Halloween

Shadwell Stair

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments

Halloween is a chance for us to note our fears.

I first wrote “celebrate” in that sentence, but revised it to ”note,” with musical pun intended.* I don’t think we actually celebrate fear on Halloween, but rather we play with it: pretend we don’t have it, pretend we can sport with it — though perhaps some connoisseurs roll the sense of it around on their tongue to absorb fear’s full body and taste. But in any of those ways, however obliquely, we are acknowledging it.

How close are we to our fears the rest of the year? I suppose that varies. Can we name them? Do we bother? Do our friends, our intimates, know them? Do we even speak of them to ourselves?

Today’s piece is based on a hard to explain poem by one of the most loved British “War Poets” who wrote of their experience of WWI, Wilfred Owen. Certainly that war’s trench warfare, mixing squalid contemplation and carnage, would offer enough horror to write about, and Owen’s WWI poetry is loved while not flinching from that horror or buffering it in patriotic bunting.

But then there’s this poem. It is not set on the front lines. If it mentions the war at all, it must be implied from knowing his biography.

Shadwell Stair is on the banks of the Thames River in urban London. In Owen’s early 20th century it was apparently a noisy, smelly industrial area. This blog post has numerous pictures, some history of the Stair, and the delicious trivia that it’s next to “Labour in Vain Street.”

As treasured as Owen’s bleak poetry is, Shadwell Stair  isn’t one of his best-known “Greatest Hits.” Its effective condensed portrait of the locale isn’t the most-read poem of that time and place in metaphor, being eclipsed by “The Waste Land’s”  bankside sections written by an American, T. S. Eliot. Those portions of Eliot’s poem are alienated, partly by the recent Great War, and partly by his own sense of an educated visitor weighing England’s and Europe’s history and culture against the grimy realities of the London he had settled in. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”  doesn’t actually name the fears in the center of it, but it conveys them in vivid and varied silhouettes. Arguably, Owen’s poem is more coy — if only by being brief — but let me make a case for it. Here’s a link to the text of Owen’s poem.

The first stanza introduces lovely word-music that the poem carries on throughout. It claims to be in the voice of a ghost. We may (I did) anticipate a classic Halloween poem. If we know Owen’s biography, we might think the slaughter-house there is a reference to the war. It may be, but I think the second stanza gives us a different context.

It’s a fleshy context. I can almost feel the goosebumps on the skin, and the speaker’s eyes are lit up in what? Fear? Anticipation? Heightened vigilance? If this be a ghost, it’s an embodied one.

The third stanza is almost all scene-setting, lit by snapping arc lamps evoked between interrupting night noises — those streetlights had a sensual, buzzing, almost reptilian sound that younger readers now may not have had the experience to hear. Of our mysterious speaker, it only says of themselves here that they are watching. OK, watching for what?

Later readers have given an understanding to the mystery here: Owen’s sexuality had a homoerotic element. In this reading, the speaker (presumably Owen) is cruising for a hookup, and it’s said that the disreputable docks and titular Stair were known sites to London’s homosexual demimonde. As with the harsh arc-lights, this context illuminates the poem. I see vividness in this reading, and no reason not to give it credence. Let’s consider then the situation evoked: here is a man, likely on leave from the immense horror of a war that was grinding men up with ineffective tactics in the face of modern lethality. Many Halloween readers here with holiday ease to play with fears would likely have no gauge to measure that — but what has his flesh firming, his skin puckered with cold plucked-chicken skin, his pupils dilated out round as the gems of Rilke’s absorbing cat from last time? Answer: the anticipation of sensual, carnal, sexual contact — intensified by a fear of police trolling for arrests, complicated in the doubts of attraction or rejection with disgust that strangers meeting in the night would encounter.

If so, the enigma of this poem has a specific — if unspoken — core, and the last stanza is an aubade of something even more transitory than the average parting of lovers at dawn. We started being told this is a ghost poem, and the ghost here meets another ghost. The ghosts here are metaphor for spirits that could barely speak of the eros of their lives. A silencing louder than bombs.

shadwell stair MS1

Here’s Owen’s poem in work-in-progress form, He seems struggling most with the 3rd stanza yet at this point.

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Today’s music had two challenges for me. The setting I devised might benefit from a “real singer,” someone who could carry a melody with confidence and a beautiful timbre. I’m not that. I decided I could do no better than I can do. And then too, while I was pleased at what I could come up with feeding parts into my orchestra instrument arranger, and particularly with the high trumpet part that comes in near the end, I was never satisfied that I could get the best trumpet Virtual Instrument I own to have the correct envelope I wanted. There I just surrendered. No one with a “no-revenue” independent musical enterprise could expect to be able to present the full richness of the actual instrument. Those who can, will know I fell short — but the rest will, I hope, accept my approximation. You can hear my musical setting of Wilfred Owen’s “Shadwell Stair” with the audio player gadget below. Not even a ghost of such a player visible?  This highlighted link is an alternate way which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*”Note…fears?” See that final paragraph today.

Rilke’s Black Cat — and expanding the pie in the face of translations

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Is today’s piece the Parlando Project’s surrender to the Internet’s pervasive cat fancies? No, this is a very serious piece of cultural distribution — and it’s Halloween fans, that grave and gothic lot, that we’re serving with content this month.

I do fresh translations into English as part of this Project semi-regularly. Translations bring benefits, important ones that would fulfill that serious…cultural  claim. Since poetry exists in nearly every society* no matter the language spoken, translation allows us to casually absorb more outlooks as readers. And as proud as English speakers can be about the home-team’s innings in verse, a great many poets have taken tactics, forms, and inspiration from writers that wrote in other languages. Adding to the corpus of translations then, is a service to readers and poets.

A couple of the poets I’ve translated here have almost nothing available online in English, a few more, little. Rilke, who wrote today’s piece in German is not such a case. He’s a favorite poet of many English-speaking readers, and has had many well-known translations. But even so, adding another Rilke translation is like adding another human perception of a piece of his writing. All translation comes with a viewpoint and a path taken by the translator to the point of translation. My viewpoint is not particularly learned. I’m not an expert in German literature, and I don’t speak German beyond a few phrases. While I happen to like my approach to writing or performing poetry (most poets get little love for their verse other than self-love, so we’d better have that regard to do the work) that’s about all I bring in qualifications to translating.

My translation approach is primarily image-centered. I want to try to absorb what the poet is seeing, and feeling and transfer that portrayal of sensation into contemporary English. I usually don’t try to convey the parallel sensation of the poems word-music in its original language, but I will give some weight to a sequence of the images as they convey the poem’s argument, the thing I call “the music of thought.” I do like there to be some English word-music in the end result, but as with my original poetry in English the images shouldn’t suffer much just to make some formal lock-step.

Which brings me to the other benefit of translating, the reason I recommend translation to every poet, to every creative-writing class: translating forces you to consider choices made by the original poet intimately, and to make subsequent English-language choices that are not dictated at origin by your  desire to tell your life-story or outlook. This separation allows you to practice, in separation, the craft of poetry.**

I took on Rilke’s “Black Cat”  because it seems like an apt Halloween poem — after all, it does start out with the cat being described as an apparition of mysterious supernatural powers.***  As I dug into the poem there was one mystery I didn’t solve: how much is Rilke joking with us? Is this cat a dark vision, a domestic cosmic black hole with a gravity that absorbs light? A real Rilke scholar might have a learned opinion on this, but I am not that person. The Rilke poems I know, and famous Letters to a Young Poet  essays seem utterly serious — I’d say almost to a fault as weighed by my own tastes. There’s a certain kind of Rilke fan, like a certain kind of Robert Bly fan, that makes me wary of the seriousness with which they take their precepts and scriptures.

Black Cat

The Internet was designed so that scientists, the military, and government could exchange ideas. And cat pictures like this one I found there. Well, the cat pictures came later, but I’m sure it was in the design. Now, who’s my dark little existential vision of non-being that meets my gaze…

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But as I translate Rilke I occasionally find images that seem to fall into slapstick. Did Rilke intend this, or is that my own path, my outlook, reflecting off the surfaces of poems? Seriousness is indispensable to slapstick after all. My favorite part of this poem is when the frustrated viewer of the black cat resorts to enraged stomping about. Last time we had a poem about the pathos of black & grey ghosts seeming to manifest in a dark house. Is this dark cat a solemn symbol of ever-so-serious human-condition dread — or an excuse to burlesque the frustration of life we cannot fully control, things we cannot perceive clearly, yet are stuck trying to figure out anyway?

Black Cat Translation

This is what I came up with for today’s performance

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It may not be what we’d wish, but as Rilke gets to his last line, I smile. We try to see in the darkness, we might try to command capricious cats, but in the end we’ll all be extinct as prehistoric insects captured in amber crystals — but at least by translating Rilke (or other poets) we can see our gaze in their gaze.

To hear my spoken word performance of my fresh translation of Rilke’s “Black Cat”  you can use the audio player below. What, has a black cat crossed your screen and obscured any such audio player gadget?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Do historians and anthropologists know of any documented society that didn’t have a form of poetry? I’m neither — but I don’t know of one. If so, this seems a strange fact in the face of poetry’s peripheral place in modern American culture. Is poetry just an archaic skill, like how to make a stone knife or knowing which fungi are safe or sacred to eat?

**Current online language translators (Google’s seems particularly good) are generally adequate at giving you an English-language gloss to start with. For key words conveying images in a poem, online foreign language dictionaries can drill down into further insight. The translator’s job isn’t just turning some decoder ring though: the job is to find effective English language poetry to hold the poem you’re translating.

***Admitting my lack of portfolio to do so, there’s a third reason to do my own translations: I want to avoid — even for my “absolutely-no-profit” Project — taking other writer’s work that isn’t free for reuse. Rilke’s work is in the public domain in the U.S. — but this isn’t true of most English translations of it.

The House of Ghosts

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s been a busy week at the Parlando Project studio as I record more Halloween-themed songs freshly made by combining other people’s words (usually literary poetry in the public domain) with original music in differing styles. Let us go to the lab and see what’s on the slab.

Last dark-and-stormy-night-time we had a poem that started with someone at a household’s door asking to be let in. Waif or wraith? Therein lies that tale. Today we again have a piece that starts at a doorway — but the tale-teller here lets themselves in. What do they find there? Well, that’s the song.

The words I used today originated with a poem by early 20th century American writer Margaret Widdemer. While Widdemer is little remembered now, she was a successful presence in the literature of her day. And while the Parlando Project does the everlasting Greatest Hits of Poetry sometimes, I also like digging through old poetry collections and anthologies looking for overlooked poems and poets. Such “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” reading let me find Widdemer, and one thing that drew me to her was that she seemed to have absorbed some stuff from the folk-music collectors of her time — for example, this eerie poem of hers that builds on the “Lyke Wake Dirge”  presented here six years ago.

One thing that folk-music tradition teaches us: the singer is free to change and adapt the song that was handed down to them. Entirely new words or new music may be applied. Verse order, much less exact wording is not sacrosanct. Instead, a good fit for the singer and the audience (these being the folk in folk-music) is the guiding force. Most composers who work in the Art-Song form are compelled to keep the text unaltered, and while I’m not of that tradition, I most often present the poet’s words as they published them for the silent page. But, for today’s piece I substantially altered Widdemer’s poem to make what I hope is a more effective song.

House of Ghosts

Widdemer’s poem is linked here if you’d like to see the “before” to my substantial revision.

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I started with a simple change: I created a refrain based on the initial verse of Widdemer’s original text when I found it ineffective for audience grabbing. In other revisions and additions, I sought to sharpen the “build” of the story’s details, and I excised antique words and diction that added no charm.

Musically I recorded a late-night laid-back Rock combo of two electric guitars, electric piano, bass, and drums for my resulting song. Here’s the chord sheet in case you’d like to play your own rendition. That’s also the in the folk-music tradition: the song shouldn’t belong to only one voice.

To hear the way I played and sang it you can use the audio player below. What? Has no audio player gadget materialized on your screen?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player then.

I plan to be back soon with an entirely different, more orchestral ensemble for the next piece in our 2024 Halloween series. Should I act like a YouTubber or Substack author and urge you to subscribe for this upcoming content?*

No, I’ll leave you as a free agent on that decision. This Project goes beyond non-profit — it is by design no-profit. I just love diverse music and poetry and get a kick out of exploring what’s possible. I have nothing to sell and would avoid anything that is paid by the click, because I have no makeup to be a small-businessman.** But my self-regard (or desire to promote a range of poetry) likes seeing viewers and listeners. Sharing this stuff on social media, or just telling a friend, will help keep this going.

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*The Parlando Project started as a short-form podcast, one sans the usual blather, paid-for-promotions, and between-host jocularity — presenting instead our typically 2-5 minute musical pieces unadorned. It turns out that podcast audiences prefer one-to-two hours of gab — but if you want a break between the talkers in your podcast app, you can still subscribe to the Parlando Project on Apple Podcasts or most other popular ways to get podcasts.

I don’t believe I misunderstand those who appreciate the typical podcast format. I sometimes listen to podcasts while cleaning or fixing something with my hands. Alas, as a person who spends much of their time reading, composing, playing, recording, and mixing music, my own ears are usually occupied, and so I lack time to partake.

**I admire small-business people in general — and yes, I appreciate how hard it is for musicians, composers, and writers to make even a meagre living these days. While I work at this Project like someone with a small-business enterprise, I’m just not suited to bookkeeping, form-filling, and tax-law lane-keeping.

The Witch

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m starting a Halloween series again this year, so musical pieces using public domain poems that have fantasy or supernatural elements are something I’ve been gathering, and this one popped up in a couple of lists. It’s by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, an English early 20th century poet I did not know.

Yes, she’s distantly related to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the “Kubla Khan”  and “Ancient Mariner”  guy, but this poem reminds me (in a good way) of Christina Rossetti. Here’s a link to the text of her poem “The Witch.”

My search for Halloween material and reading those early 20th century children’s poetry anthologies for this year’s National Poetry Month shows that supernatural creatures were a cultural thing in this era, and were presented in a range of contexts from folk-tale weirdness, to gothic, to pleasant guises. I’m hesitant to say without enough scholarship, but unlike ghosts or fairy folk and the like, witches were almost always depicted as evil.*

Here’s an excuse for me to trot out my favorite construct, the how-old was-X-thing-when-this-was-written calculation. Witch trials and witch executions were around 200 years past when “The Witch”  was written, perhaps long enough to be considered expired history to be toyed with for literary uses, but the general roots and results of that deadly hysteria lingered. Fear of the outsider, the strange one, their unknown and supposed beliefs and motivations never left the world. I can see it in current disgusting news stories recycling old libels.

If Halloween is a holiday that has broadened its scope from an origin of remembering the dead and their spirits into a celebration of the things we fear as much as death — and to the spice of experiencing those fears in a transitory way — then this poem is an example we might want to interrogate.

The plot of “The Witch”  is simple enough,** but Coleridge does a great job of structuring the tale. The first two of the poem’s three stanzas are a vivid present-tense monolog from what sounds like a refugee or wanderer who’s outside someone’s homesite door begging to come in from the cold. The outside voice describes herself as “a maiden still.” An interesting claim — what with the “still” — and my imagination as I read this says that she is claiming this because she doesn’t necessarily look like a young woman.

The poem’s final stanza is swift and concisely indirect in a way that pleases me. The viewpoint changes to someone else, the home’s resident on the inside of the door recounting (now in past-tense) what happens. The outsider is invited, indeed carried, in past the threshold, there’s a movement intensified by a repeating “she came,” and the poem’s standout enjambment ends a line with “the quivering flame” continuing on the next line’s “sunk and died in the fire.” It doesn’t say this, but my imagination filled this line break with the outsider changing shape into something less solid and smothering the home’s hearth-fire. The poem ends with the inside-the-home’s voice telling us the fire can now not be relit. This conclusion is ambiguous. It might be that the outsider has killed the home’s resident who would have tended the fire, just as it has killed the fire. Or it might be (and I prefer this option) that the insider is doomed to be as cold and lost as the outsider was in the poem’s opening, and now is cast in the same curse. This is a well-told tale, so easily set to music — I couldn’t resist letting it over my threshold.

But as I worked on it, it wasn’t the supernatural element that was giving me chills. Is this the wrong poem to make into song in my time and place when fear of the outsider is being whipped up for purposes? Is this poem a parable supporting that?

Yes and no — but I’m going with the no. To me, it’s also a story about deceit, those lies that we invite inside ourselves, which is why I fell to and promote the reading that in the end the insider becomes the same creature as the outsider: cold, in despair, now likely self-serving and lying to be invited in though the door.

The Witches Kitchen - Frans Francken the younger

Documentary oil-painting evidence that all witches are not dogmatically against fire.

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I don’t know if I’ll find any good witches to sing about this month, but I do plan, in whatever Halloween series I can complete, to examine our fears and the why and where they take us.

You can hear my song performance of Mary Coleridge’s “The Witch”  with the audio player below. Is your way of reading this ghosting that audio player gadget?  This highlighted link is a spell to open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Well, L. Frank Baum’s Oz  has a good witch, but even there Margaret Hamilton and her flying monkeys are what’s tattooed on our dreams. Modern NeoPagans and so forth wish to rehabilitate the idea of witchcraft as empowerment with a sideboard of herbal remedies.

**The premise of a supernatural pretense to gain invited entrance to a warm homestead reminds me of a fantasy verse play and excerpted poem by Yeats.  Yeats wasn’t necessarily anti-magical beings — after all, he had his own sideline as an esoteric mage. Robert Frost directed Yeats trickster-fairy play for student actors, and later wrote this gently satiric “answer poem” to Yeats’ work. In Frost’s poem the wizard powers of New England skepticism is cast to defeat supernatural treachery.

A Winter’s Tale: A cold mystery for Halloween

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Having done over 700 audio pieces in the more than 7 years of the Parlando Project, I take pride in the variety of the original musical settings I’ve supplied for them. Oh, there are more than a few of the performances over the years that embarrass me: stuff were my problematic vocals don’t deserve parole, or arrangements where I can’t now tell how I ever thought they worked, or those where it would have been better if I’d had access to better musicians than my overdubbing, but many of them still sound good to me.

None sounds better than this one as we near the end of my Halloween Series presenting some of the listener favorites from those 700-plus pieces. “A Winter’s Tale”  sets a should-be-better known poem by D. H. Lawrence. For some of you that poem’s climate is going to seem premature — and you may even wonder why it fits a Halloween theme. I assure you in Minnesota, in the northern parts of North America, this poem is not out of season. We’ve had no snow yet, but my morning bike ride was –5 Celsius. And tomorrow? Those thin polyester costumes sold at stores for trick or treating are not right for many a Minnesota Halloween. And any creativity in making one’s own costume is suppressed by the eventual need for an overcoat which will cover it. And what of Lawrence’s poem — here’s a link to the text of the poem — what’s Halloween about it?

Winters Tale 1080

A long way between houses just for some candy.

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Well, it’s quite mysterious. This is the third time I’ve presented it, and I’m still not sure what the specifics of the described wintery mystery are. At times it seems like a breakup or strained love poem. Other times it seems like a hunting poem, metaphorical or not. It may have some connection I’ve not fathomed to Shakespeare’s play concerned with virulent mistrust. If it’s a hunt, I can’t even say who the speaker/singer and the hunted are. One or the other may even be Winter itself. That mystery and the air of danger are enough to make it a Halloween poem, and after my musical work, a Halloween song.

You can hear it with the audio player gadget you should see below. No player to be seen? This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new window with its own audio player.

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“Stones,” rolling slowly and backwards

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Nine days ago I started this Halloween Series with my sung adaptation of a graveyard poem by Robert Frost. Now we’re nearing the end of the series, and today I’m going to present another graveyard poem that sits with my sense of Halloween, Ethna McKiernan’s “Stones.”

I also promised in the beginning of the series that I would say why I’ve decided to make an extra effort to note Halloween. Decades ago, I met a young man (we were both young then) who had many interests, John Brower. The immediate bond: we both loved unusual music, not just strange or adventurous Rock that one could find in many a large record store back then, but harder to find Modernist orchestral music, and the even harder to find musics from other cultures around the globe. John also had a strong interest, much stronger than mine, in fantasy and horror genre fiction and film. What links those two groupings? For one thing, they were outsider-ish things then. If you want direct evidence of this mysterious connection you only need to investigate the trope of using the musics of the first of John’s interests with the movies and TV shows within his second one. The first signals the second: dread, tension, and the unknown. Scary movie, unknown planet, unsettled minds, eldritch times and places, it was a good chance that the less tonal string sections, the theremins and early electronica, the gongs or tuned percussion, the swooping vibratos and strange timbres of otherwise unheard avant-garde or exotic musics would emerge in the soundtrack. In the obverse, can anyone think of a well-known happy or loving scene similarly soundtracked with odd music? I can’t.*

But that doesn’t explain John. He gathered about him an eclectic mix of folks interested in these things, many of whom would be loners by inclination or classification. And every Halloween he would take them into the dark autumn north woods to his family’s cabin for a celebration of the holiday of the things less -heard than feared, we all in this group lit by the light of frightening movies until deep into the night.**

John grew up, continued to be engaged in many things, keeping those core interests and working to foster them. Then he died suddenly, while still young by the way I’d measure lifetimes from my current age.

There so much more to his story, and I’m sure parts I don’t really know, but within the briefness I prefer for these posts I want to say that I learned things from John and his enthusiasms, and in the scattered pre-Internet age he was a rare ear interested in some of the things that I spent my time thinking about and seeking out. Two decades after his death, I still will hear a piece of music, see a movie referred to, or encounter a piece of dark fantasy, and I’ll think of John, remembering some of what he thought of it, or I’ll be occasioned to consider what he might say about it today,

John had this spirit of Halloween, the old spirit of the things we repress and shush-up the rest of the year. Now, long after his death, and the death of others who so graciously tolerated and helped inform my interests in music and poetry, I have this personal graveyard in my head that I’m tending. As the Blues Poet Bo Diddley sang, I find “I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind…”

Stones Illustration 800

One of the most striking and effecting poems in my Halloween Series, Ethna McKiernan’s Stones. If you want more, and I’m thinking some of you will, buy her book, linked below.

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Which brings me to today’s poem I set to music. Regular readers may recall Ethna McKiernan from earlier posts. She was part of a small poet’s group alternate Parlando voice Dave Moore and I were part of — and unlike Dave or I, she published her poetry regularly both locally and via her connection with Ireland.***  She died nearly two years ago now, but in my head she has a mind’s gravestone like my late wife, like John Brower, like Ethna’s friend and poet compatriot Kevin FitzPatrick.

Poets, musicians — we play in our heads all the time. We look back at inscribed dates inside there, and compose in that dark using beats and sounds strung over time. Those beats come to rests, those sounds fade to silence. When I set Ethna’s poem “Stones”  to music I chose to refrain a line from her beautiful poem so that it won’t end before you pay attention to it: “I am watching over all of you.” In Ethna’s poem that line is hauntingly unclear by design. We the living are charged with watching over our personal graveyards. We hope, transparently and by wisps of sight, that their residents are also watching over us.

Happy, yes, Happy Halloween that we knew them. The audio player to hear me trying to do justice to Ethna McKiernan’s poem “Stones”  with my own music and performance is below. No player on your screen? This highlighted link will open a new tab which will supply you with an audio player.

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*While the avant-garde or the exotic was only used for terror and unrest, for some reason the foundational composer of western classical music, Johan Sebastian Bach was the other go-to music for frightening undercurrents. Why? As young children, did filmmakers sit under towering pipe organ tubes fearing that wolves would appear out of that forest, or that teetering from low notes, that they would fall over and crush them?

**John was one of the first folks I knew with a home VCR, and even as video rental stores started to emerge he proudly purchased movies he admired, just has he collected esoteric avant-garde records, and small-press books. Neither of these things were inexpensive to his income level then, but he considered this his form of patronage of artists and their art.

***As she was dying, Ethna finished her final new and collected book, and it’s very very good. You can order Light Rolling Slowly Backwards  from your local bookstore or from the publisher at this link.

William Blake’s The Poison Tree

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There’s much commerce between fantasy and fable — and William Blake, as literal as he may have drawn the angels of his visions, was one such trafficker. In this poem a metamorphical form of pomology creates out of anger a beautiful, attractive, and cursed fruit, so I thought this poem suitable for our Halloween Series.

One question asks for an answer in Blake’s poem: what makes the poison apple grown from wrath, fear, and tears “bright” and “shining,” and eventually so irresistible to the poem’s enemy?

Many readings concentrate on the poem’s singer, the one who instead of forgiving as he had done with a friend, grows their anger, sorrow, and fright into the Poison Tree. But let’s consider the other party, their enemy. Let’s look at the song from their view.

The emotions that grow the Poison Tree are often stronger than the more positive emotions like trust, love, and mere happiness — and the alloys of these negative emotions can be made into purer metals. Thus the human reaction, however unacknowledged, to envy the tactics of our enemies. Oh, what great evil they use, how powerful that is, how greatly we’ve been hurt by it — so, shouldn’t we be allowed at least some of the fruits of that tree? No, not all the root and trunk of that evil —for we are not like our enemies, — we are just owed a little of that power, maybe one apple?

The poison apple “shines” because it seethes with the power of hatred. It’s “bright” because the dark fruit becomes reflective the moment we reach to pick it. A convex apple is a strange mirror. We see ourselves magnified, we see our enemies too, we see wrath distorting us.

Blake’s fable in that reading says then: do not plant that poison tree from the injustice done to you, as the poem’s singer does, for the fruit will be impossible for your enemy to resist. “Oh, that’s not so bad,” you may first think, “the foe ‘is outstretched beneath the tree” as the poem ends. But beyond the poem’s ending there’s another refrain: the foes survivors have wrath, fears, and tears — and a seed poison apple for another tree.

One thing I admired about Blake was his multiple skills, out of which he created the poetry, the book design, and the artwork for his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Indie!

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My performance of Blake’s “A Poison Tree”  is full of the sound of an American invention most often used by British bands of the late Sixties and early Seventies, the Mellotron. The Mellotron was supposed to be a home or light theater/salon entrainment device. It had tape recordings of instruments, including recorded sections of orchestral strings and woodwinds, one recording for each note to be triggered by a keyboard. When it was discovered by rock bands they found they could saturate their recordings in these orchestral textures. Because the articulations of the taped instruments were “canned” not freshly played, the result was a little ersatz — but eventually this was embraced and the output of the polite Mellotron was sometimes patched through overdriven amplifiers like an electric guitar might be. That’s part of the sound in the LYL Band performance of “The Poison Tree”  that you can hear with the audio player gadget below. No player?  This highlighted link is an alternate way to hear it, as it will open a tab with its own audio player.

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Emily Bronte’s Cold Halloween Spell

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing our Halloween Series featuring some of our listener’s favorite fantasy and supernatural pieces from the seven years of the Parlando Project we get to today’s short Emily Brontë poem “Spellbound.”   Once more we have an eerie situation with withheld information that adds to the mystery while paradoxically compelling our attention.

Before beginning the Parlando Project I was only aware that Emily Brontë had written poetry, holding that fact as having no other consequence. I’m not even sure what drew me into her poetry — memory fades — but it may have been finding out that another Emily, Emily Dickinson, read it. Brontë’s poetry, which preceded her famous novel Wuthering Heights,  was at least partially extracted from a series of writings she and her young siblings created within a set of fantasy worlds — and though this short discussion of Emily and Anne Brontë’s imagined world of Gondal doesn’t list this poem as being part of that universe, “Spellbound’s”  setting doesn’t sound out of place from the northern, winter island in their Gondal.

Nor out of place in the northern U.S. where I live, where the wind and weather is casting us to cold with predictions of snow and ice within the next 24 hours. When I first presented this poem three years ago,* I was intrigued by the prepositional position that the poem’s speaker seems to be in. In the poem they say that clouds are above them and the wintery wastes are below. It could be that Brontë was only envisioning a highlands or hillside perspective, but my mind’s eye had the spellbound speaker suspended, frozen in mid-air. Perhaps again, my imagination overtook me in that detail, but then I’m glad for Brontë’s imagination which created this chilling and enchanting poem that let me picture that.

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Another illustration created by enchanting Adobe’s Firefly with an incantation. Firefly claims that it doesn’t use uncompensated artists work in its AI model.

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I rather like the music I came up with for this one. Maybe you will too. An audio player is below for many of you so you can hear the performance of it, but some ways of reading this blog will suppress that page element, and so I also offer this alternative: a highlighted link that will open its own audio player gadget.

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*If you follow this link to my original presentation of “Spellbound”  you can see the lyrics as part of a chord sheet in case you would like to perform this song yourself.

The Listeners: a classic of mystery

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Judging from the numbers of its inclusions in Internet lists of spooky poems, Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”  comes to mind to more than just me when people are asked to think of Halloween poems. Yet it has no monsters, no sudden scares, no wicked battles, no fully-described supernatural events.

It creates its strange effect in this strange way: it gives us lots of details which may seem inessential, and next to nothing of its central situation. The plot is simple: a man travels to a building on horseback. He knocks at the building’s door. No one answers. He leaves. As an elevator pitch summary, it has little to call us in or disturb us. Why does it leave us with a wondering chill? It’s those details. Here’s a link to the poem.

First off, there’s a supporting character in the poem which seems to have only one for sure, the Traveller. That character: his horse. We meet the horse right at the start, noticing that it is unconcerned and grazing as the Traveller opens with his door-knocking announcement of arrival.

We’re also told it’s night. Only slightly unusual, in that one generally doesn’t schedule appointments at night. The Traveller knocks again. We’re told the building has a turret. Castle or fortress, or just a decorated Victorian era house? We know by this it’s not a small hut or cabin. The listeners that are spoken of soon are something of some means.

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Our two characters: the Traveller, and the horse he rode in on. One thinks it’s very important to be there, the other couldn’t care less.

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We’re told the Traveller has grey eyes. What an odd detail! We’re not filling out his driver’s license after all. Grey is a quite rare eye color in de la Mare’s Great Britain or Western Europe. Does the poem mean to suggest the Traveller is coming from a far distance?

Is there anyone inside the house? The poem mentions “phantom listeners” and these listeners are in the title. “Phantom” says they aren’t in the house at present in the way the Traveller and the horse are outside the door. We learn that the house has a hall, reinforcing by detail that the building isn’t small. The Traveller senses these whatevers, their “strangeness.” How are they strange? Nothing is said — but our second character, the horse, remains only interested in grazing.

The Traveller is insistent, pounding louder, shouting the intriguing line “Tell them I came…that I kept my word.” This is the plot’s climax, we don’t know what duty brought the Traveller there, perhaps from a long way off. Of course, we wonder what the bargain is, what the promise was. Is our wonder stirred by not knowing? Mine always is.

Another detail: we’re told the Traveller is “the one man left awake.” How are we to take that statement? That the “phantom listeners” are asleep and can’t be awakened? Or should we take it more catastrophically: that the “phantom listeners” aren’t human, never were, and that the Traveller is the last man at all, anywhere, awake? I never considered this latter reading until typing this tonight —perhaps I’m over-reading — but if so, is the Traveller coming to ask them to lift that spell, the only man still with agency to plead?

I love the final quatrain of this poem. Our horse returns, and the listeners, we’re told, can hear the creak of the leather from its saddle stirrup — a lovely detail, and a quieter sound compared to the pounding and shouting that has preceded it. Finally this sound: the evocation of the horseshoes ringing on hard stone inside a world of otherwise silence. The horse may be unconcerned by the silence, perhaps even the lack of any other awake people is not of any matter to it.

My music for this features the electric 12-string guitar, an instrument that I love. You can hear me perform Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”  with the audio player below. If you can’t see that player, no need to knock louder, use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player. Thank you for being The Listeners for this Project!

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Does your garden have ghosts, part 2: Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

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.”

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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.

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