Um, I guess so. I’m going to try, anyway.
I’ve had the great privilege of singing this work with my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale. We loved it! (So did the audience.) All three parts of the Nocturnes have lyrics from American poems, and I’m going to take a stab at clarifying them. As I’ve said this before, though, taking a poem apart to pry out the meaning is a little bit like explaining a joke: when you’re all done, you’ve destroyed the original. Still, there are some intriguing lines in all three selections that repay analysis. If you’d rather leave the mystery intact, you can skip the following.
The first poem is the least mysterious: Sara Teasdale’s “Stars.” On the surface it’s just a description of being out in the woods at night and seeing the stars. I’m including the text below because we do so much repetition in the piece that it’s easy to lose sight of the poem’s construction. (That’s not a criticism, just a fact.) So here it is:
Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars
Over my head
White and topaz
And misty red;
Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;
Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill
I watch them marching
Stately and still.
And I know that I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty.
It’s always a mistake to try to read too much into a poem and have everything be somehow about The Meaning Of Life, so I’ll try not to do that. Teasdale is doing a bit more than just painting a pretty picture, though. She’s interested in the stars’ eternality and majesty. I especially love the third verse with its description of the countless stars with their “beating hearts of fire,” which, if you think about it, is literally true. All stars shine because of the thermonuclear furnace burning away inside them. Whether or not the poet knew this literally, she recognized it instinctively. They will last for “aeons” without being irritated or weary. They simply exist. Her imagery of the stars’ marching up the dome of heaven may not mean much to us city dwellers, as we don’t typically stand on the sidewalk gazing into the night sky and light pollution is going to dim the stars anyway, but the stars do rise and set over the course of a night. And I like that Teasdale doesn’t go the usual route of “I feel so insignificant in comparison to the stars” route. Instead, she is “honored” simply to be able to see them in their majesty. Hmmm. As I’m writing this I feel a tug toward going camping so I can lie outside in a sleeping bag and gaze up at the sky. Have I ever actually done that, or is there any real chance that I ever will? Probably not.
On to the second poem, by Emily Dickinson, whom I sometimes find to be rather irritating with all of her dashes for punctuation and her occasional rather twee wording. (My impression of her may be colored more than it should be by Julie Harris’ one-woman show on the poet, The Belle of Amherst. Loved Harris, disliked Dickinson.) Ho-kay. Have I whetted your appetite yet? Here’s the poem in its entirely:
Lightly stepped a yellow star
To its lofty place —
Loosed the Moon her silver hat
From her lustral Face —
All of Evening softly lit
As an Astral Hall —
Father, I observed to Heaven,
You are punctual.
Once again it’s easy to lose sight of the overall drift here in singing this section, especially if as a choir you’re trying to get all those “k” sounds into the repetitions of the word “punctual.” So what is Dickinson’s point? She sees the heavens following a timetable: a particular star reaching its place (so there’s the image of the stars rising, as with Teasdale) and the moon coming out. The stars emerge right on time to light up the night sky, the “astral hall,” or hall of stars. If I may indulge in a little nit-picking here, “lustral” does not mean “lustrous,” as you might have thought. It has to do with ceremonial purification; you might have a “lustral pool” for cleansing before some kind of religious rite. But that meaning just doesn’t make sense. After wasting a fair amount of time chasing down references to this poem I’ve decided that Dickinson did indeed mean “lustrous,” but she didn’t want to sacrifice the internal rhyme of “lustral” and “astral.” She ends with a little joke: God (“Father”) is “punctual” in running the universe. (Rhyming “hall” and “punctual” is a bit of a joke, too.)
Now for Part III. Unlike the lyrics for the other two Nocturnes, these lines are only a small part of a much longer poem, this one by Walt Whitman, “Passage to India,” from his book of poetry Leaves of Grass. Forrest has taken lines from sections 5 and 8 for his piece, choosing those ideas and images that fit into the overall theme of the Nocturnes, that of the majesty and splendor of the heavens. In reality, if you read the entire poem, Whitman’s emphasis is centered on the wonders of the modern world and how the East and the West, and past and the present, can all be united as one. If he were around today we’d call him a globalist!
Here are the lines from our piece:
O vast Rondure, swimming in space!
Covered (all) over with pow’r and beauty!
Alternate light and day, and teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable, high processions of sun and moon,
And countless stars above;
O transcendant! Light of the Light!
Shedding forth universes, thou centre of them!
Mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving!
Thou moral, spiritual fountain! Affection’s source!
Thou reservoir! Thou pulse!
Thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
That circling move, in order, safe, harmonious,
Across the shapeless vastnesses of space.
Do the above lines bring an echo to your mind of the wonderful piece by Ola Gjeilo, “Across the Vast, Eternal Sky”? They do for me.
I could go on and on about Whitman’s imagery in just this brief snippet from the original poem, but I’m aware that perhaps you, dear readers, are not as enamored of poetic language as I am, former English teacher and all that. So let me just point out that Whitman is modern in his sense of the earth being united but also brings in the ancient idea of the earth being at the center of the universe. This idea is especially clear when he calls the earth “thou centre,” and makes it the “motive” (the mover, the engine) of “stars, suns, systems, that circling move.” You get the picture of the earth pulling everything along, keeping everything in place, as it moves through space. It may not be a scientifically correct picture, but it’s pretty inspiring. And it’s not just that the earth is the physical center of everything; it’s the spiritual and emotional center, too, the source of the “true, the good, the loving!” The “moral, spiritual fountain! Affection’s source!” (Whitman is awfully fond of exclamation points. I can relate!)
It would be interesting to know how Dan Forrest came to choose these three particular poems. He says in his composer’s note on the sheet music that he had received a commission for a piece involving chorus and percussion ensemble at a time when he’d been marveling at the night skies over the plains of Kansas. “I chose three texts about stars which were penned by different authors in diverse styles, but which all expressed a sense of wonder at the night sky.” I guess we’ll let it go at that.
Really nice performance below from BYU:
© Debi Simons
