4 Requirements of Song: "Both Sides Now"

For poetry lovers, we have a series of blogs, Poetry Lessons, guest-hosted by Emily R. Dunn of Writers Ink Books.  Visit our page on every 5^th  (5th, 15th, and 25th) to see which poem has inspired a lesson in thinking and writing.  We'll also intersperse news about books. ~~ M. Lee Madder

4 Requirements of Song:  “Both Sides Now”

Poetry like “Both Sides Now” came out of the 1960’s social change movement.  Joni Mitchell’s voice seemed simple while it carried a powerful message.

One of her strongest messages came through “Big Yellow Taxi”, hiding a riptide undertow with its obvious ecology and love of trees (Yes, I’m a tree hugger.  The bark’s a little rough, though.)

“Both Sides Now” speaks more universally.  This version by Judy Collins provides us our lyrics:

Remember the 4 Requirements of Song?  Powerful Lines.  Strong Imagery.  Heart-felt Message.  Clear Communication.  “Both Sides Now” achieve all four without difficulty.

The Ages of Mitchell through Powerful Lines and Strong Imagery

Stanza I = Clouds

Clouds represent childhood, when we had the time to lie on our backs and stare at the lazy summer passages and dream about the places we’ll go (as long as the metaphorical fire ants don’t interfere with our imaginings).  The shapes in the clouds transport us from our humdrum droning days.

Of course, when big puffy clouds build in, they herald rain (and snow in winter), metaphors for the things of life that interfere with our “cloud’s illusions”.  Years from our childhood, we recall our lost dreams.

And Mitchell’s last line in the refrain—“I really don’t know clouds at all”—becomes especially poignant looking back with the jaded experience of our maturity.  The line hints at how we went wrong:  we didn’t truly understand what we wanted, what the dream required, and what we would have to sacrifice.  When a child dreams of what s/he wants, that child doesn’t understand the devotion necessary.

Stanza 2 = HEA Love

Stanza 2 moves from childhood to young adult and the “dizzy dancing” mysterious glory of love, when everything is possible and nothing interferes.

Unfortunately, life interferes.  “Fairy tale” happily-ever-after love rarely lasts.  The glowing first rush of attraction is not sustainable.  Hopefully, more than the pheromone-driven rush pulls together a couple.  Compatibility keeps the love re-charged;  devotion helps it endure life’s slings and arrows.

This persona never gets past the dying of the fairy tale rush.  She gives two pieces of advice.  The first is a light-hearted mutual parting:  “leave ‘em laughing when you go.”  The second is for broken hearts:  “If you care, don’t let them know.

”

Broken dreams and bruised hearts build emotional walls that are difficult to knock down.  The persona comments that love is a “give and take”.  Is that a mutual exchange?  Or does one give while the other takes?  When she laments about “love’s illusions”, we understand the reason those relationships never worked.

Stanza 3 = Life and its Changes

How do we go forward with these emotional barricades constructed of the rubble of broken dreams and bruised hearts?

“Tears and fears and feeling proud to say ‘I love you’ right out loud”: only to have our hearts damaged again.  After a time, we guard ourselves from further emotional pain.  “Dreams and schemes and circus crowds”” only to have our glorious plans fall apart.  After several disappointments, we stop pursuing the hard goals.  We don’t give up;  we just turn aside.

And well-meaning friends see our emotional barriers, see our guarded hearts and discarded plans, and ask why we aren’t reaching out?  Have they not faced the same difficulties?  Or did they never dream and just contented themselves with life’s first offerings?  When that failed, they just shrugged and went to the next.  And they “shake their heads, they say ‘I’ve changed’.”

Heartfelt Message: Keep Pursuing the Dream

Mitchells shrugs off their judgements.  She just wants a balanced “win and lose” life.  After all, “something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day.”

And that’s Mitchell’s truth:  don’t drift.  Happiness and heartaches will occur.  Don’t try to understand them.  We can never understand the magical mystery of life and its illusions.  Just live.

Writing “Both Sides Now”

The structure seems simple enough:  three stanzas and one refrain, but this refrain changes through incremental repetition, with each change matching its particular stanza.

Incremental repetition repeats the same words at expected times (the entire refrain, in this case) with a slight change.  The change occurs with “clouds” then “love” then “life”.  Each change represents a different age of life, a clever three stages of life with three wishes for life.

In addition to incremental repetition, Mitchell employs two clever rhetorical devices:  the polysyndeton and anaphora.

The polysyndeton stretches out the first line of each stanza, just as childhood, the beginning of love, and the launching into maturity seem to stretch out:  I > “Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air”; II > “Moons and Junes and ferris wheels”; and finally III > “Tears and fears and feeling proud . . . .”

The first anaphora occurs at the midpoint of each second stanza line with “I’ve looked”.  The sentence then continues with the predominant metaphorical topic of that stanza.

The second anaphora occurs on the third line of each stanza which begins with “But now”.  Along with the repetition and the rhyme, these anaphoras tie the stanzas even more tightly.

Summing Up

“Both Sides Now” is a clever exercise in the Ages of Man with rhetorical devices.  Keeping it simple becomes powerful with Joni Mitchell’s talent.

Childhood, youth, and adult:  we all have our dreams and disappointments.  Mitchell reminds us that life will perform its balancing act.  She wants us to look at the even-handed give-and-take of both sides;  we gain when we do.

Reality will keep us balanced;  the illusions keep us going.

Coming Up

Still in the works because it's being difficult (and there's a lesson for every writer:  when it's difficult, swtich gears) > the Rock Allegory of “Hotel California” with a wink and a nod to Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna!”, in MidSummer.

Before that, Occasional Poems fill up May and June.

Riddling Allegories in Music: Carole King's "Tapestry"

For poetry lovers, we have a series of blogs, Poetry Lessons, guest-hosted by Emily R. Dunn of Writers Ink Books.  Visit our page on every 5^th  (5th, 15th, and 25th) to see which poem has inspired a lesson in thinking and writing.  

We'll also intersperse news about books. ~~ M. Lee Madder

Riddling Allegories in Music: 

Carole King’s “Tapestry”

When songs and poems haunt us, enticing us to return over and again, they have served the writer’s purpose:  to have us read and re-read their words.

Sometimes the enticement is the beauty of the words or the music or both.  Sometimes the enticement is the emotion and memories that the song or poem evokes.  And sometimes the enticement is the riddling mystery that surrounds the work.  We long to decipher the maze of words.

The best writers tell us everything and nothing.  They reveal even as they veil.  And thus we have “Tapestry”, the 1971 song and album by Carole King.

A Little History

The album Tapestry is ranked 35^th by Rolling Stone list of the top 100 albums of all time.  It also is second on the Billboard’s longest-running albums list (Number 1 is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon).

Lyrics here and Video here

What is an Allegory?

First, an allegory depends upon an extended metaphor.  We have a comparison which has multiple points for linkage.

A tapestry creates an image stitched with bits and pieces of different-colored threads.  The canvas upon which it is built is blank;  the needleworking artist creates the image as she stitches.  The threads can be pulled out, removing the created image.

The allegory works by following through the extended metaphor > life = tapestry.  However, in an allegory, a story is told.  The elements of the story link to the points of the extended metaphor, each as interconnected as the threads in a tapestry.

How to Write a Riddling Allegory

In “Tapestry”, King does not bother with the usual refrain.  Each stanza serves a disparate purpose:  the first to build the metaphor, the second and third and fourth to work out the parts of the story, the last to connect the story to herself (and us) and conclude the metaphor.

To help tie the lines together, she uses alliteration:

o   1^st stanza :: rich / royal, vision / view, wondrous / woven, bits / blue

o   2^nd stanza ::  soft silver sadness / sky, torn / tattered, coat / colors

o   3^rd stanza :: what / where, and perhaps hanging / hand

o   4^th stanza :: rutted road / river rock, turned / toad, seemed / someone / spell

o   5^th stanza :: gray / ghostly, deepest darkness / dressed

With the allegory creating the obvious writing skill, the song depends upon a simple paired couplet structure for each stanza.  The rhyme scheme is the simplest of all, AABB.  The last stanza has five lines instead of four (a neat echo to the stanza), but the very last line is a repeat of the last part of the line before.

In the song itself, King chooses to conclude with a piano repetition of the last stanza, unvocalized.

So, a seemingly simple structure for her allegory.  However, King is extremely clever with the elements of her story.

How King Writes a Riddling Allegory

Like the Moonspinners of Greek mythology, the speaker in “Tapestry” is weaving different threads together to create an image of her life.  The Fate Clotho spins the thread;  her sister Lachesis measures it; their fellow triplet Atropos cuts the length with her dreaded shears.

We are our own Moirai, controllers of our fate.  We select the colors for our lives, of “rich and royal hue”.  In the paradox of the antithetical repetition “everlasting” and “ever-changing”, we construct meaning in the disparate parts of constancy and change.  Our lives seem to push steadily onward even as they alter visibly and invisibly.  When we end, our souls continue to a new existence.

This is the magic, the miracles that we often don’t recognize.

The last line contains yet another seeming paradox:  “A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold.”  If we can feel it, how can we not hold it in our hands?  Ah, we have a dual meaning of feel ~ touch and emotion.

Riddling Starts in the 2^nd Stanza

The allegorical story begins in the second stanza with the entrance of the tatterdemalion drifter, each bit and piece symbolic of his wanderings.

He wears a coat of many colors, like the biblical Joseph, forced to leave his homeland because his brothers sold him into slavery.  Joseph had to make the best of his situation—just as we should when we sell ourselves into the slavery of work rather than pursuing our dreams.

Much Mystery in the 3^rd Stanza

This drifter “moved with some uncertainty”  We often don’t understand our purpose.  I’m sure Joseph had many years when he wondered why he was where he was.  In our pursuit, we reach for a golden item, unnamed, unclassified—yet something which we desire, the ultimate treasure.  Like Adam & Eve, eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Yet his hand grasps nothing.  He reaches for his treasure, reaches for the knowledge of his desire.  He hasn’t found it yet.  Like the fairy tale of the Enchanted Song Bird in a gilded cage in a tree, we desire songs of love—but how often do we find such love?

King merely hints at this allusion, yet it fits best with her other wide-ranging allusions.

4^th Stanza Reveals at it Veils

On the rutted road of his journey, the drifter takes his ease on a river rock only to fall victim to a curse.  He becomes the frog prince, transformed by a wicked spell—as we all are transformed when our desires are put off, again and again, dreams deferred as in Langston Hughes’ “Harlem”.

Yet who created this wicked spell?  Why is the drifter cursed?  Would anyone have been cursed?  Or was the spell intended for him alone?

And inferred is that he needs his princess, to kiss him and remove the curse.  He will be trapped in his toad-eous form until he receives that kiss from someone both inherently great and innately kind.

5^th Concludes and Continues the Riddling

An unknown figures enters the tapestry, one that the speaker recognizes as a companion even as she questions who he is.  Is he the Reaper?  Death (as in Donald Justice’s “Incident in a Rose Garden”)?

Before she can discover, the tapestry and life is unraveling;  the Moonspinners’ thread is done.

Riddling to Truth

The Moonspinners who provide the threads to weave the tapestry are from Greek myth.  Joseph is biblical while the golden treasure in the tree could be the Enchanted Songbird story from the Orient.  The Frog Prince is a European fairytale, and Death—gray and ghostly, sometimes dressed in deepest black—comes from many cultures’ mythologies.

What is this journey to find the greatest treasure of all, a journey that makes us so weary we might fall into a wicked spell of non-pursuit?  Is the drifter Perseus, bringing back a gorgon’s head?  Is the songbird the golden nightingale that heals the dying emperor?  Or is it the golden bird sought by the young prince who constantly makes mistakes and needs the fox’s avuncular help?

Like the best of the ancient balladeers, King doesn’t give us all the answers—deliberately, she does not.

These questions keep us returning to decipher the clues she has given us.

Her allegory draws from every where and every when and every what, just as we do.

 

We don’t have all the answers

. 

We keep returning to our own story to decipher the clues we are given.

Clues we may never decipher.

Writing Riddling Allegories

When constructing your own poems, play with the idea of the allegory.  Set up your extended metaphor, and guide your story through it.

Use a comparison that is universal.  When story speaks to everyone in every time, story endures.

Use simple methods to tie your lines together.  Use clever methods to develop your story.  King is clever with her use of allusions to develop her structure and story.

And leave enough clues so that your readers, like Hansel and Gretel, will journey back to your work, over and again.

Coming MidSummer ~ the classic Rock Allegory of “Hotel California” but first a look at Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and Occasional Poems

Dangers for Spies

Released by Writers Ink Books, March 10, 2017, another in the Hearts in Hazard series by M. A Le.

The Dangers for Spies can come long after they considered themselves retired. Old missions come
 back to haunt them as dangers from the past track them down.

The Dangers for Spies

Past actions cause present dangers.

The French Double Agent

Eugenie DesChamps thinks she is safe, hidden in the English village of Little Houghton.  She paints landscapes to supplement her income.  She embarks on a flirtation with Charles Audley.  To her the world seems radiant, so very different from eight years ago.

No one knows that she once was a toast of Paris, a pretense she used to acquire information to pass on to English spies.  Eugenie hated the corrupt French government that had caused the deaths of her family.  Then a French agent discovered her double game.  She barely escaped with her life.

The English Undercover Spy

Eight years ago, Tobias Kennit worked with Eugenie, stealing information about Napoleon’s troop movements.  Then their operation crashed.  He fled, believing that Eugenie was executed as a traitor to her home country.  Toby abandoned his undercover spying and became a gamester and a rake.

Yet now the English spycatcher Roger Nazenby has approached Toby once more.  He wants him to protect a cryptographer living in the village of Little Houghton.  French spies have infiltrated England to capture Charles Audley and return with him to France.  Toby agrees to the assignment only because the woman he wants to marry (Melly Ratcliffe) lives in that village.

The Master Cryptographer

Charles Audley returned to his home village for peace and quiet after stressful years in London developing a series of ciphers for English agents.  His latest ciphers led to English victories in the Peninsular War. 

In Little Houghton, he is charmed by Eugenie DesChamps, a mysterious French artist.  Their flirtation distracts him from his cryptography, but he feels no guilt whenever he is in her company.

When Toby sees Eugenie, he is shocked.  Eugenie is not dead, and he wants answers from a woman he thought was a double agent.  Is she in Little Houghton to help kidnap the cryptographer?  She convinces him that she is not—but who is the threat to Charles Audley?  And can they protect Audley when they do not know when or where the attack will strike?

The Man who wants all of them Dead

French agent Didier Poulaine has spent eight years weaving together the snippets of threads to help him locate the only two spies who ever escaped him:  Eugenie de la Croix and an Englishman masquerading as a French military officer.  He tracks them to Little Houghton, the location of the cryptographer he came to England to kidnap—or kill.

Will they survive?

Poulaine’s threads have woven together.  Three lives intersect again and involve a fourth.  Blood must be shed before the past is purged.  Whose blood?

The Dangers for Spies is a romantic historical suspense set in Regency England, part of the Hearts in Hazard series.  While this novel and The Game of Spies have interconnected characters, D4Spies is a complete work on its own.  However, readers will have a richer experience if they have also read The Game of Spies. 

Investigate more by clicking here.