ivoryebony

Monday, June 2, 2014

Walt Whitman describes the Song of the Katydid

But the katydid -- how shall I describe its piquant utterances? One sings from a willow-tree just outside my open bedroom window, twenty yards distant; every clear night for a fortnight past has sooth'd me to sleep. I rode through a piece of woods for a hundred rods the other evening, and heard the katydids by myriads -- very curious for once; but I like better my single neighbor on the tree.

Let me say more about the song of the locust, even to repetition; a long, chromatic, tremulous crescendo, like a brass disk whirling round and round, emitting wave after wave of notes, beginning with a certain moderate beat or measure, rapidly increasing in speed and emphasis, reaching a point of great energy and significance, and then quickly and gracefully dropping down and out. Not the melody of the swinging-bird -- far from it; the common musician might think without melody, but surely having to the finer ear a harmony of its own; monotonous -- but what a swing there is in that brassy drone, round and round, cymballine -- or like the whirling of brass quoits.