by Whitman · Cluster: Birds · Music and Song · Nightingale
Abstract
A regimental band playing Italian opera in the wild Dakota night; nature listens, and art and wilderness find unexpected rapport.
Connections
Motifs: Music and Song, Nature Themes & Concepts: Nature vs Civilization, Beauty Settings: American Frontier
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: AUTUMN RIVULETS
[“The Seventeenth—the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.”]
Through the soft evening air enwinding all, Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds, In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes, Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial, (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here, Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house, Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home, Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish, And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;) Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown, Music, Italian music in Dakota.
While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm, Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses, Acknowledging rapport however far remov’d, (As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,) Listens well pleas’d.