fridayam
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- May 20, 2008
- Posts
- 585
Last night the idea came to me to write a trilogy of poems about pieces of early music. This is so far off my usual poetic beat that it did occur to me that I may be becoming foolish, so your opinions are even more welcome than usual. Appropriately, the subject of this first piece is "La Folia", "The Follies of Spain", which you will have heard at some point in your life even if you think you haven't--its use was that widespread. Examples are on YouTube.
This is very much a work in progress and also longer than my usual work--sorry
La Folia
The world’s first Number One?
Portuguese, a shepherds’ dance implying
madness or extreme joy
--it must have been a
hoot to dance it,
fast and sweaty,
erotic too, away from all
those sheep.
It got written down, maybe
in the Alenteja, about the time
Columbus bumped into the Americas
and they danced to it at court,
laughing at the shepherds but
loving the music and the
blind mad whirl
of skirts and hearts.
But in that whirl there is a plaint
and someone, no doubt late at night,
slowed it down to make a
Sarabande of such sadness that it
stirred the souls even of those
who had lost their minds to its
lusty, throbbing rhythm only
the night before.
The faster, fleeter dance had already
passed the porous Pyrenees
into Provence and thence to Paris,
stirring French feet all the way.
It’s slower brother followed, via
slender staves on brittle paper,
into brittle minds suspicious of
newfangled things.
By Spanish conquest it
invaded the Americas:
by Spanish possession it
infiltrated Italy,
the Netherlands too, from whence it
seeped into England where poor people
whooped to dance to the
Follies of Spain while
Armadas came and went and
Dutch fought Spanish fought English
all dancing to the same tune
and laughing as they danced.
Meanwhile, men who made their living playing
viols or theorbos or clavecins
spent their silent nights
mining the music’s melancholy heart so that
even when two hundred years
of thunderous feet fell silent
still the plangent chords went
echoing on.
This is very much a work in progress and also longer than my usual work--sorry
La Folia
The world’s first Number One?
Portuguese, a shepherds’ dance implying
madness or extreme joy
--it must have been a
hoot to dance it,
fast and sweaty,
erotic too, away from all
those sheep.
It got written down, maybe
in the Alenteja, about the time
Columbus bumped into the Americas
and they danced to it at court,
laughing at the shepherds but
loving the music and the
blind mad whirl
of skirts and hearts.
But in that whirl there is a plaint
and someone, no doubt late at night,
slowed it down to make a
Sarabande of such sadness that it
stirred the souls even of those
who had lost their minds to its
lusty, throbbing rhythm only
the night before.
The faster, fleeter dance had already
passed the porous Pyrenees
into Provence and thence to Paris,
stirring French feet all the way.
It’s slower brother followed, via
slender staves on brittle paper,
into brittle minds suspicious of
newfangled things.
By Spanish conquest it
invaded the Americas:
by Spanish possession it
infiltrated Italy,
the Netherlands too, from whence it
seeped into England where poor people
whooped to dance to the
Follies of Spain while
Armadas came and went and
Dutch fought Spanish fought English
all dancing to the same tune
and laughing as they danced.
Meanwhile, men who made their living playing
viols or theorbos or clavecins
spent their silent nights
mining the music’s melancholy heart so that
even when two hundred years
of thunderous feet fell silent
still the plangent chords went
echoing on.
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