By Adrienne Provenzano
Songstress of the Limberlost and Advanced Indiana Master Naturalist
Have you had a chance to just sit and listen to the leaves recently? The songs of the trees changes a bit each day, each type of tree with its own music. Bird songs mix in as well in this outdoor concert as other singers and instrumentalists blend their voices in and out of a tapestry of sound. It is a time of year for such a variety of sounds and sights, tastes, aromas, and textures. The crunch of dried foliage underfoot. The rosy hue of a sweet autumn apple. The scent of harvest in the air. The softness of cozy sweaters.
In the 1890s, Gene Stratton-Porter started the Wednesday Club, a literary society in Geneva, Indiana. She presented a paper at one meeting about the poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), focused on his life and his work Leaves of Grass. She appreciated Whitman's independent nature and wrote as follows: "He liked to stretch his body on the greensward in the sun with the winds of heaven to fan him, and to be of the earth, earthy. He simply would not be confined; the world was his stage; he would travel it. His brain should scale mountain and peak; all nature and all nations were his." Stratton-Porter's 1910 publication, Music of the Wild opens with this quote from Whitman: "All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments." Music of the Wild is a detailed account of forest, fields, and marsh.
Here's a poem of Whitman's from Leaves of Grass that seems especially suited to this time of year.
"The Music Always Round Me"
The music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning,
Yet long untaught I did not hear,
But now the chorus I hear and am elated,
A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health,
With glad notes of daybreak I hear
A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,
A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the universe,
The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailing with sweet flutes and violins,
All these I fill myself with,
I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by exquisite meanings;
I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving,
Contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion'
I do not think the performers know themselves---
But now I think I begin to know them.