The fact had somehow escaped me until an email responding to Wednesday’s column about Emily Dickinson. And I’m not sure if I wasn’t better off without the information.
But as I now know, for good or bad, most if not all of Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the tune of a traditional American ballad, The Yellow Rose of Texas.
For this, I’m indebted to reader Seán Lyons, who tells me he first learned it from a lecture by an American professor at Listowel Writers’ Week a few years back. A long-time admirer of Dickinson, Lyons now sees her in a completely different light:
“I cannot read her poems since without mentally donning a 10-gallon hat, and heading towards the sunset, just my rifle, my pony, and me.”
Over on Out: Frank McNally gets to the bottom of a mysteriously familiar phrase
All Yellow - Frank McNally on singing Emily Dickinson, Joyce’s advanced maths, and quantum mechanics in Blackrock
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A literary stroll: Frank McNally explores the streets of Dublin’s north inner city
Sure enough, I too have suddenly taken to humming “Hope is the thing with feathers–/That perches in the soul”, in a jaunty, thigh-slapping, hoedown rhythm. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,/And Mourners to and fro” has also acquired a whole new personality.
But it’s not just The Yellow Rose of Texas, apparently. There are many other songs you can sing Dickinson’s poems to just as well.
That’s in part because she wrote in ballad (or hymnal) meter. It may also be an effect of her famous dashes, which break up the lines in a way that Ronnie Drew might have done, to pause for beneath.
Whatever the reason, it makes my image of her sharing a bench on the Royal Canal with Brendan Behan seem even more plausible.
I don’t know if The Yellow Rose of Texas was one of Behan’s party pieces, but in his memoir Hold Your Hour and Have Another, he mentions someone else singing it in his presence during a pub session in Co Down once.
Yellow was not an apt colour that day. It was the Twelfth of July, in the overwhelmingly unionist village of Millisle. Despite being a red-roaring republican, the mischievous Behan was disappointed the old man singing did not choose “something more Orange”.
Discussing Euler’s Identity, “the most beautiful equation in maths”, in Thursday’s Irish Times, Peter Lynch was nevertheless mystified as to why a recent visitor to the James Joyce Tower in Sandycove wrote the formula into the visitors’ book.
I don’t know either, but perhaps the tower’s circularity inspired thoughts of Pi, one of the numbers used in the equation? Or maybe the visitor was responding to what he saw as the beauty of Joyce’s maths, especially in the construction of Finnegans Wake.
I’m thinking of a study by physicists in Poland some years ago, which analysed sentence-length and other patterns in 100 works of literature. FW was the standout result. The study found that its structures mimicked “purely mathematical multifractals”.
By his own estimation at the time he was writing it, Joyce was attempting to square the circle. “I am making an engine with only one wheel,” he told his benefactor Harriet Weaver. “No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you? […] It’s a wheel ... And it’s all square.”
Joyce was of course born in a square, in 1882. But even then, there were complications. The square – Brighton Square in Rathgar – was and remains, notoriously, a triangle.
The same Martello tower was the venue on Wednesday for the announcement of a new, marathon Bloomsday event, the first instalment of which will take place on June 14th.
No, it’s not a mere reading marathon: there are plenty of those already. This will involve athletic activity, the more enthusiastic participants in which will cover 100km. The goal is to run from Sandycove to Mullingar, a town in which the young Joyce spent a formative summer and which also features in Ulysses.
Hardline athletes will leave the Martello tower at 6am on the Saturday in question. But the event is not a race, organisers insist. Nor are most of those taking part are not expected to make the full trek.
Other suggested starting points include Maynooth, Enfield and Kinnegad. Even 5km sections of the route are encouraged. The main thing is to get to Mullingar around 5pm, for further fun.
The Joycean connection aside, half the point is to celebrate the aforementioned Royal Canal and its Greenway. Hence the “Royal Canal Odyssey”, to give the event its full name. More details are at royalcanalodyssey.ie
Getting back to advanced maths, I was briefly alarmed by the subheading on our restaurant review yesterday: “Tucked away above a main street bar, Blackrock gets its Barcelona moment.”
The thought of Blackrock being tucked away in the upstairs room of a pub somewhere suggested an experiment by Flann O’Brien’s mad scientist De Selby gone wrong.
He was last seen running amok in a neighbouring suburb (The Dalkey Archive, 1964). But his creator was a regular in at least one Blackrock pub, so De Selby could well have been implicated here too.
Happily, as the story revealed, Blackrock has not turned into a black hole. It’s only a new restaurant that is tucked away over a bar, not that the entire suburb has collapsed in on itself. This must have been a great relief to all concerned.
