Dance This Silence Down Through The Morning

I hosted an Easter Music Lyrics Quiz on Facebook last week-end and the title of today's blog was one of several clues that the hive mind failed to solve, to my considerable surprise. It's a line from what I'd previously considered was a well-known song, 'Mr Jones'  - a big hit for the band Counting Crows in the mid 1990s, from their debut LP. I find it an arresting lyric because it sounds poetic: "Dance this silence down through the morning". What does that mean? (to quote a particularly annoying earworm from a current TV advertisement for a range of vacuum cleaners). And does it really matter?  I shall discuss...

Here's what I think. At that end of the scale of expression closest to pure sound (music), there exist forms of words which are incantations, almost spell-like, where the meaning of the words (if indeed they have a logical meaning) is of secondary importance to the sound and sensation they produce. Slide just a little way from there in the direction of the prosaic and you have phrases like the one I've quoted, in lyrics or poems where a certain mystique resides, where language and imagery are allusive, where meaning may be hard to grasp, and where the sounds and sensations the words evoke are more powerful, more important than any concerns of realism or logical sense. That's the beauty and appeal of a line like "Dance this silence down through the morning". It means whatever you want it to mean. It's seductive in the way it allows, even demands, that the reader should engage his or her imagination in making something of it. May I rest my case there?

What I do know, from re-listening to that first Counting Crows album on my daily walks along the promenade this week, is that a new layer of strong impressions has been laid upon 'August And Everything After ', such that every time I hear it in future, it will not only take me back to the Shire of Herts circa 1993 but also to Blackpool's glorious sun-drenched though largely deserted seafront in the weird Covid spring of 2020.

For a poem this week, I've done something a little ekphrastic, based on the photograph above, related to the lyric title of the blog, with a nod to Tchaikovsky and in recognition of the weight of social distancing that is pressing all our lives out of their customary shapes. This may not be its final form, but I put it out as is... I hope you like it.

Duende*
Black swan pirouettes in slow emotion
to the score in her head, a slender isolate
dancing in silence down through the morning,
rehearsing the roles to which she's been bred,
this Odette/Odile, entrancing no one, soundlessly.

No curtain call as she curtseys breathless,
just the iron walls of the cavernous hangar
where by force of will day after day she pushes
body and soul through a repertoire missing its king,
bereft of its cast of supporting wings. But better is this

unobserved balletic routine, this exacting,
inspiring, quietly beautiful dance of defiance
while she has power in her young lungs; far better
than those long hours of worry each night, reverted
to human form, wondering fearful if her turn might come.

* a Spanish word meaning (ambiguously and appropriately): inspiration or evil spirit.

As an uplifting musical bonus, here's a link to  Mr Jones  (Just click on the song title to play it.)

Thanks for reading. Stay sprightly,  S ;-)