On the inside cover of my college text, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of Keats (edited, with an introduction by Harold Edgar Briggs, The Modern Library) is a penciled note, “read in Mary-Ellis’ book pg. 312, 317, 329-30” that I’ve been puzzling over.  I think it has to do with Romantic Lit being at 9:00 AM.  I missed so many classes that apparently Mr. Tosswill enquired several times if I was unwell. I wish I could get back those classes when I missed pages 312,317, and 329-30 in the Keats text.  I might have made useful notes that I would appreciate seeing now that I am a morning person.  On the other hand, when I was 20 years old my notes said things like:

Flora—goddess of flowers

Darkling—in the dark

Lethe—river of forgetfulness

Heinous- hā´ nes –odious, hateful

These aren’t words I need help with any longer

John Keats died at age 26, a shooting star who didn’t begin writing until he was 18, and matured as a poet in about six years.  His father was an ostler who died when John was eight.  His mother died when he was fourteen.  He trained as an apothecary but never practiced.  He is nowadays considered to have had bi-polar disease.

His brief life was troubled but sensitivity, grace, and compassion come through his poems and letters.  After Shelley who seems so full of himself, Keats has an astonishing maturity, the kind of personality I love to spend an evening with.  Shelley reminds me of people I skulk down the far aisle to avoid.  The two of them are often linked because—I believe– they wrote during the same time period and both died young.

After reading Keats in the over-footnoted Norton, I will never again wonder about the meaning of eremite (hermit) or Aeolian harp (harp played by the wind.) All the times I played Aeolian in Scrabble I never cared what it meant, but now I know.  Also I have begun looking for individuals who can be described as “alone and palely loitering” (from “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”) because it is such an outstanding descriptive phrase.

Keats learned construction by writing sonnets, but he felt constrained enough by the form to create the odes:

“So if we may not let the muse be free,

she will be bound by garlands of her own.”

(If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chained).

I love the odes.  They have a sweet sadness that suggests Keats knew he wouldn’t live long. “Ode to a Nightingale” comforted me in years when I was deeply depressed.  It contained so much feeling that it helped me manage mine:

Darkling, I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Beyond the sonnets and the odes, I was impressed this week with the letters.  Here are some bits and pieces from Keat’s letters:

*I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the Truth of Imagination.

*Nothing startles me beyond the moment.

(letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov 22, 1817)

*Every man has his speculations but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes false coinage and deceives himself.

(letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, Feb 3, 1818)

*I.  .  . intend to become a sort of Pip-civilian.  An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people.  .  .

(letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818.  A pip-civilian seems to be an enthusiastic amateur, a dilettante)

*What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet.  It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.

(letter to Richard Woodhouse, Oct 27, 1818)

*Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced—Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.

*Call the world, if you please, “The Vale of Soul-making–”  then you will find out the use of The World.  .  .

(letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Feb-May, 1819)

And finally, here are some lines that have entered the language and Hallmark shops:

*A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases, it will never

Pass into nothingness; but will still keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

(Endymion)

*O for a beaker full of the warm south.  .  .

*.  .  . tender is the night.  . .

*.  .  . amid the alien corn.  .  .

(Ode to a Nightingale)

*Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes, play on:

Not to the sensual ear, but more endear’d

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.  .  .

*“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”–that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(Ode on a Grecian Urn)

*Ay, In the very temple of Delight

Veil’d melancholy has her sovrain shrine

(Ode on Melancholy)

*Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.  .  .

(To Autumn)

And if Mary-Ellis will just have a look inside her college Keats text and tell me what she’s written on pg 312, 317, 329-30, I’d be grateful.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an intense, wordy young man.  As I plowed through the Shelley selections in the Norton Anthology, I wondered why he was given so much more space than the other romantic poets.  Then I did a calculation (can you tell I am wearying of the Romantics?) and found that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley filled roughly 150 pages each and Wordsworth filled 250 pages.

How to explain why Shelley seemed so interminable?  I love it that he is unconventional, intense, idealistic, and passionate about both art and about the equality of human beings; but I don’t find his personality all that appealing.  He’s too self-absorbed and self-congratulatory for me. Every so often he introduces an idea that excites me only to have him dive into an adoring pool of his own language.  When Shelley describes his poem “Adonais” as a “highly wrought piece of art” I think he’s talking about himself.

I’ve gotten used to the grandiosity of people who themselves aren’t writers (psychoanalysts come to mind) and who refuse to let anyone edit their papers.  Writers need editors just as singers need other singers to listen to them.  We all need someone to tell us what we sound like outside our own head.

But with Shelley it was an article of faith that he wasn’t to be edited. In his prose piece “A Defence of Poetry,” which I actually like and what’s more, mostly agree with, he says this about the creative process: “. . . the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within.  .  .”  So far so good, but he goes on to say that once the composition begins, inspiration is on its decline and the finest passages of poetry are not “produced by labour and study,” and by the way, keep your hands off my poem.  I made up that last part.

Shelley thinks that “the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue” and “a poet is more delicately organized than other men.” I can forgive him his extravagant idealism and his grandiosity when I consider that he died at age 30, practically a boy, in a sailing accident.  But it doesn’t make me want to spend any more time reading his unedited poems.

I enjoyed some of the shorter poems because I could keep track of what they were about from beginning to end.  Many of the inclusions in the Norton anthology are abridged or excerpted. Those little ellipses that marked the end of an excerpt became my little friends.  If I could just keep track of things until I got to the little ellipses, I could usually stay with the longer poem.  Here are some of the lines I liked:

*“Sunset and its gorgeous ministers”— (“Alastor: or The Spirit of Solitude”)

*Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert—

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. (“To a Skylark”)

*Music when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory.

Odours, when sweet violets sicken

Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves when the rose in dead,

Are heaped for the beloved’s bed—

And so my thoughts when thou art gone,

Love itself will slumber on.

(“Music when soft voices die” –I sing this set to music by the inestimable Roger Quilter)

*Most musical of mourners, weep anew.   .   .

.  .  .Whilst burning thought the inmost veil of Heaven

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.  (Adonais)

*Best and brightest, come away!  (“To Jane. The Invitation”)

*The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendor.  .  .  (“Mont Blanc”)

*The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats through unseen among us,–visiting

This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.

(“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”)

I just spent a week getting reacquainted with Byron—George Gordon, Lord Byron–and the magic wasn’t happening. When I was in college, he was my favorite of all the romantic poets because he was easiest to understand and he was funny. This mid-life trek through the Norton anthology is highlighting how much I have changed: my tastes, my understanding of life, my values.  I’m reading through more layers than when I was 20.  Still the poets, they seem to understand everything.  Here’s Byron:

And all that Memory loves the most

Was once our only Hope to be,

And all that Hope adored and lost

Hath melted into Memory.

Alas it is delusion all:

The future cheats us from afar,

Nor can we be what we recall

Nor dare we think on what we are. (“Stanzas For Music”)

Byron’s masterpiece is Don Juan, a book length poem in five cantos that begins with the great line “I want a hero” and proceeds to give us a satirical one.  Incidentally it’s pronounced “Don Jooan.”  I didn’t believe it when Mr. Tosswill told us that in the Romantics class.  I thought he had misunderstood somewhere along the way and had been mis-pronouncing it all his life.

I still find Byron funny but my favorite is one of his serious poems.  It’s not actually in the Norton Anthology: “The Prisoner of Chillon.”  There’s a section of it I memorized once when I was coming out of depression. This past week I found the complete poem in an old Rinehart edition of Byron and read it one afternoon in my garden while the cats snoozed and mock orange blossoms fell on me and I thought how wonderful it is to be nearly 60.

Chillon is a castle on Lake Geneva that was used as a prison for a short time in the 16^th century. That was enough to set Bryon off.   In the poem three brothers are imprisoned, the eldest being the narrator.  He describes how they are each shackled to a column and unable to see one another.  One by one the younger brothers die and are buried where they were shackled. For years, the narrator is alone in the dungeon next to the graves of his two brothers.  The depression that Byron describes is familiar to me:

.  .  . vacancy absorbing space,

And fixedness without a place:

There were no stars, no earth, no time

No check, no change, no good, no crime,

But silence, and a stirless breath

Which neither was of life nor death:

A sea of stagnant idleness,

Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless.

His journey out of depression is also familiar to me.  It begins with some small effort from the prisoner himself: the willingness to be open to goodness:

A light broke in upon my brain,–

It was the carol of a bird.  .  .

.  .  .then by dull degrees came back

My senses to their wonted track.  .  .

Then the prisoner is in a position to accept help from others: One of the jailers takes pity on him, doesn’t renew his chains when they rust open, thus allowing him a bit of freedom.

What Byron describes next is, I think, brilliant, and it had a profound effect on me.  The “Prisoner of Chillon” does not end with a rainbow.  What the prisoner (and I) had to confront was how much the long imprisonment/depression had defined us.  In my case, I found myself so identified with being depressed that depression became a glorified state.  Look at how strong I am, how much pain I can take.  Happiness is for sissies.

In the “Prisoner of Chillon” I found a companion who understood that intermediary state of not being quite sure I wanted to step into a foreign world even when that world offered the experience of Joy. Here is the end of the poem and the part I memorized:

It might be months, or years or days,

I kept no count, I took no note,

I had no hope my eyes to raise,

And clear them of their dreary mote:

At last men came to set me free:

I ask’d not why and reck’d not where:

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be,

I learn’d to love despair.

And thus when they appear’d at last

And all my bonds aside were cast,

These heavy walls to me had grown

A hermitage—and all my own!

And half I felt as they were come

To tear me from a second home:

With spiders I had friendship made,

And watch’d them in their sullen trade,

Had seen the mice by moonlight play,

And why should I feel less than they?

We were all inmates of one place,

And I, the monarch of each race,

Had power to kill—yet, strange to tell!

In quiet we had learn’d to dwell:

My very chains and I grew friends,

So much a long communion tends

To make us what we are:–even I

Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.

Thanks to a chilly morning which got my annual yard sale off to a slow start, I had the leisure to power through the Norton Anthology’s selection of Romantic period essayists, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey.  They were all fond of laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) which led the Norton editors to an overuse of footnotes defining laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol).  I will never forget the definition of laudanum: opium dissolved in alcohol.

Charles Lamb, had he been alive today, would no doubt have been a blogger.  The lively pieces he wrote under the pseudonym of Elia are just right for a post, if a bit long.  In “Old China” he describes the comings and goings of the figures on some cups and saucers, free associates to observations on human foibles and comes back to “Now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summerhouse.”

“The Two Races of Men” posits that the human species is composed of two distinct races: the borrowers and the lenders.  Here is his encomium to the borrowers:

“What careless, even deportment hath your borrower.  .  . what a beautiful reliance on Providence.  .  .what contempt for money—accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross.  What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions of meum and tuum*.  .  .what a noble simplification of language resolving those supposed opposites into one clear intelligible pronoun.”

William Hazlitt I have to thank for pointing out how great an effect the French Revolution had on the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth.  It leaned him toward using the vernacular and writing about The Common Man.  I’m sure they told us this in college and I’m sure I wrote it in my notes: “Wordsworth influenced by Fr. Rev,” and wasn’t remotely curious as to what that had to do with anything.  Having more of a history myself than I did when I was 20, I can now appreciate what the flow of events birthed. 

I also have Hazlitt to thank for the phrase “we quaffed our flip,” flip being a sweet, spicy ale not unlike the Whisky Mac my friend Eileen introduced me to, and quaff being what I and my neighbor Gwen-who- knows-something-about-just-about-everything did with said Whisky Mac the other night.  We quaffed it.

One of Hazlitt’s essays is entitled “On Going a Journey” You read that correctly.  It’s an affirmation for those of us who like to travel alone: “We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.”

I liked Thomas De Quincey best.  His best known essay has the provocative title, “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” De Quincey’s story has a contemporary resonance.  He became addicted to laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol), which he originally began taking for pain.  Sometimes he was able to support himself, his family and his habit, and sometimes he lived rough on the streets of London.  Like many of the homeless that we today take for granted, he was an intelligent and sensitive human being. 

De Quincey seems to be writing in a dream state.  It’s unclear what are waking day dreams, nightmares, withdrawal hallucinations, fantasizing and illusion.  He writes movingly of Ann, a prostitute who befriended him.  One night when De Quincey became violently ill, Ann bought a medicinal tonic out of what little money she had and so helped him get through a bad patch.  Then she disappeared.  Nearly twenty years after the incident with Ann, and while in one of his trance-like states he imagines he sees her and says, “So then I have found you at last.”  Just that.  And I burst into tears.

On some other tangent in “Confessions.  .  .” De Quincey says “The dread book of account, which the Scriptures speak of, is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual.”  Now there’s a road I can go down.

It was a pleasant morning reading these guys, and sipping tea out of an old cup and saucer of my great Aunt Ann’s Johnson Brothers’ Blue Regency pattern: Do just look at that odd looking bird, a bird I don’t think resembles anything in nature, but rather might be some creature imagined while under the influence of laudanum. (Opium dissolved in alcohol.)

Blue Regency china

*I hope your intelligence isn’t offended if I tell you these words mean “mine and thine.”

In which I find in Samuel Taylor Coleridge a kindred soul. It might be his struggle with depression.  It might be his experience—so common to women—of feeling that nothing he does is respected as much as something a(nother) man does, in this case Wordsworth.  The two of them conceived of a book they called Lyrical Ballads.  Wordsworth wrote his poems of the common-folk and Coleridge contributed his mystical, magical story poems. Coleridge was self-deprecating when it came to Wordsworth, unjustifiably, I think.  I find his “Christabel” and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, much more accessible, engrossing and downright interesting than Wordsworth’s “Michael.”

I read “Kubla Khan” when my friend Nancy assigned it to her college English class. I will be forever grateful to her introduction to it because the sexual imagery makes me swoon and I like a good swoon every now and again.   Go through the poem and circle every word that has sexual connotations.  Then think how much fun it would have been to have taken high school English from Nancy:

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! As holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-mitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Of chaffy grain beneath the threshers’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves:

Where was heard the mingles measure

From the fountains and the caves.  .  .

Coleridge never finished “Kubla Khan.” He was interrupted in his process of writing by a business acquaintance from the nearest town, Porlock.  When he returned to the poem, that particular muse had gone into permanent retirement. The expression a “person from Porlock” refers to an intruder who interrupts inspired creativity. That’s a freebie for your next party.  Here’s another, in case you weren’t assigned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in high school:  The mariner is the man with the original albatross around his neck.

One of the Coleridge poems I liked most in this past week’s reading was “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison.”  Coleridge had hurt his foot and couldn’t accompany his houseguests on a walk in the Devon countryside.  This poem arrived from that experience.

When I read the poem I immediately feel the emptiness and quiet after the house party moves off down the hill, leaving the poet indisposed underneath his lime tree, which he at first calls a prison. He imagines where his friends are going and what they will see. When he imagines them in the woods, his language suggests enclosure: the ash trees making arches across the dell.  When they emerge from the dell into the sun and fields, the language is more expansive.  I know all this because I made a list of all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in each stanza.

It struck me that the first two stanzas are all fantasy.  Coleridge imagines they are walking from the dell into an expansive vista. He imagines what they will see because he knows what he has seen when he has made the walk.  But he doesn’t know that they aren’t going around a corner of the house, to smoke opium and speculate that he is faking his injury.  His lovely descriptions of nature aren’t immediate.

In the last stanza he comes into himself and notices what it feel like to be alive at that moment, right there under the lime-tree.  In doing so the lime- tree bower is no longer a prison and “no sound is dissonant which tells of Life.”

Coleridge had fresh and provocative ideas about the organic organization of Shakespeare’s plays and about poetry theory, more than I want to explore here.  I’ve got my father’s The Portable Coleridge which is on my list for when I get out of my Norton Anthology Prison.  Here are a few lines from Coleridge I loved:

.  .  .  Pale beneath the blaze

Hung the transparent foliage: and I watched

Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see

The shadow of the leaf and stem above

Dappling its sunlight. (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”)

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.  .  .  whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the silent moon.  (“Frost at Midnight”)

A week ago I would have told you that I loved William Wordsworth. After reading the selections in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, I have concluded that it’s only a few of his poems that I love, and a few lines from here and there. I was all excited to read The Prelude because I thought it would be 56 pages of the same kind of bliss I get from reading “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798,” mercifully shortened to “Tintern Abbey.”  The Prelude is essentially Wordsworth’s memoir in 14 “books” of blank verse.  I was only a few pages into it when I was already thumbing ahead to see how many more there were, which is how I know there are 56 pages; and I was reading an abridged version in the Norton Anthology.  I read half of it, then just read all the footnotes for the second half and called it good.  There was a funny footnote on the following line from Book Five:

.  .  .The visible scene

Would enter unawares into his mind,

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received

Into the bosom of the steady lake.”

Of this line, Wordsworth’s friend Coleridge had said: “Had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out ‘Wordsworth!’”

It’s hard to appreciate Wordsworth’s contribution to poetry in an age when a poem can be written about anything: a big toe, a leaky pen, Elvis, a road in the woods, or a lanyard.  But as I learned in his interminable preface to Lyrical Ballads, his folksy poems about commoners were a departure from the grand subjects and formal language of earlier poets.  Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” He felt that the working classes lived closer to the common feelings that unite humanity.  They also have more fun. While the aristocracy is sitting around the drawing room trying to be cool and unmoved, saying things like “So amusing to hear a bit of Chopin,” the servants are waltzing in their bare feet in the hall.

In our post-Freudian age, it’s also hard to appreciate how much poetry anticipated psycho-analysis although I think Freud appreciated it: “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Wordsworth was interested in how our perceptions and imagination “half creates” the world we inhabit and in how memory re-orders our experiences.  In many of his poems he visits the idea that “. . .in this moment there is life and food for future years”  and “thy memory be as a dwelling place.” This is the appeal for me of “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798,”and usually mercifully shortened to “Tintern Abbey.”

The last time I visited England, my cousins took me to Tintern Abbey.  I wandered off (as a cloud) on my own as I usually did, with plans to meet later.  I walked half a mile and found a clearing in the trees where I could see the pinkish colored ruins from a distance.  I stood in the quiet and read the poem aloud, hoping to catch some of the genius loci.  In the midst of my mystical experience I heard a tramping and the sound of voices.  Around the corner came a woman who looked like an old time scout mistress and two younger women.

“Of course, there are a few places where there still is ethical fishing.  .  .” the scout mistress was saying.

They tramped on past me.  My mood completely broken, I thought, “This is why I like to travel alone.”

*****************************************************************

Here are some Wordsworth jewels:

.  .  .that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindnesses and of love.

.  .  .  I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity.

.  .  . And I have felt a

Presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused

Whose dwelling is the lights of setting suns,

And the round ocean and living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought

And rolls through all things.

(From “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798,”and usually mercifully shortened to “Tintern Abbey.”)

There is a comfort in the strength of love:

‘Twill make a thing endurable which else

Would overset the brain or break the heart.  .  .  (from“Michael”)

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.  .  .

.  .  .Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower:

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind:

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be:

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering:

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.   (from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours:

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.  .  .

(from “The World is Too Much with Us”)

*Up! Up! My friends and quit your books.  .  .

Books! Tis a dull and endless strife.  .  .

(from “The Tables Turned” and often quoted by Debi, my fellow English major at Whitman College, now Putzer, the attorney)

The pink Tintern Abbey

Who couldn’t like Robbie Burns? Well, the British, I suppose.  And he didn’t wear well with the Edinburgh Scots.  When I turned the page from William Blake in my trek through The Norton Anthology of English Literature, there was Robert Burns with all his apostrophes.  After I got used to the a’s, the whas and the gies, I found him oozing warmth and conviviality.  I also found a flood of associations that go back to my childhood.

As a girl, I loved a book called Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink. As a result of a shipwreck in the Pacific, Mary and Jean Wallace, age 12 and 10, find themselves in a lifeboat with four babies.  When the boat washes up on an island, the intrepid girls find a way to not only survive but make a home for themselves and the babies. 

There was an old salt of a British sailor on that island who had a parrot that would squawk, “Oh Bedelia, I’d like to steal ya,” a line of verse that I have remembered all these years, having no idea of the song’s context.  It’s one of those stray pieces of ephemera that float to the top of my consciousness at odd moments.  I might be pulling a weed from the garden or rolling down a window at a stoplight and suddenly I think, “Oh Bedelia, I’d like to steal ya.”

When the girls got scared they would chant “Scots Wha Hae,” by Robert Burns. The lines I remember from way back in second grade are:

Now’s the day and now’s the hour,

See the front of battle lour.

I had no idea what that meant.

I didn’t know that “Scots Wha Hae” had been put to a beautiful tune until a piano student came in one day talking about her paper on William Wallace.  We found this arrangement of “Scots Wha Hae” by The Corries.  It’s quieter than the one from the Braveheart soundtrack and, I think, much more moving.

In 1980, when I first visited my cousin Hazel who lived in the Cornish village of my great grandfather, I kept a copious journal of everything she and I did: the walks, the vegetation in the hedge-rows, the biscuits and cakes we had for tea, and the weekly bus to Tavistock.  Back home I typed up my journal and sent her a copy with photographs I had taken.  One of the photos was of Hazel and me in her sitting room in the middle cottage of the three miner’s cottage that had been remodeled together into one house.

Hazel wrote me a letter in which she quoted from Robert Burns’ “To a Louse:”

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

And as a rider, she added, “I don’t usually allow my knees to be photographed.”

The verses of Robert Burns have gifted the world with songs: “Afton Water” and “Coming Through the Rye,” both of which I grew up singing because they were in the Mark Nevin series for piano Tunes You Like.  “Ye Flowery Banks,” sometimes called “Caledonian Air,” sometimes “Bonnie Doon” does indeed break my heart with its line:

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonnie bird

That sings upon the bough.

Thou minds me o’ the happy days,

When my fause luve was true.

None of Burn’s poems are as famous as “Auld Lang Syne” so it’s a pity that most people don’t know the whole song because it’s another that will break your heart with joy, sadness, and longing. It’s probably the most requested song we do in the OK Chorale. Here’s Susan McKeown and Johnny Cunningham from the album A Winter Talisman: Auld Lang Syne

And here is an intimate view of The OK Chorale singing “Auld Lang Syne”last Christmas:

It hit me the other day what I wanted to do for a summer reading project: read The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. I and II.  Collective gasp all around.  This venerable collection has been around a long time but I don’t believe anyone has actually read it—certainly not the college students for which it was compiled.  I have the fourth edition which thankfully reflects the fact that women are and always have been sentient beings. Since there are no women listed as the editors, I say to the eight men listed: Good for you, let’s continue to try to keep up.

I haven’t given up on Ulysses.  I’ve just temporarily stalled halfway through the book as have my Joycean compatriots.  I think Bloomsday, June 16, would be a good target date to begin again, and it needn’t interfere with the Norton book because I only can read a small chunk of Joyce at a sitting.

I decided to start with Vol. II– because it’s my project and I felt like it—which opens with the Romantic period (1798-1832).  It’s not a long period in literature because they all died young of theatrical consumption and angst. I usually clock the romantic period as lasting from the death of Beethoven in 1827 to the beginning of the 20^th century, but that’s the perspective of a musician who doesn’t really care and just needs an easy definition.

I began reading a few days ago.  Right out of the gate I didn’t think I could bear to read William Blake.  I need more help than the footnotes give me.  As well, I expect Blake is better read from a book that includes some of his etchings and engravings. But I read some of the shorter poems and have this to report:

I remember a college professor going on and on about “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” which rails against the thinking of the philosopher Democritus and the poet Lucretius whose De Rerum Natura was ultimately the impetus for my reading the complete canon of Shakespeare’s plays last summer. That’s all. Just a confluence of memory and history.  Pause to muse about the mysterious nature of life and time.

Then there is the extremely odd marriage of a Blake poem called “And Did Those Feet” to the Women’s Institute, a kind of 4-H for women,  in England.  It was put to music by C. Hubert H. Parry in 1916. It makes a stirring anthem but seems a bit odd as a W.I Song.

After singing next to my robust cousin Hazel on Christmas morning in Cornwall however, I can picture her at her monthly W.I. meeting singing,

Bring me my Bow of burning gold,

Bring me my arrows of desire

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold

Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

and then sitting down to listen in disbelief to that woman from Saltash who claimed she got her crispy pie crust with margarine instead of butter.

And finally, here is one of Blake’s easier short poems.  Literary periods and trends come and go.  Some things never change:

    The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

I’d like to see those Women Institute ladies with their arrows of desire have a go at those priests.

As I write I have my nose in three Sungold tomato plants.  When I finish this post I’ll put them out for a day of hardening off.  They are emblematic of the journey I take every quarter with The OK Chorale.  If you’re new here, the Chorale is a community choir I started in 1992.  We operate through the University of Washington’s Experimental College so we’re on a quarter system—thank God—because I would explode from over-stimulation and unrealistic expectations (primarily by me and of myself) if I didn’t get a break every two months.

I’ll explain about the tomatoes in a minute.  I’ll begin when this quarter began soon after I got notice that The OK Chorale had been accepted to perform at the Northwest Folk Life Festival in May.  Acceptance into Folk Life causes a flurry of excitement and a re-evaluation of the music I had already planned.  It was going to be an all Beatles program which appealed to everyone except the deepest bass and the best counter in the current crop of singers.  I scrambled for some substitutions to lure them back. It worked.

The Folk Life Festival occurs at a point where I would normally expect to have another week to rehearse.  The pressure starts with knowing that.  Then there are the instrumentalists.  For some unfathomable reason I had been in the habit of using the guitar pickers and autoharp strummers in our ranks for spring quarter.  When it takes all I’ve got to rehearse just the choir for a normal quarter, I have to add a motley and cheerful group of amateur accompanists to a shortened one.  

“I don’t have an f-sharp minor key.”

 “I can play everything pretty okay except the bridge. Here, I’ll show you the part I can’t play.”

“I don’t think I can sing and play at the same time.”

I watched them drop their music and tip over their stands and thought, “Folk Life. Stage. Audience.”  I started to sweat along the hairline.  If I’m not having fun, no one has fun.  I decided to can the instrumentalists.

After that it was a typical quarter.  I made my usual speech about not pointing fingers and tattling on others for singing the wrong note.  I want rehearsals to be a place where people—including me– can make mistakes and not be criticized.  The protocol is for a tenor to say something like, “Can you play the tenor part at measure 38?” and not something like, “The sopranos are coming in too early and messing us up.”

It’s funny, but it’s usually the tenors and the sopranos that get into it.  The basses are too shy or too confused—not sure which—to say much of anything and the altos are steady, reliable and patient.  The higher voices –I can say this because I am a solo soprano—are as high strung and demanding as racehorses.

When you listen to a choir perform, especially one where everyone is dressed exactly the same and the sound is sculpted like a hairdo—not the Chorale, incidentally—you probably can’t imagine the drama that goes on behind the scenes in rehearsals: the jealousies, competition, snarking, and hurt feelings.  One of the Chorale’s longtime members began life as an alto.  She switched to tenor to get away from an annoying alto, and then became a soprano in the hopes of bothering another soprano enough to cause her to quit.  

Every quarter there’s something.  Somebody lets me know all is not well.  I’m like a priest.  I have to hear it and know it and, most of the time, not interfere.

I was trying to address some such situation with a comment I made prior to the potluck-rehearsal.  The potluck-rehearsal is something I instituted to boost comfort levels for people who need to stand in close proximity to other human beings doing something as intimate as singing together.  We’re not a uniform choir.  We are an Aquarian Choir.  We are individuals who retain our eccentricities, oddities, aloofness –whatever it is we bring within our personalities—while we sing in four-part harmony.  It’s important to the mise en scène that we look like we can stand each other.

I said, “If there’s someone in the Chorale who annoys you, you might use the potluck to get better acquainted with him or her.  Sometimes that helps reduce.  .  .”

I was drowned out by the explosion of laughter. So I did what I often do when I’m too much in earnest. I started re-explain myself and ended up saying exactly the same thing which resulted in another assault of laughter while a few people –tenors, I think– began acting out the parts of Annoyed and Annoying Person. 

Nicki (soprano and also a teacher) mouthed to me, “Leave it alone. You’re done!”

“OK, fine,” I grinned but I hate it when I know I’m blushing. “See you at the potluck.”

At the potluck, Terry (alto) sat down next to Chris (tenor) and said, “I’m supposed to sit next to an annoying person and Hal isn’t here.”

I think for the most part, we all tend to get along.

The Northwest Folk Life Festival, Memorial Day, 2013. I always wish I could be dropped right into our singing venue because I hate the parking, the crowds, the noise, and this year, the rain and the humidity.  But once we were assembled at the Center House Theater with a luxurious half-an-hour to do a sound check because the group before us had cancelled; and once I had ascertained that the piano was not an upright, but a console, I was relaxed and happy. 

And then I got The Rush. The first time The OK Chorale sang at Folk Life, we were on the Intiman stage and that was a complete thrill.  But I think this year was the best we have ever sung.  The theater was packed and the audience was appreciative.  They yelled for an encore.  If I hadn’t been so high, I would have thought to repeat what was arguably our best: “Hold Me, Rock Me” by Brian Tate.

Instead, it was over.  The next day, Tuesday, Susan (soprano) sent a video her husband had taken from his phone.  It brought back the energy and joy of “Hold Me, Rock Me” and I maintained my high all day.

On Wednesday, I got an e-mail about the Sungold tomato plants I was expecting from an organic farm owned by friends of a friend.  I had asked the farmer last May if I could buy a couple of Sungolds from her this year.  I reminded her in January and again in April.  In the e-mail on Wednesday she sent her profuse apologies: she had forgotten all about my tomatoes and the plants were gone.

I burst into tears.  I was unreasonably depressed, crying intermittently all morning.  I wanted those tomatoes.  I hadn’t been able to find them last year and they were the only tomatoes I liked. Nothing else would do. How many times should I have reminded her?  Once a month? What was I going to do now?

Around noon, I thought, “I don’t think this is about the tomatoes.  This is the down after the high. Oh yeah. That.”

I live eight blocks from Swanson’s Nursery.  One phone call ascertained they had organic Sungold tomatoes and on sale. I was over there before they closed.  I’m taking them outside right now.  Those tomatoes and I are both going to be case-hardened by the end of the week, and ripe for summer.

You can hear “Hold me, Rock Me” here.  (Just scroll down an inch or two once you get to the link.) Our best counter, the Human Metronome, is the woman marching in place on the far right.  Thank you, Heather (alto)!

Nina(rhymes with Dinah) and I went to a piano concert on Saturday evening.

“I am so looking forward to the couch,” I said as we set off.

“So am I.” Nina said.

We headed downtown to Sherman and Clay to hear Fred Kronacher.  It’s something we do three times a year.  The first two concerts are always at Green Lake United Methodist Church where the platform is staged to resemble a drawing room and the lamps and flowers obscure the keyboard.  We always complain about it. We sometimes ask a staff person to do something about it.  There was one memorable occasion when we re-arranged the stage ourselves. 

The last program of the series is always downtown at the Sherman and Clay piano store where they re-arrange the showroom to accommodate an audience.  Rows of uncomfortable folding chairs dislocate a couch and two armchairs to one side of the room.  Nina and I always sit–and sometimes lie–on these renegade pieces of furniture.  They face away from the performer but we don’t care.  We sit –or lie—on them because we are middle-aged women and we can.

I had had a long, busy day on Saturday and I was looking forward to claiming the couch for the duration of the recital.  This took precedent in my mind over the actual content of the concert which in any case is always brilliant.

“What’s he playing this time? I can’t remember.” Nina said

“I don’t know either.  I just want to lie on the couch.”

At the door we rummaged for our tickets.

“Oh, it’s Schubert and Schumann. Oh good, I like them,” I said.

“We couldn’t remember what the topic was,” Nina explained to the ticket takers who we privately call Fred’s Groupies.

But when we got into the showroom, the couch and armchairs were gone.

“You moved the couch!” I said to the first staff person I saw.  I didn’t know if he was Mr. Sherman or Mr Clay. (He was Oscar Spidahl.) I might have sounded a teensy bit accusing.

“You liked the couch?” he inquired

“It’s the only reason we came.”

He looked at me like he was appraising me somehow.

“I like demanding and entitled people,” he said. “I think I can help you.”

Nina and I looked at each other. Demanding and entitled. Huh.

Oscar pulled two armchairs –not as plush as the ones to which we were accustomed, but more comfortable than the folding chairs—out of an office.  He set them up for us well away from, as he put it, the riffraff.

“Demanding and entitled,” I said. “I like it.”

Fred is an exquisite pianist.  He also has a gift for transmitting his enthusiasm for classical music.  He tells the audience a little about the composer, and demystifies some of what we will hear in the work he is about to perform.  He plays snippets from the pieces and suggests what to listen for.

He has two other penchants which I, as a teacher and performer, applaud.  He understands attention spans.  His lecture/concerts last one hour and thirty minutes. The end. 

Secondly, he silently directs audience etiquette.  He sits at the piano and looks at the offender if there is any talking or rattling.  He is much nicer than the sister at Late Nite Catechism but he gets the same message across: we are not going on until it is quiet. Once the concert begins people do not talk and they do not rattle candy wrappers and programs.  Even so I don’t feel the terror that I do at a Wagner opera or a Gilbert and Sullivan show, terror that I might breathe too loudly and cause someone to miss an iteration of a motif or a line in a patter song.  I especially don’t feel the terror when I’m lying on a couch.

Alas, there is nothing Fred can do about helicopter parents such as the one who sat in front of us. The father and the two boys sat still and attentive but I swear the mother did not come to listen to piano music.  She came to watch her youngest child attend a piano concert. 

She turned to look at him. 

She fussed at him, put her arm around him, and smiled at him. 

She looked at the piano and nodded two or three times to the music.

She sat still for five seconds.

Repeat.

Though I was in danger of falling off the chair which I wouldn’t have been if I’d been on a couch, I closed my eyes. It was a good call anyway. The work was Schumann’s “Carnaval,” a musical description of a series of characters entering the ballroom for a masked ball.  Fred had given a wee introduction to the characters and the musical themes and then suggested that we not follow along as he played the 21 short pieces because, as he said, “This is music.”

You, too, can have an excellent musical experience: http://www.musicalexperiences.org/ but I get first dibs on any couches.