Tag: song

summer sounds

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.

No ordinance is seen, 5
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.

Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low, 10
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.

Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference 15
Enhances nature now.

~Emily Dickinson

The crickets’ song in this poem begins as “pathetic,” “minor,” “unobtrusive.” By the end of the poem, however, it has become “pensive,” “spectral,” even “druidic.” The humble cricket-song takes on magical and mythological significance.

Your prompt is to take one of the sounds of summer and magnify it, tease out all its meanings and correspondences. What is it on the surface, and what lies beneath?

Baronial bees!

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

Some rainbow coming from the fair!
Some vision of the World Cashmere
I confidently see!
Or else a peacock’s purple train,
Feather by feather, on the plain
Fritters itself away!

The dreamy butterflies bestir,
Lethargic pools resume the whir
Of last year’s sundered tune.
From some old fortress on the sun
Baronial bees march, one by one,
In murmuring platoon!

The robins stand as thick to-day
As flakes of snow stood yesterday,
On fence and roof and twig.
The orchis binds her feather on
For her old lover, Don the Sun,
Revisiting the bog!

Without commander, countless, still,
The regiment of wood and hill
In bright detachment stand.
Behold! Whose multitudes are these?
The children of whose turbaned seas,
Or what Circassian land?

~Emily Dickinson

There’s much to love about this poem. In my edition, it’s titled “Summer’s Armies,” which I really like. It seems fitting. So many armies–hordes and throngs of birds, insects, blossoms, marching on into eternity, felled cyclically but always resurrected.

And the “baronial bees,” of course. The image is amusing to anyone who’s ever spent even a few minutes bee-watching. Never have I ever seen bees march one by one. Order they have in spades, but not in any way we think of it, and certainly not in a single-file way. There is a beautiful order to a hive, to its comings and goings, but on a warm day, to the human eye a bustling hive looks at first like sheer chaos. It’s an airport where no one appears to be performing air traffic control. Bees are everywhere. They clot the air, zoom in for crazy landings, twist and squiggle their ways around each other. Yet they know exactly what they’re doing, and nobody crashes into anybody or anything else.

They are a murmuring platoon, though. There are few lovelier sounds than their soft constant hymn to the sun.

Oriole, Part 1

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

TO hear an oriole sing
May be a common thing,
Or only a divine.


It is not of the bird
Who sings the same, unheard,
As unto crowd.


The fashion of the ear
Attireth that it hear
In dun or fair.


So whether it be rune,
Or whether it be none,
Is of within;


The “tune is in the tree,”
The sceptic showeth me;
“No, sir! In thee!”

~emily dickinson

This is a weird and wonderful poem. Structurally it’s very different from most Dickinson poems, with its three-line stanzas. The last line of each is markedly shorter than the first two. There is an abrupt, revelatory feel to these short lines, as if Dickinson is demanding that we sit up straight and pay attention because something important is about to be unfolded. The whole thing reads like some obscure ancient riddle.

I think what she’s saying is that the music of birdsong is within each of us–that is, the perception of the song as music. The “only” in the first stanza is interesting. “Or only a divine” sounded to me on the first few readings as if the poet was saying “only” in the sense of “merely,” which feels odd and yet somehow perfectly Dickinsonian, minimizing the divine for some kind of effect. But on about the third reading I wonder if she means “only” in the sense of “purely” or “exclusively.”

This whole poem is like a riddle, the answer of which is different for each person because it is buried deep within ourselves, like our perception of the oriole’s song.

Anodyne

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

HEART not so heavy as mine,
Wending late home,
As it passed my window
Whistled itself a tune,—


A careless snatch, a ballad,
A ditty of the street;
Yet to my irritated ear
An anodyne so sweet,


It was as if a bobolink,
Sauntering this way,
Carolled and mused and carolled,
Then bubbled slow away.


It was as if a chirping brook
Upon a toilsome way
Set bleeding feet to minuets
Without the knowing why.


To-morrow, night will come again,
Weary, perhaps, and sore.
Ah, bugle, by my window,
I pray you stroll once more!

~Emily dickinson

Life has felt heavy lately–heavy and overwhelming. It’s crammed full of things–obligations, challenges, setbacks, disappointments, unpleasant surprises. This poem captures beautifully the heaviness of the soul without going into specifics–we know that the speaker is weighed down. But the point of it all is the moment of sweetness, the unexpected beauty of a song sung by a passerby. Even at its heaviest, life offers us these moments, scattered like seafoam, glittering against the somber background of the everyday.

No matter how busy you are, how distracted, how overwhelmed, how overburdened, may you find your anodyne today.

Bluebird

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Image source: Pixabay,
https://pixabay.com/images/search/bluebird/

Before you thought of spring,
Except as a surmise,
You see, God bless his suddenness,
A fellow in the skies
Of independent hues,
A little weather-worn,
Inspiriting habiliments
Of indigo and brown.


With specimens of song,
As if for you to choose,
Discretion in the interval,
With gay delays he goes
To some superior tree
Without a single leaf,
And shouts for joy to nobody
But his seraphic self!

~emily dickinson

Yesterday my dad was cleaning out birdhouses. He hadn’t seen a bluebird yet, he said. The tree swallows had come and gone suddenly, and he seemed certain it was because the birdhouses needed clearing out. Birds have a way of making their opinions known. Last summer, hummingbirds would hover outside my kitchen window, staring in at me as if to say “Get a move on!!” while I cleaned and refilled their feeder. So I suspect Dad was not wrong about the tree swallows.

This afternoon, while my husband and I walked the dog in the field behind our house, a bird burst from one of the newly-cleaned houses–probably a mockingbird or catbird, judging from its size and the flash of grey. Not a bluebird.

Then, suddenly, wings blazed blue across the winter-brown field. A bird perched on top of another birdhouse and sat there, watching us. I stared against the sun, trying to discern its exact color. A bluebird. They are back, and with them, hope and warmth and light, and permission, for those of us who needed it, to shout for joy to no one but ourselves.