THE POEMS
To Brooklyn Bridge: the music begins looking down into the swirling dark waters beneath the bridge – then up through the cables of the bridge, like a giant harp, playing against the sunlit sky.
Ave Maria: Columbus crosses rough Atlantic seas on his first voyage home to Spain, his mind filled with visions of Cathay.
The Harbor Dawn: A chilly fog-filled dawn at the Bridge, fog horns and buoy bells call out through the fog. Then the sun.
Van Winkle: The modern world is evoked, as gun-grey macadam crosses the American continent. The sounds of a grind-organ elicit memories of childhood.
The River: Spanning America are signs of commerce – jingles, advertisements, telegraph poles – and hobos riding the rails, which gradually transition to a great vision of waters, the river of life, flowing down to the sea and taking everything with it.
The Dance: An ecstatic vision of the old pre-Columbian world, in which an Indian warrior seeks the spirit of America in the guise of Pocahontas, a princess who becomes corn, the land.
Indiana: a mother of the prairie bids farewell to her son, who leaves home, likely never to return, for a life of adventure on the high seas.
Cutty Sark: The poet, in a bar in South Street, meets an old sailor who regales him with tales of the sea. After wandering drunkenly through the streets, the poet returns home, to collapse into bed dreaming of the great sailing ships of old.
Cape Hatteras: A great vision, spanning vistas of time, as the great continent arises from the sea, later to become the earth mother of the pre-Columbian world, later the ground upon which Walt Whitman walked and saw his vision of America, the Wright brothers sailed the air – to transform into WW I young Americans fighting in the air over France.
Southern Cross: the first of three songs, the poet’s imagining of the idyllic woman, makes it impossible to find love in the real world. He imagines Eve, Magdalene, Mary and Venus.
National Winter Garden: a different vision of woman – the one presented on stage at the burlesque shows popular in the 1920s.
Virginia: A young man waits for his girl to emerge from her office tower in Manhattan, with dreams of a good time. But she leaves him flat.
Quaker Hill: an vision, encompassing all of time, that leads to a particular moment in time in a quaint historical village in upstate New York.
The Tunnel: a dark vision of Hell, symbolized by a descent into the subway. As the subway rider descends, overhead, the great East River flows on.
Atlantis: In a culminating, ecstatic vision, the bridge emerges, like the lost continent, to connect past to present, coast to coast, city to prairie, all in one song, one bridge of fire.
MUSICAL REFERENCES
Ave Maria – Con amores, la mi madre (Juan de Anchieta)
The River – Deep River (traditional); My Old Kentucky Home (Stephen Foster); Casey Jones (Wallace Saunders); Some Sunny Day (Irving Berlin)
Indiana – The Lousy Miner (folk song)
Cutty Sark – The Rose of Stamboul (Leo Fall)
Cape Hatteras – Panis Angelicus (Saint-Saens)
Southern Cross – Maria Magdelene et altera Maria (Francisco Guerrero); Maria Magdelene et altera Maria (Andrea Gabrieli)
Virginia – I’m Coming Home Virginia (Donald Heywood)
Quaker Hill – How Can I Keep from Singing (Robert Lowry); The Bells of the Angelus (anonymous); Angelus (Victor Herbert)
The Tunnel – Te Deum (Bruckner)
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