Hope

In church, we had this choir service, which means that the choir performed the service. The focus of this particular service was nature, birds in particular.

One of the numbers we performed was an “art song” (I find even the term offensive. Are other songs not art?) derived from a poem by Emily Dickinson. An art song is essentially a poem set to music. The problem arises in that the composer very seldom understands the poem. The result is that the poem and music seldom serve each other. In this case, “Hope Is a Thing with Feathers” derives from Dickinson’s poem “Hope.” Reading only the text, the composer forced some unnaturally cheerful—some would say manic—music onto a poem that essentially a depressive recluse’s attempt to deal with life. Dickinson loved nature and birds, but she seldom ventured outdoors and almost never off the grounds of her parents’ house.

Dickinson is one of my favorite poets. In fact, she is the only poet who I care enough about to own more than one volume of verse—other than maybe Shakespeare or Poe (but their volumes contain other types of works). This painful rendition of one of her better poems caused me to pen the following parody. I don’t consider this a parody of Dickinson’s poem, but rather the art song.

Hope is a thing that whithers

And suppurates the soul

A baleful tune without remorse

That never stops at all

 

More fickle than a gale this word

That leads your heart astray

Turns winter to a summer bird

That blithely flies away

 

It makes its nest in snowy lands

And travels o’re the sea

And ever in extremity

On human hearts it feeds

It could also be fun to play with, “Hope is the thing that slithers....”