Tarantella

Poetry is surely meant to be like verbal music. Words that resonate, even when the intricacies of language and the actual words used or the poet's feeling for them, are beyond your intellectual comprehension. I don't know exactly what was in Tchaikovsky's head when he wrote Romeo & Juliet or the 1812. There was a harmonious cacophany there - a chaotic passion - that, to this day, resonates with emotions in my own life, and undoubtedly with everyone else's life, too. It doesn't matter exactly what the poet, composer or artist was thinking or feeling; what matters, surely, in any art form, is finding the theme or melody that we all understand at the deepest level. We can all write commentaries on our everyday life and it isn't poetry. Poetry, that much abused work of art, is music put into words....This beautiful poem by Hillaire Belloc is one of my favourites, not only because I have loved the Pyrenees, but also because of the definite music in the rhythmical pattern of such brilliant words:

Tarantella

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of the tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteeers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of a clapper to the spin
Out and in ---
And the Ting, Tong, Tang, of the Guitar.
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.