I read this poem for the first time in June:
For a few days after I read it, this poem felt like the only thing in the world. Maybe it was something about the moment it found me in. I was feeling creative and young and a little bit wild (Note: grass! I was sitting outside!) and this young boy in spring, in Germany, falling in love, was so clear and so emotionally complex to the reader, thanks to Oliver’s particular writing style and the story her brief poem tells.
If you don’t already know, which I didn’t really, Robert Schumann was an early 18th-century German composer and pianist of the Romantic period. In the spring of 1840, he married Clara Schumann, a more famous pianist than himself, and the two lived together in Germany for their entire married life, excepting his last two years, which he spent in a sanatorium after trying and failing to drown himself in the River Rhine. Oliver’s poem opens with an image of him in the asylum, which casts a shadow on the later images of his hopeful youth. His life story is really interesting, and his music is famous for good reason. From the little I know about classical music, he wrote some of the good stuff.
This poem reignited my dormant interest in classical music, which I have been listening to more and more since I first read this poem in June. I like when a piece of art leads me to a different piece of art.1
While I’ve never composed a piano piece inspired by my favorite poem or novel, I have written some poems in response to art that I love. This experience is always so fun. My current poetry workshop is doing a unit on ekphrasis next week, and it is a writing assignment I feel actually prepared for.
It’s difficult to pull a poem from nothing—it’s impossible, actually. Without a starting point of emotion or experience, there can be no poem. But art that makes us feel gives us a solid base on which to balance our own words and build our own stories. Not that ekphrasis is easier than other kinds of writing, but it surely leaves the artist feeling connected to something greater than herself—to a community of people who create art as a way of releasing something, often a feeling or experience, and then get to see how others react to their thing, as they have chosen to represent it. Ekphrasis, to me, is an exciting kind of reaction. The things you choose to write (or paint, or sing, or dance) about are just as important as the way you write (or paint or sing or dance) about them.
So Mary Oliver must have enjoyed, or at least found interesting, the music and story of Robert Schumann, or she would not have written this poem. I am glad she did, because it has led me to this Spotify playlist which I now listen to every day and whose cover made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it.
Some of the songs on this playlist are part of his Myrthen, Op. 25, a song cycle of twenty-six songs (or ”lieder”) that he wrote for Clara, his then fiancée, and gifted to her on the eve of their wedding in the spring of 1840. Each of these songs sets an already-loved poem to a piece of classical music, to create what is called a “lied,” all of which I learned only after reading Oliver’s poem and later, Robert Schumann’s Wikipedia.2
After being so excited about Oliver’s poem and the ability of art to inspire art, I nearly pissed myself when I read that much of Schumann’s own work was inspired by poems and novels he enjoyed. What a cycle! What a wonderful, magical cycle of beauty and art and inspiration and more art! And we exist within it! We get to witness and participate!
Anyways. For whatever reason, I think about this poem every day. And look at that playlist cover. Robert! Perhaps he was fond of house plants?
Do you listen to classical music? Do you like knowing the history and details of the art you consume, or are you content to just enjoy it? I can never quite decide for myself. Have you ever written about your favorite painting, or painted about your favorite poem? You should. Some inspired young artist will thank you someday! Maybe in twenty years some Gen Beta Spotify intern will make a Canva graphic using a photo of you from that one time you had a really bad haircut.
I’m thinking I’ll write a poem about Clara. She was the more famous of the two, after all.
I don’t pretend to know anything about classical music. I listen to it regularly, but that’s about the extent of my engagement with it. I am no snob.