4 Min read

Santana

The drive home

Rain on the Roof

Full circle

Poetry for emergencies

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AVAILABLE ON PODCAST

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I took a trip to my mother’s Buddhist center for the one-year anniversary of her death. On the way home I played Santana because she loved “Black Magic Woman” and his guitar sound. So for five hours on the way from Virginia to Connecticut, I listened to Santana, riding the vibe.

Hearing his collaborations, I landed on the tune, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I fell in love with Santana’s version with Yo-Yo Ma and India Arie. And the lyrics lulled me away from this sad and narrow space I was in, specifically the phrase, GENTLY WEEPS. Then, I switched to the Beatles, to playlists of similar titles, and continued to listen to the song for days.

I look at you all,
See the love there that’s sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at the floor,
And I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps

– George Harrison (1943-2001), first verse

When I got home I began to research with Claude AI and then Google Books to isolate the phrase. You know it is paradoxical, right? Gently weeps. Something soft and something extreme — gentle is not the modifier that comes to mind when weeping.

Together the euphony and the phrasing personify the guitar, making it human, the sound coming from the instrument’s body, indistinguishable from the musician. Claude AI couldn’t find the phrase in Shakespeare, or the Bible, or even from the composer George Harrison himself when interviewed.

Harrison said he grabbed a book from his mom’s shelf and decided to use the first words he saw. In the interview he mentions the I Ching and a trip to India the Beatles took for meditation and Eastern practice.

Google Books found it in a nineteenth century anthology of American poetry, quite possibly the one Harrison picked up that day.

So here it is — the first connection ever — to Coates Kinney’s poem “Rain on the Roof.” Ok, I exaggerate – I did see a comment on the poetry site for this poem from a scholar on the Beatles, a teaser to check out his work.

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Rain On The Roof

When the humid shadows hover
  Over all the starry spheres,
And the melancholy darkness
  Gently weeps in rainy tears,
What a bliss to press the pillow
  Of a cottage-chamber bed,
And to listen to the patter
  Of the soft rain overhead!

Every tinkle on the shingles
  Has an echo in the heart;
And a thousand dreamy fancies
  Into busy being start,
And a thousand recollections
  Weave their air-threads into woof,
As I listen to the patter
  Of the rain upon the roof.

Now in memory comes my mother,
  As she used long years agone,
To regard the darling dreamers,
  Ere she left them till the dawn:
O! I see her bending o’er me,
  As I list to this refrain
Which is played upon the shingles
  By the patter of the rain.

Then my little seraph sister,
  With her wings and waving hair,
And her bright-eyed cherub brother—
  A serene, angelic pair!—
Glide around my wakeful pillow,
  With their praise or mild reproof,
As I listen to the murmur
  Of the soft rain on the roof.

And another comes, to thrill me
  With her eyes’ delicious blue;
And I mind not, gazing on her,
  That her heart was all untrue:
I remember but to love her
  With a passion kin to pain,
And my heart’s quick pulses vibrate
  To the patter of the rain.

Art hath naught of tone or cadence
  That can work with such a spell
In the soul’s mysterious fountains,
  Whence the tears of rapture well,
As that melody of Nature,
  That subdued, subduing strain
Which is played upon the shingles
  By the patter of the rain.

— Coates Kinney (1826-1904)

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Coates Kinney was born two hundred years ago, and his sweet phrase lives on in guitars gently weeping on stages across the world.

And the beauty, the sound of this poem when read — please, please read it, or listen to my podcast. There’s also this precious memory of “my mother,” and there it is, coming full circle.

My mom was nothing of soft rain, more like a northeaster or a hurricane, but there is comfort in the shared songs of those passed. And our hearts gently weep and our souls gently weep, just as surely as George Harrison wrote that song and performed it with Eric Clapton (though he was not credited) and the Beatles.

“I see her bending over me as I listen to this refrain.”

And it’s true for me, about the rain.

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FOOTNOTES

*Santana, Yo-yo Ma, India Arie. While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

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*The poetry anthology where Google Books located this poem was edited by William Cullen Bryant. A New LIbrary of Poetry and Song, 1876, New York.

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