Horse Fiddle
Horse Fiddle - fact Summary
Hunger and Persistent Craft
This poem frames the speaker’s offerings of songs and poems as unabashed gifts—performed for wind, river valleys, and a single look—while explicitly accepting the material cost of doing so. It ties the poet’s insistence on continuing to sing despite hunger to his lived experience of poverty. The final image returns to moonlit listening, suggesting art born of endurance rather than commerce.
Read Complete AnalysesFIRST I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind. Next I would like to write one for you to sit on a hill and read down the river valley on a late summer afternoon, reading it in less than a whisper to Jack on his soft wire legs learning to stand up and preach, Jack-in-the-pulpit. As many poems as I have written to the moon and the streaming of the moon spinners of light, so many of the summer moon and the winter moon I would like to shoot along to your ears for nothing, for a laugh, a song, for nothing at all, for one look from you, for your face turned away and your voice in one clutch half way between a tree wind moan and a night-bird sob. Believe nothing of it all, pay me nothing, open your window for the other singers and keep it shut for me. The road I am on is a long road and I can go hungry again like I have gone hungry before. What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing? Leave me with the hoot owl. I have slept in a blanket listening. He learned it, he must have learned it From two moons, the summer moon, And the winter moon And the streaming of the moon spinners of light.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.