Scream-of-Consciousness

Interstate 40 at 3:00 a.m.
Garrison Keillor is wrong.
There are times and places it is dead useful to have been an English major.
Say, for instance, in the middle of the Arizona desert in the middle of night, when your husband is snoring in the seat next to you, your dog is snoring in the seat behind you, and the bitter death-juice some truck stops refer to (for want of a better word) as "coffee" is no longer having any effect.
And there is a long highway behind you and a long highway in front of you and the scenery would be beautiful if you could actually see it, but because it is winter you figure the sun won't actually rise until about the time you reach Barstow... which, on reflection, you would rather go through without the benefit of daylight, because some things are worse than truck stop "coffee".
And there's no one you can call and talk to in order to stay awake, because the rest of the world, being more sensible, is in bed asleep, and even if you were to call anyway and wake someone up (out of spite more than anything else, since *you* can't sleep, so why should they?), there's the little problem of the almost dollar a minute in cellphone roaming charges that would result.
In order to remain alert and awake (and thus alive) on such occasions, the English Major portion of my brain snaps into gear, and I concentrate on remembering 14th and 15th century poetry.
Those of you who have had to memorize the blasted things at one time or another will understand... if you can muster your wits sufficiently at three in the morning to recite the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales ("Whan that April with his showres soote..."), then driving a car becomes child's play in comparison.
My two favorites in such circumstances are anonymous "Ballads" of the era... "Sir Patrick Spens" and "Get Up and Bar the Door".
And then my brain begins to take bizarre turns.
Somewhere between Flagstaff and Kingman I started musing on the fact that although these poems are called "Ballads", they are not set to music. And, hey, maybe they should be.
I tried setting "Sir Patrick Spens" to "Greensleeves" first, but it didn't quite work, mostly because each stanza of the poem is only four lines long and Greensleeves requires eight because of the refrain... you could alternate stanzas between the verse melody and refrain melody, except the poem has eleven stanzas, so you'd have to end it on the verse and not the refrain. You could solve by repeating the first stanza at the very end, thus making it the twelfth stanza (which is cool, because lots of folk songs come full circle like that) but I wasn't quite satisfied.
So then I thought about the fact that the poem is basically about a shipwreck in bad weather, and a man who knows he's being sent to his death but goes anyway.
And I set it to the tune (if you can call it that) of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (or, as I once heard it called, The Wreck of the Gordon Lightfoot).
And that worked surprisingly well.
You can try it yourself if you like.
If you've got the old black Norton Anthology of Poetry, it's on pages 74-75.
Tell me which one you prefer.
This may end up like Auld Lang Syne, with its two melodies... the one Burns liked, and the one everybody sings today because the good one is too complicated.
As for "Get Up and Bar...", I may need to make that an audioblog post later on.

posted by lisamarlene @ 7:10 AM