One thing leads to another

So last Saturday Cleo and I made the quick drive up to Towson, to give L a much-deserved few hours on her own and to check out a swing music concert with some friends. In short, a happy evening: a wonderful dinner, friendly hosts, and a bucolic, Huckleberry Finnish walk through fields to a historic plantation house that served as a dramatic backdrop for the gaggle of little girls and rejuvenated oldsters spinning to the music.

But much as fairy tale princesses face serious consequences if the clock strikes twelve, parents of tykes need to keep an eye on the time, too. And in this case, the sheer loveliness of the grounds(which once featured an 18th-century orangerie) proved my undoing; before I knew it, Cleo was wide awake and as hungry as a defensive end after two-a-days. Cry, Cleo, cry: she bawled as we walked - in those terse hurried steps of Parents Who Know Things Are Not Going Well - back to the car, and then bawled some more in the car on the way home.

Hoping to improve the soundtrack at least slightly, I switched on the car radio, and was greeted with the angelic sounds of a piece I'd never heard - but later learned was Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony. Truly stirring: a choir against an orchestra; lofty vocals against a ground of white motion. A note of grace in a difficult situation; a ray of light in a basement.

Later, I looked the piece up. 1903-9; a pivotal work in the evolution of the English symphony; etc., etc. What I found more interesting, though, was the motivation of the piece, which lay in Whitman - whom Williams had met through Bertrand Russell, in Cambridge, in 1892. Whitman's verse became a pole star for Williams, who carried Leaves of Grass with him for most of the first decade of the 1900s.

And it's in Leaves of Grass, as you may know, that there's a dialogue between Child and Father. One passage leaps out as relevant in this narrative:

Father:
Cease, cease, my foolish babe.
What you are saying is sorrowful to me...

And then we were home, L caught up on duties around the house, breast ready, Cleo home, no need to cry, music still in the ear, night, good night, sweet milk, Behold, says Whitman, the solid wall'd houses, good night.