Music, Poetry, Religion

Poetry is a framework that allows us to explore the depths of who we are as individuals.  Poetry is distilled truth.  One of the things I love about poetry is that it can mean different things to different people, or even something different to the same person at different points in their lives.

Last night, my voice was tired, so I decided to work with some easier English songs rather than my physically demanding Strauss. I found myself exploring the poetry.  In any song you sing, there are really four interpretations taking place.  First, the singer should try to figure out what the poet was trying to say.  Knowing more about the poet's life--their relationships, passions, and pains--helps you to understand the origins of these words.  Then, through examining the music--the phrasing, dynamics, harmonies, etc.--you explore possibilities of how the composer might have interpreted the ideas presented by the poet.  Your life experience brings it's own interpretations to the table.  And finally, the truth you convey through the song reaches the listener where she or he again filters it through their own history and hears the truth that they need at the moment.  

What Would I Give?

I immediately love the melody of Vicki Tucker Courtney's setting of Christina Rossetti's poem, "What Would I Give?" but I didn't find any connection at all with the words.  It was about someone who couldn't feel and didn't have the words to express what they were feeling.  I feel too much and I write to process that, so this song and I just weren't connecting.  Then I did a quick review of Rossetti's life history and remembered about her religious experiences and her struggle with depression.  Suddenly, I found my connections to the song.  These ideas may not in actuality resemble anything that Rossetti or Courtney were thinking, but it gave my a direction for my own explorations.  I now have three different lenses through which to filter the truth of this song:  depression, religion, and the two of them entwined. 

Let's start with religion.

What would I give for a heart, 

a heart of flesh to warm me through, 

instead of this heart of stone ice-cold, whatever I do?  

Hard and cold and small, 

of all hearts the worst of all. 

Feelings and manifestations of the spirit are often intertwined.  We speak of a burning in the bosom as confirmation of a spiritual truth or experience.  We talk about hard hearts, closed to truth and light.
We don't talk about large, warm, open hearts enough, but they are implied as the opposite of those hard hearts we are warned about.  

Imagine someone desperate for spiritual guidance sitting through a church experience (which everyone later describes as incredibly spiritual) and feeling nothing, except how defective they must be to not feel what everyone else seems to be experiencing.  

What would I give for words, 

if only words would come?

But now in its misery

my spirit has fallen dumb.  

O merry friends, go your own way,

I have never a word to say.  

Imagine sitting in a church meeting and hearing words that instead of inspiring you, hurt you deeply.  And in that pain, you can't find the words or the courage to speak up and speak out.  The conversations after the service are all bubbly and positive, but you walk away because you don't want your pain to pull them down.  Plus, they probably wouldn't understand anyway and would just try to fix you.  

What would I give for tears?  

Not smiles but scalding tears, 

to wash the black mark clean,

and to thaw the frost of years, 

to wash the stain ingrain,

and to make me clean again.  

Again, imagine that you've been told that there is something wrong with you and that it must be because of sin and the only way to be free of that is through "godly sorrow", but you know that all the tears in the world can't change this, because it is part of who you are.  

Let's shift gears slightly at look at this from the perspective of clinical depression.  

What would I give for a heart,

a heart of flesh to warm me through, 

instead of this heart of stone ice-cold, 

whatever I do?  

Hard and cold and small, 

of all hearts the worst of all. 

Some people think that being depressed is about being sad and crying all the time.  Sometimes it is that, but there is also a kind of depression where you just become numb.  You don't feel anything.  You no longer enjoy activities, and you also can't muster the energy to care about it enough to grieve those lost experiences.  You just feel nothing.  Dull, empty nothingness.  In those moments you wish for something, even pain to break you out of the spell.  

What would I give for words, 

if only words would come?

But now in its misery

my spirit has fallen dumb.  

O merry friends, go your own way,

I have never a word to say.  

Words feed my soul.  Words help me clarify what I feel.  But sometimes, in the depth of depression, there are no words.  It's not writers block, which to me is about a lack of inspiration and direction.  It is total emptiness.  I can't speak of where I am and I can't write about it.  

What would I give for tears?  

Not smiles but scalding tears, 

to wash the black mark clean,

and to thaw the frost of years, 

to wash the stain ingrain,

and to make me clean again.  

At this point, you'll take anything, even if it is tears that are required to break the cycle.  Can you cry away the emptiness?  Can this defect be removed?  Can I be whole again?

Now take a moment to explore what depression plus religion might feel like by going back and re-reading.  Read the stanza of poetry, then the possible religious interpretation, and finally the view from depression.  Together, it is dark and not completely without hope, but close.  

The composer chooses to repeat "What would I give?" as the last line of the song.  The singer ends on the tonic of the minor key, so we know that things didn't improve immediately (which might have been indicated with a Picardy third).  We are left to wonder and wait, in much the same way the subject of the poem does. 

I haven't decided yet exactly what this song means to me, but living with those questions and options keeps me open to discovering even more depth.  

I Am the Wind

With my initial reading of "What Would I Give?" I didn't understand the words, but I was drawn to them somehow.  When I first sang Courntey's setting of the Zoe Akins poem, "I Am the Wind" I didn't experience that pull, from the text or the music.  But last night, that changed.  Again, the song is in a minor key, so maybe that is what pulled me to it last night.  The basic idea is of the poem is that you (whoever it is ) and I (whoever I am) are opposites.  I'm not big on black and white thinking, which is what this seemed to me at first.  

I am the wind that wavers,

you are the certain land; 

I am the shadow that passes

over the sand.  

I am the leaf that quivers, 

you the unshaken tree; 

you are the stars that are steadfast, 

I am the sea.  

You are the light eternal, 

like a torch I shall die; 

you are the surge of deep music, 

I but  a cry!

I first read this thinking of someone talking to their love.  "I am" and "you are" seemed an invitation to declare one good and the other bad, or one strong and one weak, but based on the way she set it, I don't think Vicki Tucker Courtney was thinking of it that way.  "I am the sea" is strong and powerful; it is really the climax of this song, so I doubt that Courtney read "the sea" as wishy-washy or the opposite of steadfast.  

Again, because I've been thinking a lot about religion lately, I saw this as possibly a description of a relationship with a church and/or God.  

I am the wind that wavers,

you are the certain land; 

I have lots of questions.  Maybe I'm unsteady or unreliable.  The church sets itself up as certain and solid and unchanging.  

I am the shadow that passes

over the sand.  

Maybe my questions darken the way of those who think they are on solid land.  But sand is not one piece of solid land.    It is billions of individual pieces that move and shift with the wind or the tide.  

I am the leaf that quivers, 

you the unshaken tree; 

I am part of the whole.  Yes, I shake and move with the wind, but the tree stays rooted and never moves.  

you are the stars that are steadfast, 

I am the sea.  

Stars give light and direction.  We think of stars as steadfast and unchanging, but in reality, they too are moving and changing, just at a rate much slower than we are.  "I am the sea."  I am alive with change.  I am the crystal clear water through which you can see to the bottom of the sea hundreds of feet below.  I am also the rolling and surging water of the waves.  I am a powerful force for change.  

The first two stanza's begin with what I am and how that is different from what you are (in this interpretation, from the church.)

For me, that changes with the last stanza.  The church is neither "the surge of deep music", nor "the light eternal."  It's no longer about the church.  It's about God.  Like God, I am a light, but my own individual influence will pass.  God's light will continue to shine.  The "surge of deep music" again is bigger than anything I can accomplish or do.  This isn't about torches or cries not mattering, because they do.  But there is something bigger and grander in play.  Bigger than me, and bigger than the church.  

The beautiful thing about poetry is that it doesn't matter if the poet or my high school English teacher see the same meaning in the poems that I do.  The point is that it makes me think and that I find my truth.  Will I see the same things in these poems 20 years down the road?  Who knows?  But for today, I found something of beauty.  That is what matters.