CHAPTER 18

From Sunday at Nine (1949)

Scripts for Two Radio Broadcasts

Good evening. This is Muriel Rukeyser. Tonight I am offering to you the first in a series of hours called Sunday at Nine. The program represents a new venture on the part of this station and myself, although the reading of poetry and the playing of music combine to make one of the oldest pleasures of the world.1

Radio has in the last years brought fine music into your home—first-rate contemporary music and indeed, a wide range of the music of many countries and many times. As we have grown used to asking for more and better and more brilliantly heard music, stations—like this one—have built programs around fine music. And, during these years of a growing feeling for music heard again and again, we have been aware of the place of radio in the story. We have been aware, too, of the place of the musician in our lives. It has changed. From the choice we used to have—of the music-maker seen as a decorative, romantic, and slightly foreign person, or as a useless, clowning long-hair, and still foreign to most of us—we have come, largely through radio, to know the musicians as givers and sharers in our life as a people.

But none of this warmth has come as yet into our feeling for poetry. What is poetry to us—even to those whose lives are deep in poems? It is still foreign, and we do not let it enter our daily life. Do you remember the poems of your early childhood—the far rhymes and games of the beginning, the little songs to which you woke and went to sleep? We all remember them. But, since childhood, to many of us poetry has become a matter of distaste. To recite is one thing: one of the qualifications for an announcer, listed by an enormous network among “good voice” and “correct pronunciation” is “the ability to read and interpret poetry.” The other side of the picture is told perfectly in a letter written ninety years ago by the wife of the author of Moby Dick. Mrs. Melville said to her mother—and you can hear the misery of her words—“Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.”2 What is this distaste for poetry? If you ask your friends about it, you will find, as I have, that they will give you the same answers. Your friends may say that they have not the time for poetry. Now this is a curious position to take; for poetry, of all the arts that live in time—music, theatre, movies, writing—poetry is the briefest and most compact of these. Or your friends may say that they are bored by poetry. If you hear this, try one or two further questions. You will find that “bored” means different things. One person will confess that he has been frightened off forever by taking apart lines of poetry in school, and that now he thinks of a poem simply as a set of constructions that should have been much more. One will have come from a theatre of war to be confronted with verse like “Bobolink, bobolink / Spink, spank, spink.”3 One will tell you that, try as he will, he cannot understand poetry, and particularly, modern poetry . . . it is intellectual, confused, obscure. Almost any friend, if you ask a man, will finally tell you that there is something effeminate about the whole thing.4 In all of these answers, you will meet a shying-away that amounts to a fear of poetry.

Now a poem does invite, it does require, if it is any good. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response from you. But it is not a mainly mental response; it is total, but it is reached through the emotions. A first-rate poem, a fine poem, will reach you intellectually . . . or may I say that when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too . . . but the way is through emotion . . . through what we call feeling.5

What I would like to do in these evenings is to read to you, for a few minutes, from among the most immediate poems I know, and then, for the rest of the hour, to play recorded music—music which I have chosen to go with the poetry.6 Much of what we will read is contemporary, and much is American. But, later, we will be turning many times to other places and other centuries; and, after three Sundays of reading poems which you may find in books, the fourth Sunday will always be another kind of evening. Three Sundays from tonight, for example, Sunday at Nine will offer an evening of the blues, their words and their music. And on other fourth Sundays, we will have movie poetry and movie music, children’s poetry, street cries, theatre poetry . . . and so on. These programs are a new venture for me, and I am excited by the possibilities. I hope you will be, too; and that this new venture will give you a many-sided enjoyment. The opinions and the voice on Sunday at Nine will be, chiefly, mine. And now let us have the poems.

Episode One: Emily Dickinson

The legend of Emily Dickinson can now be seen receding like a trick movie sequence into the empty unreal distance.7 With the publication of Bolts of Melody, and the disclosure of more of her story in Ancestors’ Brocades, a full life begins to make coherence out of all the flashes and fragments of greatness we had until now.8 The rareness of the woman, the rareness of her gift, and her view of life as rareness—of moment and communication—all come through. Emily Dickinson wrote this poem:

Your thoughts don’t have words every day,

They come a single time

Like signal esoteric sips

Of sacramental wine,

Which while you taste so native seems,

So bounteous, so free,

You cannot comprehend its worth

Nor its infrequency.9

The gifts of Emily Dickinson seemed to be withdrawn. They were not: for we have them. The problem is simply one of display.

The blood is more showy than the breath

But cannot dance as well.10

Emily Dickinson was a recluse, yes. She lived in her house and her garden, locked away after an extremely social youth; and her queer concern, even for New England in her time, was truth. She knew how dangerous the light of truth.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,

Success in circuit lies,

Too bright for our infirm delight

The truth’s superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind,

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind.11

If truth is a light, what is a poet, then? She writes:

The poets light but lamps,

Themselves go out;

The wicks they stimulate,

If vital light

Inhere as do the suns,

Each age a lens

Disseminating their

Circumference.12

Our age disseminates Emily Dickinson. We see the directness in which she lived. She was a recluse not because the outer world was too much for her; she lived at the center of her intensities, and told us of them, of almost all of them. She gave us her animals of emotion; and she gives us her cat, in all its cathood and ferocity, in its moment of hope—

She sights a bird, she chuckles,

She flattens, then she crawls,

She runs without the look of feet,

Her eyes increase to balls

Her jaws stir, twitching, hungry,

Her teeth can hardly stand,

She leaps—but robin leaped the first!

Ah, pussy of the sand,

The hopes so juicy ripening

You almost bathed your tongue

When bliss disclosed a hundred wings

And fled with every one!13

Look at her poems of animals. The wit that sparkled in her house, in her town of Amherst, will let her say, with a half-grave scientific air: “After all birds have been investigated and laid aside . . .”14 And she will make the connection, over and over, between heaven and the season:

Spring is the period

Express from God.

Among the other seasons,

Himself abide,

But during March and April

None stir abroad

Without a cordial interview

With God.15

But in this book, we have—and this is more true, to me, here, than ever before in her poems—we have that structure and continuity of meaning packing the bud which makes the penetrating poet:

Bloom is result. To meet a flower

And casually glance

Would cause one scarcely to suspect

The minor circumstance

Assisting in the bright affair

So intricately done,

Then offered as a butterfly

To the meridian.

To pack the bud, oppose the worm,

Obtain its right of dew,

Adjust the heat, elude the wind,

Escape the prowling bee,

Great nature not to disappoint

Awaiting her that day—

To be a flower is profound

Responsibility!16

The poems we have heard—light, the cat, the flower, the spring—are an introduction to another set of meanings. Here is a poem which opens the door to a sense of greatness—that greatness which allows us all a sense of our own capacity:

I thought that nature was enough

Till human nature came,

But that the other did absorb

As firmament a flame.

Of human nature just aware

There added the divine

Brief struggle for capacity.

The power to contain

Is always as the contents,

But give a giant room

And you will lodge a giant

And not a lesser man.17

Emily Dickinson’s poems have a silence around them, like the silence of a still house. Her music is of several kinds. She is the soliloquy, the voice speaking alone among the darker sounds, as in the Soliloquy by Bernard Rogers. [Music]18

The base of poets like Emerson and Emily Dickinson is, too, in the familiar hymns of their youth and their churchgoing families. [Music]19 And her town, Puritan and keen, is around her, and her fiery, volcanic family. Emily Dickinson gives us one clue to her withdrawn life when she speaks of “Vesuvius at home”; and some of the witty and intricate music of Scarlatti, even in an Italy so far from nineteenth-century Amherst, tells us a little of that background.20 [Music]21 Music she heard, listening from the hall, was the piano music of Beethoven and Scarlatti and Bach. Now Gieseking plays a Bach partita. [Music]22

Emily Dickinson, in a world of values, could have no idea of her success or failure in the future. That she wanted fame with a lifelong hunger, we know. But that was a gambler’s chance, and on one of the thousand of little pieces of paper that hold her poems, is written this:

We lose because we win.

Gamblers,

Recollecting which,

Toss their dice again!23

Her whole life was consciously lived between the pit, into which many dare not look, and the heavens many have not the hope to see. In one of her poems that knocks against our hearts, asking the great questions, Emily Dickinson says:

A pit—but heaven over it,

And heaven beside,

And heaven abroad,

And yet—a pit,

With heaven over it.

To stir would be to slip,

To look would be to drop,

To dream, to sap the prop

That holds my chances up.

Ah, pit! With heaven over it!

The depth is all my thought,

I dare not ask my feet;

’Twould start us where we sit

So straight you’d scarce suspect

It was a pit, with fathoms under it,

It’s circuit just the same:

Seed, summer, tomb.

Who’s doom—

To whom?24

You may want the chance to look at these poems. Some of them live more fully on the page—for all they are crowded with sound—and we feel that they were written for silence, in silence. This poem speaks of rareness and loneliness and all the hope of unrepeatable music.25 But here are not the unheard melodies of Keats: this woman heard this strain:

Better than music, for I who heard it,

I was used to the birds before;

This was different, ’twas translation

Of all the tunes I knew, and more;

’Twasn’t contained like other stanza,

No one could play it the second time

But the composer, perfect Mozart,

Perish with him that keyless rhyme!

So children, assured that brooks in Eden

Bubbled a better melody,

Quaintly infer Eve’s great surrender,

Urging the feet that would not fly.

Children matured are wiser, mostly,

Eden a legend dimly told,

Eve and the anguish grandame’s story—

But I was telling a tune I heard.

Not such a strain the church baptizes

When the last saint goes up the aisles,

Not such a stanza shakes the silence

When the redemption strikes her bells.

Let me not lose its smallest cadence,

Humming for promise when alone,

Humming until my faint rehearsal

Drop into tune around the throne!26

Here is one of the poems that is devout as any love poem, any religious poem, any seed-poem could reach to be:

He was my host, he was my guest,

I never to this day

If I invited him could tell

Or he invited me.

So infinite our interview,

So intimate indeed,

Analysis like capsule seemed

To keeper of the seed.27

The pain of her life, with its conscious loss, its immediate untold agonies—that pain is given us:

One crucifixion is recorded only;

How many be

Is not affirmed of mathematics

Or history.

One Cavalry exhibited to stranger;

As many be

As persons or peninsulas.

Gethsemane

Is but a province in the being’s center;

India,

For journey or crusade’s achieving,

Too near.

Our Lord indeed bore compound witness,

And yet,

There’s newer, nearer crucifixion

Than that.28

“A pang is more conspicuous in spring,” Emily Dickinson writes.29 She is too strong in herself and her poetry to allow pain to remain without telling what carries it, to whom the terrible struggles come, and what withstands.

There is a strength in knowing that it can be borne

Although it tear.

What are the sinews of such cordage for

Except to bear?

The ship might be of satin had it not to fight.

To walk on tides requires cedar feet.30

These poems are a chart of the strengths of the spirit. Have you seen the table of colors that express the degrees of heated steel? That table reminds me of these poems. Here is one of the great poems of our language, I believe, that speaks for the profundities of love and loss, and the places of the spirit’s own right, and of the enlargement which is joy, even joy gone:

The things that never can come back are several—

Childhood, some forms of hope, the dead;

But joys, like men, may sometimes make a journey

And still abide.

We do not mourn for traveler or sailor,

Their routes are fair,

But think, enlarged, of all that they will tell us

Returning here.

“Here!” There are typic heres, foretold locations,

The spirit does not stand,

Himself at whatsoever fathom

His native land.31

The Mozart Duo in B-Flat speaks in a voice like that one of hers. [Music]32 And for her country with its river running through the hills, and the accent of New England, here is Charles Ives’s Housatonic. [Music]33 A ground-voice to her many gifts, it is hard to choose. I wish we could hear the little music of the lock which opens the chest where all her poems were kept. But here is Bach, with the pure voice that reaches directly, speaking with the openness of secrets we all know, in his First Sonata. [Outro music]34

Episode Four: The Blues

Good evening. This is Muriel Rukeyser with the fourth hour of Sunday at Nine.35 Tonight’s poetry does not rise out of the pages of books. If you want to look at these words, you will have to take them down yourselves, in nightclubs, in the South, in the places, still apart, where Negroes live—or at home, from records. Every fourth Sunday of this program we will listen to poems that have, as yet, no written connection with literature—not in the textbooks and histories, at any rate. But these poems, these songs, in the darkness of their music, in what they say, have power. They reach us, our bodies and our lives. This evening will be given to the blues. In the last few years, the attitudes toward jazz and toward the blues have split sharply, and we no longer have a small, isolated audience to listen to these penetrating and native songs. Instead, we have two groups: one group still stays away from everything connected with jazz and thinks of literature, and music, only in relation to what are known as art forms. The other group is devoted to jazz. With the frenzy of any religious group early in the history of its movement, this group listens devoutly, has built up commentaries of the riff and the break, and has set up a critical hierarchy around the trumpet solo.36 I am interested in the second group—the religious one—because I care very much about jazz and the blues. But I am curious about the gaps in their rapture. They are devoted to the blues. Every figure of this music, which preceded jazz, is familiar to them. The words alone—the words of the blues are forgotten, or at best glossed over.

Now it is impossible with these songs that shake you and reach you in fire and tears and in every kind of laughter—it is impossible to rip the words away from the music. In the first place, the form of the blues—a basic verse form—is built on repetition. The first line is repeated. It is as if the line itself were used as a rhyme. The song goes:

There’s a change in the ocean, a change in the deep blue sea,

There’s a change in the ocean, a change in the deep blue sea,

and then the third line resolves the verse:

You can bet yo’ life there ain’t no change in me.37

The songs we are having this evening are not about any subject; there is no driving theme, and although sadness has come to be identified with blues, there is a hot, untamable sadness which ranges from the homesickness of “Michigan water tastes like sherry wine” through the defiant shouting song of Lead Belly to the broken love of many of them, including the Mississippi of this music.38 [Music]39

Here is Bessie Smith in her power and unburied implacable song, full of triumph and full of despair, with “Young Woman’s Blues”:

See that long lonesome road

Lawd you know . . . it’s gonna end.

I’m a young woman

And ain’t done runnin’ roun’.40

It seems to me that in many ways the songs we are hearing this evening are, to us, what the troubadours’ songs were to Provence.41 It has been said that only a few of the troubadours wrote poetry of any great literary merit. But they were the founders of modern lyric poetry. Only a small number of tunes have survived among the poems. The blues have taken a whole language, and made song. But the values are completely different. Even the love sung by the blues is vastly different from the love celebrated by the old French songs, with their emphasis on patience, discretion, and secrecy, even the secrecy of the name of the beloved. The songs of the troubadours were made for the court, we are told; the music traveled with the traveling entertainers who juggled and sang. The “courts” for which the blues were made were the tours and the band contests, the “palaces” of Basin Street, the River excursion boats, and the nightclubs.42 Later, Tin Pan Alley learned to contrive blues: we’ll hear Hollywood versions, Tin Pan Alley blues, and music that uses blues in extended composition.43

Will you remember to listen to the words? One man says that the music is pure and clean, the lyrics impure and dirty, and another believes that the blues are more valuable as a source of folk poetry than of folk music. You may hear some things easy to let pass. I think you will also hear much poetry, in its first emergence, raw, intense, reaching your life.

Have to count these blues, so I can say them all. We go on with Bessie Smith, singing “Midnight”:

[Music]

Daddy, daddy, please come back to me

Your mama’s lonesome as she can be.

You left me at midnight, clocks were striking twelve,

You left me at midnight, clocks were striking twelve,

To face this cruel world all by myself.44

And now Bessie Smith sings “Cold in Hand”:

[Music]

I got a hardworkin’ man

The way he treats me, I don’t understand . . .

[. . .]

Now I don’t want that man

Because he’s gone cold in hand.45

Billie Holiday has been compared often to Bessie Smith. Her song is “Strange Fruit”; here she sings, first, “Long Gone Blues”:

[Music]

I’ve been your slave

Ever since I’ve been your babe

But before I see you go

I see you in your grave.46

And now Billie Holiday sings her own “Billie’s Blues”:

[Music]

I love my man

I’m a liar if I say I don’t

But I’ll quit my man

I’m a liar if I say I won’t47

Josh White has not been able to get permission from many nightclub owners to sing “T. B. Blues.” The naked life comes through his inflection and his guitar:

[Music]

Mmmmmm the T.B.’s killin’ me

Ah, Lord, the T.B.’s killin’ me

Got the tuberculosis, consumption killin’ me.48

And another Josh White song, “Fare Thee Well Blues”:

[Music]

I had a gal, she was long and tall,

She moved her body like a cannonball.

Fare thee well, oh honey, fare thee well.49

One of the old blues, which I am drawn to again and again for its poem: “O come all you women and listen to my tale of woe / I got consumption of the heart, I feel myself sinkin’ slow.”

Sara Martin, singing “Death Sting Me.” [Music]50

The father of the blues, W.C. Handy, gave us the most far-reaching blues of all. Listening to his own version and that of Louis Armstrong is a very different matter from hearing Billie Holiday’s or the Hollywood treatment. Bing Crosby does another thing with the song, filling it with his charm and his ease:

[Music]

I hate to see that evening sun go down

’Cause my baby, he’s gone left this town.51

Jelly Roll Morton seems to me a unique singer. New Orleans music is here, and the man sitting at his loose and blue piano. [Music]52

On music paper, another style, in some ways only a decoration, comes in, and the earlier, unwritten music changes, reaches a wider audience, and then is lost or, if you like, absorbed into the bloodstream of the people. “Blues in the Night” is a written, contrived blues; it comes closest of the professional songs to the color and flow of the great ones, and it stakes out again the wide night-country, “from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, / Wherever the four winds blow”; and Gershwin orchestrated the material into the “Rhapsody’s” big city music.53 [Music]54

But once more to the pillar, the source-music, the poetry behind much of our talk, much of our song—“St. Louis Blues.” [Outro music]55

(Unpublished, 1949)