Another fine poem from Joe Stickney:<\/p>\n
This is the violin. If you remember –
\nOne afternoon late, in the early days,
\nOne of those inconsolable December
\nTwilights of city haze,
\nYou came to teach me how the hardened fingers
\nMust drop and nail the music down, and how
\nThe sound then drags and nettled cries, then lingers
\nAfter the dying bow. –
\nFor so all that could never be is given
\nAnd flutters off these piteously thin
\nStrings, till the night of a midsummer heaven
\nQuivers . . . a violin.
\nI struggled, and alongside of a duty,
\nA nagging everyday-long commonplace!
\nI loved this hopeless exercise of beauty
\nLike an allotted grace, –
\nThe changing scales and broken chords, the trying
\nFrom sombre notes below to catch the mark,
\nI have it all thro’ my heart, I tell you, crying
\nChildishly in the dark.
\n
\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\nReference:<\/em>
\nPoem XXVI, page 237, of:
\nTrumbull Stickney [1966]: The Poems of Trumbull Stickney<\/em>. Selected and edited by Amberys R. Whittle.\u00a0 New York, NY, USA:\u00a0 Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
\nPrevious poems by Trumbull Stickney here<\/a>, and previous poetry posts here<\/a>.\u00a0 Another poem about a violin, by Vadim Delone, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another fine poem from Joe Stickney: This is the violin. If you remember – One afternoon late, in the early days, One of those inconsolable December Twilights of city haze, You came to teach me how the hardened fingers Must drop and nail the music down, and how The sound then drags and nettled cries, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,63,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-poetry","category-violin","p1","y2009","m04","d19","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}