Welcome back to the Poem of the Month!
Sometimes you read a poem and it just really resonates with you. That’s the case with this poem by Walt Whitman about music.
I grew up singing old gospel hymns in the Southern Baptist Church in Dothan, Alabama, and even as a small child I always found myself drawn not so much to the melodies, but to the harmonies in those great, old hymns. A lot of times, even today, it’s not the melody that I hear first, but it’s the vocal harmonies, or maybe the bass line driving the tempo of a song in the background. I don’t even realize sometimes that I am singing or humming (and I hum a LOT) the bass or tenor harmonies and not the main melody.
Like a lot of you, perhaps, I also find that music and specific artists or songs take me back to a part of my history and have become so strongly intertwined in the memory of those times that they are inseparable. Styx “The Grand Illusion” album takes me to back to my brother’s room when I was 7, lying on the floor and listening to his stereo in the dark when he wasn’t home. The Beastie Boys’ “License to Ill” album on my Walkman brought a little artificial swagger to my freshman year of high school. Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” was one of my high school best friends’ favorite songs, and his tragic death inextricably linked that song to my memories of him. Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” was the anthem for saying goodbye to my closest high school friends as I left for college. And I can’t hear any song from Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ “Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars” album without fondly remembering the friends and experiences of my first semester of college. The list goes on…
I’ve always said life deserves a soundtrack. Seems like Walt and I had a few things in common.
Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
That Music Always Round Me
That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning—yet long untaught I did not hear;
But now the chorus I hear, and am elated;
A tenor, strong, ascending, with power and health, with glad notes of day-break I hear,
A soprano, at intervals, sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,
A transparent bass, shuddering lusciously under and through the universe, 5
The triumphant tutti—the funeral wailings, with sweet flutes and violins—all these I fill myself with;
I hear not the volumes of sound merely—I am moved by the exquisite meanings,
I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;
I do not think the performers know themselves—but now I think I begin to know them.
