Some Promise

There's this smoky and dusky voice of Carla Bruni in the background that got my attention first. It was a perfect song when I was searching for the sun and a peaceful sunday. Later, I looked it up and sure enough the cover design was, shall we say, quite enticing.

I liked the concept of the album wherein you take your favorite poems (particularly the 8-6-8 syllablic hymnals) and sing it out. Whats more, its got Yeats and Dickinson, two of my favorite poets. The chosen tracks are a little femmy but they go well with a cardamom flavored tea.

I smiled to myself at the end of the album because when the British colonised folks around the world, they imposed English as a mask of their conquest whilst their own intelligenstia and elite were treating themselves to the best of french literature. The English considered French to be cool and setting standard. Today, we see this Frenchwoman considering the Irish and American poets cool enough to sing their works.

If I were to sing a Yeats poem, I would have done the following one

The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.

Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:

How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
While our love grows an Indian star,
A meteor of the burning heart,
One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart,

The heavy boughs, the burnished dove
That moans and sighs a hundred days:
How when we die our shades will rove,
When eve has hushed the feathered ways,
With vapoury footsole by the water's drowsy blaze.