Running To Paradise

"Running to Paradise"
(Performed by Jo and Ben, live)

"As I came over Windy Gap
They threw a halfpenny into my cap.
For I am running to paradise;
And all that I need do is to wish
And somebody puts his hand in the dish
To throw me a bit of salted fish:
And there the king is but as the beggar.

My brother Mourteen is worn out
With skelping his big brawling lout,
And I am running to paradise;
A poor life, do what he can,
And though he keep a dog and a gun,
A serving-maid and a serving-man:
And there the king is but as the beggar.

Poor men have grown to be rich men,
And rich men grown to be poor again,
And I am running to paradise;
And many a darling wit's grown dull
That tossed a bare heel when at school,
Now it has filled a old sock full:
And there the king is but as the beggar.

The wind is old and still at play
While I must hurty upon my way.
For I am running to paradise;
Yet never have I lit on a friend
To take my fancy like the wind
That nobody can buy or bind:
And there the king is but as the beggar."

W.B. Yeats' poem “Running To Paradise” strikes me as speaking to the struggles of daily life at the time, and relationship between it and the impact of the monarchy. It seems to me that in the “run to paradise” that the speaker finds himself on, he details situations where (in light of what is occurring) the king is “but as the beggar”. Vast class distinctions become relatively meaningless in the context of everyday life and the race for something more.

For this assignment, I wanted to find a lyrical performance of Yeats’ poetry that deviated from my intuitive vocalization of it. Admittedly, I wound up turning to a pair of obscure German musicians to find it. But lest my choice be dismissed as a simple appeal to translation or language matters, it was actually the artists' interpretation of the rhythm and meter that really caught my attention. Reading the poem both silently and aloud, the iambic feet came naturally. Yet in this performance, the artists drop the first beat of each musical phrase, which has the effect of reducing the intuitive 4 iambic “feet” per line that I originally read and heard to three (or perhaps even two, if one considers the mid-beat straddling of the last two syllables of each line). Not only does this create a different emphasis, but it gives the performance a hurried feeling, most likely a function of the first beat of each phrase being missed as well as a kind of lyrical “catch-up” of unstressed syllables during the rest of each line in comparison to the typical iambic reading. Given the poem’s title and the repeated references to running, I couldn’t help but wonder if the effect was intentionally crafted.

I think this particular poem of Yeats’ lent itself well to contemporary lyrical interpretation. The rhyme and meter, as well as the employment of a repeated chorus, seemed to me to be particularly well suited to musical presentation, as it created emphasis outside of a rote non-lyrical reading and appealed to the utility of having single, repeated lines both dividing and ending each stanza.