The Poetry of the Blues

This essay seeks to use the wider society’s first glimpse of the blues in W. C. Handy’s Father of the Blues as an image to sketch the character of the genre. I wrote it as the introductory chapter to a book of my essays on blues lyrics as poetry, many of which are posted on this site.



     Some of the finest twentieth century American poetry appeared neither in little magazines nor in books from literary or academic presses. The poetry of the blues was sung on front porches and in juke joints in some of the poorest and least educated regions of the country. In fact, it was specifically in such areas that the blues could flourish as could other traditional forms of oral poetry such as Appalachian ballads and Cajun song.
     In the Mississippi Delta gifted poet-musicians created a body of work that continues to move listeners both through recordings of the original artists and the countless others whom they influenced. The power of their poetry is best experienced in performance, but the strength of their lyrics as poetry emerges more dramatically in transcriptions on the page. Close readings of classic blues songs depend on a sophisticated system of conventions which the artist may observe or flout, but which have the precision and expressive power of troubadour cansos or Elizabethan sonnets.
     The subtlety and complexity of this signifying system allowed the singers to express the themes most central to the psyche in profound and beautiful verses. The primary topic of the blues is sexual love, the most powerful human desire, though the songs also engage alienation and mortality. The emotional range of the blues is wide. Though the melancholy heart’s cry predominates, some blues songs are high-spirited, even rollicking, which others have a tone of confidence or contentment.
     The orthodox origin myth of the blues is well-known. In his autobiography in 1941, W. C. Handy describes hearing a ragged man in the train station at Tutwiler, Mississippi who played slide guitar and made the “weirdest” music he had ever heard while singing the repeated line: “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.” Handy understood the phrase to refer simply to the man’s destination, the town of Moorhead, at the intersection of the Southern Railroad and the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley line sometimes called the Yazoo Delta or the “Yellow Dog.” The reference to such a crossroad has the functional purpose of using a landmark rare in a flat agricultural district, but that literal meaning is simply the foundation for a more significant complex of connotation from which may be spun a characterization of the blues themselves.
     The energy, the passion, even the “weirdness” of the song Handy heard suggest semantic trajectories beyond the simply geographical. In Handy’s own “Yellow Dog Blues” the poem expresses love-longing as the singer finds her lover has fled and has “gone where the Southern cross' the Yellow Dog.” [1] Here the intersection is less a specific location than simply indicating a place inaccessibly far away. Indeed, in most of the songs that later use the same phrase it signifies the distance distant between the singer and the love-object, and thus the phrase bears commonly a plaintive edge of lament. The utterance of the original singer in Tutwiler is obscure given the scarcity of data, but it is clear that he is expressing some heartfelt suffering associated with separation. In Handy’s usage the pangs of love-longing are explicit and foregrounded.
     Loneliness, though, is not always the inverse of romance. A feeling of lost desolation may be existential as well as situational and the bereft tones of blues songs have long spoken to listeners in a wide variety of suffering. If many blues songs are, in fact, laments or complaints, this is because the world is, as Christians say, a “vale of tears,” or, in the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths, life is suffering.
     Though the singer looked like a vagrant (probably especially so to the fastidious Handy), he was far from aping popular white musical styles as a great many black entertainers have done in all periods. His song sounded strange because it was a creole form using African elements of which the artist was well aware. He was in a sense an underground rebel, impudently asserting his own music in the center of a hostile Jim Crow culture. Local railroad slang -- “Yellow Dog,” “North Dog,” “Cannonball,” “Peavine” – was primarily used by the black workers, so the lexical choice as well is assertively African-American.
     The steam locomotives were spectacles and the railroad company’s properties reflected that industrial sector’s great strength, both mechanical and financial. The intersection of two rail lines, an intensification of a highway crossroad, seemed a nexus of power. Any such point suggests a point of decision, a choice of routes in life as in the motif of Herakles at the crossroads of virtue and vice. More broadly in many traditions including the New World belief systems derived from Yoruba, crossroads suggest a point of contact between human and divine realms. [2] In the context of blues history one cannot avoid the supernatural associations that lend such power to Robert Johnson’s prayer at the crossroads in “Cross Road Blues.”
     Though Handy was, by his own declaration, ignorant of the blues, and his experience was not only fragmentary but also accidental, these terms together construct the distinctive semantic field that characterizes the blues. They are often focused on the theme of suffering, alienation, and a consciousness of mortality, and on a dramatic enactment of the power of Eros. The songs are expressed in a purely American creolized form that mixes African and European musical conventions and employs subcultural slang. At times a scent of the divine or of the diabolic lingers in the air.
     The generic development over a period of time generated a rich inventory of conventions and thus an equal number of ways to negate or twist or develop those conventions, leading to increased signifying potential. The code was rendered denser yet by the African-American perspective which lent it a hip DuBoisian “double consciousness.” The signifying monkey, though a figure in toasts rather than blues songs, is an apt emblem for the cunning indirections of African-American poetry and, indeed, of all artful use of language.
     Since adolescence I have been as captivated by the sound of the blues as W. C. Handy was upon hearing the anonymous musician. I am convinced that listeners’ appreciation of the lyrics of singers like Son House and Charlie Patton would benefit from close critical reading no less than sonnets by Spenser and Sidney. I, like any reader of blues songs on the printed page, will return to the recorded performances, of course, in which the addition of expressive music, phrasing, and tone contribute to the uniquely American beauty of these extraordinary poems. Anyone who has ever felt abandoned and lost, or altogether in love, or simply lusty has experienced the blues. Anyone susceptible to poetry can feel the power of the blues in these masterful American songs.



1. See W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues. With only this snatch of the anonymous singer’s song, his meaning remains unknown. In their general narrative outline, Handy’s later lyrics are a reply to Shelton Brooks’ “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” (1913) which uses racetrack imagery and makes no reference to trains. The versions of “Yellow Dog Blues” by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith follow Handy closely.

2. Crossroads are associated with Odin, Hekate, Hermes, and other deities. In late medieval and early modern times, suicides and sometimes murderers as well were buried at crossroads.

Every Reader's Herbert

     George Herbert, the seventeenth century poet and Anglican priest, reminds me of certain Tang Dynasty Buddhists who retreated from the world to cultivate their spirituality and to write. Scion of a wealthy aristocratic family and godson of John Donne, he excelled at Cambridge where he was named Public Orator before joining Parliament. Though he seemed headed for a career in government – his brother Edward who assumed the title of 1st Baron Herbert combined service as a soldier and ambassador with significant publications as a poet and philosopher – at the age of thirty-six George Herbert gave up all worldly ambitions to devote himself to the duties of a parish priest in the obscure parish of Fugglestone St. Peter. He seems to have pursued his work there with exemplary dedication. Izaak Walton’s unreliable biography tells how Herbert paused while walking to Salisbury to offer assistance to a poor man and arrived eventually to join his company “soyl’d and discompos’d,” saying that “the thought of what he had done, would prove Musick to him at Midnight.”
     By the time of his death, only a few years after his ordination, he had published nothing beyond a few Greek and Latin poems, but on his deathbed he gave the manuscript of a volume he called The Temple to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, later known for his own withdrawal from affairs to establish the community at Little Gidding. Herbert’s poetry is entirely concerned with religious topics; it resembles the Psalms in that his primary topic is the depression and elation, the alternation between obedience and errancy in the individual spiritual life. This may be a hard sell to a modern audience that would prefer verses treating love or violence or madness, but Herbert’s passion is so high and his self-discernment so sensitive that he moves and impresses readers who cannot share his doctrines.
     Yet Herbert had a remarkable sensual quality in his spirituality. In his manual for rural priests like himself, he suggests that minister should preach using figures of speech employing images of "things of ordinary use” such as farm implements in order to lead the congregation toward “Heavenly Truths.” Though his description of his parishioners as “thick, and heavy, and hard to raise to a poynt of Zeal” may sound condescending, his poems use the same technique to make spiritual experience intelligible to his readers.
     Metaphysical poets like Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw favored extended, often unlikely comparisons now called “conceits.” “The Pulley” illustrates both a rhetorical figure of this sort and the unique ambivalence of the author’s faith, marked by an unusually agonistic note, as though he, like Jacob, must always wrestle with his angels.


When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.

“For if I should,” said he,
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.

“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”


     The pulley is unmentioned in the body of this little fable; still, the reader understands that the mechanical device represents the force that lifts the soul toward god, toward what Christians call salvation (what other traditions may consider enlightenment or liberation). The deity in Herbert’s view uses a cunning means to outwit human sloth, relying neither on the force of revelation nor on blind faith. If the surest way to hoist people up to the heavens is their deep-rooted anxiety, the troubled believer may paradoxically gain confidence as well as guilt from doubt, certainty arising our of uncertainty. The mortal is drawn upwards, willy-nilly, by the pulley of his restless Angst.
     In a clever trope on the story of Pandora, god is said to have granted all good things to people, withholding only “rest,” to ensure than they avoid complacency or pride and fail to render divine homage. In the last stanza the word rest is deployed bearing its other meaning of remainder in a playful way suddenly referring not to relaxation but to all the other treasures. The word acts like a prism, promising “the rest,” that is, all the other available excellences as well as “rest” meaning psychic repose. The implications of the word “rest” grow until what might have meant simple indolence merges with the final rest of an eternity in paradise.
     With his audience for the most part reading his poetry on a printed page, Herbert exploited the appearance of the text, making pictures with the words in a sort of concrete poetry. One example is “Easter Wings” which was originally published sideways on two facing pages, as though it had been rotated ninety degrees to the right.


Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.


     Here in place of the pulley that lifts the believer heavenward, it is wings, associated with Christ’s return from the dead which Christianity teaches allows the individual likewise to conquer death. The image of “imping” or grafting extra feathers on a falcon’s wings in the effort to increase her powers in flight is another example of an unlikely Metaphysical conceit which with wit seeks to shadow forth truth. God’s wings cannot fail; therefore, Herbert can fly by joining his poor insufficient human wing to the divine. Though such an image had perhaps never before been used, it should strike the reader with the pleasure of a stroke of wit and the deeper and longer-lasting satisfaction of a comforting insight.
     The effects of the poem’s arrangement on the page are simple but multiple. Apart from the immediately pleasing novelty effect of the double pair of wings, the reader observe that the shortest lines describe the greatest spiritual impoverishment and the latitude of the longer lines contains a plenitude of bliss. In a sense, each of Herbert’s poems may be conceived as an attempt to fashion wings that might bear his readers aloft.
     Herbert’s paradoxical principle of spiritual advancement through hesitation is again the theme. The first stanza concludes with the convention of the “fortunate fall,” which deems Adam’s sin in the end felicitous because it allows then for Christ’s sacrifice and the salvation of humankind. With insistent alliteration, Herbert insists that the fall in this way is a prerequisite to his gaining wings to “further the flight in me.” In the next stanza, more directly personal, Herbert confesses his shortcomings, his “sicknesses and shame,” yet claims that his very “affliction” “shall advance the flight in me.” Out of his need, Herbert has created a model that has since served many others. One may doubt one’s sanctity, but who can doubt his or her sinfulness? Of his poignant longing to rest in the divine bosom, Herbert has created what the cynic may regard as an ingenious exercise in self-hypnosis.
     In the final poem of Herbert’s book, the speaker’s acceptance and rejection of the divine is paralleled by the dramatic back and forth, the call and response of the poem’s dramatic narrative. For all the poet’s anxieties and self-criticism, this tortuous oscillation ends on a sublimely positive note, and it suddenly seems as though his doubt was the dynamo that propelled him in his terms to salvation.


Love (III)

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.


     Here the dramatic back and forth of conversation substitutes for the elaborate Metaphysical conceits of other poems. The second line’s mention of “dust” stands out for its very concreteness. The pose is utter sincerity and directness; in which ars est celare artem (“art is to conceal art”). The poet fashions a lovely anticipation of heaven using the homely image of a good meal. While perfectly orthodox in terms of Christian teachings on grace and original sin, the persona’s self-doubt opens the text even to non-Christians.
     Herbert’s themes were so unrelentingly Christian at a time when the rhetoric and drama of Christian myth shaped virtually European spirituality. Modern secularists may be more tolerant of Hindu or Buddhist theology than Christian, but it is not difficult to transpose Herbert’s existential fears, his sense of unworthiness into terms general enough to apply to most individual experience. A dear friend who is a critic told me he does not deal with religious writings, because no one can know anything of the claims of religion and thus we have nothing to teach each other. This attitude, of course, is parochial, limited to a cultural slice of our own time and place. In fact god broadly conceived probably tops even love as a topic to engage writers and readers through the whole of human history. And fortunately, Herbert, though grave as can be, is anything but sanctimonious.
     Those for whom personal experience is more significant in spirituality than tradition, theology, and bureaucratic status value often the full-blown visionary mystics, but the consciousness of a man like Herbert who struggled and wavered and yet, according to the testaments of his contemporaries, strove to actually live a Christian life, may have more to offer most readers. In the end religion and philosophy are not arcane disciplines for studious eccentrics, but instead present the issues at the core of everyone’s life. The records of a man like Herbert who, with a sensitive and open heart, sought to live the best life he could conceive in this fallen world, will always find receptive readers. He aimed every poem at the very horizon of truth, seeking to glimpse Ultimate Reality in the myriad things of this world. If he never could feel he stood quite on solid ground, he is the more plainly like all the rest of us.

Trouble in Elysium: Carew’s “A Rapture”

Parenthetical numerical references are to the lines of the poem. Endnotes are in brackets.


     A purely libertine poem is possible, but it must be very short. [1] With even modest amplitude, the complexities, ambiguities, ambivalences, and mysteries of Eros will almost inevitably emerge, often with little regard for the author’s conscious intention. The libertinism of Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture,” which attracted opprobrium as well as readers since its composition, is justified by an argument for enthusiastic utopian free love, yet the poem is laced with contradictions. Its joyful sensual hedonism is broken by nastiness and self-doubt, and the females who appear at times as independent sexual agents seem at others mere passive commodities. Such incongruities are part of the very structure of the poem which mixes literary genres in a continual play with reader expectations. [2]
     Carew embodied the Cavalier values expressed in the carpe diem poems of Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace. [3] He was himself a courtier, holding offices such as server or “taster in ordinary” to the king, though his behavior was not shaped by a wish to avoid scandal. His reputation as a rake and a wit was well enough, but his excesses went beyond those typical of the privileged of the day. Thoughts of reform may well have come to him once his health was failing. The Earl of Clarendon noted that "after fifty years of life spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that licence.” [4]
     However that may be, “A Rapture” seems at first glance an assertive defense of free love. It is difficult to mistake the antinomianism of some of Carew’s lines.


          All things are lawful there, that may delight
          Nature or unrestrained appetite ;
                                                        (111-112)

          We only sin when Love's rites are not done.
                                                       (114)


     His claim is not merely that all is permitted; he further insists that bliss and blessedness are certain to result. This is the central significance of the equation between sexual experience and paradise, figured as a blissful shore (9), a heavenly spot occupied by “blest shades” (24), where choirs sing paeans to the “deity of love” (47); love makes, in fact, Elysium (2 and 110). The woman is as enthusiastic as the man; she is, after all “free” (20 and 150), they both have “necks unyoked.” (151). He refers to “our joys” (147) as wholly mutual. He uses political language, saying that he can enjoy her body because he is “enfranchised.” (29), that those who accept conventional morality are slaves to a tyrant (144) who has usurped (150) the place that should belong to Beauty and Nature (26).
     The liberty and equality of the couple is problematized, however, by the poet’s imagery. All the elaborately pretty accoutrements of the locus amoenus cannot conceal the fact that the lady is most passive. She is an ivory carving (30), a thing of snow (28, 72) and gold (28). It may be commonplace to call one’s beloved a “treasure” (32, 56), but Carew’s financial language goes further. She is a “mine” (33), potential children are “coinage” (35), the regrets of those who had been modest become their payment of “double rent” to “Love's exchequer” (146).
     He manages even a few acrobatic image systems in which the female is twice passive. She is the sea (81) and yet she is also the harbor (87), while he, the ship, moves through both. In another passage women are at first flowers, rose, violet, and others (63-64) visited by the active male bee and then Celia is the beehive to which the active bee returns (78).
     Mythological references allow writers to introduce complexes of narrative, often elaborated in meaning by a history of usage, with a single word. Carew’s are curiously at cross purposes with the trajectory of his argument. [5] He cites Danae, Daphne, and Lucrece as though they were women who notoriously enjoyed passionate love, though all were raped while seeking to avoid sexual contact, as well as Penelope, legendary for fidelity to her long-absent husband, and Laura, Petrarch’s highly idealized love. The inevitable effect of these references, after an initial quizzical surprise, is to undermine Carew’s contention that sex makes all things well.
     The conclusion of the poem undercuts the ostensible theme most dramatically. Though “Honour” and morality in various forms had been ridiculed at the outset as a bugaboo and imposter one might readily ignore. The malevolent giant returns however (154 ff.), reminding Carew that he would be honor-bound under certain circumstances to fight a duel, despite the disapproval of the church. Here he does not question social convention, but assumes he would have no choice but to ignore Christian teaching in favor of his culture’s expectations. With suddenness and drama he equates that dilemma with his lady’s free sexual practice, calling her by the same name the most conservative prig might use: “whore” (166). The reader must feel very far indeed from Elysium. [6]
     Surely it is unlikely that the author is clumsily attempting Celia’s seduction while unaware of the ambiguities, nor does it work as a cynical display of self-interest whose very incongruities make it the more amusing. One doubts that Carew is simply confused, except in the sense that we all are confused. Surely each of the positions suggested by the poem has a sort of truth. Doubtless Carew did fantasize at times that he might occupy a prelapsarian paradise with unlimited orgasms for all, while on other occasions he felt the notoriety that reminded him he did not live in Elysium. He may well have felt respect and concern for the wishes of one woman at one time, while thoughtlessly wishing to take possession of another. His jumble of literary genres and his self-defeating use of allusion are among the signs that he was well aware of his own contradictions. Not knowing what else to make of them, he made a nicely turned poem.





1. The same is true of a poem of unadulterated "romantic" love.

2. A critic has delineated the role of “pastoral, Ovidian epyllion, carpe diem seduction lyric, [and] elegiac couplets.” See Laura Alexander Linker’s “Goblins of Desire: Carew's Libertine Women in ‘A Rapture’" CEA Critic vol. 69, no. 3 (spring and summer 2007), pp. 1-12.

3. Metaphysicals and cavaliers were not always as clearly distinguished in life as in reductive histories. Donne, from whom Carew borrowed much, was court preacher to Charles I during Carew’s service there and Carew had earlier spent time in the service of Baron Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert’s brother. His use of the name Celia and his smooth and melodious lines suggest affinities with Jonson and the Cavaliers, while his use of elegiac and heroic couplets foreshadows neo-Classicism. “A Rapture” is most clearly influenced by Volpone III, ii and Donne’s Elegy XIX.

4. Earl of Clarendon, Life and Continuation.

5. The point is thoroughly developed in Laura Alexander Linker’s excellent essay cited in note 2.

6. Moderns would be even more outraged to read Carew’s “The Second Rapture” in which he declares that wealth, honor, family, long life, all are mere “shadows of felicity” when compared with a “wench about thirteen,” though, to be sure, she should be already experienced, “Already voted to the queen/
Of lust and lovers.”