 |
 |
The received transcriptions of Dickinson's poems were arranged into lines that squashed her music into 8 6 8 6 (or 8 7 8 6 or 7 6 8 7 or etc etc). This would be something like ballad meter, or more likely, the meter of the hymnals in use in Western Massachusetts in the middle of the 18th century. Dickinson broke her lines over those divisions -- her editors put the divisions back. Or so goes the current conventional understanding of Dickinson, the dubiety of which I apologize for in advance. So -- yes, the Yellow Rose of Texas, but also a number of Wesley's melodies. I think the corollary is that Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" can be sung to Hernando's Hideaway. Is it absurd to ask a question on the order of: who are the twins in John Wilkinson's "The Speaking Twins"? What is he twinning, is it a kind of double-consciousness? Pardon the inarticulation, I don't have the vocabulary to talk about what he does yet, and wonder if I could draw on the not inconsiderable resources of this list, especially with respect to what holds that poem (and others of its genera?) together; if it is the changing yet always parsable syntax, the variety of tones, agh, I'm lost again. At any rate it seems important to say what is happening in this work and how it differs from other serious (or not serious!) work. Jordan Davis %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%