First Song by Galway Kinnell (1953)

I must have read this poem before this year, I must have. I’ve had A New Selected Poems since its publication, and I have flipped through it countless of times. One of Kinnell’s other poems from this collection, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps, was the one I thought I’d be including in this month’s series.

Earlier this year, when we were still leaving our homes, I grabbed his book on a whim for my commuter train ride into Austin. When I finished First Song, reader, I dropped my book. There I was, hurdling through Austin suburbs, dropping my book like a freak. Public transit here is grossly deficient in freaks (I thought Austin was supposed to be weird!), so this actually made me stand out. Or maybe it was me collapsing back into the train seat, agape, sighing in shock.

The thing is, it’s the first poem in the collection! How did I miss it all these years?

I think it was due to my previous impatience. I wasn’t much into nature-type art before, so I probably read the first few lines and bounced. But now, thanks to Mary Oliver, I’m all about trees and stuff. So I read the whole thing and then dropped my book like a freak.

Kinnell’s wordplay, his imagery, his verb choice, his thoughtful repetition and rhyme, are all incredibly enchanting and carry with them the music of the story. Hold on tightly to your phone when you read this. Those things are expensive.

Short Stuff:

• Kinnell’s poems famously connect everyday life to bigger, grander meanings, much like, in my opinion, Mary Oliver’s do.
• He was a civil rights and anti-war activist.

Topics

growing up; innocence & knowledge; duality; friendship

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First Song

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

Soon their sound was pleasant for the boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.

It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache
A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.

—Galway Kinnell