Published 25 Jun 2020
Poems for Contemplation: "Listening to Beethoven's Fifth"
Poet Jeanne Murray Walker shares a listening poem in this offering for our Summer 2020 Poetry Series.
By Jeanne Murray WalkerA blog post Women Scholars and Professionals
This summer The Well is featuring a series of poems by women. Ruth Goring invites you to approach them curiously and meditatively
"Listening to Beethoven’s Fifth"
I.Thunder growls hatred. Lightningtorches the clouds. What can we do nowbut ride out disasteras trees toss their necks like stallions,as the carnal rain swamps us?
II.Dot, dot, dot, dash. It’s the Fifth.Old Ludwig having his way again,the stooped deaf magician turning his wheel so the craft will slip through,the violins cutting the waves,timpani puffing out like sails.
III.I am thinking how inclement news—the lump invading my dear friend’s body—threads its signal to my reptilian brain-stem,passing its code to the cerebral cortex, thenhow the order faithfully goes outto check ruptures and neurofibrillary tangles,to hold against dementia and despair.
IV.As we sit, hands folded in our laps,ranks and ranks of us, wedding rings,cuticles, everything groomed and listening,how near disaster lurks—bollixed messages,finger hinges not opening on command,some small failure swelling to commotiontill chaos flashes in the circuitsand then it’s all-out war, wordssnapping like masts in the pouringdark. And who will save us?
V.It is a mystery, how we pick our way,repeat old codes, how V stands for both five and victory,how, years after Beethoven died,Morse made dot, dot, dot, dash depictthe letter V. How that code for victorysang above the dissonance of warto the starving French all that Nazi winter:Dot, dot, dot, dash. How werage, love, survive.
This poem can be found in Helping the Morning by Jeanne Murray Walker.
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Jeanne Murray Walker (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is a poet and playwright whose work has been widely published and performed. She heads the creative writing program at the University of Delaware, where she has been a professor of English for forty years. She also serves as a mentor in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Seattle Pacific University and on the boards of Shenandoah and Image magazines.Her poems and essays have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Christian Century, Blackbird, Image and several hundred other journals. Her scripts have been performed in theaters across the United States. They are published by Dramatic Publishing Company, and they are archived in North American Women's Drama. Walker is coeditor (with Daryl Tippens) of Shadow and Light: Literature and the Life of Faith and author of a memoir, The Geography of Memory. She is the author of seven books of poetry in addition to Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems.Walker's work has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, the Glenna Luschei-Prairie Schooner Prize, many Pushcart nominations, inclusion in Best American Poetry, and inclusion in the 100-year anniversary anthology of Poetry magazine.Photo by Vondel Stevens