When Words Sing
When words sing, poetry happens. When words sing, lyricism happens: Lyric poetry (and prose) happens. Friedrich Nietzsche declared that the lyric poet “always says ‘I’ and sings us through the full chromatic scale of passions and desires.”
Mary Oliver writes: “The lyric poem is brief, concentrated, has no more than a single focus, single voice and employs a natural musicality.”
When I studied Virginia Woolf’s work, I heard music in most sentences.
I put together a collection of poems from her novels. You can do this, too, only, don’t try to market them. The Virginia Woolf society won’t like it. Next came novelist, Willa Cather. NOW – here’s music! Read this passage from My Antonia out loud.
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
The first lyric poetry was sung, chanted, or recited to musical accompaniment. Today’s lyric poetry tends towards quiet, inward song like compositions. They appear as sonnets, odes, elegies, haiku, and whatever the poet builds on the page.
Now hear this.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
~ William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While on stand on the roadway, or on the parents grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Next, consider the music of Wallace Steven’s words. Here is iambic pentameter at it’s hypnotic best.
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
These words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
This next poem is one you’ll recognize. You may have memorized it.
God’s Grandeur
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Return to this poem and read the end words of each line. (I write in books. After this poem are my penciled words, “Oh, yes!” )
Haiku as lyric voice? Listen to these from Richard Wright. (I had trouble choosing. The book contains 809 haiku.)
766
Standing in the snow,
A horse shifts his heavy haunch
Slowly to the right.
770
My guests have now gone;
The grate fire burns to white ashes, –
How lonely it is.
Now, a March poem from Wendell Berry. Consider the music of the letter “s” as you read this poem.
March 22, 1968
As spring begins the river rises,
filling like the sorrow of nations
– uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains,
the debris of kitchens, all passing
seaward. At dawn snow began to fall.
The ducks, moving north, pass
like shadows through the falling white.
The jonquils, half open, bend down with its weight.
The plow freezes in the furrow.
In the night I lay awake, thinking
of the river rising, the spring heavy
with official meaningless deaths.
I found this poem by Jane Kenyon in Naomi Shihab Nye’s collection of poems titled, what have you lost?
What Came to Me
I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.
You may also read Elizabeth Bishop’s The Complete Poems for lyric pleasure.
From Mixed Voices: Contemporary Poems about Music, there’s a poem in tribute to jazz great, John Coltrane, by Gerry Gordon.
Gas
after John Coltrane
Riding high into the night
on John’s Good gas we shot thru
Ravenna & Rootstown and Shalers-
ville digging on Pablo Cruise &
Bob Seger & the heavy night but
When Trane came thick on tenor
Something snapped, she shifted
Into low in that unknown home
Where the wind peeled our
Heart open to the bone.
This poem, Instructions to the Player could read, Instructions to the Poet. This poem is a reminder to pause. Give silence/linebreaks/whitespace a place in your music and words.
Instructions to the Player
~ Carl Rakosi
Cellist,
easy on that bow.
Not too much weeping.
Remember that the soul
is easily agitated
and has a terror of shapelessness.
It will venture out
but only to a doe’s eye.
Let the sound out
inner mysterioso
but from a distance
like the forest at night.
And do not forget
the pause between.
That is the sweetest
and has the nature of infinity.
Writers, March is your singing month. Sing on!
Resources:
Robert Pinsky, Singing School, W. W. Norton, 2013.
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, A Harvest Original, Harcourt Brace and co. 1994.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Chris Baldrich, Oxford University Press, 1990.
Wendell Berry: New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2012.
Mixed Voices: Contemporary Poems about Music, edited by Emilie Buchwald and Ruth Roston, Milkweed Ed., 1991.
Naomi Shihab Nye, what have you lost, A Greenwillow Book, Harper Collins, 1999.