battle of Britain during WWII.

Reading the notice, I immediately thought of this Yeats poem, about a fatalistic Irish pilot during WWI who flew into battle having no love for the British Empire. John Hemingway’s Wikipedia summary mentions nothing about his weighing of the enormous risks he took in RAF battles, but a recounting of the number of times he was shot down and got back to flying again makes me think he’d accepted his death as a probable result of his service. Fate had sport with him, he lived to be 105.

So here’s this poem by Yeats, written during WWI about an Irish combat pilot. Yeats seems prone to removing the specifics in some of his poems written about contemporary events. One of the most popular posts ever here draws interest because it resolves the mystery of who and what the friend and work was in Yeats’ poem “To a Friend Whose Work has Come to Nothing.”   Did Yeats invent the fatalistic airman in today’s poem, or did he have someone in mind?

Not much research required in this case, it’s widely recognized as a poem written as an elegy to a particular doomed Irish Airman, Robert Gregory, the son of a friend and ally of Yeats, Lady Gregory.

I know nothing of how this poem was received by the mother who’d lost a child. Yeats portrays a peculiar heroism with the poem’s subject. Using only the evidence within the poem’s boundaries, it’d be a fair reading to say that the titular airman here was driven to mortal combat because there was no hope otherwise in his country’s situation. Another reading, more specific to the man Yeats had in mind, might be that the airman was drawn to air warfare for the pure sport and sensation of it, but that latter reading still incorporates, if not an outright death wish, a sense that the most intense love of the moment asks for an acceptance of imminent death. So, an odd poem, poised between self-destructive despair and dark romantic thrills.

Well, whatever — it is a poem by Yeats, so of course it’ll sound wonderful, and reading it on the page will cause any number of its silent readers to want to sing it. After I completed my version, I listened to nearly 10 other musical versions, yet I still hope that my version isn’t superfluous.

An Irish Airman

Here’s the chord sheet for today’s song version of Yeats’ poem. Feel free to improve on my attempt. As I play it the G and A  chords in the last line of each stanza are played at the 3rd  & 5rh fret positions.

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I chose to make my song entirely jaunty, a reverse of my minor key remembrance in the E. E. Cummings Spring poem last time. That doesn’t mean I want the listener to take it as a recruiting poster or an endorsement. Poetry is portraiture you can feel in your ears or breath, but you’re still allowed to think. Whatever his internal motivations or conflicts, the singer of Yeats’ words seems proud of his choice. John Hemingway likely thought he was in for the same deal that Robert Gregory signed up for. Fate laughed. Reports say Gregory, the brilliant Irish WWI flying ace, may have died either from friendly fire or pilot error secondary to a case of the flu. Another man, a proudly stupid one, once said that he liked pilots who didn’t get shot down. Hemingway, as it happens, was shot down several times in WWII, and yet had decades to live other pleasures I’d find more delightful than combat. And that otherwise unrelated man, the one who truncates his thought, but not before he asks to be judged by his judgements — how is he weighed?

You can hear my performance of Yeats’ “An Irish Airman foresees his Death”   with the audio player below. No player to be seen? You can hear my performance stored somewhere in the clouds above by clicking this link, which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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Stars: Robert Frost and The Book Of Nature

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Robert Frost. Long-time readers/listeners here will know I love to sing Frost’s early poems as part of this Project. We’ll get back to Frost, but another thing long-timers here know: for me, roundabout is the best mental journey — and there will be a piece of music at the end as we rest from our walk.

Ok, let’s stroll.

It’s a famous midcentury half-hour black & white TV episode. So famous that you don’t have to have seen it to know the recognition scene near the end of its story that has become a modern myth that SF and Fantasy fans like to point out their stories aspire to. Given that, I’m going to assume no one will need a spoiler alert for this 1962 Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man.”

The format’s so brief, the story must be told rapidly. We’re told that a race of other-planetary beings have landed on Earth. With retrospectable irony, their leader is described as “Christopher Columbus from another galaxy.” They go about setting things here in benign order with advanced technology. They leave behind a book in their language that seems to be a guide to the extraterrestrials’ efforts. Partway in, Earth’s code-breakers have deciphered the book’s title: To Serve Man.  And they seem to be doing just that: ending hunger, gently enforcing world peace, taking selected humans on spaceship rides to their home planet.

Many of you are now speaking — telepathically or aloud — to a device’s screen what is urgently delivered to the story’s human hero once the humans can decrypt more of the book than just the title: “It’s a cookbook!”

I’ve written here often about something I call The Book of Nature. Though not an exclusive American idea, I connect it with the 19th century American “New Thought” movement called Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists believed that a true scripture of the universe’s higher power was transcribed in nature. By contemplating nature big to small one could discern the highest truths. Our contemporaries who are “spiritual but not (sectarian) religious” may hold to this as a core belief, but it’s likely that every denomination of religious belief can incorporate this too — after all, if The Creator made this, their authorship means there is plausibly something there to be read.

Now we can get back to Robert Frost. Frost no doubt knew Transcendentalist thought, but unlike his fellow great American poet, Emily Dickinson, Frost didn’t hold with its doctrines.*  Yes, Frost wrote seemingly “En plein air” about nature often. His early poems, some of the ones I like best, are suffused with the landscape and particulars of New England nature. Did he see a supreme being’s handwriting there?

If so, Frost would be critical of The SB’s penmanship.

stars

Chord sheet so that you can sing this one yourself.

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If we look at this example, “Stars”  from Frost’s first book of poems, A Boy’s Will,  what do we “read” from nature’s book? The stars come out at night. What is their nature?** “Countless(ly),” we can’t even get the basic stats correct. Oh wait, Frost can see a primary Roman goddess in there: Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and strategy. No, he reconsiders: it’s a statue of Minerva he sees in the stars, a human-made simulacrum — and her marble eyes are the form of sight organs without any such function. So should we look lower down at our earthly landscape?***  Snow covers it profoundly, drifting “as tall as trees” and so obscuring even the ground-level facts. Wind is blowing — the choreographer of this landscape — yet, this dance doesn’t tell a story, it obscures it, though here at last Frost reads a message. That wind, that obscuring snow, is “our fate.” In the most mysterious part of the poem, the second stanza, we cannot see where we’ve walked or where to guide our steps. The gothic part of my nature reads Frost’s “place of rest invisible at dawn” as death. I read the image in this stanza that in such deep and overblown snow, one cannot even see the walk fate will not reveal to a farmhouse graveyard.

Nature acts “with neither love nor hate.” Robert Frost has decrypted The Book of Nature — and all the pages are blank.

Here’s that song at the end of our mental walk where I set Frost’s poem to music with acoustic guitar. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below, or with this backup highlighted link if that gadget is not shown.

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*Frost’s friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas was an exquisite nature poet of his British Isles countryside. In regards The Book of Nature, he’s between Frost and Dickinson for he has a horticulturalist’s specific eye like Dickinson — and his consistent naming of natural details and seeing them as readable symbols indicates he finds them plausibly capable of guidance.

** Astrologers, Biblical Magi, and classical constellation dots-connectors of course are reading that sky in clear text.

***In a changeup meant to fool this writer and singer, my specific winter this year has been oddly empty of any expected Northland winter symbolism. We’ve had next to no snow, only a week or so of bitter sub-zero cold, and I look out today on a sunny brown yard over which squirrels are carelessly playing tag and tree as we rise to our predicted afternoon high of (in Minnesota! In January!) of 55 degrees F.

I’ve been riding my summer bicycle with its summer tires most every day this “winter,” where that bike normally stays hung up high in the back of my shed. Spring in Minnesota is famously snowy, my winter bike with studded knobby tires cannot be put out of the way. Perhaps as long as I leave it by the door we may continue to have a mild winter.

Lenox Avenue: Midnight, an extension

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s another early Langston Hughes poem from The Weary Blues,  his collection which I’ve chosen to focus on during this Black History Month. Given Hughes’ esteemed position as part of the Harlem Renaissance and the long career that followed, it may be hard to remember that this is a poem by a young man, less than 25 years old. Of course, as I reminded myself as I tried to write the best poetry I could as a young person: famous British poet John Keats died at 25 — so there’s no reason for our Afro-American poet to wait to write either.*

Though it was Langston Hughes’ first book, The Weary Blues  doesn’t make much of a point of his youth. While the perennial youthful topics of wine, love, and song make their appearances in this collection’s poems, there’s little if anything I can recall that makes explicit pleading that the author is of a new generation with new perceptions. The way Hughes did signal that was in the way he deals with the “song” part of that triumvirate: Jazz and Blues were still considered disreputable musics of little substance. The decade of the last Twenties may have been called “The Jazz Age,” but that then novel music was mostly the music to dance, drink, and swive to.

So, when Hughes claims right from the start that “The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm” he’s making a fresh claim in 1926, that it’s not just some musical fad that’s passing through, a speeded-up frivolity. Even if white musicians and dancers were quick to latch onto the jaunty high-BPM rush of Jazz, Hughes is ready to claim that broken desires and pain were in there too.

Does he mean lovesick blues, or the Afro-American experience here when he makes that claim? Both I think. That’s a hella-reason why Afro-American forms pervade American music to this day: Americans as a whole have a long and strong dissatisfied streak. Plenty of musics sourced from around the world are good for dancing and signaling your erotic availability. Same for songs of utter sadness. But Afro-Americans figured out how to make sublime musics out of a combination of the oppressions and absurdities of life.

In his poem, Hughes twice makes the claim “The gods are laughing at us” — and despite the repetition of that line, he is ambiguous about what we should think of that. Are the gods the society that ignores, belittles, and oppresses? Or are the gods the wise eternals who know that we humans live short lives approaching half-knowledge, an absurdity that leaves laughing as wisdom?

I think at midnight — perhaps after some youthful partying that’s implied as preceding this poem — it’s a vibrating mixture of both. Overtones, undertones, Hughes says.

Move by Heidi Randen 800

Overtones, undertones….Jazz in Hughes’ 1926 was still thought of as a way to shake your groove thing.

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I often mention that my experience of the poems I use for texts here often changes in the process of making them into Parlando Project pieces. With this one, as I began to understand and express Hughes’ words I wanted to reply to the laughing gods in the original poem. So, I extended the original words with my own couplet: “Let them hear the laugh I return. / Let them understand the laugh I return.” Is that laugh and desire to the wise gods or the careless and oppressing system? Both. I’m far from 25, and that’s what I think reading and performing the young Hughes’ poem today.

Music in this piece is about as close as I can get to Jazz, though more of the Jazz of my youth than that of Hughes’ time. Yes, that fad was still going concern 40 years after Langston Hughes wrote his poem. I spent most of my time creating the piano part, which unlike a real pianist I have to compose by playing and selecting parts for each hand, but modern “virtual instruments” let me do stuff that Conlon Nancarrow had to hand-punch into player piano rolls to realize. I wanted a saxophone part too, but as I’ve already mentioned this winter, I can’t really get the articulations a good Jazz sax player relies on. My sax part sounded like an early student playing the most dismal society dance band number, and so I made the compromise I normally avoid and put in a short Gil Evans-ish horn section sample to enclose my sax part effectively.

You can hear Langston Hughes’ “Lenox Avenue: Midnight”  and my extension to it with the player gadget below, if you see one — or this highlighted link which will open a new tab to play it.

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*Lesser-known early 20th century Afro-American poet Anne Spencer made the same point eulogizing Paul Lawrence Dunbar with her short poem.