In between

Poetry and music play well together

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Winter activity

In other parts of the country, it’s ice fishing season. I’d love to try it, but distance and disability make that impossible. Still, it’s a romantic notion: the cold, the isolation, the knowledge that beneath inches of ice, warm-blood creatures swim.

It could even be comfortable. The ice houses (also known as ice shanties) below have chimneys, the better to accommodate small propane stoves. The upper Midwest ice is too thick to melt, but there are some safety considerations, outlined here.

These are not Port-a-Potties. They are ice fishing houses, resting for the summer on a vacant lot in Rice, Minn. Fran Gardner photo

. . . Or forget the ice house and just cut a hole. Glenna Haug via UnSplash

On the brink

The grandkids, ready to step into their futures. Photo © Maggie Gardner

In-between time

The season bridges, winter into spring;
Fall’s acorns waken deep within their germ;
The  ferns’ heads stretch in yearning to unfurl;
Safe in their dens, bears dream of spring’s return.

The grasses feel a tingle in their roots.
Fresh snowbells push above their green surround
Soon daphne, season’s herald, scents the air
And hellebores bloom, nodding to the ground.

False spring brings gardeners out with eager tools
Ready to turn earth, prune, plant, fertilize,
But the season isn’t ready yet to be—
Hold planting until March. Prioritize.

Till then, the leaf mold stays a bitter brown
And winter shrubs mere sticks with swollen ends.
Wise cedars breathe while birches rest awhile,
Awaiting what the coming season sends.

Still fascinated by the gaps

“It’s what’s between that is real.”

That's one of the first things Robert Jaffe said to me when our relationship was new and we were falling in love. It was true then, and it’s true now.

When I wrote about silence, I observed how in music it’s the intervals between the notes that give compositions form. And in life, as in music, the spaces between, the pauses, the intakes of breath, are what create experience.

Meditation explores the between places. You are aware of the spaces between your breaths. You concentrate on the spaces between thoughts. You emerge refreshed, energized by what was between.

Practice

As you move through this week, pause and consider the between things. Consider what is between your perception and another’s in a relationship. When you read a book or newspaper, notice how the spaces between the words are what delineate the words.

What’s between is everywhere. When you look at a tree in winter, what’s between the branches? Other trees? Sky? Just plain air?

The Universe has gifted us with betweenness, so that everything doesn’t just run together in a solid reality.

Come, celebrate the between things.

Down a rabbit hole

~In which I use a lot of colons while exploring poems and hymns~

You know how it is. You start looking for something on the Internet, and two hours later you are stranded on an uncharted island where the palms drop coconuts filled with raspberry creme.

One day I found myself reciting the lyrics to “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” to one of the servers in the Rose Schnitzer Manor dining room. Why? Because while her name wasn’t Lydia (it’s Sadie), she did have tattoos and a sense of humor.

I didn’t remember how the song started, so I went looking for the lyrics to “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” as sung by Groucho Marx in At the Circus Show*, and what I found was a fascinating interior rhyme scheme—that’s where there’s a word in the middle of the line that rhymes with one at the end of it.

*In the 1940 movie “The Philadelphia Story”, Dinah Lord (played by Virginia Weidler) sings the first verse of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”, a 1939 song written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg.

The road not taken

Now, the dilemma: which way was I going to go? My original thought was to explore a few other funny ditties by Groucho. But I could also explore the idea of interior rhymes.

Interior rhymes won. Here’s from the beginning of “Lydia”:

She has eyes that men adore so
And her torso even more so.

That’s delicious. Internal rhyme is so clever. Here’s a famous example:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Also: When treetops glisten and children listen 
Tucson, Arizona—don’t forget Winona
But one of you here is a mother-fakir 
                       (from The Ballad of Dan’s Guru, posted Nov. 14, 2022)

Segueing to W.S. Gilbert

“The Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (not to be confused with Silas Marner by George Eliot) also has internal rhyme, and that might have been what W.S. Gilbert had in mind when he penned “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell,” a long and ludicrous poem I memorized as a teen.

Kvell on the internal rhyme of the third line as Gilbert sets the scene:

His hair was weedy, his beard was long.
And weedy and long was he;
And I heard this wight on the shore recite.
In a singular minor key:
 
“Oh, I am a cook and the captain bold
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bos’un bosun tight, and a midshipmite
And the crew of the captain’s gig.”

Next, please

Well, long story short [too late! My children would yell about here], the Nancy Bell is shipwrecked, and only 10 sailors survive.

The wight on the shore continues:

For a month we’d neither whittles nor drink,
Till a-hungry we did feel,
So we draw’d a lot, and, accordin’, shot
The captain for our meal.

Wham. Bam. Everyone (except the capt’n) eats. Eventually most of the crew meets a similar fate, until:

Then only the cook and me was left,      
And the delicate question. “Which
Of us two goes in the kettle?” arose,
And we argued it out as sich, 
 
For I loved the cook has a brother, I did.
And the cook he worshipp’d* me.
But we’d both be blowed if we’d ever be stow’d
In the other chap’s hold, you see.

*The version I am quoting, from The Golden Treasury of Poetry, uses 2 P’s in worshipp’d. As I wrote in the “kidnaped” article on Jan 16, 2023, it should be “worshiped.” But as we all know now, spellcheck doesn’t care. It only flags Gilbert’s Victorian spelling, meant to keep “worshipped” from being a three-syllable word, “wor-ship-ed.”

Back to the poem

You can guess who survived that last encounter:

And I eat* that cook in a week or less,
And as I eating be
The last of his chops, why I almost drops,
For a wessel in sight I see.

*The past tense of “eat,” pronounced “et.” Nowadays we’d say “ate.”

Another rabbit deep dive

Gilbert wrote “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” before he became the versifying half of Gilbert & Sullivan. His collaborator, Arthur Sullivan, was a church organist, and in that capacity wrote a large number of hymns before he and Gilbert became an item.

Further down the rabbit hole, I find that six of Sullivan’s tunes ended up in the 1982 hymnal of the Episcopal Church of America, of which I am very fond and with which I am very familiar.

They include

• “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (tune name: “St. Gertrude”)

• The “English” version of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (from “Noel,” a traditional melody adapted by Sullivan)*

*Noel is also the tune for “Praise God for John evangelist, who bore the Spirit’s sword, whose words reflect, like eagle’s wings, the glory of our Lord.” Text by F. Samuel Janzow.

• “Welcome, happy morning! Age to age shall say,” tune name “Fortunatus,” because its words are those of the medieval monk Venantius Honorius Fortunatus.

• “Alleluia, alleluia!” (tune name “Lux eoi,” bright morning star), which features a spine-tingling descending scale from high E to E with some lovely accidentals. I am indebted to the Gilbert & Sullivan archive for noting that “Lux eoi” was originally set to a much more mundane verse:

All is bright and cheerful round us; 
All above is soft and blue;
Spring at last hath come and found us, 
Spring and all its pleasures too: 
Every flower is full of gladness; 
Dew is bright and buds are gay; 
Earth, with all its sin and sadness, 
Seems a happy place to-day. 

Wow, that’s Victorian

You can hear little tweety birds chattering all around. I can’t imagine singing it.

Here are the lyrics for “Alleluia,” a much more muscular Easter hymn:

Alleluia, alleluia!
Hearts to heav’n and voices raise;
Sing to God a hymn of gladness,
Sing to God a hymn of praise:
He who on the cross a victim
For the world’s salvation bled—
Jesus Christ, the King of Glory, [this is the great descending staircase of notes]
Now is risen from the dead.

Beethoven elbows in

Further down the rabbit hole, I find that another text sometimes set to “Lux eoi” is “Joyful, joyful, we adore you.”* BUT, those lyrics are most commonly used with the tune “Hymn to Joy,” by Ludwig van Beethoven. That’s the familiar, stirring finale from his majestic 9th Symphony.

*These lyrics are not in the The Hymnal 1982, my source book for this post. I found this info at Hymnary.org, [the url is the same] a comprehensive collection located at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

• “Come, ye faithful, raise the strain” (tune: “St. Kevin.” (Really, there’s a St. Kevin? Another rabbit hole)* I like the alternative tune, “Gaudeamus partier, from Bohemian carol melody, 1544”

*St. Kevin was a sixth century Irish aesthetic who is the patron of blackbirds. Seamus Heaney wrote a famous poem titled “St. Kevin and the Blackbird,” and James Joyce referred to him several time in “Finnegan’s Wake.”

Whence Groucho?

I can’t get back to Groucho Marx’s funny songs through the rabbit hole’s convoluted burrows, but I remember a few more lyrics:

This is from Animal Crackers:

[chorus] Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African explorer!
[Groucho] Did someone call me Schnorrer?
[chorus] Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

And a song in need of a better rhyme pattern from Horsefeathers:

Whatever it is, I’m against it!

I don’t know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I’m against it
No matter what it is or who commenced it
I’m against it
 
Your proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood:
Whatever it is, I’m against it
And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it
I’m against it!

That is followed, inexplicably, by “I Always Get My Man”: 

My son is right
I’m quick to fight
I’m from a fighting clan
When I’m abused
Or badly used
I always get my man
No matter if he’s in Peru, Paducah, or Japan
I go ahead
Alive or dead
I always get my man

I soon disposed
Of all of those
Who put me on the pan
Like Shakespeare said to Nathan Hale
“I always get my man.”

No internal rhyme there

But a few surprises. Like the tweety birds at the end of the “I’m Against It!” clip. I’m all for tweety birds.

I pop out of the rabbit burrow, into the sunshine

Care to share where your surfing ended up this week?

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No negativity February

I’m working hard on avoiding negative thoughts and reactions. Trying to see the good in things.

It’s working! When I’m in a conversation, I’m less thinking of how to refute the other’s argument or insert my own (trenchant!) comments. I’m paying more attention to my interlocutor. I’m noticing body language and other subtle clues to that person’s essence. We’re both the better for it.

An negative exception

Well, all except for my brokerage. You may remember I was excited to use part of the RMD (required minimum distribution) from my IRAs to reclaim the tax deduction for charitable giving. (See the posting “Work, Poetry, Poem,” December 26, 2022).

I’ve had a lot of negative thoughts about Ameriprise after I realized they were not going to report any of my qualified charitable distributions (QCBs) to the IRS. So there goes the tax break.

Turning negativity on its head, I resolve to just write the checks myself and forgo the tax break. The organizations need the money more than I need a break.

Are you writing?

It’s often said “don’t should on yourself,” but this is one case when you should should. Nothing will put your life on track like the discipline and creativity of writing.

I hope you will find, as I have, that sometimes the Universe takes over the pen. All you have to do is keep writing, or typing, and the words that tumble forth are ones you yourself didn’t dream up. Do they come from deep inside or deep “out there”? No matter; they are your words now.

Something I didn’t dream up

As for that reference at the top to coconuts filled with raspberry creme, I’ve added a little story to the Substack titled Fables and Legends. It’s called “Doubloon” and, besides coconuts with creme filling, it features a pool of bubblegum, some lemonade, and a passel of Vikings swilling their very own Vik-o-Mead.

As for that other stuff:

• January’s “no shopping” is over, but I hope that you are still pausing before you hit the “place order” button to consider if you really want—or need—whatever it is you intend to buy.

  Better yet, get in the habit of waiting a day before you commit to a purchase. You’ve been without it for another 24 hours; is your life any poorer for it?

• Ah, yes, cold showers. I’ve asked around about whether anyone’s tried it, and folks tend to shudder and gasp. No one has been able (or will admit) to try rinsing off in cold water at the end of a nice hot shower.

  You only have to screw up your courage once. After that, you’ll be a convert.

—30—