sunrise

The Sunset stopped on Cottages

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that I made into a little song. There’s an audio player below to hear it.*  I intended the music I made for this piece to be jaunty – not only because I worry that too many of the Parlando Project pieces are slow to mid-tempo, but because it fits the language of Dickinson’s poem. Just 8 lines, but its “what’s in the box” description includes: a sunset, a morning, cottages, and a USB C charging cable.

No – error – sorry. No charging cable. I looked at the catalog listing:

Emily Dickinson no longer includes a charger or charging cable as part of our environmental commitment, which we maintain as we continue to offer the finest in Cottage-Core products for the home poetry enthusiast. Folks who listen to ‘The Sunset Stops on Cottages’  often listen to ‘I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose’   and may also be interested in a delightfully antique Emily Dickinson tulle tippet nightgown or one of the delightful Tyrian purple moth-scented candles from our Susan Gilbert Dickinson collection.

OK. I’m funning with you. After living with the poem for awhile as I set it to music and recorded my performance of the result, I instead believe this poem is an example of the genre my wife calls “Cozy Gothic.” How come? I think the poem’s cottages are graves.

Here’s how I understand Dickinson’s poem. There’s a pretty sunset, an eternally repeated and universal, broad-sky-set thing. The sunset must appear where ED’s poem sees it, but after its moment it’ll be “Gone Westerly,” for today. Gone westerly is likely a similar idiom to “gone south,” a euphemism for death. The sun has not fled out of dereliction of duty –“treason” – but because a day, like a human life has its limits. The poem’s second stanza reminds us of the circadian day too: that morning and a sunrise was, and will be, there – but that’s no matter to the dwellers in the cottage/grave “swellings in the ground” who can’t see the “supercilious Sun.”

Sunset stopped on Cottages

Here a chords sheet, and what’d be more Cottage-Core than playing this Cozy Gothic song in your own cottage? That G chord form I played is just the B & E strings fretted at the effective 3rd fret along with the open D and G strings.

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I asked my wife again this morning about “Cozy Gothic” as I prepared to write this. I reminded her that the young Emily Dickinson did not grow up in the grand house that’s now the Emily Dickinson Museum, but in another place where the Dickinson family lived in her youth after her grandfather got the family finances mired in debts until her generation extracted them from that and were able to move back to the grander house we associate with her poetry. The grand Dickinson manse was across the road from a crop field, and had room for gardens of fruit, food, and flowers; and it was beside a main road for travelers in and out of town. The place that her family had to relocate to was smaller, and across the street was a graveyard. Mix those two homes ED knew in her lifetime, and you have some pretty good poetic loam. I asked my wife, a known PK,** “Did you ever live next to a graveyard?”

Yes, when we lived in a parsonage. The town was taken aback when I sunbathed in the graveyard. I didn’t know what the big deal was about that – it just seemed like a nice, peaceful, place.”

That’s my wife. Nature nymph and likely a better writer than I am – and for all the mixture that made up her childhood, she got to live the spirit of this Dickinson poem directly – Cozy Gothic.

Here’s that audio player gadget. What, has any such audio player “Gone Westerly?” You can take hope in the resurrection, but it’s likely because some ways of viewing this blog suppress displaying the audio player gadget, just like they mute the angels that would write better, more concise blog posts. I make do by providing this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player though. Playing the bass track for this one – without making a point to think of it, but still thinking of it – I was thinking of the great British bassist, Danny Thompson, who died this autumn. Thompson’s playing could be quite free and capable of quick, large, leaps in register, but while doing that he could follow complicated or chaotic other players ad lib and help make musical sense out of them. I loved his playing, and of course mine is more a tribute than the work of a peer in skills or dedication to the instrument.

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*I find it puzzling as this Project enters its 10th year that the number of people who take the time to listen to the (almost always) short musical pieces here remains essentially flat from 3 years in the Project on forward, while the number of readers of the blog posts continues to grow. Less than 10% of readers click the audio player or link, assuming that the stats I get are accurate.

I have guesses. My rough-hewn voice will never make me America’s sweetheart. My naïve compositional skills may fall between the sawhorses of pop ready-mades and art-song sophistication. The variety of my musical approaches may put a stop to continued listening, as I’m near certain to attempt a style someone doesn’t like (and so my failure or limited success in evoking those styles could be beside the point).

**”PK” = “Preacher’s Kid.” Not just my wife, then Dave Moore, my long-time musical partner sometimes heard here, is a PK too. I’m sort of one, though my father left the Protestant ministry, except for fill-in roles, in my childhood – but that history and those fill-in pulpit appearances likely helped shape me.

The sequela of being a PK vary. Some become rebel angels, some follow into the “family business,” some suffer from having had childhood expectations of goodness and polity, others take the close-hand connections with music, ethics, or philosophy and use that in some other field. For myself, I think the main thing I took from it (and my father deciding not to take to it) is the concept of “a calling.”

I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

After our short trip to Chinese translation, let’s return again to Emily Dickinson, who is observing another morning.

This LYL Band performance of “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose”  is a bit imperfect. Alternative Parlando Project reader Dave Moore takes the lead here, but he and I are singing instead of our usual recitative, and we’re caught at the top of our singing range as well. Dave even bobbles a word in the line “The hills untied their bonnets.” So, yes, this leads to some imperfection—but this lyric is so perfect that perhaps it can carry us along anyway.

I suggest you listen to this piece now and then read my discussion of what I see in it afterward. Dickinson, like a good melody, doesn’t require understanding before enjoyment. The player to hear it is at the bottom of this post.

“I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose”  begins with a homespun 19th century village dawn, and the singer starts right off almost bragging that they can tell us how the sun comes up. As proof, Dickinson unleashes a string of lovely, singing metaphors for sunrise, looking down from the dawn only once to let us see the squirrels running about as if with the news of the day. She concludes this section with finest simplicity: “That must have been the sun!”

Isn’t that a strange way to sum up dawn? It comes up and it’s already past tense, like Meng Haoran’s morning in the last post, and Dickinson comments on this common splendor as if she’s a surprised alien from another planet who has never seen the sun. Her boast that she can tell us “how the sun rose”—something she and all of us should already know, set in nothing more special than a prosaic town—becomes instead a small, whispered, apprehended wonder.

In the second section, Dickinson shifts gears so smoothly that no matter how many times you read or hear this poem you will never notice. There is a little engagement of the gears as she says of sunset “I know not,” unlike our first gear’s “I’ll tell you;” but we’re soon on to a rural scene with the sun rays like children climbing up and then down a stairway over a hedge or fence row (a stile).  At that point, there’s a bustle in your hedgerow as the dusk becomes a grey robed “dominie,” a strange and archaic word perhaps even in Dickinson’s 19th century, and a sure stumper for any modern English speaker.

A dominie is a Latin word meaning the leader of a congregation, a minister, a pastor—and ‘pastor” is derived from the word for shepherd—and that’s just what our grey dusk becomes as it leads the children of the dawn, now dusk, away like a flock, closing the bars, closing the gate, so that they cannot return.

Some readers are so charmed by Dickinson’s first section that they feel it is pedantic to think that this sunset section is describing a passage to death, “The undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns,” so no wonder that Dickinson moved from “I’ll tell you” to “I know not.”

That dominie seems so removed from the pleasant village of the first section, so foreign. Another subtle word choice contrasts the two sections. There’s only 88 words in this piece, and five of them are colors. “Rose” puns for dawn pink in the first line and then dawn is “amethyst,” a word for both purple and a semi-precious stone. The sunray children are “yellow”, and our strange dominie is dusky “gray.” The stile sunset stairway that the sunray children are climbing is “purple.” So out of our five colors, one of them is roughly the same color. In the first section, it’s semi-precious and wondrous, but in the second it’s just purple—a ruling, royal color perhaps—but those sunset ray children’s steps are ruled over not ruling, not shining like the amethyst steeples of the dawn.

stile sunset

Putting on the stile

 

Did you listen to the performance of “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose”  before reading all this? I feel a bit here as if I’m acting  like that dominie myself, leading you past the plain and beautiful dawn, over the stile, and closing the gate to simply hearing the sound and the manner of expression of Dickinson. Too often we make too much of the meaning of poetry, and particular the deeper meaning of poems. Just as Meng Haoran’s poem from last time can be understood well enough to be enjoyed by children, this poem too can be enjoyed as compressed observation. Perhaps it’s because I am an old man, one who has tried to write and make music for many years, that I care to see what is underneath the sun rays, to look over the stile, and to find what is inside Emily Dickinson’s expression.

To hear the LYL Band perform “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose,”  use the player below.