More on the Scarlet Tanager
A chance encounter in the newest issue of the Kenyon Review (vol. 37, no. 3, May/June 2015), a poem by Meg Kearney:
Scarlet Tanager, 1893[Echoing the story of the scarlet tanager from the other day.]
[Antonin Leopold Dvorák] incorporated the song of the scarlet tanager, a bird not found in the Old World, into his American Quartet in F. -- Diana Wells, 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names
After too much New York City noise --
off-key and birdless -- Dvorák rode out
to Iowa, that little Bohemia, to find
himself a little scherzo. He'd already
written his requiem, married his true love's
sister. What he needed then was something
molto vivace, something quirky, full of off-
beats and cross-rhythms, something American.
Enter: the scarlet tanager. No matter Thoreau
disliked the bird's "harsh notes" and his
own wife said it sounded like a robin
with a sore throat -- from an oak's green canopy
came the high, interrupting strain of a violin
on fire. Next came the second violin, a viola,
a cello, a gapped pentatonic composed by nature,
a scarlet-plumed opus, folklike but stranger;
next came an American Quartet in F major.
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