The poet reflects “truant fancies wander” to an old sweetheart while he’s sitting in the yard listening to the sounds of his wife and kids.
“I feel no twinge of conscience
To deny me any theme
When Care has cast her anchor
In the harbour of a dream –
In fact, to speak in earnest,
I believe it adds a charm
To spice the good a trifle
With a little dust of harm –
For I find an extra flavor in
Memory’s mellow wine,…
An excerpt of an unpublished poem “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” by James Whitcomb Riley recorded by Victor Talking Machine Company 1912 and put online by the Indianapolis Public Library.
“the thoughts that come in the shadows never come in the shine” writes Riley In the Dark.
How marvelous to hear his voice and accent and intonation live. I read his poems for years growing up, first buying a collected at an estate sale. Many summer days were spent reading his poems aloud.
And now hearing it again it’s like an entry point to my father. He uses reductions like “just” to “jes'”, and “he gat askeered” for “he got scared” that Riley sometimes wrote in is close to dad’s. Clumbed for climbed, drug for dragged and these “non-standard” grammars that we are mandated to make by consensus invisible and erased after being marked as “uneducated” and invalid. The “sloppy speech” that subscribes to principles of local convergence, talking like one another for communication, rather than to this fiction of there being a “proper” English and a hierarchy of lesser Englishes spoken by lesser people. To record how people actually speak is considered a pony trick, or obstacle to words being able to be transferred father in time and space but the very practice of avoiding the recording of what is thought would only be meaningful in this time and place and people is to confine them to that presumption. To steer back…
The cadence of Riley is familiar. The dialect, has things like “see the shadder in it”, “deer crick, that’s grand enough for me” with en embedded humbleness to God-fearing, never uppity; culturally close to dad. I could hear dad saying too “soak yer hide in sunshine” or “sharpen up a feller’s appetite” in talking weather as farmers are apt to do at length, with no weather that isn’t a calamity.
It’s rife with old expressions and turns of phrase like fetter, and worry so, and in trader joe “folks has gone so fur’s to say I’m fixed, in a worldly way” (i.e. people I’ve spoken with have explicitly remarked to me that I’ve got more money than most people do). It segues me to memories of dad’s speech that I can’t often call consciously to mind, that language which is opaque to hubby and unfashionable for its lack of curses or seeking to impress by polish, such as it “it was a thrill by gad” to discover this old gem online.