Winter again

Wintry walk — in a Maryland park

Grey trunks

Leafless limbs shiv’ring
At sharp winter’s blast; beneath:
Roots clasp cold comfort.
— Tony Lee

Each year time out of mind communities of people have framed winter’s first phase with festivities where light and gay color, preferably green, play a central role. In college (1960s a Queens College, CUNY) I read and as a central text of the first half of British literature (1990s at George Mason) I taught the wonderfully marvelous medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, accompanied by much explication where we were told why red was the other favored color, but I’ve forgotten now (it has to do with blood, berries, mistletoe, legends). Still, without knowing why but because it was there and caught our eyes Izzy and I must’ve bought in the past three years (since we’ve been putting up a tree again) a glittery red garland. It’s in such good shape. (Some of our ornaments go back to before Izzy was born, most at least 6 years old. We have far more than we can put on our nowadays tiny trees). It was the final wrap round this year’s decorating:

Each year for some 15 years I’ve also taken down from the attic my pottery penguin dressed for snow sports, whom I named Colin. At night when I plug him in, he too glitters:

This year I bought him a small friend, to sit by said tree too, a silvery squirrel: funnily, my male cat Ian likes to sit next to this squirrel. It is clearly a harmless presence. She is as yet nameless.

We have bought token but wanted presents to exchange with Laura and Rob six days from now (when we are all to go to the Kennedy Center to see An American in Paris, and after eat out somewhere nice), and tomorrow I’ll send out what paper cards I have to exchange, and many more electronic. We added a new (we hope fun) ritual to our usual Jewish Christmas (Izzy and I go to a movie and then eat out Asian food on the 25th, with the next Boxing Day spent at a museum): on Christmas eve’s afternoon an English Christmas pantomime we found happens each year in Bear and Bush tavern style in a small Alexandria City theater. Jim enjoyed these so (we managed over the years to find three, twice in DC and once at the English embassy), especially the music hall routines that usually accompany them.

Our miniature Maple outside in front — dusk, close-up (this year I had an outside socket installed)

I seem to have forgotten to mention that about three weeks ago I made my way to an evening of Gilbert and Sullivan at the Hirshhorn museum — a Smithsonian event where a professor accompanied about 2 hours of brilliantly chosen clips from films of great productions, interspersed by a local Georgetown theater group (college students) who each spring do a full G&S production. It was great fun, a full auditorium, but I realize that most of the people there had not seen much G&S where I have seen so many — from my years living with Jim. It ended on one of my favorites, which was one most of the people in the audience seemed not to know, from the ending of The Yeoman of the Guard, “I have a song to sing O”. Jim said at the time the sad ending of the play and this song were unusual for G&S.

It brings to mind a song I was led to listen to today, which I’ll close on.

I was coming to the end of the 9th Poldark novel, The Miller’s Dance, where Clowance Poldark, of the Napoleonic era heroines (the year 1812) seems about to self-destruct by knowingly marrying a man she knows to be violent, a liar, possessive, unreasonable, and yet is drawn to — reminding me of what Chaucer and Shakespeare say about the love of Troilus and Cressida that they drink down the poison as it answers some need in their veins (an enthralling drug). She is at an assembly ball and Valentine (a twisted soul himself, whom she thinks is her cousin but is her half-brother) calls for “The Miller’s Dance.” The characters do not know this dance as it seems to be an older one, and we are told it begins with long resonant strings, “creating a deep echoing note such as is heard before a Scottish reel.

Gradually the dance emerges as couples follow a caller and dance round a solitary man kneeling on a sheaf of corn. In the song variant written probably by Graham, the figure counts “his corn and taxes the sun,” but when it comes to money, all vanishes and at the word “gone,” the couples must change partners. Whoever remains in the middle partnerless is pelted by what comes to hand (cake, ribbons, nuts, candied food). In this civilized time all is a “noisy lark but the heavy beat of the music and its peculiarly melancholy rhythm” has an effect of “old Cornish tunes, building an emotion by its endless repetition and conjuring up superstitions and practices which could not so easily survive the night.” The narrator wonders if the “sacrificial centre” had once upon a time “been stoned.” (The archaic basis of the story and motifs of Sir Gawain and his Green Knight is similarly atavistic — someone bewitched, someone beheaded.)

Clowance enjoys the wild dancing and exchanges, half-reeling with exhaustion, until it comes to her this music had “been communicating something to her which had been taken out of her psychic self … ” For her the miller is this man she is trying to break off from, “an unshriven spirit,” “vigorous, brash fascinating … hair, muscle, sinew … ready to fight … to demand what he thought to be his,charming, dominating, ruthless …”

I went about to find the source, and got back as far as a Chesire folk song, found copied out in a manuscript traced to John Dryden, later resurfacing as reworked by Isaac Bickerstaffe in the 18th century from a man and his sons, to be about a deeply reclusive distrustful man, to a re-incarnation in 1973 by Sondheim as “The Miller’s Son” (A little Night Music, an adaptation of Bergman’s movie, Smiles of a Summer Night.

The song quoted in the novel is a fictionalized version of all these others, made to fit the story and characters. As danced in the novel by these 18th century characters it would be closer to the YouTube rendition of the 18th century dance, but I think the layering here includes and comes to refer primarily to that erotic Miller’s Son. It’s not summer in the novel but later November into winter.

What purports the nomination of this song: the price of having chosen a version of that miller’s son. This is my fifth winter without him.

Miss Drake

Oh tree oh little tree

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