The Lads In Their Hundreds

a haunting

No dedicated practice update this week; my work proceeds along its appointed course. A couple of interesting developments are on the horizon, which I hope to talk about more in a couple of weeks.

No, today I want to talk about being haunted.

From time to time a poem, a scent, a particular cast of the light as it cuts across my face, becomes so intertwined with a memory, or a series of memories, that the two can’t be shaken apart.

Sometimes the connection is obvious — like many who were living in the general environs of New York City at the turn of the century, I find there is a particular shade of cloudless and brilliant blue sky that can immediately transport me back to September 11, 2001. The effect is persistent, and persistently eerie, over twenty years later.

Sometimes, however, it’s a twisty connection, only announcing itself much later, sometimes to dramatic effect — and so it has proved for the song that, every time I hear it, recalls to me the worst days of the pandemic, and more generally to a sense of helpless grief at lives cut short.

I am, of course, as readers of this newsletter doubtless know, one of ye olde “frontline healthcare workers.” Throughout the pandemic, I worked 12-hour night shifts at the hospital, 84 hours one week then off the next. In March of 2020, knowing that I would of course be exposed to this new disease, and not knowing how dangerous Covid might be to children, I took a page out of a Victorian novel and sent my only child (then a kindergartener) away to the seaside to stay with his grandparents, just days before the lockdowns and travel bans went into effect.

So after my 84-hour work week during which I was responsible (among other work of course) for “pronouncing” (officially confirming the death of) everyone who died overnight in the hospital — and with multiple floors full of Covid patients one can imagine — during my off weeks I was totally alone at home but for my cat.

The world was in chaos, and amidst the chaos the Met Opera started streaming an opera a night, free for all. One week, while I was home from work, they announced they would be streaming the entire Ring cycle, one night after another. I twisted the arm of a close friend into participating, so we called each other up, pressed play at the same time, and watched the entire thing together, from 8pm until whatever unearthly hour the curtain finally dropped (past midnight sometimes) four nights in a row.

And honestly, besides a dislike of LePage’s staging, I don’t remember much about it — except for how much I loved Bryn Terfel singing Wotan.

It was the first time I had ever really listened to Terfel, and somehow the particular sound of his voice became pressed into the memory of how I was feeling during that time — all that darkness and loneliness and death.

I was also reading a fair amount of poetry then — Yeats and Eliot, who are long-time favorites, and I picked up Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad,” a book of poetry written just before WWI and containing several meditations on early death. “A Shropshire Lad” became enormously popular during that war, and many of them were set to music by George Butterworth, an English composer who himself died at the Somme at the age of 31. Such was my pandemic reading.

And so, a few months ago, I stumbled across a recording of Bryn Terfel singing the Butterworth setting of Housman’s poem “The Lads in their Hundreds” — and I felt as if the front of my ribcage was unhinging.

I’m not sure that I have a point to make here other than to meditate on the incomprehensible way that a perfectly blue sky — a transcendent moment of song — can intertwine so deeply and irrevocably with darkness. And if we allow it — with time — by the awful grace of God — sometimes the darkness is transformed.

The Lads In Their Hundreds

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,
There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.

There's chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart,
And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,
And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,
And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.

I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

— A. E. Housman