A Hard Truth Expressed Joyfully–Gloria Srikijkarn’s “Laugh, Sing, Rejoice”

It’s an unusual concert at which there will be in attendance two composers of the music being performed. It’s even more unusual to have one of those composers actually singing in the choir. (We’re also singing an arrangement by a member of the choir; I’m going to try to get to that piece in a later post.) We’ve been privileged in the past to sing Gloria Srikijkarn’s rousing setting of Psalm 100; now we get to present her 2019 composition using lyrics from “Solitude” by the mid-19th-century American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Srikijkarn is a long-time member of the Cherry Creek Chorale and at present serves as the chair of our artistic committee.

I asked the composer about her creative process with this song, and she told me that when she was growing up her father had a book of poetry containing “Solitude.” (The poem has as an alternate title “The Way of the World.” Don’t know why.) As an adult Srikijkarn remembered the poem and decided to set it to music, but when she went back and read the whole thing she realized that it was much darker than she’d thought. Her first draft ended up being unusable, and she used just half of the lines in her finished piece. Here they are:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.

You can picture the truth of these ideas if you think about how strange it would be to see someone sitting and laughing by him/herself but how common it is to picture a person weeping alone. I was pleased to run across this anecdote online about the origin of the poem:

“Solitude” is Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s most famous poem. The idea for the poem came as she was traveling to Madison, Wisconsin, to attend the Governor’s inaugural ball. On her way to the celebration, there was a young woman dressed in black sitting across the aisle from her. The woman was crying. Miss Wheeler sat next to her and sought to comfort her for the rest of the journey. When they arrived, the poet was so unhappy that she could barely attend the festivities. As she looked at her own face in the mirror, she suddenly recalled the sorrowful widow. It was at that moment that she wrote the opening lines of “Solitude.” It was first published in an 1883 issue of The New York Sun. (Original source for this story is unclear.)

You can see how Wilcox’s reasoning process went, can’t you? She’d put herself out to comfort this person, and what was her reward? She’d gotten pulled into sadness herself, almost missing out on the event she’d traveled to attend. Did she think, “Boy, I’ll never make that mistake again”? Did she picture what she’d have felt like if, instead of the weeper she’d sat next to a joker? Emotional contagion is a real thing; here’s what I wrote about it some time ago in an old blog post:

But still. I need to realize, once again, that how I act has a tremendous impact on others; my outward emotional behavior can cause others to “catch” the same feelings. I think of the times when I’ve been in a bad mood and cast a pall on an outing. When others have done that, I’ve wondered why they couldn’t just suck it up and be nice. Well, good question! (“Beware of Negative Emotional Contagion”)

So the message of the poem can be seen as pretty stark: You drive people away when you need them most; that is, when you’re unhappy. If you keep going in Wilcox’s poem you’ll read the line “No man can help you die.” Woof! Pretty dark, indeed.

So Srikijkarn tore up her first draft and re-wrote the song, this time ending on an energetic, positive note and using one more line from the final stanza of the poem. Here’s how it goes:

Laugh, sing, rejoice.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live.
Laugh, sing, rejoice.

I don’t think that either Wilcox or Srikijkarn is saying that you can’t ever show negative feelings, that you have to be a hypocrite in order to get people to like you. Or that you have to be a Pollyanna. Or that you always (cliché alert!) have to “fake it till you make it.” But nothing is ever gained by marinating in your troubles. (I say that as an accomplished marinater myself.) Oh dear! I just can’t resist that great line from VP Spiro Agnew who called members of the media “nattering nabobs of negativity.” He didn’t end up too well, did he? In his case the negativity of his critics was justified.

Back to the piece. The music is a great fit for the words; lots of syncopated rhythms, some vocal slides, and a rousing finish. And we get the composer to conduct us! Win-win, as they say.

A bonus for you if you’ve read this far: a video that’s gotten over 17 million views, about the difference between sympathy and empathy. As you’ll see, one message in the video is exactly the same as the one in Wilcox’s poem: most people just want to dismiss your depression and tell you to get over it; they don’t want to be around you or acknowledge the reality of your feelings. But . . . well, I’ll let you decide whether or not the bear actually helps the sad little fox. (They’re both down in the hole at the end, after all.) Take a look and see what you think.

Here’s the second half of Wilcox’s poem: