POEMS ABOUT SINGERS & SINGING

Excluded are songs about birds singing,
as these are too numerous to include here.

POEMS IN ENGLISH



POEMS IN OTHER LANGUAGES




Don Juan: Canto the Fourth [excerpt]
George Gordon, Lord Byron

LXXX

He saw some fellow captives, who appear'd
To be Italians, as they were in fact;
From them, at least, their destiny he heard,
Which was an odd one; a troop going to act
In Sicily - all singers, duly rear'd
In their vocation, had not been attack'd
In sailing from Livorno by the pirate,
But sold by the impresario at no high rate.

LXXXI

By one of these, the buffo of the party,
Juan was told about their curious case;
For although destin'd to the Turkish mart, he
Still kept his spirits up - at least his face;
The little fellow really look'd quite hearty,
And bore him with some gaiety and grace,
Showing a much more reconcil'd demeanour,
Than did the prima donna and the tenor.

LXXXII

In a few words he told their hapless story,
Saying, "Our Machiavelian impresario,
Making a signal off some promontory,
Hail'd a strange brig; Corpo di Caio Mario!
We were transferr'd on board her in a hurry,
Without a single scudo of salario;
But if the Sultan has a taste for song,
We will revive our fortunes before long.

LXXXIII

"The prima donna, though a little old,
And haggard with a dissipated life,
And subject, when the house is thin, to cold,
Has some good notes; and then the tenor's wife,
With no great voice, is pleasing to behold;
Last carnival she made a deal of strife,
By carrying off Count Cesare Cicogna
From an old Roman Princess at Bologna.... LXXXVI

"As for the men, they are a middling set;
The musico is but a crack'd old basin,
But, being qualified in one way yet,
May the seraglio do to set his face in,
And as a servant some preferment get;
His singing I no further trust can place in:
From all the Pope makes yearly 'twould perplex
To find three perfect pipes of the third sex.

LXXXVII

"The tenor's voice is spoilt by affectation;
And for the bass, the beast can only bellow;
In fact, he had no singing education,
An ignorant, noteless, timeless, tuneless fellow;
But being the prima donna's near relation,
Who swore his voice was very rich and mellow,
They hir'd him, though to hear him you'd believe
An ass was practising recitative.

LXXXVIII

"'Twould not become myself to dwell upon
My own merits, and though young - I see, Sir - you
Have got a travell'd air, which speaks you one
To whom the opera is by no means new:
You've heard of Raucocanti? - I'm the man;
The time may come when you may hear me too;
You was not last year at the fair of Lugo,
But next, when I'm engag'd to sing there - do go.

LXXXIX

"Our baritone I almost had forgot,
A pretty lad, but bursting with conceit;
With graceful action, science not a jot,
A voice of no great compass, and not sweet,
He always is complaining of his lot,
Forsooth, scarce fit for ballads in the street;
In lover's parts his passion more to breathe,
Having no heart to show, he shows his teeth."



At Half-Mast

E. Pauline Johnson

You didn't know Billy, did you? Well, Bill was
     One of the boys,
The greatest fellow you ever seen to racket an' raise
     a noise, -
An' sing! say, you never heard singing 'nless you
     heard Billy sing.
I used to say to him, "Billy, that voice that you've
     got there'd bring
A mighty sight more bank-notes to tuck away in
     your vest,
If only you'd go on the concert stage instead of a-
     ranchin' West."
An' Billy he'd jist go laughin', and say as I didn't
     know
A robin's whistle in springtime from a barnyard
     rooster's crow.
But Billy could sing, an' I sometimes think that voice
     lives anyhow, -
That perhaps Bill helps with the music in the place
     he's gone to now.
He was going' acrost the plain to catch the train for
     the East next day.

'Twas the only time I ever seen poor Bill that he
     didn't laugh
Or sing, an' kick up a rumpus an' racket around,
     and chaff,
For he'd got a letter from his folds that siad for to
     hurry home,
For his mother was dyin' away down East an' she
     wanted Bill to come.
Say, but the feller took it hard, but he saddled up
     right away,
An' started across the plains to take the train for
     the East, next day.
Sometimes I lie awake a-nights jist a-thinkin's of
     the rest,
For that was the great big blizzard day, when the
     wind come down from west,
An' the snow piled up like mountains an' we couldn't
     put foot outside,
But jist set into the shack an' talked of Bill on his
     lonely ride.
We talked of the laugh he threw us as he went at
     the break o' day,
An' we talked of the poor old woman dyin' a thou-
     sand mile away.

Well, Dan O'Connell an' I went out to search at the
     end of the week,
Fer all of us fellers thought a lot, -a lot that we
     darsn't speak.
We'd been up the trail about forty mile, an' was
     talkin' of turnin' back,
But Dan, well, he wouldn't give in, so we kep' right
     on to the railroad track.
As soon as we sighted them telegraph wires says
     Dan, "Say, bless my soul !
Ain't that there Bill's red handkerchief tied half
     way up that pole?"
Yes, sir, there she was, with her ends a-flippin'
     an' flyin' in the wind,
An' underneath was the envelope of Bill's letter
     tightly pinned.

"Why, he must a-boarded the train right here,"
     says Dan, but I kinder knew
That underneath them snowdrifts we would find a
     thing or two;
Fer he'd writ on that there paper, "Ben lost fer
     hours, - all hope is past.
You'll find me, boys, where my handkerchief is
     flyin' at half-mast."



The Silent Singer
Len Roberts

The girls sang better than the boys,
their voices reaching All the way to God,
Sister Ann Zita insisted during those
practice sessions
when I was told to mouth do, re, mi,
but to go no higher,
when I was told to stand in back
and form a perfect 0 with my lips
although no word was ever to come out,
the silent singer in that third-grade class
during the Christmas Pageant and Easter Week,
the birth and death of Christ lip-synched
but unsung
while my relatives, friends and parents
praised my baritone,
how low my voice was,
Balancing those higher, more childlike tones,
my father said,
Adding depth, my mother said,
Thank God they had my huskiness
to bring all that tinniness to earth,
my great-aunt whispered,
so I believed for many years in miracles myself,
the words I'd never sung reaching their ears
in the perfect pitch, the perfect tone,
while the others stuttered in their all-too-human voices
to praise the Lord.



I heard you singing
 Harry Rodney Bennett

I heard you singing when the dawn was grey
And silver dew on ev'ry blossom lay;
Though the rising sun too soon drank up the dew,
I thought I heard you singing all the long day through.
I heard you singing in the silent hour
When evening came with sleep for bird and flow'r;
A song like happy murmuring of woodland streams,
I thought I heard you singing down the vale of dreams.
Beloved, when the last call echoes clear,
And I must part from all that is so dear,
I shall not fear the valley that before me lies,
If I may hear you singing as I close my eyes.



At the Playground, Singing for Psychiatric Outpatients
Peter Everwine

The bright-faced children have gone home,
trailing the sun to supper.
     Tonight,
these others have come,
almost sweetly shy, starched
for their monthly party.
Nurse herds them into metal chairs.

I've come to sing, Nurse tells them,
and they fold their hands
- these lately mad who failed behind a door
or slipped under in a jammed street,
whose eyes blossomed like silver
fists in mirrors, in plate-glass windows.
Nurse is waiting for me.

So I sing for them,
     for the boy
in the front row, groping
the stiff corners of his pockets;
for the ugly one in pink anklets
- her legs have never felt a razor,
though her wrist has; for him
whose fingers are eaten by ants; for her
whose face sags like a torn sack.
They do not like my songs,
but infinitely polite, they turn
their smiles up into the dark
as if a smile should fall softly,
obliquely, like rain.

"Home on the Range," Nurse calls out,
her sure fingers on the pulse of America.
I start in faltering voice,
half-forgetting those dead words
sung at campfires in the past.
One joins, and then another:
Home, home on the range...
Where the deer...
And the skies are...
The voices crack and lurch, we
are singing - the boy, the ugly one -
singing like crows in the empty
prairie of a children's playground
where if there are distances that shine
they shine like the eyes of pain.



The Alto's Lament
Marcy Heisler

It's awful being an alto when you're singing in the choir,
Sopranos get the twiddly bits that people all admire,
The basses boom like big trombones, the tenors shout with glee,
The alto part is on two notes, or if you're lucky, three.

And when we sing an anthem and lift our hearts in praises,
The men get all the juicy bits and telling little phrases.
Of course, the trebles sing the tune - they always come off best -
While altos only get three notes and twenty-two bars rest.

It doesn't matter what we sing, from hymnbooks or from psalter,
The choirmaster looks at us - our voices start to falter;
Too high! Too low! Too fast! Too slow! You hold that note too long!
It doesn't matter what we do, it's certain to be wrong.

Oh! shed a tear for altos: they're the Marthas and they know
In ranks of choral singers they're considered very low.
They are so very humble that a lot of folk forget 'em:
They'd love to be sopranos, but their vocal chords won't let 'em.

And when the final trumpet sounds and we are wafted higher,
Sopranos, tenors, basses, all will form the heavenly choir.
When they sing Alleluias to celestial flats and sharps,
We altos in the corner will be polishing our harps.



Peepshow
Modest Mussorgsky (transl. unknown)


Come, honorable gentlemen, look this way,
walk up, come and see, wonder
These great gentlemen, our lords of music!
They're all here!
Once a river overflowed into three streams:
One stream ran through the forest,
Another got lost in a bed of sand,
And the third passed by the mill,
By the mill-wheel made of elm, right by the mill-stone.
O turn, you wheel, O grind, you stone,
Grind out the whole truth about these fine fellows,
These brave musicians,
The show is beginning!
See, breaking away from the clouds,
A dweller in the eternal realms
Comes to show to mortals
The secret mystery of simple things.
He comes with God's help!
He tells us that the minor key is a sin of our forefathers,
And that the major key is the atonement for our sins.
And so, hovering in the clouds with the birds of the sky,
He pours on mortals words too deep for understanding,
And God helps him!
After him, running and skipping, comes Fif, every young,
Fif the undaunted, Fif the peace-maker, Fif the clever one -
All his life he has been in the midst of things, now he is losing his head:
He does not heed anyone, he cannot hear anything,
He heeds only Patti,
He adores Patti, he sings only of Patti,
O Patti, Patti, o Pa-Pa-Patti,
Wonderful Patti, divine Patti,
O Patti, Patti, o Pa-Pa-Patti,
Wonderful Patti, divine Patti,
But why that blonde wig?
Patti's blonde wig? A wig!
A wig!
Patti, Patti, o Pa-Pa-Patti,
Wonderful Patti, divine Patti,
Patti, Patti, o Pa-Pa-Patti,
Wonderful Patti, divine Patti,
Wonderful, darling, exquisite, divine,
Pa-Pa..., Pa-Pa..., Pa-Pa..., Pa-Pa...,
Ti-ti, ti-ti, ti-ti, ti-ti,
Pa-Pa Patti, Pa-Pa ti-ti!
O-------- O------------
Patti
O-----------O!
Pa-Pa-Pa - Patti,
O divine Patti!
Here comes a youth staggering, step by step,
His wounds gaping:
He is pale, gloomy and weary,
He pleads for the stain to be washed away,
A quite indecent stain.
There was a time when he was blameless
And charmed everyone by obeying his elders,
And with his delightful chatter, so shy and childlike,
Captivated many, many hearts.
But that time has passed.
Suddenly sensing within himself a mihty power
He caught sight of the enemy, engaging him in battle,
And was slain.
The poor fellow suffered a mortal blow,
A blow of mighty force!
Here he is, Titan!
Titan, Titan!
See how he races and tears along in a fury,
How he roars and rages, storms and threatens,
How terrible and fearsome he is!
On his teutonic Bucephalas,
His hard-worked steed of the future,
With armfuls of thunderbolts
Prepared for printing.
Quick, a seat for the genius!
The genius has nowhere to sit.
Call him to dinner!
The genius loves a speech!
Banish all directors!
He'll take everyone's place!
See how he rages!...
On he comes, on he comes,
Straight at them,
At the bold lords,
This Titan, this Titan,
With his titanic arrogance.
O what a scandal, what a scandal,
To mix in such company!
And immediately he blazed with anger,
And fell on them in fury
And mercilessly overrode them.
And he pushed and pulled them around...
pushed and pulled them around...
But the thunder rolled! ... And darkness descended,
And a thick mist began to gather,
And headlong they fell in holy terror,
That cloud-dweller, young Fif
And that proud Titan!
And in a crown of roses and lilies
And snow white camelias
The Muse approached!
And perfumes filled the air,
And the heroes grew calm
And sang the Hymn of prayer:
"O most glorious Euterpe,
O mighty goddess,
Grant us inspiration,
quicken our feeble strength.
And with a golden shower from Olympus
Water our cornfields;
Goddess of the golden tresses,
Heaven-born muse,
We praise you eternally
And raise songs to you on the sounding zithers!"



Sing fair Clorinda
Henry Lawes

Sing fair Clorinda, sing whilst you move
Those that attend the throne above,
To leave their holy business there,
Till each with his obedient ear
Shall so much harmony attain,
To think the spheres were made in vain.

Since here's a voice quickens the sloth
Of nature's age, it comforts growth
In all her works, and can provoke
A lily to outlive an oak.



A Singer
William Allingham

That which he did not feel, he would not sing;
What most he felt, religion it was to hide
In a dumb darkling grotto, where the spring
Of tremulous tears, arising unespied,
Became a holy well that durst not glide
Into the day with moil or murmuring;
Whereto, as if to some unlawful thing,
He stole, musing or praying at its side.

But in the sun he sang with cheerful heart,
Of coloured season and the whirling sphere,
Warm household habitude and human mirth,
The whole faith-blooded mystery of earth;
And I, who had his secret, still could hear
The grotto's whisper low through every part.



The Alto's Rebuttal
Anonymous

The poor lonely altos
So mild and so meek
Forlorn and abandoned
Forbidden to speak.

We've begged and we've pleaded


For lines with some spunk
We know we can do it
We're in such a funk.

We smile at the tenors
The basses we love
The sopranos our sisters
We'd just like to shove.

We want to sing melody
We so want to shine
We're just the support group
And that is just fine.

For when we're in Heaven
And you all sing your parts
The altos will be there
With hands on our hearts.

We'll polish those harps
If that be our task
We'll sing not a note
Unless we are asked.

Please remember this warning
And heed it quite well
Just don't cross an alto
You'll end up in Hell.



A Song from "The Player Queen"
William Butler Yeats

My mother dandled me and sang,
"How young it is, how young!"
And made a golden cradle
That on a willow swung.
"He went away," my mother sang,
"When I was brought to bed,"
And all the while her needle pulled
The gold and silver thread.
She pulled the thread and bit the thread
And made a golden gown,
And wept because she had dreamt that I
Was born to wear a crown.
"When she was got," my mother sang,
"I heard a sea-mew cry,
And saw a flake of the yellow foam
That dropped upon my thigh."
How therefore could she help but braid
The gold into my hair,
And dream that I should carry
The golden top of care?



My Vocation
Béranger (tr. Toru Dutt)

A waif on this earth,
Sick, ugly and small,
Contemned from my birth
And rejected by all,
From my lips broke a cry,
Such as anguish may wring,
Sing, - said God in reply,
Chant poor little thing.

By Wealth's coach besmeared
With dirt in a shower,
Insulted and jeered
By the minions of power,
Where - oh where shall I fly?
Who comfort will bring?
Sing, - said God in reply,
Chant poor little thing.

Life struck me with fright -
Full of chances and pain,
So I hugged with delight
The drudge's hard chain;
One must eat, - yet I die,
Like a bird with clipped wing,
Sing - said God in reply,
Chant poor little thing.

Love cheered for a while
My morn with his ray,
But like a ripple or smile
My youth passed away.
Now near Beauty I sigh,
But fled is the spring!
Sing - said God in reply,
Chant poor little thing.

All men have a task,
And to sing is my lot -
No meed from men I ask
But one kindly thought.
My vocation is high -
'Mid the glasses that ring,
Still - still comes that reply,
Chant poor little thing.




As I was going along
Anonymous

As I was going along, long, long,
A-singing a comical song, song, song,
The lane that I went was so long, long, long,
And the song that I sung was as long, long, long,
And so I went singing along.



The Minstrel
Archibald Lampman

Through the wide-set gates of the city, bright-eyed,
Came the minstrel; many a song behind him,
Many still before him, re-echoing strangely,
           Ringing and kindling.

First he stood, bold-browed, in the hall of warriors,
Stood, and struck, and flung from his strings the roar
And sweep of battle, praising the might of foemen,
           Met in the death-grip:

Bugle-voiced, wild-eyed, till the old men, rising,
Gathered all the youth in a ring, and drinking
Deep, acclaimed him, making the walls and roof-tree
           Jar as with thunder.

Then of horse and hound, and the train of huntsmen
Sprang his song, and into the souls of all men
Passed the cheer and heat of the chase, the fiery
           Rush of the falcon.

Singing next of love, in the silken chambers
Sat the minstrel, eloquent, urged by lovely
Eyes of women, sang till the girls, white-handed,
           Gathered, and round him

Leaned, and listened, eager, and flushed, and
dreaming
Now of things remembered, and now the dearer
Wishes yet unfilled; and they praised and crowned
him,
           They, the beloved ones.

Gentlest songs he made for the mothers, weaving
Over cradles tissues of softest vision,
Tender cheeks, and exquisite hands, and little
           Feet of their dearest.

Into cloisters also he came, and cells, and
Dwellings, sad and heavy with shadow, making
All his lute-strings bear for the hour their bitter
           Burden of sorrow.

Children gathered, many and bright, around him,
Sweet-eyed, eager, beautiful, fairy-footed,
While with jocund hand upon string and mad notes,
           Full of the frolic,

He rejoicing, followed and led their pastime,
Wilder yet and wilder, till weary, over
All their hearts he murmured a spell, and gently
           Sleep overcame them.

So the minstrel sang with a hundred voices
All day long, and now in the dusk of even
Once again the gates of the city opened,
           Wide for his passing

Forth to dreaming meadows, and fields, and wooded
Hillsides, solemn under the dew and the starlight
There the singer far from the pathways straying,
          Silent and lonely,

Plucked and pressed the fruit of his day's devotion,
Making now a song for the spirit only,
Deeper-toned, more pure, than his soul had fashioned
          Every aforetime.

Sorrow touched it, travail of spirit, broken
Hopes, and faiths uprooted, and aspirations
Dimmed and soiled, and out of the depth of being
          Limitless hunger.

First his own strange destiny, darkly guided;
Next, the tragic ways of the world and all men,
Caught and foiled for ever among perplexing,
           Endlessly ravelled,


Nets of truth and falsehood, and good, and evil,
Wild of heart, beholding the hands of Beauty
Decking all, he sang with a voice and fingers
          Trembling and shaken.

Then of earth and time, and the pure and painless
Night, serene with numberless worlds inwoven
Scripts and golden traceries, hourly naming
          God, the Eternal,

Sang the minstrel, full of the light and splendour,
Full of power and infinite gift, once only -
Only once - for just as the solemn glory,
          Flung by the moonshine,

Over folds of hurrying clouds at midnight,
Gleams and passes, so was his song - the noblest -
Once outpoured, and then in the strain and tumult
          Gone and forgotten.



Bind me - I still can sing -
Emily Dickinson

Bind me - I still can sing -
Banish - my mandolin
Strikes true within -

Slay - and my Soul shall rise
Chanting to Paradise -
Still thine.



On Hearing a Recording by the Last Castrato
(Alessandro Moreschi, 1858-1922)
Kenneth Wolman

1

This is how they must have done it: heard his voice
in church on a Sunday, the sweet boy-soprano
rising toward the ceiling as toward Heaven,
and saw in that Heaven the crown of thorns turned to gold,
metal vibrating in the air like a celestial harp,
the promise of glory brought to earth in
the fossilized voice of a little boy:

and went to his parents, poor farmers, whose life
was a misery of late rents and stillbirths,
and showed them God in their son's unchanging voice:
and his father wept, took the gold pressed like nails into his hands,
prayed his son would not know, but knew that he would,
prayed he would forgive them, but knew he was not God:

and knew that the dessicated honey-laden voice
that would rein its fury in Mozart's golden scales
from the stages in Rome or Vienna or Milan
would be his son's revenge, would come to him by night,
to breed in his nightmares, and would spurt forth the seed
of dreams, in molten rage, in the voices of his never-born grandchildren.

2

The voice on the wax cylinders shatters the barrier
of time and of sex: its conjured face is of the ancient infant
in a painting by the Douanier Rousseau:
benign, delicate, the skin pink-wrinkled with age,
suspended in babyfat, forever a child.

What is behind its eyes that stare blankly outward?
What is the man who grew behind the woman's voice
whose soaring scales cut like the knife that maimed him?
What did he hear when he heard his voice played back
through a horn, but eternity granted, eternity lost?

For only the voice grew: not down but outward,
its never-broken scales filling a massive chest,
throbbing inside it like a shivered scream.



Upon Julia's Voice
Robert Herrick

When I thy singing next shall hear,
I'll wish I might turn all to ear,
To drink-in notes and numbers, such
As blessed souls can't hear too much
Then melted down, there let me lie
Entranced, and lost confusedly;
And by thy music strucken mute,
Die, and be turn'd into a Lute.



Knocking at the Door
John Freeman

Great winds may blow now
But I will go now
Down to her cottage on the shore,
And drawing near her
I shall hear her
Singing as I knock at the door.

Blow high or low then
The winds, I shall know then
She's happy when I hear her sing.
Then at my knocking
The quick rain mocking
She'll pause, and to her wild heart cling.

And I shall stand there
In the blown sand there,
Listening as she listens too,
And the dark fir-trees
And autumn bare trees
Hush, then shake their bones anew.

I knock again and
Again like rain and
Softly as rain, till she laughs to hear.
"I thought it was rain-drops
That when the rain stops
Patter the pane with tapping clear."

- In, in, in now!
There's fire within now,
And a voice whose song is heard in speech....
But if that knocking
Were the rain's mocking
And she opened but to an empty beach;

Or if that singing
Were but the wind's ringing
Faint senseless bells hung in my brain;
How would the night then
Lack all light then,
And she and I listen in vain!



Across the Yard: La Ignota
Robert Lowell

The soprano's bosom breathes the joy of God,
Brunnhilde who could not rule her voice for God -
her stately yellow ivory window frames
haven't seen paint or putty these twenty years;
grass, dead since Kennedy, chokes the window box.
She has to sing to keep her curtains flying;
one is pink dust flipped back to scarlet lining,
the other besmirched gauze; and behind them
a blown electric heater, her footlocker with Munich
stickers stood upright for a music stand.
Her doorbell is dead. No one has to hire her.
She flings her high aria to the trash like roses....
When I was lost and green, I would have given
the janitor three months' rent for this address.



Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in New York
Robert Lowell

The great still fever for Paris, Vienna, Milan;
which had more genius, grace, preoccupations?
Loss of grace is bagatelle to pay
for a niche in the Pantheon or New York -
and as for Europe, they could bring it with them.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sings, herself her part,
Was ist Silvia, Die alte Marschallin,
until the historic rivers of both worlds,
the Hudson and the Danube burst their bar,
trembling like the water-ivy down my spine,
from satyr's tussock to the hardened hoof....
La Diva, crisped, remodelled for the boards,
roughs it with chaff and cardigan at recordings
like anyone's single and useful weekend guest.



The Whiffenpoof Song
Meade Minnegerode

From the tables down at Mory's,
To the place where Louie dwells,
And the dear, old Temple Bar we love so well,
Sing the Whiffenpoofs assembled,
With their glasses raised on high!
And the magic of their singing, casts a spell.

Yes the magic of their singing,
Of the songs we love so well:
"Shall I Wasting" and "Mavourneen" and the rest!
We will serenade our Louie,
Till health and voices fail,
And we'll pass and be forgotten with the rest.
We are poor little lambs
Who have lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We are little, black sheep
Who have gone astray!
Baa! Baa! Baa!
Gentlemen, songsters, off on a spree,
Doomed from here to eternity.
Lord! Have mercy on such as we,
Baa! Baa! Baa!



On Hearing Miss P------ Sing "He Doeth All Things Well"
Peter John Allan

How sweet the sound of words divine
From lips of innocence like thine!
Fancy, whene'er that strain you sing,
Delights to spread her buoyant wing,
And, borne upon the solemn air,
To join with angels in their prayer.
Earth seems her youth to have renewed,
Where erst in Eden's solitude
The happy pair together trod -
The children and the friends of God;
For spirits there from heaven descended,
And worship with their worship blended,
Singing their solemn songs divine
As sweetly as thou singest thine.
So lovely, innocent, and young,
Still truth direct your heart and tongue;
For oh! your sex, the first to sin,
Have ever since repentant been -
Have ever since show'd higher powers
Of head, and heart, and soul, than ours,
And taught us there's a heaven above,
By making earth a heaven with love.



The Singers
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

God sent his Singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again.

The first, a youth, with soul of fire,
Held in his hand a golden lyre;
Through groves he wandered, and by streams,
Playing the music of our dreams.

The second with a bearded face,
Stood singing in the market-place,
And stirred with accents deep and loud
The hearts of all the listening crowd.

A grey old man, the third and last,
Sang in cathedrals dim and vast,
While the majestic organ rolled
Contrition from its mouths of gold.

And those who heard the Singers three,
Disputed who the best might be;
For still their music seemed to start
Discordant echoes in each heart.

But the great Master said, "I see
No best in kind, but in degree;
I gave a various gift to each,
To charm, to strengthen, and to teach.

"These are the three great chords of might,
And he whose ear is tuned aright
Will hear no discord in the three,
But the most perfect harmony."



The Village Blacksmith [excerpt]
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He goes on Sunday to the church,
     And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
     He hears his daughter's voice,
Singing in the village choir,
     And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
     Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
     How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
     A tear out of his eyes.



Walter von der Vogelweid
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Vogelweid the Minnesinger,
When he left this world of ours,
Laid his body in the cloister,
Under Wurtzburg's minster towers.

And he gave the monks his treasures,
Gave them all with this behest:
They should feed the birds at noontide
Daily on his place of rest;

Saying, "From these wandering minstrels
I have learned the art of song;
Let me now repay the lessons
They have taught so well and long."

Thus the bard of love departed;
And, fulfilling his desire,
On his tomb the birds were feasted
By the children of the choir.

Day by day, o'er tower and turret,
In foul weather and in fair,
Day by day, in vaster numbers,
Flocked the poets of the air.

On the tree whose heavy branches
Overshadowed all the place,
On the pavement, on the tombstone,
On the poet's sculptured face,

On the cross-bars of each window,
On the lintel of each door,
They renewed the War of Wartburg,
Which the bard had fought before.

There they sang their merry carols,
Sang their lauds on every side;
And the name their voices uttered
Was the name of Vogelweid.

Till at length the portly abbot
Murmured, "Why this waste of food?
Be it changed to loaves henceforward
For our tasting brotherhood."

Then in vain o'er tower and turret,
From the walls and woodland nests,
When the minster bells rang noontide,
Gathered the unwelcome guests.

Then in vain, with cries discordant,
Clamorous round the Gothic spire,
Screamed the feathered Minnesingers
For the children of the choir.

Time has long effaced the inscriptions
On the cloister's funeral stones,
And tradition only tells us
Where repose the poet's bones.

But around the vast cathedral,
By sweet echoes multiplied,
Still the birds repeat the legend,
And the name of Vogelweid.



A Song [excerpt]
Carolyn Sloan

I sang a song yesterday,
I thought I sang it well
The notes were all in tune.
The phrases smooth and uninterrupted by unconscious
breaths.
I varied the rhythms and spoke the words clearly.
I anticipated each key change.
My voice was warm and moved effortlessly through each
rise and fall of the melody.
When I finished, I was sure Iād told the story well
and communicated my interpretation.
But I did not experience a feeling.
My heart remained unchanged.
I was unmoved.
My soul still yearned for expression.
Despire my efforts,
I realized I had not sung at all.
The music, it seemed, slept quietly beside me,
Patiently waiting to be awakened.
I decided to start again.
This time I did not listen.
I did not watch.
I did not think.
This time I willingly vanished.
This time I became...
a song.



Two Sunsets [excerpt]
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One day he heard a singing strain -
     A human voice, in bird-like trills.
     He paused, and little rapture-rills
Went trickling downward through each vein.

And in his heart the whole day long,
     As in a temple veiled and dim,
     He kept and bore about with him
The beauty of that singer's song....

Then suddenly a fresh young voice
     Rose, bird-like, from some hidden place,
     He did not even turn his face;
It struck him simply as a noise.



Whilst Cynthia sung
Anonymous

Whilst Cynthia sung, all angry winds lay still,
And Zephyrs with a gentle gale
Did softly swell the trembling sail,
Cynthia! whose voice as well as eyes can kill.
Charm'd with the magic of her tongue,
The wanton waters danc'd along,
Each little billow strove to stay,
Though nature forced it away;
And all together blame the tide.

From rosy mouth she breath'd the perfum'd sound;
The mournful Attic Philomel
Ne'er did warble half so well,
Whilst mocking echoes babble it around.
Ne'er in so sweet a tune as this,
Upon the banks of Thamesis,
Did silver swans, about to die,
Dear Cynthia, they're excelled by you,
In sweetness, and in fairness too.



Urge me no more
Anonymous

Urge me no more, this airy mirth belongs
To better times, these times are not for songs.
The sprightly twang of the melodious lute
Agrees not with my voice, and both unsuit
My untun'd fortunes. Th'affected measure
Of strains that are constrained afford no pleasure.
Music's the child of mirth, where griefs assail
The troubled soul, both voice and fingers fail;
My grief's too great for smiling eyes
To cure or counter charms to exorcise.

The raven's dismal croaks, the midnight howls
Of empty wolves mix'd with the screech of owls,
The nine sad knolls of a dull passing bell,
With the loud language of a nightly knell,
And horrid outcries of revenged crimes,
Join'd in a medley, is music for these times.
These are no times to touch the merry strings
Of Orpheus, no, Ah! no, these are no times to sing.
How can my music relish in your ears,
That cannot speak for sobs nor sing for tears?



Amphion [excerpt]
Sara Teasdale

'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue,
Such happy intonation,
Wherever he sat down and sung
He left a small plantation....



On the Death of Swinburne
Sara Teasdale

He trod the earth but yesterday,
And now he treads the stars.
He left us in the April time
He praised so often in his rhyme,
He left the singing and the lyre and went his way.

He drew new music from our tongue,
A music subtly wrought,
And moulded words to his desire,
As wind doth mould a wave of fire;
From strangely fashioned harps slow golden tones he wrung.

I think the singing understands
That he who sang is still,
And Iseult cries that he is dead, --
Does not Dolores bow her head
And Fragoletta weep and wring her little hands?

New singing now the singer hears
To lyre and lute and harp;
Catullus waits to welcome him,
And thro' the twilight sweet and dim,
Sappho's forgotten songs are falling on his ears.



Refuge
Sara Teasdale

From my spirit's gray defeat,
From my pulse's flagging beat,
From my hopes that turned to sand
Sifting through my close-clenched hand,
From my own fault's slavery,
If I can sing, I still am free.

For with my singing I can make
A refuge for my spirit's sake,
A house of shining words, to be
My fragile immortality.



Evensong [excerpt]
Conrad Aiken

IV
A neighbor started singing, singing a child to sleep.
It was strange: a song thus heard, -
In the misty evening, after an afternoon of rain, -
Seemed more beautiful than happiness, more beautiful than pain,
Seemed to escape the music and the word,
Only, somehow, to keep
A warmth that was lovelier than the song of any bird.
Was it because it came up through this tree,
Through the lucent leaves that twinkled on this tree,
With the bright lamp there beneath them in the street?
It was exquisitely sweet:
So unaffected, so unconscious that it was heard.
Or was it because she looked across the city,
Across the hills of tenements, so black,
And thought of all the mothers with a young and infinite pity?...
The child had fallen asleep, the hush swept back,
The leaves hung lifeless on the tree.



The Serenade
José Asunción Silva (transl. Alice Stone Blackwell)

The street is deserted, the night is cold,
The moon glides veiled amid cloud-banks dun;
The lattice above is tightly closed,
And the notes ring clearly one by one
Under his fingers light and strong,
While the voice that sings tells tender things,
As the player strikes on his sweet guitar
The fragile strings.

The street is deserted, the night is cold,
A cloud has covered the moon from sight.
The lattice above is tightly closed,
And the notes are growing more soft and light.
Perhaps the sound of the serenade
Seeks the soul of the girl who loves and waits,
As the swallows seek eaves to build their nests
When they come in spring with their gentle mates.

The street is deserted, the night is cold,
The moon shines out from the clouds aloft;
The lattice above is opened now
And the notes are growing more low, more soft.
The singer with fingers light and strong
Clings to the ancient window's bar,
And a moan is breathed from the fragile strings
Of a sweet guitar.



Consumption
Julie Carter

My ears ring obbligato to her plaint,
or if it's just the rattled panes,
abused speakers' whines,
the neighbors will be calling.

But Violetta's more alive than usual,
has that fierceness in her soprano
belying any hints of lacking air.
I do not think she will die
betrayed by singing such,
or that she is a slut, not make-believe.

I've glimpsed the librettist's subtle lie.
There was no love when Alfredo powdered,
screaming whore whore,
but he knew that going in.
Scared off more by contagion,
hints of incessant coughing
keeping him up nights.
But he's related to a baritone.
Let papa guard your back, boy.
Let papa ease her off.

***

So I've been wondering, mother,
when you'll be turning Alfredo
(and no it isn't sauce, so don't you start
screaming about the cheeses you can't buy
less concerned with his death than your diet).
When you'll be scared off more by
hints of incessant dying
keeping you up nights.

But I forget, you have no papa
to guard your back,
to ease him off.

Don't ask me will he make it
through the day, the week,
arise to shout his life like
Violetta must before she can go home.
But my father never could sing, his voice
worse even than mine.

***

Violetta's more alive than usual
though her Amami, Alfredo! still hints
suspiciously of pasta,
and how she can think of eating
at a time like this,
should be like Karen Carpenter
let rainy days and sundaes get her down.

She's still singing, that soprano wraith.
And if I hit replay, rewind, I find
I can always bring her back.



The Skulls
Ivan Turgenev

Sumptuous, brilliantly lighted hall; a number of ladies and gentlemen.

All the faces are animated, the talk is lively.... A noisy conversation is being carried on about a famous singer. They call her divine, immortal.... O, how finely yesterday she rendered her last trill!

And suddenly - as by the wave of an enchanter's wand - from every head and from every face, slipped off the delicate covering of skin, and instantaneously exposed the deadly whiteness of skulls, with here and there the leaden shimmer of bare jaws and gums.

With horror I beheld the movements of those jaws and gums; the turning, the glistening in the light of the lamps and candles, of those lumpy bony balls, and the rolling in them of other smaller balls, the balls of the meaningless eyes.

I dared not touch my own face, dared not glance at myself in the glass.

And the skulls turned from side to side as before.... And with their former noise, peeping like little red rags out of the grinning teeth, rapid tongues lisped how marvelously, how inimitably the immortal...yes, immortal...singer had rendered that last trill!



Song
Eamon Grennan

At her Junior High School graduation,
she sings alone
in front of the lot of us -

her voice soprano, surprising,
almost a woman's. It is
the Our Father in French,

the new language
making her strange, out there,
fully fledged and

ready for anything. Sitting
together - her separated
mother and father - we can

hear the racket of traffic
shaking the main streets
of Jersey City as she sings

Deliver us from evil,
and I wonder can she see me
in the dark here, years

from belief, on the edge
of tears. It doesn't matter. She
doesn't miss a beat, keeps

in time, in tune, while into
our common silence I whisper,
Sing, love, sing your heart out!



The Compleat Virtuoso
Edward Lear

There was an old man of the Isles,
Whose face was pervaded with smiles;
He sang "High dum diddle",
And played on the fiddle,
That amiable man of the Isles.



Ballata. Of True and False Singing
Anonymous (transl. Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

A little wild bird sometimes at my ear
Sings his own little verses very clear:
Others sing louder that I do not hear.

For singing loudly is not singing well;
But ever by the song that's soft and low
The master-singer's voice is plain to tell.
Few have it, and yet all are masters now,
And each of them can trill out what he calls
His ballads, canzonets, and madrigals.

The world with masters is so cover'd o'er,
There is no room for pupils any more.



Orpheus with his Lute
William Shakespeare or John Fletcher, from Henry VIII

Orpheus with his Lute made Trees,
And the Mountaine tops that freeze,
Bow themselues when he did sing.
To his Musicke, Plants and Flowers
Euer sprung; as Sunne and Showers,
There had made a lasting Spring.
Euery thing that heard him play,
Euen the Billowes of the Sea,
Hung their heads, & then lay by.
In sweet Musicke is such Art,
Killing care, & griefe of heart,
Fall asleepe, or hearing dye.



A Fiddler and a Castrato
Alexander Pushkin (Tr.: A. Baylin)

A poor fiddler called upon
A rich castrato in his salon.
The singer dickless said: "Behold
My precious gems, my priceless gold.
When I grow bored, I count my treasure.
And you, my friend, for your own pleasure
What do you do? What thing enthralls,
Diverts and keeps you occupied?"
The poor man to him replied:
"Me? I just sit and scratch my balls."



Hark! from the pit a fearsome sound
Anonymous

Hark! from the pit a fearsome sound
That makes the blood run cold;
Symphonic cyclones rush around -
And the worst is yet untold.

No - they unchain those dogs of war,
The wild sarrusophones,
A double-bass E-flat to roar
Whilst crunching dead men's bones.

The muted tuba's dismal groan
Uprising from the gloom,
And answered by the heckelphone,
Suggest the crack of doom.

Oh mama! Is this the earthquake zone?
What ho, there, stand from under!
Or is it the tonitruone
Just imitating thunder?

Nay, fear not, little one, because
Of this sublime rough-house;
'Tis modern opera by the laws
Of Master Richard Strauss.

Singers? They're scarcely heard nor seen -
In yon back seat they sit;
The day of Song is past, I ween:
The orchestra is "it".



The Slave Singing at Midnight
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Loud he sang the psalm of David!
He, a Negro and enslaved,
Sang of Israel's victory,
Sang of Zion, bright and free.

In that hour, when night is calmest,
Sang he from the Hebrew Psalmist,
In a voice so sweet and clear
That I could not choose but hear,

Songs of triumph, and ascriptions,
Such as reached the swart Egyptians,
When upon the Red Sea coast
Perished Pharaoh and his host.

And the voice of his devotion
Filled my soul with strange emotion;
For its tones by turns were glad,
Sweetly solemn, wildly sad.

Paul and Silas, in their prison,
Sang of Christ, the Lord arisen,
And an earthquake's arm of might
Broke their dungeon-gates at night.

But, alas! what holy angel
Brings the Slave this glad evangel?
And what earthquake's arm of might
Breaks his dungeon-gates at night?



The Singing Girl
Joyce Kilmer

(For the Rev. Edward F. Garesche, S.J.)

There was a little maiden
In blue and silver drest,
She sang to God in Heaven
And God within her breast.

It flooded me with pleasure,
It pierced me like a sword,
When this young maiden sang: "My soul
Doth magnify the Lord."

The stars sing all together
And hear the angels sing,
But they said they had never heard
So beautiful a thing.

Saint Mary and Saint Joseph,
And Saint Elizabeth,
Pray for us poets now
And at the hour of death.



When the shy star goes forth in heaven
James Joyce, No. IV from Chamber Music

When the shy star goes forth in heaven
All maidenly, disconsolate,
Hear you amid the drowsy even
One who is singing by your gate.
His song is softer than the dew
And he is come to visit you.

O bend no more in revery
When he at eventide is calling,
Nor muse: Who may this singer be
Whose song about my heart is falling
Know you by this, the lover's chant,
'Tis I that am your visitant.



Wandering Singers
Sarojini Naidu

Where the voice of the wind calls our wandering feet,
Through echoing forest and echoing street,
With lutes in our hands ever-singing we roam,
All men are our kindred, the world is our home.
Our lays are of cities whose lustre is shed,
The laughter and beauty of women long dead;
The sword of old battles, the crown of old kings,
And happy and simple and sorrowful things.
What hope shall we gather, what dreams shall we sow?
Where the wind calls our wandering footsteps we go.
No love bids us tarry, no joy bids us wait:
The voice of the wind is the voice of our fate.



At a Solemn Musick
John Milton

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'n's joy,
Sphear-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Vers,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
Dead things with inbreath'd sense able to pierce,
And to our high-rais'd phantasie present
That undisturbèd Song of pure content,
Ay sung before that saphire-colour'd throne
To Him that sits thereon
With Saintly shout, and solemn Jubily,
Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow,
And the Cherubick host in thousand quires
Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires,
With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms,
Hymns devout and holy Psalms
Singing everlastingly;
That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportion'd sin
Jarr'd against Nature's chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd
In perfect Diapason, and their state of good.
O may we soon again renew that Song,
And keep in tune with Heav'n, till God ere long
To His celestial consort us unite,
To live with Him, and sing in endles morn of light.



Beer [excerpt]
Charles Stuart Calverley

Coffee is good, and so no doubt is cocoa;
Tea did for Johnson and the Chinamen:
When "Dulce est desipere in loco"
Was written, real Falernian winged the pen.
When a rapt audience has encored "Fra Poco"
Or "Casta Diva," I have heard that then
The Prima Donna, smiling herself out,
Recruits her flagging powers with bottled stout.



An Ariette for Music. To a Lady singing to her Accompaniment on the Guitar
Percy Bysshe Shelley

As the moon's soft splendor
O'er the faint, cold starlight of heaven
Is thrown,
So thy voice most tender
To the strings without soul has given
Its own.

The stars will awaken,
Though the moon sleep a full hour later
Tonight:
No leaf will be shaken
Whilst the dews of thy melody scatter
Delight.

Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again,
With thy sweet voice revealing
A tone of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.



Faust
W.H. Auden

If only the phantom would stop reappearing!
Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.
The heroine no longer appeared in Faust.
The crowds strolled sadly away. The phantom
Watched them from the roof, not guessing the hungers
That must be stirred before disappointment can begin.

One day as morning was about to begin
A man in brown with a white shirt reappearing
At the bottom of his yellow vest, was talking hungers
With the silver-haired director of the opera.
On the green-carpeted floor no phantom
Appeared, except yellow squares of sunlight, like those in Faust.

That night as the musicians for Faust
Were about to go on strike, lest darkness begin
In the corridors, and through them the phantom
Glide unobstructed, the vision reappearing
Of blonde Marguerite practicing a new opera
At her window awoke terrible new hungers

In the already starving tenor. But hungers
Are just another topic, like the new Faust
Drifting through the tunnels of the opera
(In search of lost age? For they begin
To notice a twinkle in his eye. It is cold daylight reappearing
At the window behind him, itself a phantom

Window, painted by the phantom
Scene painters, sick of not getting paid, of hungers
For a scene below of tiny, reappearing
Dancers, with a sandbag falling like a note in Faust
Through purple air. And the spectators begin
To understand the bleeding tenor star of the opera.)

That night the opera
Was crowded to the rafters. The phantom
Took twenty-nine curtain calls. "Begin!
Begin!" In the wings the tenor hungers
For the heroine's convulsive kiss, and Faust
Moves forward, no longer young, reappearing

And reappearing for the last time. The opera
Faust would no longer need its phantom.
In the bare, sunlit stage the hungers could begin.



To Robert Browning [excerpt]
Walter Savage Landor

There is delight in singing, tho' none hear
Beside the singer.



Schmalztenor
M.W. Branch

O hark! 'tis the note of the Schmalztenor!
It swells in his bosom and hangs in the air.
Like lavender-scent in a spinster's drawer
It oozes and percolates everywhere.
So tenderly glutinous,
Soothing the brute in us,
Wholly unmutinous
Schmalztenor.

Enchanting, his smile for the third encore
(Cherubic complexion and glossy curls),
His nasal nostalgia, so sweetly sore,
Vibrates on the sternums of swooning girls.
Emerging and merging,
Suggestively urging,
Receding and surging -
The Schmalztenor.

The Absolute Last of the Schmalztenor
Is heard in Vienna in lilac-time.
He's steaming and quivering more and more
And dowagers whisper, "He's past his prime!"
Young maidens have drowned for him:
Pass the hat round for him:
Open the ground for him -
Schmalztenor.



There was a man with tongue of wood
Stephen Crane

There was a man with tongue of wood
Who essayed to sing,
And in truth it was lamentable.
But there was one who heard
The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood
And knew what the man
Wished to sing,
And with that the singer was content.



Opera
Kenneth A. Friou, Sr.

Six Crystal chandeliers dim and rise to the ceiling
Telling us that the curtain is about to open on another
Evening at the Met where a thousand waiting souls having
Paid a king's ransom in costs and ticket fees wait with
Childlike expectation the willful suspension of disbelief.
Marie Thérèse, The Marschallin, Princess of Austria as moth
To candle flies extinguishing life with the bright flame of
Youthful Rofrano and at once we will hear the virtuous
Musicality of Zeit und Ewigkeit (The snows of yesteryear).
Baron Ochs will soon appear all elegance and comic lechery,
Symbol of an empire fading in waltz: (Ohne mir...mit mir die
Nacht istu zu lange.) Then three sopranos fight the flights
Of upper energy reaching heights of ecstasy unknown to
Generations of Italian tenors and finally, the silver rose
Takes on new life again as youthful Eros burns and flames
Into the passing years.



So you want to write a fugue?
Glenn Gould

So you want to write a fugue?
You've got the urge to write a fugue,
You've got the nerve to write a fugue.
So go ahead and write fugue.
You've got the nerve to write a fugue.
So come along and write a fugue.
Go ahead, write a fugue.
Oh, come along and write a fugue that we can sing.
Go ahead; write a fugue that we can sing.
Write a good fugue, one that we can sing.
And write a good fugue, one that we can sing.
Come along; write a fugue that we can sing.
Write a good fugue, one that we can sing.
Come, write a fugue, come write a fugue for singing.
Come, write a fugue, come along and write a fugue for singing.
Come, write a good fugue.

Give no mind to what we've told you.
Give no heed to what we've told you.
Pay no mind to what we've told you.
Just forget all that we've told you and the theory that you've read.
Pay no mind; give no heed to what we've told you.
Oh, give no mind to what we've said.
For the only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one.
So just forget the rules and write one.
Have a try, have a try, have a try.
Plunge right in, have a try. Try to write one.
Yes, try to write fugue.
Have a try, plunge right in and write one.
Yes, write a fugue that we can sing.
Yes, just forget all that we've told you.
For the only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one.
Yes, plunge right in, have a try.
Oh yes!
Why don't you?
Why don't you write a fugue?
For the only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one.
Just ignore the rules and try.

And the fun of it will get you,
And the joy of it will fetch you,
It's a pleasure that is bound to satisfy, so why don't you try?.
For the only way to write one is to plunge right in.
And the fun of it will get you,
And the joy of it will fetch you.
You'll decide that John Sebastian must have been a very personable guy.

But never be clever for the sake of being clever,
For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion.
And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation,
While a stretto diminution is an obvious solution,
While a stretto, stretto, stretto diminution is a very, very obvious
solution.
So never be clever for the sake of being clever, for the sake of showing
off.
Never be clever for the sake of showing off!

So you want to write a fugue?
But never be clever for the sake of showing off.
You've got the urge to write a fugue. You've got the nerve to write a
fugue.
So go ahead and try to write one, try to write one.
No, never be clever for the sake of being clever.
But do try to write a fugue that we can sing.
Write us a good fugue, one that we can sing.
Oh, come and try.
Oh, why don't you try?
Oh, won't you try and write one we can sing.
So write a fugue that we can sing.
Now, why don't you try to write one?
Yes, come, let's try.
Write us a fugue that we can sing. Now come along.

It's rather awesome, isn't it?
And when you've finished writing it I think you'll find a great joy in it.
(Hope so.)
Well, nothing ventured nothing gained, they say.
But still it is rather hard to start.
Well?
Let us try.
Right now?
Yes. Why not?
Now we're going to write a fugue.
We're going to write a good one.
We're going to write a fugue
right now.



My throat is sore
Anonymous

My throat is sore my voice is hoarse with skriking,
My rests are sighs, deep from the heart-root fetched.
My song runs all on sharps, and with oft striking
Time on my breats, I I shrink with hands out-stretched.
Thus still and still I sing, and ne'er am linning,
For still the close points to my first beginning.



An Opera House
Amy Lowell, from Men, Women and Ghosts

III
Within the gold square of the proscenium arch,
A curtain of orange velvet hangs in stiff folds,
Its tassels jarring slightly when someone crosses the stage behind.
Gold carving edges the balconies,
Rims the boxes,
Runs up and down fluted pillars.
Little knife-stabs of gold
Shine out whenever a box door is opened.
Gold clusters
Flash in soft explosions
On the blue darkness,
Suck back to a point,
And disappear.
Hoops of gold
Circle necks, wrists, fingers,
Pierce ears,
Poise on heads
And fly up above them in coloured sparkles.
Gold!
Gold!
The opera house is a treasure-box of gold.
Gold in a broad smear across the orchestra pit:
Gold of horns, trumpets, tubas;
Gold - spun-gold, twittering-gold, snapping-gold
Of harps.
The conductor raises his baton,
The brass blares out
Crass, crude,
Parvenu, fat, powerful,
Golden.
Rich as the fat, clapping hands in the boxes.
Cymbals, gigantic, coin-shaped,
Crash.
The orange curtain parts
And the prima-donna steps forward.
One note,
A drop: transparent, iridescent,
A gold bubble,
It floats...floats...
And bursts against the lips of a bank president
In the grand tier.



The Banjo Player
Fenton Johnson

There is music in me, the music of a peasant people.
I wander through the levee, picking my banjo and singing my songs of the cabin and the field. At the Last Chance Saloon I am as welcome as the violets in March; there is always food and drink for me there, and the dimes of those who love honest music. Behind the railroad tracks the little children clap their hands and love me as they love Kris Kringle.
But I fear that I am a failure. Last night a woman called me a troubadour. What is a troubadour?



A tenor, all singers above
W.S. Gilbert, from Utopia, Limited

A tenor, all singers above
(This doesn't admit of a question),
Should keep himself quiet,
Attend to his diet
And carefully nurse his digestion;
But when he is madly in love
It's certain to tell on his singing -
You can't do the proper chromatics
With proper emphatics
When anguish your bosom is wringing!
When distracted with worries in plenty,
And his pulse is a hundred and twenty,
And his fluttering bosom the slave of mistrust is,
A tenor can't do himself justice,
Now observe - (sings a high note)
You see, I can't do myself justice!
I could sing if my fervour were mock,
It's easy enough if you're acting -
But when one's emotion
Is born of devotion
You mustn't be over-exacting.
One ought to be firm as a rock
To venture a shake in vibrato,
When fervour's expected
Keep cool and collected
Or never attempt agitato.
But, of course, when his tongue is of leather,
And his lips appear pasted together,
And his sensitive palate as dry as a crust is,
A tenor can't do himself justice.
Now observe - (sings a high note)
It's no use - I can't do myself justice!



Kubla Khan [excerpt]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.



Messiah (Christmas Portions)
Mark Doty

A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
(colors of tarnish on copper)

against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
the Choral Society

prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
Not steep, really,

but from here,
the first pew, they're a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
that neighbor who

fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
from the post office

- tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
from the T-shirt shop:

today they're all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
of distance and formality.

Silence in the hall,
anticipatory, as if we're all
about to open a gift we're not sure
we'll like;

how could they
compete with sunset's burnished
oratorio? Thoughts which vanish,
when the violins begin.

Who'd have thought
they'd be so good? Every valley,
proclaims the solo tenor,
(a sleek blonde

I've seen somewhere before
- the liquor store?) shall be exalted,
and in his handsome mouth the word
is lifted and opened

into more syllables
than we could count, central ah
dilated in a baroque melisma,
liquefied; the pour

of voice seems
to make the unplaned landscape
the text predicts the Lord
will heighten and tame.

This music
demonstrates what it claims:
glory shall be revealed. If art's
acceptable evidence,

mustn't what lies
behind the world be at least
as beautiful as the human voice?
The tenors lack confidence,

and the soloists,
half of them anyway, don't
have the strength to found
the mighty kingdoms

these passages propose
- but the chorus, all together,
equals my burning clouds,
and seems itself to burn,

commingled powers
deeded to a larger, centering claim.
These aren't anyone we know;
choiring dissolves

familiarity in an up-
pouring rush which will not
rest, will not, for a moment,
be still.

Aren't we enlarged
by the scale of what we're able
to desire? Everything,
the choir insists,

might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
quickened, now,

by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
Still time to change.



The Song That Goes Like This [excerpt]
John Du Prez and Eric Idle, from Spamalot

Once in every show
There comes a song like this
It starts off soft and low
And ends up with a kiss
Oh where is the song
That goes like this?
Where is it? Where? Where?

A sentimental song
That casts a magic spell
They all will hum along
We'll overact like hell
For this is the song that goes like this
Yes it is! Yes it is!

Now we can go straight
Right down the middle eight
A bridge that is too far for me

I'll sing it in your face
While we both embrace
And then
We change
The key

Now we're into E!
*hem* That's awfully high for me
But as everyone can see
We should have stayed in D
For this is our song that goes like this!

I'm feeling very proud
You're singing far too loud
That's the way that this song goes
You're standing on my toes
Singing our song that goes like this!

I can't believe there's more
It's far too long, I'm sure
That's the trouble with this song
It goes on and on and on
For this is our song that is too long!

We'll be singing this 'til dawn
You'll wish that you weren't born
Let's stop this damn refrain
Before we go insane
For this is our song that ends like this!



Quite Early One Morning [excerpt]
Dylan Thomas

Clara Tawe Jenkins, 'Madam' they call me,
An old contralto with her dressing-gown on,
And I sit at the window and I sing to the sea,
For the sea does not notice that my voice has gone.



A Child's Christmas in Wales [excerpt]
Dylan Thomas

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.
"What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"
"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen...And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.
"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.
"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.



The Ballad-Singer
Thomas Hardy

Sing, Ballad-singer, raise a hearty tune;
Make me forget that there was ever a one
I walked with in the meek light of the moon
When the day's work was done.

Rhyme, Ballad-rhymer, start a country song;
Make me forget that she whom I loved well
Swore she would love me dearly, love me long,
Then - what I cannot tell!

Sing, Ballad-singer, from your little book;
Make me forget those heart-breaks, achings, fears;
Make me forget her name, her sweet sweet look -
Make me forget her tears.



The Singing
C.K. Williams

I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon under the blossoms
Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here every spring with their burgeoning forth

When a young man turned in from a corner singing - no it was more of a cadence shouting
Most of which I couldn't catch I thought because the young man was black speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell me was making his song up which pleased me he was nice-looking
Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed me there almost beside him and "Big"
He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll to have my height incorporated in his song

So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing he looked in fact pointedly away
And his song changed "I'm not a nice person" he chanted "I'm not I'm not a nice person"

No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat but he did want to be certain I knew
That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord between us I should forget it

That's all nothing else happened his song became indecipherable to me again he arrived
Where he was going a house where a girl in braids waited for him on the porch that was all

No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions were left where they were
It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice person either " but I couldn"t come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he had believed it both of us knew just where we were
In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to which we were condemned

Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something is watching and listening
Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there



The Singer and the Song
Jim Brochu, from the musical The Last Session

The singer and the song
That's what we become
When you play and let us sing along
They're the songs that give us life
Don't we have a right to ask for one more song

The singer stood in front of the choir he built
and he said, "I'm leavin'.
I love you all but they tell me I am dying
And I'm so tired of crying
And I'm so tired of fighting
I will give up now!
I'll go and die now!

Well, I think the singer made a mistake today
If he thinks the choir will let him fade away

The singer and the song
That's what we become
When you play and when we sing along
You're the one that makes us strong
Don't we have the right
To ask for one more song



During Wind and Rain [excerpt]
Thomas Hardy

They sing their dearest songs -
He, she, all of them - yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!



The Choirmaster's Burial
Thomas Hardy

He often would ask us
That, when he died,
After playing so many
To their last rest,
If out of us any
Should here abide,
And it would not task us,
We would with our lutes
Play over him
By his grave-brim
The psalm he liked best -
The one whose sense suits
"Mount Ephraim" -
And perhaps we should seem
To him, in Death's dream,
Like the seraphim.

As soon as I knew
That his spirit was gone
I thought this his due,
And spoke thereupon.
"I think", said the vicar,
"A read service quicker
Than viols out-of-doors
In these frosts and hoars.
That old-fashioned way
Requires a fine day,
And it seems to me
It had better not be."
Hence, that afternoon,
Though never knew he
That his wish could not be,
To get through it faster
They buried the master
Without any tune.

But 'twas said that, when
At the dead of next night
The vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstoned grass,
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster's grave.

Such the tenor man told
When he had grown old.



Ploughman singing
John Clare

Here morning in the ploughman's songs is met
Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky,
And twilight in the east, a doubt as yet,
Shows not her sleeve of grey to know her by.
Woke early, I arose and thought that first
In winter-time of all the world was I.
The old owls might have hallooed if they durst,
But joy just then was up and whistled by
A merry tune which I had known full long,
But could not to my memory wake it back,
Until the ploughman changed it to the song.
O happiness, how simple is thy track!
- Tinged like the willow shoots, the east's young brow
Glows red and finds thee singing at the plough.



We sing to Him
Nathaniel Ingelo

We sing to Him, whose wisdom form'd the ear,
our songs, let Him who gave us voices, hear;
we joy in God, who is the Spring of mirth,
who loves the harmony of Heav'n and Earth;
our humble sonnets shall that praise rehearse,
who is the music of the Universe.
And whilst we sing, we consecrate our art,
and offer up with ev'ry tongue a heart.



Caruso
Joan Baez

Infinity gives me chills
So could the waters of Iceland
But there's a difference in finding diamonds in rust
And rhinestones in a dishpan
Miracles bowl me over
And often will they do so
Now I think I was asleep till I heard
The voice of the great Caruso

Bring infinity home
Let me embrace it one more time
Make it the lilies of the field
Or Caruso in his prime

A friend of mine gave me a tape
She'd copied from a record disc
It was made at the turn of the century
And found in a jacket labeled "misc."
And midst cellos, harps, and flugelhorns
With the precision of a hummingbird's heart
Was the lord of the monarch butterflies
One-time ruler of the world of art

Bring infinity home
Let me embrace it one more time
Make it the lilies of the field
or Caruso in his prime

Yes, the king of them all was Enrico
Whose singular chest could rival
A hundred fervent Baptists
Giving forth in a tent revival
True he was a vocal miracle
But that's only secondary
It's the sould of the monarch butterfly
That I find a little bit scary

Bring infinity home
Let me embrace it one more time
Make it the lilies of the field
Or Caruso in his prime

Perhaps he's just a vehicle
To bear us to the hills of Truth
That's Truth spelled with a great big T
And peddled in the mystic's booth
There are oh so many miracles
That the western sky exposes
Why go looking for lilacs
When you're lying in a bed of roses?

Bring infinity home
Let me embrace it one more time
Make it the lilies of the field
Or Caruso in his prime



Very Pleasant
Charles Ives

We're sitting in the opera house;
We're waiting for the curtain to arise
With wonders for our eyes;
We're feeling pretty gay,
And well we may,
"O, Jimmy, look!" I say,
"The band is tuning up
And soon will start to play."
We whistle and we hum,
Beat time with the drum.

We're sitting in the opera house;
We're waiting for the curtain to arise
With wonders for our eyes,
A feeling of expectancy,
A certain kind of ecstasy,
Expectancy and ecstasy... Sh's's's.



Lean out of the window
James Joyce, from Chamber Music

Lean out of the window,
     Goldenhair,
I heard you singing
     A merry air.

My book is closed;
     I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
     On the floor.

I have left my book,
     I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
     Through the gloom,

Singing and singing
     A merry air.
Lean out of the window,
     Goldenhair.



Piano
D.H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.



Romeo and Juliet [excerpt]
Don Marquis

Young Romeo was just designed
To play Italian opera:
A looker, with a tenor mind -
A perfect star for Wopera.



The Lay of the Singer's Fall
Eugene O'Neill

Singer was born in a land of gold,
In the time of the long ago
And the good fairies gathered from heath and wold
With gracious gifts to bestow.
They gave him the grace of Mirth and Song,
They crowned him with Health and Joy
And love for the Right and hate for the Wrong
They instilled in the soul of the boy;
But when they were gone, through the open door
The Devil of Doubt crept in,
And he breathed his poison in every pore
Of the sleeping infant's skin,
And in impish glee, said "Remember me
For I shall abide for aye with thee
From the very first moment thine eyes shall see
And know the meaning of sin."

The singer became a man and he fought
With the might of his pen and hand
To show for evil the cure long sought,
And spread Truth over the land;
Till the Devil mockingly said, "In sooth
'Tis a sorry ideal you ride,
For the truth of truths is there is no truth!"
- And the faith of the singer died -

And the singer was sad and he turned to Love
And the arms of his ladye faire,
He sang of her eyes as the stars above
He sang of - and kissed - her hair;
Till the Devil whispered, "I fondly trust
This is folly and nought beside,
For the greatest of loves is merely lust!"
- And the heart of the singer died -

So the singer turned from the world's mad strife
And he walked in the paths untrod,
And thrilled to the dream of a future life
As he prayed to the most high God;
Till the Devil murmured with sneering breath,
"What think you the blind skies hide?
There is nothing sure after death but death!"
- And the soul of the singer died -

And the lips of the singer were flecked with red
And torn with a bitter cry,
"When Truth and Love and God are dead
It is time, full time, to die!"
And the Devil in triumph chuckled low,
"There is always suicide,
It's the only logical thing I know."
- And the life of the singer died.



The Fair Singer
Andrew Marvell

To make a final conquest of all me,
Love did compose so sweet an enemy,
In whom both beauties to my death agree,
Joining themselves in fatal harmony:
That while she with her eyes my heart doth bind,
She with her voice might captivate my mind.

I could have fled from one but singly fair:
My disentangled soul itself might save,
Breaking the curléd trammels of her hair:
But how should I avoid to be her slave,
Whose subtle art invisibly can wreathe
My fetters of the very air I breathe?

It had been easy fighting in some plain
Where victory might hang in equal choice;
But all resistance against her is vain,
Who has the advantage of both eyes and voice:
And all my forces needs must be undone,
She having gainéd both the wind and sun.



One reason I like opera
Marge Piercy

In movies, you can tell the heroine
because she is blonder and thinner
than her sidekick. The villainess
is darkest. If a woman is fat,
she is a joke and will probably die.

In movies, the blondest are the best
and in bleaching lies not only purity
but victory. If two people are both
extra pretty, they will end up
in the final clinch.

Only the flawless in face and body
win. That is why I treat
movies as less interesting
than comic books. The camera
is stupid. It sucks surfaces.

Let's go to the opera instead.
The heroine is fifty and weighs
as much as a '65 Chevvie with fins.
She could crack your jaw in her fist.
She can hit high C lying down.

The tenor the women scream for
wolfs an eight course meal daily.
He resembles a bull on hind legs.
His thighs are the size of beer kegs.
His chest is a redwood with hair.

Their voices twine, golden serpents.
Their voices rise like the best
fireworks and hang and hang
then drift slowly down descending
in brilliant and still fiery sparks.

The hippopotamus baritone (the villain)
has a voice that could give you
an orgasm right in your seat.
His voice smokes with passion.
He is hot as lava. He erupts nightly.

The contralto is, however, svelte.
She is supposed to be the soprano's
mother, but is ten years younger,
beautiful and black. Nobody cares.
She sings you into her womb where you rock.



An Hour in a Studio
Richard Watson Gilder

Each picture was a painted memory
Of the far plains he loved, and of their life
Weird, mystical, dark, inarticulate, -
And cities hidden high against the blue,
Whose sky-hung steps one Indian could guard.
The enchanted Mesa there its fated wall
Lifted, and all its story lived again,-
How, in the happy planting time, the strong
Went down to push the seeds into the sand,
Leaving the old and sick.Then reeled the world
And toppled to the plain the perilous path.
Death climbed another way to them who stayed.
He showed us pictured thirst, a dreadful sight;
And many tales he told that might have come, -
Brought by some planet-wanderer, - fresh from Mars,
Or from the silver deserts of the moon.
     But I remember better than all else
One night he told of in that land of fright -
The love-songs swarthy men sang to their herds
On the high plains to keep the beasts in heart;
     Piercing the silence one keen tenor voice
Singing "Ai nostri monti" clear and high:
Instead of stakes and fences round about
They circled them with music in the night.



Singing Nigger
Carl Sandburg, from Cornhuskers

Your bony head, Jazbo, O dock walloper,
Those grappling hooks, those wheelbarrow handlers,
The dome and the wings of you, nigger,
The red roof and the door of you,
I know where your songs came from.
I know why God listens to your, "Walk All Over God's Heaven."
I heard you shooting craps, "My baby's going to have a new dress."
I heard you in the cinders, "I'm going to live anyhow until I die."
I saw five of you with a can of beer on a summer night and I listened to the five of you harmonizing six ways to sing,
"Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield."
I went away asking where I come from.



The Diatonic Dittymunch
Jack Prelutsky

The Diatonic Dittymunch plucked music from the air,
He swallowed scores of symphonies and still had space to spare.
Sonatas and cantatas slithered sweetly down his throat;
He made ballads into salads and consumed them note by note.

He ate marches and mazurkas, he ate rhapsodies and reels,
Minuets and tarantellas were the staples of his meals.
But the Diatonic Dittymunch outdid himself one day:
He ate a three-act opera - And LOUDLY passed away.



Everyone Sang
Siegfried Sassoon

Ev'ryone suddenly burst out singing,
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom
Winging wildly across the white orchards
and dark green fields
On, on, and out of sight.

Ev'ryone's voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears
And horror drifted away.
O but ev'ryone was a bird
And the song was wordless,
The singing will never be done.



Concert Party (Egyptian Base Camp)
Siegfried Sassoon, Number 3. from Picture-Show (Kantara, April 1918)

They are gathering round....
Out of the twilight; over the grey-blue sand,
Shoals of low-jargoning men drift inward to the sound -
The jangle and throb of a piano...tum-ti-tum...
Drawn by a lamp, they come
Out of the glimmering lines of their tents, over the shuffling sand.
O sing us the songs, the songs of our own land,
You warbling ladies in white.
Dimness conceals the hunger in our faces,
This wall of faces risen out of the night,
These eyes that keep their memories of the places
So long beyond their sight.

Jaded and gay, the ladies sing; and the chap in brown
Tilts his grey hat; jaunty and lean and pale,
He rattles the keys...some actor-bloke from town...
God send you home; and then A long, long trail;
I hear you calling me; and Dixieland....
Sing slowly...now the chorus...one by one
We hear them, drink them; till the concert's done.
Silent, I watch the shadowy mass of soldiers stand.
Silent, they drift away, over the glimmering sand.



The Kite
Anne Sexton - West Harwich, Massachussets, 1954-1959

Here, in front of the summer hotel
the beach waits like an altar.
We are lying on a cloth of sand
while the Atlantic noon stains
the world in light.

It was much the same
five years ago. I remember
how Ezio Pinza was flying a kite
for the children. None of us noticed
it then. The pleated lady
was still a nest of her knitting.
Four pouchy fellows kept their policy
of gin and tonic while trading some money.
The parasol girls slept, sun-sitting
their lovely years. No one thought
how precious it was, or even how funny
the festival seemed, square rigged in the air.
The air was a season they had bought,
like the cloth of sand.

I've been waiting
on this private stretch of summer land,
counting these five years and wondering why.
I mean, it was different that time
with Ezio Pinza flying a kite.
Maybe, after all, he knew something more
and was right.



In the dim light of the golden lamp
Edward Shanks

In the dim light of the golden lamp
The singer stands and sings,
And the songs rise up like coloured bubbles
Or birds with shining wings.

And the movement of the merry or plaintive keys
Sounds in the silent air,
Till the listener feels the room no more
But only music there.

And still from the sweet and rounded mouth
The delicate songs arise,
Like floating bubbles whose colours are
The coloured melodies.



To Constantia: Singing
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I
Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die,
Perchance were death indeed! - Constantia, turn!
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,
Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn
Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;
Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odor it is yet,
And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet -
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!

II
A breathless awe, like the swift change
Unseen but felt in youthful slumbers,
Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,
Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers.
The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven
By the enchantment of thy strain;
And on my shoulders wings are woven
To follow its sublime career
Beyond the mighty moons that wane
Upon the verge of Nature's utmost sphere,
Till the world's shadowy walls are passed and disappear.

III
Her voice is hovering o'er my soul - it lingers
O'ershadowing it with soft and lulling wings;
The blood and life within those snowy fingers
Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings.
My brain is wild, my breath comes quick -
The blood is listening in my frame,
And thronging shadows, fast and thick,
Fall on my overflowing eyes;
My heart is quivering like a flame;
As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies,
I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies.

IV
I have no life, Constantia, now, but thee,
Whilst, like the world-surrounding air, thy song
Flows on, and fills all things with melody.
Now is thy voice a tempest swift and strong,
On which, like one in trance upborne,
Secure o'er rocks and waves I sweep,
Rejoicing like a cloud of morn;
Now 't is the breath of summer night,
Which, when the starry waters sleep,
Round western isles, with incense-blossoms bright,
Lingering, suspends my soul in its voluptuous flight.



Singing
Robert Louis Stevenson, XI from A Child's Garden of Verses

Of speckled eggs the birdie sings
     And nests among the trees;
The sailor sings of ropes and things
     In ships upon the seas.

The children sing in far Japan,
     The children sing in Spain;
The organ with the organ man
     Is singing in the rain.



My sweetest bird that art encaged here
Anonymous (based on the Italian by Giovanni Battista Guarini)

My sweetest bird that art encaged here,
How like (alas!) thine and my fortunes are.
Both sing, both singing thus
Strive to please him that hath imprisoned us.
Only in this we differ, thou and I:
Thou singing liv'st, I singing die.



Bright is the ring of words
Robert Louis Stevenson, from Songs of Travel

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them,
Still they are carolled and said -
On wings they are carried -
After the singer is dead
And the maker buried.

Low as the singer lies
In the field of heather,
Songs of his fashion bring
The swains together.
And when the west is red
With the sunset embers,
The lover lingers and sings
And the maid remembers.



The Daddy Long-Legs and the Fly [excerpt]
Edward Lear

iv.
"O Mr. Daddy Long-Legs,"
Said Mr. Floppy Fly,
"I wish you'd sing one little song!
"One mumbian melody!
"You used to sing so awful well
"In former days gone by,
"But now you never sing at all;
"I wish you'd tell me why:
"For if you would, the silvery sound
"Would please the shrimps and cockles round,
"And all the crabs would gladly come
"To hear you sing, 'Ah, Hum di Hum!'"

v.
Said Mr. Daddy Long-Legs,
"I can never sing again!
"And if you wish, I'll tell you why,
"Although it gives me great pain.
"For years I could not hum a bit,
"Or sing the smallest song;
"And this the dreadful reason is,
"My legs are grown too long!
"My six long legs, all here and there,
"Oppress my bosom with despair;
"And if I stand, or lie, or sit,
"I cannot sing one single bit!"



The Singer
Bronnie Taylor

I met a singer on the hill,
He wore a tattered cloak;
His cap was torn,
His shoes were worn,
And dreamily he spoke.
Fa la la la la la...
Fa la la la la la.

A wrinkled face, a cheery smile,
And a nobby stick had he;
His eyes were grey and far away
And changeful as the sea.

I offered him a piece of gold
And hoped that he would stay.
No word he spoke, but shook his head
And smiled and went his way.
Fa la la la la la...
La la la la la la.

I watched the singer down the hill.
My eyes went following after,
I thought I heard a fairy flute
And the sound of fairy laughter,
Fa la la la la la... etc.



The Islet
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

'Whither O whither love shall we go,
For a score of sweet little summers or so'
The sweet little wife of the singer said,
On the day that follow'd the day she was wed,
'Whither O whither love shall we go?'
And the singer shaking his curly head
Turn'd as he sat, and struck the keys
There at his right with a sudden crash,
Singing, 'and shall it be over the seas
With a crew that is neither rude nor rash,
But a bevy of Eroses apple-cheek'd,
In a shallop of crystal ivory-beak'd,
With a satin sail of a ruby glow,
To a sweet little Eden on earth that I know,
A mountain islet pointed and peak'd;
Waves on a diamond shingle dash,
Cataract brooks to the ocean run,
Fairily-delicate palaces shine
Mixt with myrtle and clad with vin