Sea-Shell

Recently pulled this out of a pile of antique opera music I bought at the Holy Name Flea Market. The music once belonged to a woman named Sybil Colby who lived on Marine Parkway, and I've enjoyed posting images of the soprano's sheet music here before.

I've never heard the music to this song by Carl Engel, the lyrics which began as a verse for children are included in a collection of Poetry by Amy Lowell called A Dome of Many Colored Glass, a line she borrowed from Shelly. A little on her history, yes, from wikipedia, some of it not so friendly...

Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that poet Witter Bynner once said, in a cruel comment repeated by Ezra Pound and thereafter commonly misattributed to him, that she was a "hippopoetess."

Lowell not only published her own work but also that of other writers. According to Untermyer, she "captured" the Imagist movement from Ezra Pound. Pound threatened to sue her for bringing out her three-volume series Some Imagist Poets, and thereafter called the American Imagists the "Amygist" movement. Pound criticized her as not an imagist but merely a rich woman who was able to financially assist the publication of imagist poetry. She said that Imagism was weak before she took it up, whereas others said it became weak after Pound's "exile" towards Vorticism.

I don't know much about Vorticism, but it seems like the song's lyrics might belong to the movement, if the call was based on the morphology of its subject. But perhaps it would be a tad too sweet for anything aligned with Futurism.

Sea-Shell, Sea-Shell,
Sing me a song, Oh! Please!
A song of ships, and sailormen,
And parrots, and tropical trees;
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main,
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corrals under the waves,
And seahorses stabled in great green caves,
Oh, Sea-shell, Sea-shell,
Sing of the things you know so well.

What now..."Whence proud escutcheons flung prismatic fires." (Dome, p.66) Did someone say escutcheon? Is it blotted? They do tend to accommodate a smudge nicely.