“The will is always near, dear, though the feet vary. The terror of the winter has made a little creature of me, who thought myself so bold.”
An early spring will cure that!
Now, back to my discussion on issues songwriters encounter when trying to set Dickinson’s poems to music – because so many of them are short (the poems, that is, not the songwriters). #badumpbump
One post suggested a songwriter could repeat the melody – and poem (i.e., the lyrics) – several times. Another post: Just write a short song. A third post about working with Dickinson’s shorter poems said to combine them and use two or three poems together. In that post I also discussed a fourth way to add a bit of “time” to a poem for a longer song – by repeating words, phrases or lines from the poem.
A fifth way to handle Dickinson’s shorter works is…
Well, before I get to the fifth way, take a look at the lines below – and then I’ll explain the fifth way tomorrow.
Fifth Dimension Continued...
Sooo…the “fifth way” to work with the poet’s shorter poems is to add additional lyrics! LOL – but this can be somewhat risky – and I did it with one poem/song. Here’s the story, and it involves one of the first songs I wrote based on a poem by Dickinson, “If I can stop one Heart from breaking.”
The poem is short – just seven lines – so when I decided to compose a song based upon it, I also decided to add lyrics to allow for a song longer than a minute! And just like Mission Impossible, my mission – having to decided to accept it – was to write additional lyrics that sounded Dickinson-esque, or at the very least, something Dickinson-ish. |
At the time, she didn’t know that I was the one who had written the counterfeit lines, but she did realize quickly enough that the lines were not Dickinsonian – so I ditched those lines and went back to the drawing board!
On my second attempt, I came up with the lines I posted yesterday – the very lines in the pic below (compared to the poem).
Do the lines sound Dickinson-esque (or at least Dickinson-ish)?