Poem of the Week 2013/43

The Patient Witch

A lady called the Patient Witch
Lived near us long ago.
Our servants gave her off and on
A bit of coin or so,
To tell them what their dreams could mean,
And if their loves were true;
To study out their palms and say –
"A palace waits for you."
And then she always was polite,
And said, "How do you fare?
I hope your little girl is well,"
With a most pleasant air.
She mumbled much, we knew not what –
Each afternoon would wait
Beside the guide-post to the west
For some exalted fate.
She looked down every road as though
A stately coach was due,
To bear her home to somewhere else,
To folks she really knew.
"One evening," said a little boy,
The only one anigh,
"She told me pretty stories, and
She kissed my curls goodbye,
And turned into a swan and spread
Her white wings big and wide.
And flew and flew into the sky!
And I came home and cried."

Vachel Lindsay

I thought I'd head into the haunted weeks of late October with this strange and lovely poem by early twentieth-century American poet Vachel Lindsay. In some ways the title character is a traditional witch: a strange, mumbling, isolated old woman (this view is based on historical reality; see John Putnam Demos's Entertaining Satan). In other ways, she seems as much an oddity among witches as she is among her neighbors: for one thing, she's patient, rather than bad-tempered. She's polite, and has a pleasant air. Lindsay deftly sketches in the social setting: it's the (presumably less educated) servants who like to have their fortunes told; clearly there is no real palace waiting for them, but who knows what "a palace waits for you" might mean to a young servant? And they must be young, since they're asking about their loves and their futures. It's all harmless carnival fun. There's the air of a fairy tale about the whole thing; it happened "long ago" in a house with servants (the contemporary equivalent of the castles which she promises the servants after reading their palms). We hear about the "witch" only indirectly: from the servants, and later from a little boy. The somewhat archaic, childhood air is strengthened by Lindsay's use of traditional ballad meter (the steady 4-3-4-3 beat of the quatrains, with their regularly recurring rhymes).

Halfway through we switch from this scene of local color to something stranger. Right after hearing of the old woman's pleasant air, we hear she constantly mumbled, but no one really knows what she's saying – is it incoherent? unintelligible? are they just not listening closely enough? During actual witch-hunts, many real-life old women must have been done to death for their mysterious mumbling. Here it serves more to emphasize something solitary, isolated, not-understood about the old woman. The traditional region of witches is the cold North, for reasons that would probably take a Golden-Bough-sized volume to explain, but here she's waiting by a "guide-post to the west": a guide-post, as if she's seeking direction, and the west, associated with the forward movement of the sun, and so by implication with the future, but also with the setting of the sun, and so with night, darkness, silence, and death. A coach, stately or otherwise, would already have been an anachronism when this poem was written, so her awaiting one helps emphasize the old woman's dislocation from her surroundings. Then we have the poignant statement that her home is "somewhere else" – wherever that is, clearly it isn't where she is now, and no matter how much she is patronized by the servants, she is nowhere near "folks she really knew."

The only witness to her end is a little boy: is he the child of one of the servants? or the son of the people in the big house who speak of "our servants"? Is he the narrator, long ago, when he was a child? Is he just a boy who happened by? Is he old enough to distinguish fact from fairy tale? The narration of the witch's end by this uncertain story-teller takes on a dreamy distance because of our uncertainty about who this boy is and how accurate he is. Again, she is unlike traditional witches; she is affectionate rather than threatening to the child, entertaining him with pretty stories, and though she is linked to uncanny forces, they are less supernatural than Natural: there is no whiff of the sulfurous Satanic about her, or the black robes of the usual witch; instead, she turns into a white swan and flies away. Is this what she has been patiently awaiting? White is often associated with purity and innocence (not always in good ways; it can also imply cowardice, and inappropriate naivete). Swans are famously beautiful and graceful (I wonder if the shadow of Andersen's Ugly Duckling, who turned into a beautiful swan, went into this particular choice of bird?); they are also associated with death: according to legend, they sing only once in their lives, right before they die. Is her flight the child's version of her death? Or his vision of her rebirth? The odd misfit old woman, this strange resident stranger, redeems herself into something beautiful, magnificent, legendary. She flies away, free, and a lone little boy cries. How can those tears not alter the man he will become?

I took this poem from Poems Bewitched and Haunted, edited by the late John Hollander, in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series.

Poem of the Week 2013/42

Once again, it's been a little gloomy here, so I thought I would switch things up. Our first number this week is from the musical Chicago. The Prison Matron, "Mama" Morton, informs the young ladies in her charge on Murderers Row how things work under her:

When You're Good to Mama

Ask any of the chickies in my pen;
They'll tell you I'm the biggest mother . . . hen;
I love them all and all of them love me,
Because the system works, the system called: rec-i-proc-i-ty.

Got a little motto, always sees me through:
When you're good to Mama, Mama's good to you!

There's a lot of favors I'm prepared to do;
You do one for Mama, she'll do one for you.

They say that life is tit for tat, and that's the way I live;
So I deserve a lot of tat for what I've got to give!

Don't you know that this hand washes that one too?
When you're good to Mama, Mama's good to you.

If you want my gravy, pepper my ragout;
Spice it up for Mama, she'll get hot for you.

When they pass that basket folks contribute to,
You put in for Mama, she'll put out for you;

The folks atop the ladder are the ones the world adores;
So boost me up my ladder, kid, and I'll boost you up yours;

Let's all stroke together, like a Princeton crew;
When you're strokin' Mama, Mama's strokin' you!

So what's the one conclusion I can bring this number to?
When you're good to Mama, Mama's good to you!

Fred Ebb (John Kander wrote the music)

It's all very reliant on double entendres, though some of the entrendres can seem pretty single when they're naked on the page. But basically this is what Shaw said about the bawdy badinage of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing: he found the substance of their quips dull, vulgar, and obvious, but the poetry and music of their phrasing elevated them to art. With songs like the ones I'm posting here, the wit is not so much in what they're saying, which is usually pretty obvious, as in the sense of swift, comical puns and flashing, unexpected twists of meaning. The music and the individual performer can really bring out such elements as the semi-buried pun on "tit" in the "tit for tat" lines, or the jokes about "getting hot" and "putting out" and "up yours." On the original Broadway cast album (from which I transcribed the lyrics), Mary McCarty has a very bawdy, red-hot-mama approach. Queen Latifah played Mama Morton in the 2002 film; she's interesting casting, since there's something inherently elegant and refined about Latifah that makes the song more sly than raunchy. Both performances work quite well. I find the line about the Princeton crew particularly hilarious. Maybe it's the contrast between the setting and the wholesome Frank Merriwell implications of "Princeton crew" (yes, I know Frank was a Yale man; in this context, same difference). An Ivy League crew team may seem like a high-falutin' reference to use in a Chicago prison, but actually it's a deft bit of scene-setting; collegiate sports were extremely popular in 1920s America, when the musical takes place.

Incidentally I've never seen the musical Chicago on stage, though I watched the movie recently. I have seen the 1927 silent version (Chicago) and the 1942 Ginger Rogers version (Roxie Hart) of the original, non-musical, play, so I'm familiar with the story. The big flaw with the movie version is Renee Zellweger's awful performance as Roxie (not sure if the blame belongs with her, director Rob Marshall, or both). In the other versions, Roxie may be a venal, shallow, mendacious, manipulative gold-digger (and a killer), but she's also brassy and funny and oddly likeable. Zellweger is self-pitying and mean-spirited and thinks she's a victim and basically she's just playing the wrong kind of stupid.

We had a song for Mama, so here's one for Daddy:

My Heart Belongs to Daddy

I used to fall in love with all
Those boys who maul refined ladies,
But now I tell each young gazelle
To go to Hell . . . I mean Hades!
For since I came to care for such a sweet millionaire:

While tearing off a game of golf,
I may make a play for the caddie,
But when I do, I don't follow through,
'Cause my heart belongs to Daddy.

If I invite a boy some night
To dine on my fine finnan haddie,
I just adore his asking for more,
But my heart belongs to Daddy.

Yes, my heart belongs to Daddy
So I simply couldn't be bad,
Yes, my heart belongs to Daddy,
da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-Dad;
So I want to warn you laddie,
Though I know you're perfectly swell,
That my heart belongs to Daddy
'Cause my Daddy, he treats it so well –
He treats it and treats it and then he repeats it,
Yes, Daddy, he treats it so well.

St Patrick's Day, although I may
Be seen wearing green with a Paddy,
I'm always sharp when playing the harp,
'Cause my heart belongs to Daddy.

Though other dames at football games
May long for a strong undergraddie,
I never dream of making the team
'Cause my heart belongs to Daddy.

Yes, my heart belongs to Daddy
So I simply couldn't be bad,
Yes, my heart belongs to Daddy,
da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-Dad;
So I want to warn you laddie,
Though I simply hate to be frank
That I can't be mean to Daddy,
'Cause my da-da-da-Daddy might spank –
In matters artistic, he's not modernistic,
So da-da-da-Daddy might spank.

Cole Porter

Mary Martin became a star for singing this, in a musical called Leave It to Me, in 1938. She famously and repeatedly claimed she had no idea at all what the song really meant when she first sang it, and my mother for one is calling shenanigans on that particular claim: if she, with her sheltered upbringing and convent schooling, knew right away what the song was about when she heard it, then how clueless would Martin have to be not to know? And indeed if she truly didn't know you have to wonder what she thought this barrage of clever rhymes actually meant.

"Harp" in the St Patrick's Day stanza puns on an old-fashioned slang term for an Irishman. I felt I should explain that, since I think it's not a term used much anymore, and the line always cracks me up. I suppose it's a bit of a pejorative term, but since it references Ireland's legendary bards, I, as a partial Irishman by ancestry, am not for one going to take much offense.

There are probably other version of these lyrics floating around but I transcribed these from the Bolcom and Morris performance on Night and Day: The Cole Porter Album, and their scholarly imprimatur is enough for me. It's odd now to remember that I was mildly surprised long ago to learn that Bolcom was a composer, as well as a performer of American popular song with his wife, mezzo Joan Morris.

Pergolesi in Naples in Berkeley

Sunday was one of those unpleasantly hot days that smear through the occasional week here in the Bay Area. Fortunately it had cooled down by the time I arrived at First Congregational Church in Berkeley for the last concert in the first series of Philharmonia Baroque's new, thirty-third, season. Each concert this year concentrates on a particular city; last night it was Naples, with an emphasis on Pergolesi, though Handel also made an appearance, thanks to his stay in that musically influential city, as did Francesco Durante, Pergolesi's teacher. The centerpiece was in the second half, Pergolesi's famous Stabat Mater. Nicholas McGegan conducted.

The first half was framed by orchestral pieces, opening with the sinfonia from Pergolesi's opera L'Olimpiade, and closing with Durante's Concerto for Strings No. 2 in G minor. There were not actually all that many players up on the stage, but they produce an opulent, full sound. I enjoyed the coruscating elegancies of the baroque. There was a pause after the first piece, when a couple of latecomers were seated. The concert started at 7:30, but really would have been better off starting at 7:00, for the benefit of those of us who have not yet reached the bliss of retirement. Handel vocal selections came as the creamy filling between the orchestral numbers.

David Daniels and Carolyn Sampson were the soloists. Daniels is of course well known, the standard bearer and the standard for a generation of countertenors. He was in rich voice last night. But like the flighty lively crowds of Naples pleasure-seekers that McGegan invoked (at least in my mind) at the start of the concert, I was swept up by what was new to me, so with no disrespect intended to Daniels I'm going to go on about Sampson. If I've heard her before, it's been on recordings where I didn't really pay attention to the list of singers (which is not unusual for me; sorry, I'm generally more about composer and work). She was sensational, with a beautiful limpid soprano. She's an attractive blonde with a glam presence; she came out in a long dark red gown with black trim and a sparkling necklace. The dress was strapless and my first thought was, She looks great but I hope she puts a shawl on before the Stabat Mater, so I guess the Carmelite Sisters of Charity who taught in my grammar school did their work well. (To put you out of your suspense right now, she came out for the second half with a black bolero jacket over her dress, looking still stylish but also appropriate – well done!)

Daniels and Sampson sang two Handel duets, with a solo apiece in between. First was Io t'abbraccio from Rodelinda, followed by Daniels in Dove sei from the same opera; then Sampson sang Da tempeste from Giulio Cesare, followed by Caro/Bella from the same opera. It was all very satisfying but Sampson's solo turn was for me the highlight; she not only sang beautifully but she caught the character of Cleopatra perfectly; this was a woman for whom flirting was like breathing, with a pleasing teasing tone. The lively extravagance of her ornamentation in the repeats was quite seductive.

Obviously a different tone was called for after the intermission, with the lyrical passion of the Stabat Mater, the antique prayer meditating upon Mary's suffering at the foot of the cross. There was more program rustling for this part, which was unfortunate though expected. Oddly the program had the first stanza of the poem on the bottom of the same page that had the aria texts, though there was plenty of room to put the entire text with translation of the Stabat Mater on the next two pages, which would have reduced the rustling. Even better would be to use supertitles. The performance flowed swiftly, with fluid intensity. We were nearing the end ("Fac ut portem Christi mortem, / passionis fac me sortem / et plagas recolere" : "Grant that I may bear the death of Christ, / grant me the fate of His passion / and the remembrance of His wounds") when a fairly powerful earthquake jolted the building. A momentary look of panic spread across some faces but the performers carried on without a pause. On the whole, the evening was a sumptuous immersion in the warmth of the Italian baroque. The next city, to be explored 15 - 19 November, is an unusual and interesting choice for a baroque ensemble: St Petersburg. Check it out here, especially if you're one of those looking for new adventures in old music.

Poem of the Week 2013/41

Sonnet. On Being Cautioned against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, because it was Frequented by a Lunatic

Is there a solitary wretch who hies
   To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow,
And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes
   Its distance from the waves that chide below;
Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs
   Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf,
With hoarse, half-uttered lamentations, lies
   Murmuring responses to the dashing surf?
In moody sadness, on the giddy brink,
   I see him more with envy than with fear;
He has no nice felicities that shrink
   From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

Charlotte Smith

This poem was published in England in 1797. The French Revolution had begun in 1789 with the destruction of the royal prison, the Bastille, and as the country across the channel slowly descended from talk of liberty and the Rights of Man into the murderous convulsions of the Reign of Terror (convulsions which ended around 1794, to be replaced by a slow crawl towards Napoleon's dictatorship and a new series of wars), both the inhabitants and the government of Great Britain were increasingly aware of the impoverished, the lowly, the struggling, the beggars and cripples, the miserable and crazy and usually invisible in their midst – aware of them not only as individuals deserving sympathy and understanding instead of ridicule and condemnation, but also deserving of dignity. There was also a growing and linked awareness that they were a potentially dangerous social force, an angry mob-in-the-making, like the ones in France that had killed the king. (Never mind that the British had killed their own king in 1649 and been ruled by their own dictator for a while; they had later reverted to monarchy, and times had changed.) A changing attitude towards the dispossessed led what we might call the possessed, particularly the government, to keep a watchful wary eye on those who seemed too interested in French ideas about liberty, equality, and fraternity. The world was looking much more unstable. It was a jittery time.

In 1798, the year after this poem was first published, Wordsworth and Coleridge published the first (anonymous) edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection that not only concentrated on what we might these days call "the marginalized" as suitable subjects for poetry – no fine ladies and witty gentlemen, no gods, but only the humble, the poor, farmers, fishermen, "idiot" children, mumbling old women in crooked country lanes – but did so in language that was mostly radically stripped down, sounding much more colloquial than people expected when they picked up a book that called itself "poetry."

One of the fascinating things to me about this particular sonnet is how it joins two eras; it still uses the elevated, slightly formal diction of the eighteenth century, but presages the coming Romantic movement in literature, with its interest in wandering, melancholy, alienation, and insanity: a wild subject held fast in a traditional form. I've sketched broadly some of the political, social, and artistic currents informing the time, but of course there's more than that going on; this also seems like an intensely personal poem, with an unusual approach to an unusual subject. The biographical headnote for Smith in my source for this poem (Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Roger Lonsdale) states that one reason for her "considerable reputation" was "an intense but mysterious melancholy. . . ." and this quality is much in evidence in her other poems in the collection.

In addition to inner alienation, and the unavoidable social currents that form the figurative air we breathe and shape the thoughts we think, there might be other literary influences: this is just a feeling of mine, but this sonnet – with its cold winds blasting the beetling cliff, the dangerous waves far below, its wandering hollow-eyed lunatic, and particularly its deeper consideration of whether insanity is not perhaps the appropriate response to our existence – reminds me of King Lear, particularly the scenes in which Edgar, disguised as the mad Poor Tom, guides his newly blinded father Gloucester to the cliffs of Dover.

The sonnet is of the type usually described as Italian or Spenserian, meaning it consists of an octave and a sestet in iambic pentameter (as opposed to the English or Shakespearean form, consisting of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, again in iambic pentameter). The octave is taken up with a vivid description of the lunatic and his setting; they seem inextricably linked and mixed, the waves and winds sighing and chiding as if they had human voices, the lunatic responding in incoherent murmurs (like the waves of the sea) and hoarse, inarticulate cries. He seems oddly more connected to the natural world than any rational person would be (a reminder that lunatics were also known as "naturals" in an earlier era). He is a "solitary wretch" but the headlands also seem solitary and, to sophisticated urban eyes, wretched: isolated from humans, stripped down to essentials. The description is so detailed that we can feel that the poet's imagination has been drawn in an empathetic way to the wandering madman (and bear in mind that earlier in that century it had been common practice to go to madhouses to laugh at or moralize upon the behaviors of the insane).

The opening line of the sestet ("In moody sadness, on the giddy brink") is where the poem really turns; after the first eight lines, we would initially assume that Smith is continuing her description of the lunatic, but the next line begins with (and so the preceding line must modify) I. And it is only then that we realize that she is now describing not the lunatic but herself; her grammar shapes our understanding, linking her with the lunatic she had been warned against. She then makes the startling, offbeat announcement that she envies rather than fears this wretched outcast, for two somewhat contradictory reasons. First: he is released from social conventions (the "nice felicities") and free to experience the "giant horrors" of life, instead of shrinking from them as in polite, conventional, rational society. These horrors might be the existential terrors that visit us in dark and half-dreaming states, or perhaps the sort of political paranoia and persecution that had seized France and was threatening England. But then she also says she envies him because his lunacy prevents him from understanding "the depth or the duration of his woe": reason is seen not as the ultimate human blessing, as in the Enlightenment, but instead is described as a curse; at least the lunatic, "uncursed by reason," is better off than the poet, since he seems not to know "the depth or the duration of his woe."

Poem of the Week 2013/40

To Autumn

I
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, late flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

II
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
   Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

As we head into October this seemed like an obvious choice; I guess I could try to be clever and come up with something else, but sometimes something is the obvious choice because it's the best choice. When I was young most of the poetry I read was dramatic or epic; I came fairly late to lyric, which I think is maybe not usual, but this ode has been a favorite of mine since I first read it: it's so vivid, so intensely pictorial, and surprisingly action-packed for a poem that spends so much time on ripening harvests. Instead of describing apples as abundant or hazelnuts as plump, Keats gives us verbs: the apples are so plentiful they bend their boughs, the gourds swell, the nutmeats plump up; even flowers, usually linked with spring, are profuse: budding "more, and still more." The busy bees think the warm days will stretch out forever.

The poet addresses autumn directly, and intimately ("thou" and "thy" sound formal to us only because they are archaic, but they are actually the English equivalent of the intimate/singular "you"). Even when Autumn is just sitting, she (or he – nothing in the poem specifies Autumn's gender, though the abundant seasons are usually personified as women, while only sparse Winter is usually seen as a man, generally an old and cold man) is active, in ways appropriate to the season: Autumn's hair is lifted softly and "winnowed," a metaphor which reminds us that this is the time of year when the reapers winnow the harvested grains to remove the chaff; or Autumn is like a gleaner, carrying off the last bits of grain in a basket balanced on her head; or Autumn is watching those bough-bending apples being pressed into cider. This is a very rural poem; autumn in London would look very different.

The gleaning and pressing and winnowing remind us that although Autumn may provide a superabundance of deliciousness, the on-coming months will take them away, making it necessary to store what generous Autumn provides. Winter is not mentioned directly, but there are hints throughout of what's coming: we are conscious, even if the bees aren't, that the warm days won't stretch out forever. Death is here, though it is not presented as grim or violent: the day's dying is "soft"; the diminutive gnats mourn in a humming chorus among the willows ("sallows"; the willow is traditionally associated with sorrow, particularly sorrowful love); the wind, which is light like a breeze, lives or, perhaps, dies. None of this seems tragic or unexpected, but rather gentle and inevitable.

You might expect the end of a poem about Autumn to segue into Winter, but in the third stanza Keats explicitly invokes Spring instead. Balancing all the death references in this stanza, which I mentioned above, there are reminders of birth and spring: without directly saying "born" Keats puts the word into our minds twice in the space of three lines with borne and bourne. Instead of sheep, Keats describes "full-grown lambs," an amusingly odd phrase that links their springtime youth with their autumnal maturity. Birds associated with spring and summer, robins and swallows, are still here, and still making music; Autumn and Spring are linked by their music. After all the action earlier, we close out gently, with solitary whistling, and a wheeling flock twittering up above. Death is not excluded from this scene, or felt as an intruder, but woven in gently, almost as an interlude in the on-going cycle of birth and rebirth.

I took this from the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: October 2013

First, a word of warning: as of this time, the BART labor situation is still unsettled. Even for those who don't rely exclusively on public transportation, a strike will roil and snarl Bay Area traffic horribly, and so in the continuing absence of a signed contract I would exercise extreme caution in making plans or buying expensive tickets for any events after 10 October, when the current sixty-day "cooling off" period expires, a period which appears to have been mostly wasted. My understanding is that if BART shuts down again due to a strike, there is little to nothing that anyone (such as the governor) can do. I am normally very pro-union, and hate the long-term trend in America of lavishing benefits on the few at the top by squeezing the rest of us, but I have no sympathy for the notoriously lazy and unhelpful BART employees, who give unions a bad name. They are already grotesquely overcompensated, and increases to their bloated salaries and benefits will be coming out of fare hikes and tax increases on people who do not make nearly as much – a further squeeze on people who can't afford it. I do not consider opposing the BART unions anti-worker, since I also consider BART management grossly overcompensated. It would be nice if any excess money in the system were used to improve their lousy service, but that doesn't seem to be a concern of any party involved.

While I'm talking about BART, here's a reminder that due to earthquake retrofitting on the transbay tube for the next year or so, trains after 10:00 PM Tuesdays through Thursdays will be delayed by up to twenty minutes. This means that, for all practical purposes, if you attend an event on those days that starts at the conventional 8:00 PM, your transbay trip is most likely going to be seriously delayed (twenty minutes counts as a serious delay when you have to get up to go to work the next day).

Over at the War Memorial, San Francisco Opera has a few October performances of Boito's Mefistofele (2 October) and the world premiere run of Picker's Dolores Claiborne (1 and 4 October). Bicentennial birthday boy Verdi is represented by his wonderful Falstaff, the only opera that actually improves on a Shakespearean source (granted the source is the weak Merry Wives of Windsor), opening 8 October, with Bryn Terfel in the title role and Nicola Luisotti conducting; and the other bicentennial birthday boy, Richard Wagner, is represented by The Flying Dutchman, opening 22 October, with Greer Grimsley in the title role and Patrick Summers conducting. There is also a one-off performance of Verdi's Requiem on 25 October, with Luisotti conducting and soloists Leah Crocetto, Jamie Barton, Michael Fabiano, and Vitalij Kowaljow.

There's also a lot going on across the street at the San Francisco Symphony, starting with Pablo Heras-Casado conducting a mini-festival of mostly Mendelssohn and Adès: 3 October (evening) Adès himself joins baritone John Brancy and members of the Symphony in chamber music by Debussy, Ravel, and Adès; then on 3 (matinee) - 6 October Leila Josefowicz joins them as soloist in Stravinsky's Violin Concerto, along with works by Lully and Adès, and Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony; 10 - 12 October, in addition to works by Mendelssohn, soprano Audrey Luna, mezzo-soprano Chrlotte Hellekant, and baritone Rodney Gilfrey will perform scenes from Adès's The Tempest. Later in the month Edwin Outwater conducts works by Ligeti, Dvorak, Lutoslawski, and Prokofiev (Piano Concerto 3, with soloist Simon Trpceski), 24 - 26 October. There are also solo concerts by Andras Schiff (Bach Partitas, 6 October, and both the Goldberg and Diabelli Variations, 13 October) and Yuja Wang (Prokofiev, Chopin, and Stravinsky, 15 October), among other things. Get more details and check out the other scheduled concerts here.

For more in the symphonic vein, there's Wagner, Rachmaninoff, and a world premiere by Edmund Campion at the Berkeley Symphony on 3 October, with Joana Carneiro conducting. UPDATE: for medical reasons Carneiro is unable to travel, so Gerard Schwarz will now conduct this program.

Countertenor David Daniels and soprano Carolyn Sampson join Philharmonia Baroque in a program called Pergolesi in Naples, though it also features arias from Handel's Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda and a concerto grosso by Durante. The Pergolesi works are his famous and beautiful Stabat Mater and the sinfonia from his opera L'Olimpiade. That's 2, 4-6 October, in their usual variety of venues, though note that the San Francisco performances are at the Jazz Center due to Herbst's closure for retrofitting.

Curious Flights closes its inaugural season with a program called Transatlantic Crossings (collaborations between Bay Area and UK musicians and composers), featuring new or newish works by Dylan Mattingly, Larry London, and Edwin Roxburgh. I missed CF's second concert, a Britten tribute, since I was having a cornea scrape, which is exactly what it sounds like (I've been having a superfun year!), but I was at their first concert, the pleasures of which made me want to attend the others. This one is 18 October at the SF Conservatory of Music.

Also at the Conservatory of Music, BluePrint new music ensemble, led by Nicole Paiement, plays David Del Tredici (Dracula), Stephen Hartke (Meanwhile: Music for Imaginary Puppet Plays), Tobias Picker (selected songs), and John Cage (Living Room Music), on 5 October. At the other end of the chronological line, you can hear the Conservatory's baroque ensemble in vocal music of Monteverdi, 24 October.

If you're looking for further adventures in new music, check out the schedule of the Center for New Music. A couple of events that jump out at me are pianists Sarah Cahill and Adam Tendler on 19 October and vocalist Ken Ueno with Tim Feeney on percussion and electronics on 31 October. I have not yet been to this venue, which is conveniently located right by the Powell Street BART stop, but I hear great things about it.

Another interesting new music event is composer/vocalist Lisa Bielawa's Airfield Broadcast, which involves hundreds of performers spread over Crissy Field, so that (at least this is my understanding) as you move around you will have different musical/spatial experiences, each unique to that particular moment and situation. That's 26 - 27 October, and you can find out more here.

San Francisco Performances opens its season this month; they are co-sponsors of the Andras Schiff concerts listed above under the Symphony, and they have the Juilliard String Quartet playing Beethoven, Schubert, and a new work by Jesse Jones on 27 October. Their season opener on 18 October features the exciting young singers Isabel Leonard and Alek Shrader, both of whom have appeared in solo recitals presented by SFP, but it is a season opener and a benefit and tickets are priced accordingly.

Cutting Ball opens its season with Sidewinders by Basil Kreimendahl, directed by M. Graham Smith, 18 October to 17 November at the EXIT on Taylor. Shotgun Players continues its season with Strangers, Babies, by Linda McLean, directed by Jon Tracy, 15 October to 17 November at the Ashby Stage. Both these plays are new and I don't know much about them, but both these theaters have good track records, so dive in.

Speaking of diving in, there is the usual abundance of possibilities over at Cal Performances; highlights include Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette on 4 October, mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor and soprano Jessica Rivera on 13 October, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe with Les Violons du Roy on 20 October, and Musicians from Marlboro on 26 October; find out more about those programs and check out the other possibilities here.

Poem of the Week 2013/39

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats

This poem has a lot of movement, spatial, chronological, and psychological, for a single sentence about an old woman drowsing by the fireplace. There's a gentle, romantic haze over the first stanza, as the poet urges her, through the portal of the book we too are reading, to look backward into her romantic past – in fact, to dream of (rather than to examine clearly) that past. She is nodding, she reads slowly, her look was soft, and the shadows deep. The past here is a twilight kingdom, filled with her moments of "glad grace" and with many youthful lovers – this is a reverie, not a novelistic analysis. But the key word here is the very first one: when you are old. In fact, this past is still the present, and the woman at this point is neither old nor grey – the poet is telling her that this is what she should do, when the time comes. when she is old and grey.

At the moment when he is addressing her, presumably she is still young and graceful, with many admirers, but he's suggesting that in the long run his rivals will be a blur, and out of the many will come forth one – himself, the one man who sees beyond the deeps of her soft eyes and into her soul: her pilgrim soul. Pilgrim changes how we see this woman, and brings us in contact with a restless spiritual quality in her that immediately becomes more important to us than her outer appearance – it's such a vivid and unexpected word, its connotations of the sacred and searching overpowering the more generic "beauty" and "grace" that are attracting the poet's rivals. And pilgrim changes how we see the poet, who has a deeper sense than the others of what is valuable in the beloved. Her pilgrim quality is linked with her sorrows (again, unspecified, creating a melancholy sense of life's oncoming sadness as she ages; we're being drawn into a mood and a mode here, rather than a series of specific, narrative incidents). He's suggesting to her (warning her?) that the deepest, truest love comes from the one who sees beyond her enticing exterior to the deeper, more restless, sadder life within.

The sorrows reflected in her changing (aging) face bring us back forward in time to the old woman the poet conjured up at the beginning. She bends down towards the warmth and light of the "glowing bars" (the metal bars of the fireplace, that hold the burning wood or coal, and shine with their light and heat) – she seems to be alone; perhaps her rejection of the poet has brought forth this hint of a solitary future, and a warning against rejecting the true lover, since that rejection will result not just in the loss of love, but of Love – the capital letter indicates that there's more at stake than the loss of one man mooning over her; she faces the loss of Eros himself. In this last stanza she's no longer just sitting by the fire, she's bending down to it, and we have to move in close to hear her murmuring ("a little sadly"). While we move in closer and closer to her, as if a camera were moving into a tight close-up, the poem itself, its mode, mood, and meaning, are expanding, opening up more and more. We've gone from love to Love, a god fleeing and pacing on the mountains – run off, but still on this earth – until he hides forever beyond reach among the scattered crowds of stars. The rhyme here ties her fireplace (the "bars") with the mystic surrounding universe (the "stars"), which holds what she has lost (or what he is warning her she will lose).

I took this from The Collected Poems of WB Yeats, but the edition I have seems to be out of print; I think this one is the replacement, though there are a number of Yeats collections available. My copy indicates that this poem was first collected in The Rose, published in 1893. Yeats was born in 1865, and so was not yet thirty when he wrote this. In this poem, love among the elderly seems rooted more in memory and reverie than physical desire; I wonder if he still felt that way as he himself grew old.

Poem of the Week 2013/38

by Walt Whitman, from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, the song of the hermit thrush:

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv'd me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv'd us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love – but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

From me to thee glad serenade,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

This is for AMV, 8 February 1926 - 12 September 2013: "rest, rest, perturbed spirit!"

Poem of the Week 2013/37

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 the 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.

William Blake

This is one of the first Blake poems I ever read, and it made an immediate impact on me, though really it was more visual than spiritual or intellectual: I could very clearly see, in the style not of Blake himself (since the copy I read did not include his artwork) but of a medieval illuminated manuscript, the priests in black gowns (actually I pictured them as monks, with long gray beards) wandering around the garden, among the tombstones and occasional remaining flowers, busily tying things up, and that visual image has always stuck with me. Blake was one of the pure-hearted, who thought that the rest of the world was pure-hearted too.

The Garden of Love is also the title track of a CD put out last year by Martha Redbone and the Martha Redbone Roots Project. She had the genius idea of setting some poems by Blake in the style of what is now usually called roots music, a blending of Celtic and African sounds that emerged in the Appalachians, inflected with hymn tunes and country and gospel styles. It's outsider music, and Blake was also an outsider, and a mystic; his simple yet striking words fit right into this musical style. You can easily imagine some of Redbone's settings being sung as hymn tunes in small backwoods country churches. I had never heard of her before last Christmas, when V gave me a copy of the CD. Since then I have listened to it often, pushing aside the ever-growing piles of other, still-unheard, CDs so that I could give it another listen, which is always the ultimate tribute. I recommend it highly. The CD is listed on Amazon, but it looks as if the best way to get it is directly from Martha Redbone's website.

The poem is from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience; I'm linking to the beautiful Princeton edition that reproduces Blake's colored plates, part of a series of Blake's illuminated books that the Princeton Press did a number of years ago, but of course there are many other editions.

Poem of the Week 2013/36

Today is Labor Day in the United States, so here's something suitable. This is a song from the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill musical The Threepenny Opera, sung by Jenny, a maid/prostitute in Peachum's London brothel, referred to in the song as a "cheap hotel." (There are some stagings in which the song is sung by Polly, Peachum's daughter.)

Pirate Jenny

You gentlemen can watch while I'm scrubbing the floors
And I'm scrubbing the floors while you're gawking,
And maybe once you tip me and it makes you feel swell
on a ratty waterfront in a ratty old hotel
And you never guess to who you're talking –
You never guess to who you're talking.

Suddenly one night there's a scream in the night
And you wonder what could that have been?
And you see me kind of grinning while I'm scrubbing
And you wonder, What's she got to grin?
And a ship – a black freighter –
With a skull on its masthead – will be coming in.

You gentlemen can say, Hey girl! Finish the floors,
Get upstairs, make the beds, earn your keep here!
You toss me your tips and go down to the ships
But I'm counting your heads while I make up the beds
'Cause there's nobody gonna sleep here –
Tonight, none of you will sleep here.

Then that night there's a bang in the night
And you yell, Who's that kicking up a row?
And you see me kinda staring out the window
And you say, What's she got to stare at now?
And the ship – the black freighter –
Turns around in our harbor
Shooting guns from the bow.

Then you gentlemen can wipe off that laugh from your face
Every building town is a flat one;
Your whole stinking place will be down to the ground
Only this cheap hotel standing up safe and sound
And you yell, Why do they spare that one?
And you say, Why do they spare that one?

All the night through with the noise and to-do
You wonder, Who's the person lives up there?
Then you see me stepping out into the morning –
looking nice – with a ribbon in my hair.
And the ship, the black freighter,
Runs a flag up its masthead, and a cheer rings the air!

By noontime the dock is all swarming with men
Coming off of that ghostly freighter,
They're moving in the shadows where no one can see
And they're chaining up people and bringing them to me
Asking me, Kill them now, or later?
Asking me: Kill them now, or later?

Noon by the clock, and so still on the dock
You can hear a foghorn miles away;
In that quiet of death I'll say, Right now.
And they'll pile up the bodies, and I'll say, That'll learn ya!
And the ship, the black freighter,
Disappears out to sea – and on it – is me.

Bertolt Brecht, translated by Marc Blitzstein

Like most working people, Jenny indulges herself in the occasional fantasy that though she may appear to be merely a lesser cog in the machinery of profiteering, she is, in reality, powerful and important, enough so to exact retribution from her oppressors before disappearing to unknown destinations with her pirate crew – this is literally an escapist fantasy. This is not about people realizing something about "the person inside" someone they've overlooked; what Jenny's oppressors turned victims learn ("that'll learn ya!") in a blood-filled day of terror and revenge is that her social role is actually even more powerful and destructive than theirs. The "gentlemen" who treat her so contemptuously and condescendingly never see her as a person, really – and they never will. Everyone has been reduced to his or her social role. The gentlemen themselves aren't really seen as people, either, only as brutal samples of their social class. The same is true of the pirates: they have no individual personalities; they cheer and swarm and take the town in anonymous unanimity; they seek and obey Jenny's judgment without question. Why is she working as a maid/prostitute instead of sailing with the pirates? Where will they go, and what will they do, once they've destroyed the town for her? There's no indication, and there doesn't need to be; in fact, too much explanation would dilute her apocalyptic (you could say, potentially revolutionary) anger. The impossibility of her vision is what makes it so vivid. The dreamlike quality of "the black freighter" links it to doomed, otherworldly ships like the Flying Dutchman: it's "ghostly"; the crew moves "in the shadows where no one can see"; the ship does not sail or float or move out to sea, it "disappears." The most poignant detail to me is the ribbon in her hair – she can't resist the urge to make her triumphant exit in style, and though she could have given herself ropes of pearls or any other sort of pirate finery, for this impoverished drudge a nice-looking ribbon seems like luxury. It's the sort of realistic detail that people often unconsciously put into their fantasies, probably to make them seem less like fantasies and more like possibilities.

Remember, as Tyler Durden tells us: You are not your job.

I transcribed this from the 1954 New York cast recording, which features Lotte Lenya (Weill's widow) as Jenny. There are other translations of this song, but I love this one for "But I'm counting your heads while I make up the beds." There are other renditions, too, but I love the triumphant, longing, slightly spiteful yet dreamy way Lenya stretches out the final "me."