Sherry Chandler

The cicadas / and dry grass singing

Photograph by T. R. Williams.

Mr. Eliot got that right. These guys sound like the dry grass singing, though we have water enough around here. Not quite too much, like in other places. (See Via Negativa for more on actual cicadas.)

Here are the lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland:”

                        If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

— T. S. Eliot, from “The Wasteland V. What the Thunder Said,” The Complete Poems and Plays (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1934)

Though we have rain in excess and our grass is green, there is something dry and droughty in the song of the locust. Here is “The Raincrow” from Kentucky’s own Madison Cawein (Cawein’s poem “Waste Land” is thought by some to have influenced Eliot’s “The Wasteland” so appropriate enough to pair them here, though their tone and their purpose differs mightily):

The Raincrow

CAN freckled August,—drowsing warm and blonde
   Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead,
In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound,—
   O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed
   To thee? when no plumed weed, no feather’d seed
Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,
   That gleams like flint between its rim of grasses,
   Through which the dragonfly forever passes
      Like splintered diamond.

Drouth weights the trees, and from the farmhouse eaves
   The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day,
Throbs; and the lane, that shambles under leaves
   Limp with the heat—a league of rutty way—
   Is lost in dust; and sultry scents of hay
Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves.
   Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of rain,
   In thirsty heaven or on burning plain,
      That thy keen eye perceives?

But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true.
   For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting,
When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue,
   Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring
   Brimming with freshness. How their dippers ring
And flash and rumble! lavishing dark dew
   On corn and forestland, that, streaming wet,
   Their hilly backs against the downpour set,
      Like giants vague in view.

The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,
   Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art;
The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour,
   Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart;
   While in the barnyard, under shed and cart,
Brood-hens have housed.—But I, who scorned thy power,
   Barometer of the birds,—like August there,—
   Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,
       Like some drenched truant, cower.

— Madison Cawein, from Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001.

Possibly related posts:

Cotton Mather

Blackbird singing in the afternoon

A Kentucky source influence for Eliot’s “The Wasteland?”

The Kentuckian’s wasteland

Singing

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.