A Farm Picture

In a post a few years ago I reprinted a short poem by Coleridge, written in 1828, of which Richard Holmes said 'this fragment of Dutch landscape is an almost perfect imagist poem'.  In an article in the New York Review (24 June), Christopher Benfey quotes Robert Hass, editor of a Walt Whitman collection, describing some of Whitman's poems as anticipating 'the imagist procedures of the young modernists who came a half century later.'  These very short poems, 'those "brilliant and surprising experiments" in which, in three or four lines, Whitman composes a snapshot view', include 'The Runner', 'A Paumonok Picture' and 'Cavalry Crossing a Ford'.  One of them is, in effect, a three line landscape painting, 'A Farm Picture' (1865):

THROUGH the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding;
And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away

Benfey says that Whitman 'loved art galleries and one can imagine him trying, in such poems, to capture some of the effects of the painters of his time, such as the "haze and vista" of the landscape paintings of Martin Johnson Heade...'  Heade, one of those American artists subsequently described as luminists for their interest in light effects, began painting landscapes in the early 1860s and became best known for his salt marsh paintings.  He is also one of the four cultural figures examined in Christopher Benfey's recent book A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe & Martin Johnson Heade.

Martin Johnson Heade, Newburyport Meadows, c1872-8

Source: Artchive

St Louis zinc smelting establishments

I can't resist including another piece from The Poet's Eye. Geoffrey Grigson includes the whole of Walt Whitman's 'Plate Glass Notes', a diary entry for November 1879, published in November Boughs. In the extract I've reproduced here, Whitman returns from the plate glass works where he had seen 'vast, rude halls, with immense play of shifting shade, and slow-moving currents of smoke and steam, and shafts of light, sometimes sun, striking in from above with effects that would have fill’d Michel Angelo with rapture'. These sights prepare him for another sublime scene when he arrives at St Louis: the zinc smelting establishments...

'Coming back to St. Louis this evening, at sundown, and for over an hour afterward, we follow’d the Mississippi, close by its western bank, giving me an ampler view of the river, and with effects a little different from any yet. In the eastern sky hung the planet Mars, just up, and of a very clear and vivid yellow. It was a soothing and pensive hour—the spread of the river off there in the half-light—the glints of the down-bound steamboats plodding along—and that yellow orb (apparently twice as large and significant as usual) above the Illinois shore. (All along, these nights, nothing can exceed the calm, fierce, golden, glistening domination of Mars over all the stars in the sky.)

As we came nearer St. Louis, the night having well set in, I saw some (to me) novel effects in the zinc smelting establishments, the tall chimneys belching flames at the top, while inside through the openings at the facades of the great tanks burst forth (in regular position) hundreds of fierce tufts of a peculiar blue (or green) flame, of a purity and intensity, like electric lights—illuminating not only the great buildings themselves, but far and near outside, like hues of the aurora borealis, only more vivid...'

Landscape Lieder

The Lied and Art Song Texts Page is a fascinating archive of poetry that has been set to music. For example, look up John Clare and you can read the text for Ivor Gurney’s ‘Ploughman Singing’ (1920) or Benjamin Britten’s setting of ‘The Evening Primrose’ (one of Britten’s Five Flower songs from 1950, the others being Robert Herrick’s ‘To Daffodils’ and ‘The Succession of the Four Sweet Months’, George Crabbe’s ‘Marsh Flowers’ and the anonymous ‘Ballad of Green Broom’).

Here are a selection of ten more landscape lieder by famous composers:

• Sir Arthur Bliss’s ‘The Ballads of the Four Seasons’ based on the poems of Li Po
• John Cage’s ‘Solo for Voice 49 (relevant) - The Year Begins To Be Ripe’, which makes use of text by Henry David Thoreau.
• Goethe’s ‘Gefunden’ (‘I walked in the woods’), set by Richard Strauss
• Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ set by Claude Debussy
• Ralph Vaughan Williams’ version of Housman’s ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble’, from A Shropshire Lad.
• The spring poem ‘When daisies pied and violets blue’ from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost set by, among others, Igor Stravinsky
• Milton Babbitt’s version of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’
• Josef von Eichendorff’s poem ‘Forest Maiden’, used by both Hugo Wolf and Robert Schumann.
• Elliott Carter’s setting of Walt Whitman's verse in ‘Warble for Lilac Time’
• ‘Nature, the gentlest mother’, one of Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.