Spring

Blooming feelings pushed her on,
They bound her in them and the one
She wanted, new life in her breast;
She thought she'd torn it from her chest.


No-one spoke as she ran out,
The bloom of beauty plucked, her shout
Was swallowed in the morning air -
When they looked there was no-one there.


His arms' warmth coursed through every vein,
Her old wound's scar felt new again.
The sun drew halos in her hair
And green shoots sprang up everywhere.


for S


Background


Originally there were only the first two verses, which I found in a notebook I wrote in for a while. I wanted to record another song (after Silence), and I came across this and thought it might work. I sent it to my friend S, who wanted to know what happened next, and so I resolved it in a third verse. It's one of my favourite poems I've done, certainly of my songs. (It's happy, for a start, even if only on external cajoling...)


Technically


Still long ballad metre, like Silence, though the first lines of the first two verses have the initial weak syllable elided (known as acephalous lines, from the Greek for "headless"). When I write songs, generally, I can be a little freer with the metre (and simpler with the rhyme scheme) because it's accompanied. In fact, you almost get towards accentual-syllabic with some songs - but I'll save that for another post.


In case you're wondering, short ballad metre, or just ballad metre, is the classic tetrameter/trimeter pair as in "Becaúse I coúld not stóp for Deáth / He kíndly stópped for mé". Some people think that the original folk metre was seven iambs to a line (heptameter?), and then the normal pause in the line (caesura, Latin for "cut", pronounced siz-YOOR-uh if you're unsure) became strong enough to cut the line more or less in half permanently. In fact, reuniting the two halves is called writing in fourteeners, from the syllable count.


Links


Here's the rest of the Emily Dickinson poem


I recorded it with my brother playing guitar, it's on MySpace. I really like his guitar part, which he produced completely ignoring my direction, thank God. He said he was channelling Nick Drake, bastard that he is.