Thomas Moore

The Minstrel Boy

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The Parlando Project’s thing: taking a literary poem and combining it with a piece of music isn’t a new thing. If poetry exists in every language, poetry combined with music exists in every language too, and such casual melding typically pre-dates the culture’s written poetry. We have just kept on doing it as a practical and immediate art.

This is National Poetry Month here in the U. S., but I don’t think I’m overly nationalist in the words I use here. Still, just as poetry and music go together, national and ethnic pride often takes poetry and song onto itself. W. H. Auden notably stated that “poetry makes nothing happen” but if we examine it the other way around, it’s unlikely that any great movement for change or nationhood ever has had no poetry and song associated with it.

As a poem “The Minstrel Boy”  was first published in 1813 as part of the author’s collection titled Irish Melodies, and its central image is a harp carried by a “warrior bard.” It’s therefore apt that Moore combined it with music forthwith, using what he named as a traditional Irish tune.*  Harps and lyres etc. are an extraordinarily large family of instruments, but Moore seems clearly to be writing of Ireland, where the Celtic harp has become a national symbol. At the time of its writing, Ireland was still under the long-standing, often cruel and exploitative, rule of England. Classmates of Moore had recently died in one of the periodic Irish rebellions.

Minstrel Boy

I asked alternate voice and keyboard player connected to this Project Dave Moore if his family has any connection to the liked named poet. None known, he tells me. Dave’s father preached for decades, and he wrote at least one literary short story that I read after he — one of the generation this month’s poetry anthologies were marketed for — had returned from WWII.  I told Dave’s dad his story reminded me of Hemingway. He replied “I don’t think I knew anything about Hemingway then, he was kind of avant-garde stuff at the time.”

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The song also became popular in America, though I’m not certain how rapidly it took root here — but in the year of its publication America was at war with Britain for the second time after its revolution. And by later in the 19th century, the song had currency among Irish-American immigrants.

Ironically, Moore received a British diplomatic post to Bermuda, and in 1803 he not only visited the United States but met President Thomas Jefferson. The tale I read online says the two did not hit it off, and that Moore was not impressed with American chattel slavery. **

Since those times the song (or sometimes just the tune associated with it) has been closely associated with the armed forces, police, and firefighters — folks whose sense of professional duty includes risk of death. I find that ironic too, for the song’s minstrel boy is the definition of an untrained irregular, possibly underage, untrained (he has to borrow a weapon), and more of a singer-songwriter than a SEAL Team professional. *** This is one of those cases where tradition overwhelms close reading.

I’m performing this song as part of my NPM series looking at poems from a pair of 1920’s anthologies of verse for children: The Girls Book of Verse  andThe Boys Book of Verse, and “The Minstrel Boy”  appears in one of this gendered pair of books. In each instance this month I’ve asked you to guess which one: Boys or Girls.  Today’s poem is a free square in that game, as one would easily guess this military service theme would be in the boy’s book — as it is. Indeed, The Boys Book of Verse  has an entire section, Songs of Peace and War dealing with poems about battles and military service. The editors, both women, would have had recent experience of WWI, and whatever their feeling about warfare, they must have felt that subject was something their readers or purchasers would want included for the boys.

I stop to think here — as I do as I consider the entirety of this pair of “the last Twenties” books — that the first audience for these books would go on to experience a much greater and deadlier world war.

I’m likely not one of the best singers to have sung this well-loved song, but I performed it with a full rough’n’ready rock-band arrangement as best as I could peel off in this month’s accelerated schedule. My inspiration for singing this song? A similarly not-ready-for-the-most skilled-singer-contest one, Joe Strummer, who also recorded this song. You can hear me tear through those chords asunder with the audio player you should see below. If no audio player sullies your screen, it’s because some ways of reading this blog won’t show it. This highlighted link is your alternative — it will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*The tune Moore selected, named as “The Moreen,”  was said to be a traditional tune. Wikipedia says that no one has independently found a source of this tune from before its pairing with “The Minstrel Boy’’ —  so it could be that it would have disappeared forever if Moore hadn’t tapped it for his poem about a doomed harper. That adds an air of mystery to the song, doesn’t it.

**The stirring final line stating the harpers fight was against slavery does and doesn’t require an explanation. Servitude in general, even government duties and tributes required from monarchs or tyrants, was often rhetorically called out as slavery, while American chattel slavery was totalitarian: humans — and with added cruelty, any families of those enslaved — owned in perpetuity like animals without rights of any kind. I read that this song was sung by both sides of the American Civil War — the “slavery” on one side rhetorical, the slavery on the other total and abject. When I started this post talking about the widespread tradition of nationalist poetry and song, take note: a corollary from Auden’s dictum may be that poetry and song prove nothing.

***This might be a fair poetic description of the Irish rebels that the teenage Moore knew, those who died in an ineffective rebellion. The long fight for Irish independence seems to have had an outsized portion of “warrior bards,” folks with less military experience and tactical acumen than literary and musical bona fides.

Christina Rossetti’s take on “The Last Rose of Summer”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s text is a poem that works in the common garden using another poet’s central image. Christina Rossetti’s “An October Garden”  is three lines in when she reveals that her garden isn’t growing nervous grazing watermelons—that what she observes there is the last rose of summer.

Irish poet Thomas Moore seems to be the writer who first struck that coinage, or at the least popularized it. His 1805 short poem called “The Last Rose of Summer” was soon set to music based on a traditional Irish harper’s tune, and the words and sentiments with the associated music has been sticking around ever since.*   Moore’s poem is both dark and sentimental, a combination of ingredients that continues to impress audiences. Summarized to its core outlook, it’s a poem about surrendering (at least metaphorically) to loss.

Here’s a link to the text of Thomas Moore’s poem and then the text of Christiana Rossetti’s that I’ll perform below.

Chistina Rossetti Skull and Roses

Writing down to the bones & roses: “When the last rose of summer pricks your finger…”

 

What distinguishes Christina Rossetti’s use of the image from Thomas Moore’s? Rossetti’s is a bit shorter. It’s an unusual form sonnet, just 14 lines, vs. Moore’s 24. Rossetti’s sonnet form is neat: a pair of equal 7-line stanzas and an ABBAACC rhyme scheme. But furthermore, her take on the image is somewhat ambiguous. For one thing she notes there are other, more hardy flowers still around too, but her eye’s on that last rose, and however puny and forlorn it might be, she’s one for the roses and not them. Although no one would confuse her poem with a Modernist poem in the Imagist style, her presentation of the rose is more objective and there are fewer “feeling” words, and in their place: more observational words.

If one abandoned the structure she used, one could “translate” Rossetti’s poem into a free-verse Imagist poem fairly easily. But let me note one more thing about the structure: one could easily think that a need for rhymes has forced some word choices. The last rose “which cold winds balk” reads to me first and last as a forced rhyme. The literal sense is that the winds are still holding-back against this puny but still budding rose, but that’s not a strong statement (absence of the cold winds is less concrete than their presence). The other possibly forced rhyme is repeated twice:** “rosebud which uncloses.” This one is so awkward that I am still evaluating how it works. What a weird way to say what one could say simply “opens.”

There’s a dirty little secret about rhymes. More times than poets will admit, the need to make a rhyme will force a poet into a choice they otherwise wouldn’t make. There are times that rhyming need works like Surrealist tactics such as “exquisite corpse” or randomization techniques, it throws chaos and noise into one’s intent. When the result fails to set off sparks, it’s experienced as forced, a failure—but when it does work, the poem or phrase takes on a new freshness.

So which is “uncloses?” I’m still not sure. If one allows the oddity of the word, and asks what it could say that’s different than “open,” it’s saying that the last rose is making a choice in blooming, knowing that colder fall and then winter to come will make its feeble bloom even shorter. It suggests it’s choosing to not stay closed or to not close back up against the cold and bleak.

Musically I doubt my setting will do for Rossetti’s poem what music did for Thomas Moore’s, but it did give an excuse to break out the Mellotron sounds again. Musical instruments can accumulate associations, and for me nothing says sitting in an English garden like this wobbly keyboard instrument that tried to imitate orchestral instruments; and while failing in verisimilitude, succeeded in sounding like a memory of them.

My performance of Rossetti’s “An October Garden”  is available with the player gadget below. If you don’t see the player, you can find all the audio performances here on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or most other podcast sources. You can find them at such places by searching for “Parlando – Where Music and Words Meet.”

 

 

 

 

*In that Wikipedia page that I linked above for the text of “The Last Rose of Summer”  I draw your attention to the lower sections where the extraordinarly wide range of use and allusion the tune and the text has had is listed. A personal favorite is Robert Hunter’s grief-filled variation “Black Muddy River.”

**There’s an old Jazz improvisor’s trick that when a player flubs a note or makes a wrong choice when improvising, that a way out is to repeat it, or even make it a motif.