Quote of the Day (Francis Ledwidge, on the ‘Fair Tanned Face of June’)

“Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmers' fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.”— Irish poet Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917), “June,” in The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge (1919)
 
I took the image accompanying this post on June day 11 years ago at the Teaneck Creek Conservancy, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.
 
(Thanks to my friend Rob for bringing this poem to my attention.)

Bonus Quote of the Day (Thomas Mann, on a ‘Luminous’ Munich on the First Day of June)

“Munich was luminous. A radiant, blue-silk sky stretched out over the festive squares and white-columned temples, the neoclassical monuments and Baroque churches, the spurting fountains, the palaces and gardens of the residence, and the latter’s broad and shining perspectives, carefully calculated and surrounded by green, basked in the sunny haze of a first and lovely June day.”—German Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann (1875-1955), “Gladius Dei” (1902), in Death in Venice and Other Tales, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1998)

This quote was too beautiful not to highlight on this day.

Song Lyric of the Day (Rodgers and Hammerstein, on How ‘June Is Bustin' Out All Over’)

“June is bustin' out all over

The feelin' is gettin' so intense,

That the young Virginia creepers

Hev been huggin' the bejeepers

Outa all the mornin' glories on the fence!”—“June Is Bustin' Out All Over,” from the musical Carousel (1945), book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Richard Rodgers

Probably for the entire time I’ve maintained this blog, I’ve wanted to quote from this song, yet I never got around to it. Then last weekend, while listening in my car to National Public Radio, I heard novelist Julia Keller extol this “wonderfully corny” showtune by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and I knew I must write about this, and soon.

Even in miniature here, you can see in abundance Hammerstein’s lyric gifts.  It is a marvel that this immensely sophisticated urbanite could write lines filled with such love of nature and an capacity not just to hear slang, but to give birth to new forms of it (“bejeepeers”) —a celebration of literary propagation that matches the song’s glory in natural propagation.

This second Rodgers and Hammerstein musical needs all the comic exuberance it can get from this song. Before long, the two main young characters, Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan will be as powerless to resist their natural instincts as the flora and fauna are in their New England coastal town.

As I wrote in a prior post, the current toasts of Broadway were pioneering new, uneasy territory with Carousel. If they were going to persuade audiences to reject out of hand a male protagonist who was a no-account wife-beater, they had to offer something that wouldn’t overturn expectations from the start. “June Is Bustin' Out All Over” would provide welcome comic relief in one of the darkest entries in the American musical theater.

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a London “Moment in June”)

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)