Let us for a moment consider length in English language poetry. Despite the customary inclusion of one or two very short poems in most American poetry anthologies (“The Red Wheelbarrow” or “In A Station of the Metro” typically), one can easily derive from them an accumulated mainstream judgement that poems shorter than a sonnet’s 14 lines are judged slighter expressions of less merit.
Similarly, in music, for all the glories of the mid-20th Century’s two minute and forty second 45 RPM single, serious composed music demonstrates greater regard for pieces of at least middling length, and the 20 to 70-minute symphony is still regarded with reverence. And so on with improvised music practice, which seem to find the five-minute mark as a minimum. Even the later 20th Century movement that got called “Minimalism” worked the idea of fewer motifs considered at greater length.
And so it is when we consider swans, the largest waterfowl, in words. Our last post and audio piece used Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Wild Swans,” a fine poem, but if one looks at the accumulated attention gathered in the roughly 100 years since each was written, Millay’s “Wild Swans” is overshadowed by William Butler Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole.”
Yeats’ poem is worthy of this attention, and he does pack a lot into his mid-length 30-line poem, written by a late middle-aged poet as his colonized country has experienced a failed revolution and his world has seen the shocking mechanized slaughter of the original World War. All that violence is subtext—not once is it mentioned—and as we read or listen to it now, that violence may no longer be apparent, though the background of disappointment remains.
Millay presents the swans as something she cannot comprehend as they fly over her, with her disappointment, her heart at present “a house without air.” Yeats on the other hand presents an almost OCD-level attention with the swimming swans at the beginning of his poem. He has apparently been counting them on each visit for 19 years. He’s going to count them again. And then they fly off in clamor before he can finish his count even though he reports an exact number.
The specificity of those two numbers is curious. Is the 19 years of visits to Coole in Ireland a mere biographical fact? Are the “nine-and-fifty swans” he’s counted an actual census he took regularly? I do not know. Given that Yeats had a long interest in occultism, there may be some occult significance in one or both of those numbers. They are both large numbers for the things they measure: anything one has done for 19 years has a resonance for that long a duration, and given how magnificent the sight of a few swans gliding on the water are, the idea of 59 of them viewed together is an image of overwhelming swan-ishness.
What strikes me most about the two numbers subliminal effect is that both end in 9, and so, seem to be almost at an ending. As the poem develops, Yeats returns to that effect.
These details, written in Yeats typical lyrical fluency, accumulate throughout the poem. The lake and sky repeating each other. 59 swans. The “bell-beat” weight of their wings as they heavily swing them into flight, equally straining, equally coalescing into aerial rings. Their companionable swimming on the cold water “lover by lover”—ah, there’s that 59 again, an odd number—at least one swan has no mate.
But he doesn’t say that. The poem is all its music, the image after image, the beauty after beauty mixed with the undercurrent of impossibility of its permanency. The world will change, the poet or the swans will not return.
19 years of repetition does not mean 19 years of repetition to come. 59 swans is all but too much beauty, but one swan is without a partner.
John Coltrane: “Sometimes when I’m playing there are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. There’s never any end.”
Miles Davis: “Try taking the f’ing horn out of your mouth”
So, do the 30 lines of Yeats mean it’s a greater poem than the 8 lines of Millay, an objective judgement causing its greater fame?
Why do I have to choose? If Yeats had written 60 or 6,000 lines would “The Wild Swans at Coole” be better? If Millay had written 80 lines, would her “Wild Swans” have shown greater skill? We can derive from how anthologists, poetry critics and audiences respond what their preferences are, even those they never articulate explicitly, but in the end it is the longer poems that make the short poems concise and the short poems that make the longer poems seem overwhelming.
How many times have I listened to “Kind of Blue?” Does Miles Davis need to play more notes? Does John Coltrane need to play fewer? Looking at these two poems about swans, they illuminate each other.
The gadget below will play my performance of Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole.”
There’s two things that attracted me to T. E. Hulme, the lesser-known Modernist poet and theoretician that I’ve featured a few times this summer. The first is the sense in his poetry and critical writings of the limits of humankind. The other is his poetry’s surprising modesty and restraint, something embodied in the very brevity of its poetic expression and his images linking the mundane and the cosmic.
This was a man who wanted to overthrow hundreds of years of poetic tradition, and a person whose stubbornness kept him in trouble with authority figures throughout his youth, and yet Hulme expresses himself in these spare lines, as if the first lesson he’s teaching himself is to know his own limits. This seems to be Hulme’s problem with Romanticism as he saw and opposed it: humankind is not limitless, though our imagination says otherwise.
Today’s piece, William Butler Yeats’ “The Heart of the Woman” moves in opposition to that outlook, but not in opposition to that expression.
Here in North America, many in the southern region are spending this week either cleaning up from a massive hurricane or clenching their jaws in anticipation of an even larger one due to strike this weekend. Peaceful, Rousseauean nature this ain’t. Hobbes is is a weatherman.
“Come in she said, I’ll give you, shelter from the storm.”
Yeats’ poem is as measured and modest as one of Hulme’s, though it is rhymed and metrical. When one is a good as Yeats is at that, one hardly notices the form. 12 lines, not even a sonnet in length. Like Hulme, this is no great ode of endless argument. On the face of it, it’s a love song, a basic trope of Romanticism, the reason we talk about human attraction and pairing as “romantic.” Its images are centered on a couple embracing.
Why Mr. Yeats, I didn’t realize you were, well, dreamy, without your glasses
But look closely in those dozen lines. The woman who’s singing it, has left religion (“prayer and rest”) and family, and has followed a lover’s invitation into what is introduced as “gloom”. Merely the dark of night?
No, in Yeats’ lovely line, darkness is found inside the “Shadowy blossom” of her hair which will hide the lovers from the “bitter storm.” Now we are fully in the Romantic world, where our own darkness may be willful, wishful, blissful, ignorance of the “hiding hair and dewy (blurry) eyes.”
Are there any more Romantic and romantic three lines as Yeats’ final three that conclude this piece? If there are, I can’t recall any at the moment. That the simple murmurs of human breath can seem to equal a hurricane’s—is that glorious or folly or both?
In the spirit of defying human limits, this is the first time you’re going to hear me sing a Parlando Project piece acapella. And though Yeats’ poem doesn’t rule out the same romantic faith on the part of the “he” in this poem, I’m somewhat troubled by the idea that romantic devotion is presented here as female, from the poem’s title onward, so I’ll undercut that by singing this. My less-able singing voice is one reason that we chant or speak-sing a lot of Parlando Project material, but my young son’s carefree acapella singing is reminding me of the value in the singing voice. To hear “The Heart of the Woman,” use the player gadget below.
Here’s one more piece from Ezra Pound’s 1915 breakthrough collection “Cathay,” a war story he called “South Folk in Cold Country.”
At the time Pound was working from Ernest Fenollosa’s, and Fenollosa’s Japanese teachers,’ notes to translate classic Chinese poetry, World War I had broken out, and England, where Pound was living, had mobilized to fight this war. Like William Butler Yeats (with whom Pound was staying for part of this time) Pound did not want to take a side in the war. Not only skeptical of the war’s patriotic rationales, Pound also wanted to continue to focus on his modernist artistic revolution.
Earlier in the Parlando Project, we’ve seen how Yeats responded at the beginning of the war. His “On Being Asked For a War Poem”cloaked his disdain for statesmen’s’ rhetoric while seeming to take a aesthete’s stance of artistic superiority and inferiority.
Robert Frost needed to get to W. B. Yeats house,
so a helpful Ezra Pound drew him this map.
Pound felt similarly. He may not have been sure, at first, of the what he would eventually call lies by the politicians by the end of the war, but his poetic BS meter was immediately sure that the patriotic verse being produced to ennoble the war was false ethically and artistically. But Pound also recognized that any poetry he would write in such a charged environment would be inescapably seen in the context of the war.
Still, he was wary of writing about war as a civilian who had never fought in battle. At one point, he reported he had tried to enlist, but was turned down due to his (then neutral) American citizenship. At another point, he wrote a review critical of Rupert Brooke’s war poetry, only to have Brooke, who was serving in the British armed forces, die while in service, leading Pound to qualify that he was only criticizing the poetry, not the citizenship.
So as Pound created and promoted Imagism, his vision of new modernist poetry by recreating classical Chinese poetry in English, he came upon a solution. He would use the Chinese poets, both as the model for his new kind of verse and as a way to comment on the war.
Today’s audio piece is an example of how Pound went about those two things, once again translating and transforming the work of 9th Century Chinese poet Li Bai.
“South Folk in Cold Country” is an account by Li Bai of a military campaign in the north of China that had occurred almost a thousand years before he wrote. Pound, taking this for his modernism, has the soldiers who speak of their war experience say nothing of what they are feeling. There is not a word of them saying they are tired, confused, frustrated, or suffering, but their world is described by them as the image of all these things. While Li Bai/Pound’s “River Merchant’s Wife” reads musically off the page, despite being “free verse” in English, “South Folk in a Cold Country” has a more abrupt and doubtful music. Pound was trusting Li Bai and his own artistic sensibilities so that he might get some of the war experience right.
When I first read “South Folk in Cold Country” this year I thought: this sounds like a bag of fortune cookies mixed in with Ernest Hemingway. Either or both of those comparisons may sound dismissive to you, but I suspect the best fortune cookie aphorisms have some relationship, however strained, to the concision of classic Chinese poetry, and Hemingway, however familiar he may seem to us now, was using Pound’s ideas as part of what was to be Hemingway’s revolution in prose. Thanks to Hemingway, and in turn, to Pound who directly influenced and taught him, we now are not surprised by representations of war, violence, and death that assume concise description and charged observation can be truer than superfluous remarks by the author.
Hemingway, who did serve in WWI, sought out Ezra Pound to shape his writing about it
I did wonder about the General Rishogu mentioned at the end the piece. His Chinese name (remember, Pound was working from notes of Japanese scholars, not Chinese ones) was Li Guang, and his story is here. I like this as an ending. I’m not sure if Li Bai’s soldiers who speak in this piece are using Rishogu/Guang as an example of the hard fate of soldiers; or if they are saying, after what we’ve been through, making all those rapid marches to make Rishogu/Guang’s name, who among them will care about the general’s death. On the odds, I’ll take the later.
Musically I used some relentless vibes over electric piano and bass to stand for the rapid marches that the “swift moving” general kept ordering, and then some neighing winds from a synthesizer patch. To hear me perform “South Folk in Cold Country” with that music, use the player gadget below.
The subtitle of the Parlando Project is “The Place Where Music and Words Meet”. As I mentioned last night, this project, which combines words sourced from a variety of sources with a variety of music, has now reached 100 available audio pieces since it’s official launch 11 months ago. Note that stress on variety. In terms of writers, I have my favorites, and the short format of our audio pieces strongly favors poetry, but the Parlando Project has featured words taken from other sources as well, and some of the poets featured were unknown to me until I ran across them looking for material, and I’m trying to vary the music as much as I can. Sometimes our pieces are as simple as acoustic guitar and voice, as in our most recent post The Oven Bird. Some pieces have full arrangements with multiple instruments, and some feature spontaneous performances by the LYL Band, a folk-rock band that’s been playing a rough and ready mix of electric instruments and literate lyrics since the early days of Minneapolis punk rock.
We’ve gotten thousands of downloads and streams so far, and though I don’t have the time to thank everyone personally for the likes and the shares, it’s been your passing on the existence of our audio pieces that has grown our audience from a few hundred downloads to thousands. I don’t have time for a social media presence myself. Researching, writing the majority of the music, as well as arranging, producing and recording these 100 pieces has taken an untold number of fascinating hours, but it leaves me little time to promote this work myself. So I’m very grateful for you, the readers/listeners who have done so.
Since we last did did a Top 10 in the spring, that growth in listenership has meant that there is only one returning piece since that list a few months ago. Which piece has the staying power? Lets start off the countdown in the traditional order, with #10.
10. Adlestrop – a late surge brought this piece with words by fateful British poet Edward Thomas into the top 10, just beating out Zalka Peetruza and Spring Grass as the final slot shifted back and forth this week. Adlestop’s download rate is noteworthy too in that its the newest post to make this list. Listening to this hazy slide guitar piece I still recall my own muggy summer unscheduled lay-over in Kingham a year ago, but that’s a private moment, though I feel somehow I’ve shared it with Thomas thanks to his words. In a more public way, this poem gains resonance from it’s connection to Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken and to the Centenary of WWI.
9. Grass – speaking of WWI, here’s the first of two placings of a Carl Sandburg piece on this Summer’s Top 10. My private memory is performing this with the LYL Band, spontaneously as usual, with no rehearsal or warning as I read Sandburg’s words, and having us stop on a dime for line that starts “What place is this…” as Grass approaches Sandburg’s ending. For other listeners, particularly those with friends, families, and even ancestors lost to war, Sandburg’s piece asks a powerful question of forgetfulness.
8. Intro to The Waste Land – One could say this continues our WWI Centenary theme, as T.S. Eliot deals with his personal depression in the context of the aftermath of The Great War in this poem, but it was instead intended as part of our April “National Poetry Month” celebration, which I will always link to the poem’s famous opening line “April is the cruelest month.” This is one of my composed pieces musically, were I get to write and perform all the parts myself, which means I get to fully realize my personal “vision” of the music (something the listener needs to care not a bit about) and to therefore be responsible for all my own mistakes. My personal memories of The Waste Land are two-fold, one a memory of reading it for the first time in college, and though mystified, feeling an intense musical thrust in what Eliot wrote, and then to a time more than a decade ago when I felt just past my lowest ebb emotionally and then performed the last sections of The Waste Land spontaneously with the LYL Band, and found it as musical as I expected it would be, but also was surprised at how it expiational performing it was. Publically, the downloads of this have been steady, and have continued long past #NPM in April, so it’s either due to your sharing of it, or the poem’s continued fame.
7. To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing – Irish poet William Butler Yeats is another writer whose work we’ve mined for more than one piece here. One thing I learned while looking at material for this blog was that Yeats too believed that poetry performed with music was a necessary combination. Another investigation, brought on specifically by this piece, was to find out just who the friend was whose work had been thwarted, and what that work was. This has been another piece with a steady listening rate since posted. My guess is that the experience Yeats was telling us about is common to many, and whenever it is encountered it is not easily forgotten. Weeks after this was posted, I watched the former FBI director James Comey testify before Congress, and thought if Yeats was his friend, he would have said the same things in verse to him.
6. Clark Street Bridge – Carl Sandburg gets his second appearance on this Top 10 with this wistful story of day and night on this busy downtown Chicago river bridge. As a personal experience I got to see the Clark Street Bridge this spring on a visit to Chicago, and though the current bridge is almost 100 years old, it’s not the one Sandburg watched and wrote of. Another thing I learned during my trip: his night scene with silver singing stars equal in number to all the broken hearts in Chicago contained a larger number than I would have estimated from modern urban nights, as the poem was written before the widespread adoption of all-night electric lights. What are, or could, the listeners be attracted to? Well, broken hearts remain as numerous as the stars in a dark sky for sure, and Chicago has taken Sandburg to it’s heart; despite, or because, he says that that heart is broken.
5. The Death of Col. Bruce Hampton – I’ve written a number of direct tributes to musicians that I’ve featured here, but this is the most popular. Particularly now as the main lot of musicians fall back into the lower levels of the “gig economy” they gave their name to without additional payment, I see them as retaining the heroism of artists in general, who do what they do to general indifference, but now with a much lower chance of professional earnings. This is the only piece in this Top 10 where I wrote the words and the music, but that’s about the right amount, as the Parlando Project is about appreciating “Other People’s Stories” after all. The defensive shells and double-ended poison stingers that artists grow don’t always lead to happy lives, but those who knew Bruce Hampton have grateful things to say about him as a person and collaborator. And by chance, he got to come to the end his life with some of those folks thanking him, while he encouraged the creation of even more spontaneous art. I assume that’s the reason for so many people listening to this piece.
4. These Fought – Here’s one I’m a little surprised about. Ezra Pound may have done more than any other person to create modern poetry, but he’s less read today than many he influenced and championed. And though other modernists dabbled in between-the-wars nationalism and racial theories, Pound became America’s most notorious fascist apologist. And this piece, posted around Memorial Day is an uncompromising denial of the honor in the sacrifices of WWI. If you like your poetry feel-good and inspirational, if you like your poets cuddly and full of civic pride, this piece is not your choice. The LYL Band tries to equal Pound’s fierceness in this performance.
3. Love and Money – Unlike many other poetry and spoken word blogs, we feature other people’s words almost all the time in the Parlando Project. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with self-expression, but in following the Project’s dictum “Other People’s Stories,” we don’t do that often. Perhaps in consolidating that stated aim with the catalog of thought-provoking words that Dave has written over the years, many of the Dave Moore pieces I’ve posted so far have been performances where I perform Dave’s words–a mixed blessing that–because, to steal an old Columbia Records ad from the 1960s “No one sings Dave Moore like Dave Moore.” I was sold on this one the moment I heard Dave sing the first line of this piece as we spontaneously performed it, and there’s no way I could do it justice. The popularity of “Love and Money” probably has the same private and public reasons, it’s just a good song. Oh, and Dave’s pounding electric clavichord performance might have something to do with it too.
2. Up-Hill – Here’s an example of a poet I knew close to nothing about before looking for material in the public domain to adopt for Parlando performance. Having a long time love of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and knowing that poetry and poets were part of their artistic circle, I went looking for Pre-Raphaelite poems that I could relate to musically. I kept striking out. I really wanted to find something by Algernon Charles Swinburne, because, well, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”. Is there any name that says more clearly that you don’t give a damn about sounding cleanly modern and approachable? Only Ezra Pound’s invented persona “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” comes close. Alas, I could find nothing I felt I could inhabit–and then I came upon some of Christina Rossetti’s shorter poems. Read this on the page just once, and you know it’s crying out to be sung. Perhaps Up-Hill draws listeners because it’s a Christian religious poem, but Rossetti’s writing personally connects with me because it’s imagery and expression is so non-abstract and modest.
1. Frances – Here’s the only repeat from last Spring, and it’s still on top, with almost double the total listens since released of the any of the others on this list. I released Frances on a lark to mark US President’s Day last February. I suspect it got picked up and linked somewhere more popular than other pieces that have been linked from here, but I haven’t been able to find out where. Here’s an example of how relatively popular it’s remained, long after it’s author’s, the first US President George Washington’s, birthday this winter: it was the 8th most listened to piece from the Parlando Project in May, still 19th in June, and currently it’s the 13th most listened to song in July, with a hundred alternatives competing with it. What accounts for this? Well it’s a love song for one thing. Maybe it’s the pared back Pixies soft/loud arrangement? It’s a mystery.
So that completes the Summer 2017 Top 10. I plan to do another one next Fall. If you’ve got a favorite you’ve found here, do what someone must have done with Frances, and go ahead a link to it to see if it can get more listeners.
William Butler Yeats, when he spoke admiringly about the ubiquity that songwriters like Rabindranath Tagore could achieve, had already made his forays into setting his poems to music. As a sometime playwright, and a founder of the Abbey Theater in Ireland, he was already familiar with the dimensions performers can bring to words. Around the turn to the 20th Century he began to forthrightly seek to combine his poetry with music. Working in collaboration with musicologist and luthier Arnold Dolmetsch and performer Florence Farr he had a psaltery (a stringed instrument like a lyre or small harp) constructed, and Farr (a fascinating figure in her own right) then performed Yeats poems with it.
Farr with the psaltery showing Joanna Newsom how to rock it
Yeats and Farr’s performance style was not a conventional art song setting of the poet’s words sung to a melody. Yeats explicitly rejected that (even though his words have often been set to melodies in the years since). Rather he thought the words were best chanted or intoned in a rhythmic and somewhat elongated speech. Such performances are controversial then, and I would suppose they would be controversial now as well. George Bernard Shaw called Farr’s chanting “A nerve-destroying crooning,” but Ezra Pound and other early 20th century modernists took note, and they were influenced by these performances to add a more incantatory and musical element to their poetry.
Now let us break in our story for about half a century.
In the late 1950s an actor and folk singer Burl Ives recorded an album of Irish songs, and one of them was “The Wondering of Old Angus”, a Yeats poem sung to melody that Ives claimed he learned from Sara Allgood, another actor who had performed with the Abbey Theater group and would have likely known of the Farr performances. Around the same time, another folk singer, Will Holt began singing the Yeats poem to a very similar melody, using Yeats’ title “The Song of the Wandering Aengus.” Then in 1962, Judy Collins, having learned the song from Holt, made it the title song of her album “Golden Apples of the Sun,” which is where I first heard it.
No one seemed to know where the tune Ives, Holt, and Collins used came from. Those knowledgeable in traditional Irish tunes do not recognize it. Some credited Holt for it. However, early in the 21st Century a man named Bill Kennedy writing in the folk-song forum mudcat.org linked the tune to a transcription made by Dolmetsch accompanying a Yeats essay “Speaking to the Psaltery” re-published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1907. The tune there of course was not meant to be sung, as Yeats discussed in this essay, but it is recognizably the one used by Ives, Holt, and Collins in their singing renditions.
So the tune may well be Yeats’ own, or perhaps it was composed by Farr or even Dolmetsch. Since the words are Yeats’, I’m going to call it, and make him the composer; and if so, that makes Yeats yet another singer-songwriter (along with Tagore and Dylan) to have won the Nobel prize.
But he didn’t sing it, nor did he intend the words to be sung. Since we at the Parlando project are working in something like the same vein, here’s a version, using more or less that tune, but chanted not sung as Yeats suggested. Instead of the psaltery, I used fretless electric bass, some bowed strings and Mellotron to elaborate the tune. To hear it, use the player below, though neither Bernard Shaw nor I will be responsible for any nerve destruction.
NOTE: I just noticed that I miss-typed “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” into “The Song of the Wondering Aengus” here. Oh my. This could be nerve destruction, or my hurry to get ready for a recording session this afternoon. Well, he is wondering after all!
What is lost when poetry is translated? Robert Frost thought it outright: “Poetry is what is lost in translation.” Those who’ve read my notes here on the Parlando project know that I hold that poetry is words that want to sing. Those sound effects of the flowing sound of words, the call and response of rhyme, the beats of the dancing syllables—all that music can hardly be asked to make it past the visa-check at the translation station on languages’ borders.
In recent posts here I translated twopoems from classical Chinese. As a non-Chinese speaker, I could not even hope to convey what musical effects the originals had. To better see this as English speakers, let us look the other direction, and think about what Emily Dickinson’s “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose” (featured in our last post) would lose if we were to translate it to classical Chinese.
Would Dickinson’s poetic music carry over? In English we have the movement of the common meter/ballad meter in her poem, a beat that is ingrained in those who sing common Christian hymns or know secular songs using this meter in the folk and popular music fields. Since this is a common form in our culture, we are primed to move to this meter, and rich associations may arise from other times we have felt the same beat. All that is most likely lost in translation.
There’s a pun in the first line. The sun “rose” and is pink. Puns won’t likely make it across the border.
Dickinson rhymed her poem. Translators sometimes choose to create rhyming poems in their destination language, but adding this degree of difficulty to the task may cause other defects in translation as the rhyme is sought.
English sometimes has an advantage when one translates to and from it, because it is the language of a much-invaded island, which was then taken up by a polyglot country across the ocean. English as we know it today is full of words with Latin and Germanic origin, echoes of French, Spanish, German, and even more. Occasionally, puns or even rhymes can be saved when the foreign language has these connections. And metric rules for accents and syllables can be somewhat portable across the European range.
But what if we were to translate from English to classical Chinese? I’ll take an audacious shot at Dickinson’s first verse. The English gloss from the ideograms resulting might go like this:
Tell Sun Rise Ribbon Sequence Towers Wet Purple-Quartz Squirrel Messengers Hills Unpinned Hats Birdsong Started Soft Talk Inside Sun Recognized
Well, there’s something still there isn’t there, even if we as English speakers see the losses. What remains is Dickinson’s attention to an ordinary event with extraordinary details. And there’s some musical structure remaining: parallelism, theme and variation that doesn’t rely on beats or syllables that can still peak through.
Today’s episode is an English translation from the original Bengali by its own author, Rabindranath Tagore. Despite having attended school in England, despite familiarity with English as a resident of a then colonial province of the British Empire, despite some rumored editorial assistance from renowned English language poet William Butler Yeats, and despite Tagore’s well-attested to genius, “Light” was published in English in 1912 as a prose translation.
Some amateur violin player (left) meets up with Rabindranath Tagore (right)
Paradoxically this may be due to the original’s musicality. I’ll have more to say on Tagore next time, but for now just know that Tagore was a composer and songwriter, and that his songs are widely known and appreciated by millions of Bengali speakers.
So, to try to restore some of the impact originally present in this piece, I composed and played a rather dense musical accompaniment for Tagore’s translated words. I did this in ignorance of if Tagore had his own melody for this poem in Bengali. Besides animation and illumination of his English prose, I aimed to combine some of my appreciation his native region’s music and Western electric guitar based music. To hear Rabindranath Tagore’s “Light” with my music and performance, use the player below.
We’ve already met Irish poet William Butler Yeats with a brief poem earlier this month. Now his words return with a piece suitable for the aftermath of Valentine’s Day, for “A Cold Heaven” is the tale of a rejected valentine. It’s also fitting, because Valentine’s Day comes in the midst of late-winter. February, as Margaret Atwood put it, is a “month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre.”
Here in the northern Midwest it was a “seasonable” 19 degrees F. this morning, and hardy ice has outlived any soft covering snow. There is a promise of a thaw this weekend, but that will only recall mud and the detritus of what the snow once remembered inside it.
Critics from more temperate climes praise Yeats for his oxymoron here of “ice burned,” but up north we know that’s just what happens to skin in the cold, with no need for poetic intercession. And my back yard, my cities’ parks, and our central greenway have been home to that “rook-delighting heaven” he speaks of as well. Strange isn’t it, that the bird of death is so smart, so intentional, so sure, and yet inscrutable.
In “A Cold Heaven,” Yeats’ winter and his death-omen birds lead to a missed and misunderstood, “crossed” love; and he takes the blame: if not for the season, for the failed love. Like so many, and without the succor of chocolate or flowers, he is left in the rejected lovers worshipful, davening stance, “rocking to and fro.”
But he is a poet still! “A Cold Heaven” breaks itself in two with an image that is also a pun: “Riddled with light.” Yes, we Northerners know that winter light. Brighter than summer, and paradoxically the sign of a piercingly cold day. He knows his love’s in vain, and yet no amount of blame that he can assign himself—even if he exhausts “all sense and reason” to catalog that blame—can account for the failure of his love. What can solve this “riddle?”
Yeats begins again, with a majestic “Ah!” only to take us on a short ghost story, the spirit of his love in purgatory, in bardo, naked as a corpse or as a lover, wandering and asking why clear skies, clear answers, seem like punishment.
So to all those whose valentines were not accepted yesterday: peace. Such riddling has no end to its depths. I know this: that hole is too deep to be plumbed, just know that it’s deep. The correct prayer for such things is unknown.
Look, maybe she’s just not that into you…
As a performance, “A Cold Heaven” had some challenges because Yeats makes use of enjambment, where lines break in the middle of sentences; and where the meaning too, often forks, seeming to mean one thing before the line break and another afterward. Since I like to let the lines “breathe,” so that the music can interject, and so that the words’ impact can sit a little bit before the next line, I resorted to repeating a few words. There are also a couple of other audio tricks in the piece. The string parts, particularly at the beginning have a “backwards tape” articulation where the sound swells from louder to silence, in the reverse of the normal decay of strings, which I hope signifies the drop into the past in Yeats’ text.
To hear “A Cold Heaven” use the player gadget you should see just below this.
Frank Hudson 
