A few posts ago I mentioned a couple of Dickinson’s poems for which I wrote original songs in preparation for my third-annual ED Birthday celebration concert. This year, the event will be on December 7 (ED’s 195th birthday is 12/10), and a friend of mine will sing while I accompany her on the piano. Ten songs in all.
For the first event, back in 2023, I composed a song based on the poem “I never saw a moor.” Interestingly, when I set the tune to paper and played out the chord progression, I realized that I’d simply re-written Pachebel’s Canon in D with a slightly different melody. That then gave me the idea to choose an existing contemporary song to see if I could mesh a Dickinson poem with it. I chose “Angel of the Morning,” but I never could find a poem that would work with that song.
Fast forward to the summer of 2025. I sat at the piano and began to compose a song for “I felt a funeral in my brain.” After working up a melody for a few lines of the poem, I thought, “Hmm…this sounds familiar.” I realized that I seemed to be re-working Procol Harum’s song, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” – so I returned to my earlier idea: take an existing song to see if I could blend a Dickinson poem with it.
Voila! It worked. My version of “I felt a funeral in my brain,” with a tweak here and there for the lyrics, follows the chord progression of Procol Harum’s classic hit.
For the first event, back in 2023, I composed a song based on the poem “I never saw a moor.” Interestingly, when I set the tune to paper and played out the chord progression, I realized that I’d simply re-written Pachebel’s Canon in D with a slightly different melody. That then gave me the idea to choose an existing contemporary song to see if I could mesh a Dickinson poem with it. I chose “Angel of the Morning,” but I never could find a poem that would work with that song.
Fast forward to the summer of 2025. I sat at the piano and began to compose a song for “I felt a funeral in my brain.” After working up a melody for a few lines of the poem, I thought, “Hmm…this sounds familiar.” I realized that I seemed to be re-working Procol Harum’s song, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” – so I returned to my earlier idea: take an existing song to see if I could blend a Dickinson poem with it.
Voila! It worked. My version of “I felt a funeral in my brain,” with a tweak here and there for the lyrics, follows the chord progression of Procol Harum’s classic hit.
By the way, at some point in the past, I heard another person’s original composition for this poem, and while I thought it was good (it wasn’t quite mournful enough for me), he did something that I think actually altered the meaning of the poem. I’m not sure why he did it – perhaps he misunderstood the gist of the narrative of the work?
Here’s the story:
The funeral described in the poem is, of course, told from the point of view of the corpse. It is that “being” who hears the service and the lifting of the box. It is that “being” who senses the plunging of the coffin as it is “dropped down, and down.”
In the first stanza, the “dearly departed” hears the mourners treading to and fro; in the second, the service begins – once “they all were seated.” However, in the song I came across, the composer changed the fifth line of the poem from “And when THEY all were seated” to “And when WE all were seated,” as if the one singing, i.e., the speaker of the poem, was one of the mourners in attendance at the funeral. However, with that change, the rest of the poem does not work. To me, that change was the equivalent of removing the word “not” in the opening line of “Because I could not stop for Death.”
Here’s the story:
The funeral described in the poem is, of course, told from the point of view of the corpse. It is that “being” who hears the service and the lifting of the box. It is that “being” who senses the plunging of the coffin as it is “dropped down, and down.”
In the first stanza, the “dearly departed” hears the mourners treading to and fro; in the second, the service begins – once “they all were seated.” However, in the song I came across, the composer changed the fifth line of the poem from “And when THEY all were seated” to “And when WE all were seated,” as if the one singing, i.e., the speaker of the poem, was one of the mourners in attendance at the funeral. However, with that change, the rest of the poem does not work. To me, that change was the equivalent of removing the word “not” in the opening line of “Because I could not stop for Death.”
| Okay, so one last bon mot before I conclude on this Día de los Muertos. Yesterday, on Substack, someone posted this quote: “Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe I replied with this: “Hold my beer.” ~ Emily Dickinson |  |
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