This post is an addendum to my recent post about the poet Galway Kinnell.

If you’re going to write a music-of-the-sphere and music-of-the-spheres poem, here’s a better way to do it than Kinnell’s. It’s by an old UD favorite, James Schuyler. I’ve gone to the trouble to make it a seasonally appropriate choice.

As always, I’ll interrupt the poem constantly with my commentary. Go here for the poem unmussed.

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A MAN IN BLUE

Under the French horns of a November afternoon [Just start in on the idea that sometimes, some seasons, earthly days introduce themselves so beautifully they seem positively symphonic. Say French horns to convey the high-style baroque rarity of these particular earth-tones. Don’t talk about how moved you are by the music of the globe, the way Kinnell does…. Nice assonance, too – all those ers.]
a man in blue is raking leaves [So this poem will be an extended bit of the poet’s consciousness as he gazes, in autumn, at an ordinary sight – a man in blue (overalls? jeans? in blue as in set beneath a brilliant blue sky?) raking. Like many imagistic poems, this one will follow the thoughts of a speaker as a particular image dominates and complicates his thought. Call it stream of consciousness or interior monologue if you’d like.]
with a wide wooden rake (whose teeth are pegs
or rather, dowels). Next door
boys play soccer: “You got to start
over!” sort of. [Sort of. Or rather. This is hip relaxed New York School verse – see also Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery – which will capture the vague immediacies of world-apprehension, the mind-ramble of a poet.] A round attic window
in a radiant gray house waits like a kettledrum. [The sun is obviously shining brightly – the gray of the house has been made radiant – so we can gather that the man in blue is certainly a man in a blue sky. The poet works his music of the sphere metaphor with the round window as a kettledrum awaiting its entry after the horns.] –
“You got to start . . .” [Repeating this phrase, the poet conveys his continued musing over it. It has obviously attracted his attention and thought. Is he thinking of the earthly as well as human imperative to keep going? The seasonal renewing recurrences of the globe, and our own felt commitment, despite all setback and time-passage, to persisting and thriving?] The Brahmsian day
lapses from waltz to march. [So now he is gathering up his unattributed instrumental references into a particular composer. His mind has wandered – lapsed – from stray instrumental sounds to a specific instance of instrumental music: something by Brahms. And we’re picking up steam here as we go – from the slower waltz to the snappier march, early afternoon to full midday, as the poet sits and muses.] The grass,
rough-cropped as Bruno Walter’s hair, [The sweet, silly, random, way-charming feel of the New York School poem. Start with an absurdity but a truth – hanging around a residential street on a beautiful autumn day can make you so symphonically blissful that you’ll start hearing French horns – and then just keep going, push it deeper and deeper as your free mind and spirit play with those instruments and their associations.]
is stretched, strewn and humped beneath a sycamore
wide and high as an idea of heaven [I don’t think we’re in modernism anymore. Here’s TS Eliot that same day, a few hours later:

[Oh – and Schuyler has in fact now gone directly to heaven – the immense and lovely sycamore puts him in mind of the vastness and loftiness of heaven – but he will cut off at the knees any impulse to get late Romantic about that (the music it prompts in the brain can be late Romantic, but the language the modern poet brings to the phenom will be modern).]
in which Brahms turns his face like a bearded thumb
and says, “There is something I must tell you!”
to Bruno Walter. “In the first movement
of my Second, think of it as a family
planning where to go next summer
in terms of other summers. A material ecstasy,
subdued, recollective.” [And this is how he will cut it off: He will conclude his poem with a fantasied exchanged between composer and conductor about Symphony 2, Movement 1. This is total adorable imaginative freedom on the part of the poet; the appeal and insight of this poem will not be poignantly, longingly, metaphysical – as in Kinnell – but rather it will reside in the hilariously alive play of a creative mind. Notice indeed how subversive of Romanticism Schuyler’s piece is: Brahms himself is eager to downplay the heavy-breathing significance of the movement, insisting to the conductor that he interpret it rather as expressing simple happy domesticity: a family planning a summer vacation: a material ecstasy. Bound, delightedly, to the earth.] Bruno Walter
in a funny jacket with a turned-up collar
says, “Let me sing it for you.”
He waves his hands and through the vocalese-shaped spaces
of naked elms he draws a copper beech
ignited with a few late leaves. [So, Brahms, you mean in this passage where you go lalala duhduhduh bahbahbah… Walter takes up his baton and waves his hands and sings it for us and creates a picture, the sort of picture the late romantic setting has conjured in the head of the poet… Sound, word, song, image, merge in this materially ecstatic synesthesia.] He bluely glazes
a rhododendron “a sea of leaves” against gold grass. [A magician, the conductor lifts his wand and sets the world late romantically alight, makes a poetic phrase of a rhododendron.]
There is a snapping from the brightwork
of parked and rolling cars.
There almost has to be a heaven! [The poet always brings us back to the immediate local reality: The polished metalwork of the cars on the street and at the curbs gives a gloss to the music/scene – the ordinary machinery of modern life also has its radiance to contribute to the earth-symphony.] so there could be
a place for Bruno Walter
who never needed the cry of a baton.
Immortality—
in a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy
Magnavox from which a forte
drops like a used Brillo Pad?
Frayed. But it’s hard to think of the sky as a thick glass floor
with thick-soled Viennese boots tromping about on it.
It’s a whole lot harder thinking of Brahms
in something soft, white, and flowing. [You can record Bruno/Brahms for the ages on your scratchy old Magnavox which by now creates a painfully rough sound. It might be authentic, but it doesn’t transport you. Material, yes, but too material, too thick-souled. On the other hand, it’s just as non-transporting to try to turn the composer and conductor into angels. We don’t do angels around here.]
“Life,” he cries (here, in the last movement),
“is something more than beer and skittles!” [Well, this is pure Schuyler. Of all modern poets, he seems to UD the one most committed to trying to express the sheer weird pulsating bliss of being alive. The crazy running around French horny finale in the Brahms is completely full of beans, after all.]
“And the something more
is a whole lot better than beer and skittles,”
says Bruno Walter,
darkly, under the sod. I don’t suppose it seems so dark
to a root. Who are these men in evening coats?
What are these thumps?
Where is Brahms?
And Bruno Walter?
Ensconced in resonant plump easy chairs
covered with scuffed brown leather
in a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke
(sycamore, tobacco, other),
their nobility wound in a finale
like this calico cat
asleep, curled up in a breadbasket,
on a sideboard where the sun falls.