witches

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.

Dusk in Autumn

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I risked taking the charm and playfulness out of Emily Dickinson’s ghost poem last time by trying to puzzle out exactly what she saw. I won’t risk that today. This next poem in our Halloween series was written by a poet, Sara Teasdale, who wrote some complex adult love poems — but with this one she portrayed a child’s wonder. Well, a child with a little taste for tea parties with witches, but still.

Sara Teasdale Smiles

Sara Teasdale. Want to come to my tea party?

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Teasdale was roughly a contemporary in her childhood in St. Louis with T. S. Eliot, but Eliot decamped for Harvard and then Europe — so as far as I’ve been able to find out, the two poets never met. I think Teasdale’s poem requires no further explanation, so I’ll just urge you to listen to it below. And here’s a link to the text of the poem if you’d like to read that.

Another simple musical accompaniment here, this time just some acoustic guitar. You can hear Sara Teasdale’s “Dusk in Autumn”  with a graphic audio player that many will see below. However, there are ways to read this blog that won’t show the player, and I also provide this highlighted link to click, which will allow those who don’t see the player to access the musical performance.

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They’re All Dead Now

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

In the last two posts I’ve mentioned how early 20th century Irish poet Joseph Campbell used the concision of Imagist poetry to present eerie folkloric material. However, today’s piece, written some 70 years later by Dave Moore, shows how the reiterative storytelling methods used in many traditional ballads can still work. Because of the way it tells its story, it’s somewhat longer than usual pieces here, but well worth 8 minutes of your time.

I quite vividly remember the first time I heard this song. I’d known Dave for over a decade then, but there was something new: he told me that he had written some songs and I offered to record them. I setup a cassette recorder in his living room where a patinaed old upright piano sat against a wall next to a set of framed pocket doors that he and I had spent some time stripping a few years before. I had a pair of Radio Shack microphones to hook up to record him. I think one of my mic stands was a second-hand-store gooseneck floor lamp that had given up its socket for a mic clip.

I don’t recall most of what Dave played and I recorded that day. Maybe four or five songs, but the last one was the piece I’ll perform for you today. Dave was a powerful, pounding piano player in those days, and the old upright was ringing out pretty good as he gave forth the lyrics of “They’re All Dead Now”  loudly over the top of that. By the end of its 11 verses, his voice was getting ragged — but the story he was singing was powerful enough that it probably should wear one out. He finished, and his voice was too.

The tape I made is now long lost, though “They’re All Dead Now”  remained recorded in my memory. Also to my recollection, that day was the day that the idea of the LYL Band that you’ve sometimes heard here as part of this Project took hold.

I think we may have tried to play or record it once or twice since, but it’s a difficult piece to bring off. Effective singing of long ballads in this kind of traditional form and length is extraordinarily difficult. While trained singers have built up stamina and technique to do that, this untrained singer will testify that it is as wearing as singing a set of hardcore punk — and since traditional ballad singing often uses sparse accompaniment, you have nowhere to hide and nothing else to bring the fury or shock to the audience other than the song’s story and one’s voice. Which is why, even in folk clubs among aficionados, long ballads are an iffy thing. The emotion too often invoked is boredom. Polite audiences will not throw things at the ballad singer, but they will fall into talk among themselves, and some will drop their eyes to half-mast and tune out to thoughts of more exciting music or leaf raking.

But of course, these songs can work. To build up to doing this performance I listened all morning to June Tabor recordings. Tabor (and Anne Briggs) are two of the best I know at performing this kind of material, and Tabor often uses instrumental backing (Briggs more often sang unaccompanied). I wasn’t ready to expose just my bare voice for this piece.

The piano part you hear is actually two piano tracks. Here I was thinking of the simple repeated motifs that John Cale,* with his association with what was called Minimalist composed music, would sometimes play. I added a synth part, which is more faithful to what Tabor would sometimes use, where the easy to transport and amplify electronic instrument serves almost as some droney acoustic folk instruments might at a traditional ballad sing.

I sang my vocal at my most energized part of the day and managed about four takes, and what you’ll hear is the best of that. I wouldn’t say my vocal timbre is pretty, but then maybe this song can survive that.

Yes, Dave’s song. I still think it’s a great song, same as the first time I heard it. The story it tells is historical,** it happened on the West Coast of Scotland just as the lyric says in 1618. Though it’s heavily refrained and has those 11 verses, it still doesn’t waste much time, dropping you in media res and progressing in presenting a horror that should be more frightening than witches.

Illustrating your 17th century Scottish Facebook feed: political instability, patriarchy, and religious fervor (or excuses).

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I used to dream of hearing a great singer sing this song, but folk music’s principles say that a song needs singers  rather than necessarily waiting for that. June Tabor is my age,*** I’m not sure she still performs. Rhiannon Giddens, the ball is in your court. Contact me.

But the rest of you can hear my best at transforming Dave’s song right now. There’s a player gadget some will see below, and otherwise this highlighted hyperlink will also play it.

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*Yes, I’m still on a Velvet Underground jag this month.

**You might think 1618 is fairly late in the ugly history of witch prosecutions, but if you go to this account from the town of Irvine in Scotland I link here, you’ll read that “In 1650, a total of 17 women were also executed for witchcraft – 12 in March and 5 in June. Other burnings similarly took place in the town in 1662 and 1682.” So, there was enough of this that the story of Margaret Barclay, John Stewart, and Isobel Crawford is sometimes not included in round ups of the atrocities. Walter Scott did his own investigation in the 19th century, and the Irvine hyperlink above includes some of Scott’s account.

***October –  besides being the occasion for this week’s Halloween series – is also Dave’s birthday month. Happy Birthday Dave! Age has taken some ounces off of Dave’s keyboard pounding, but I still hope to present more of his voice here as part of the Parlando Project.

Witch Hunt

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve spent a lot of words this month talking about the history of poet and songwriter Dave Moore, who’s been the alternate voice here since we kicked things off more than two years ago. Today I’m going to end the history and get back to the present, shut up a bit, and let Dave’s words and performance tell its own story. Here’s a recent Dave Moore piece performed with the LYL Band this fall.

Let me tell you another thing about witches

Little to do with Dave’s song, but I can’t resist including a still from René Clair’s “I Married a Witch”

Is this a Halloween song? A political commentary? An investigation of something that precedes and supersedes civilized politics? An excuse for me to fire up my Mellotron virtual instrument again? I could talk. You could listen. Today let’s choose the later. The player gadget is below.