One more poem for the month of April
This is something that I memorised for the open mike over at Smokedaddy’s one evening. I barely got through it, it nearly made me weep. I’ve never tried to speak it aloud since.
Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950). Spoon River Anthology. 1916.
Fiddler Jones
THE EARTH keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle—
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.
The Fiddler of Dooney
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.
I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs I bought at the Sligo fair.
When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;
For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:
And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.
I tried reading that one aloud- couldn’t get through it. Must be something about fiddlers, eh?
Actually, I posted “Fiddler Jones” because posted that very same Yeats poem. She also linked to this little tit-bit from the Washington Post on the subject of Joshua Bell’s busking experiment. Which likewise put a lump in my throat. It must be the fiddle.
Here’s another one for you
I know this poem because the great Geoff Berner made it into a song. Check out his stuff – Berner himself is one of the best songwriters alive, although he’s not very well known on account of he’s a Canadian punk-klezmer accordionist.
Re: Here’s another one for you
Give “Clown and Bard” a listen.
Re: Here’s another one for you
You ought to check out I think you two would get along very well!
Stella, you always find these clever pieces that are outside the realm that I know. It’s very evocative.
Oh, if you like poetry at all, I really recomment the “Spoon River Anthology”
It’s a collection of about 250 poems, each one the voice of someone in the graveyard- each one has something to say, and it could be the story of their life, or the way they died, or some quibbling complaint they never let go of… just extraordinary! You get both sides of the story, in some cases.