ANATOMY OF A SONG

Classics Prof John M. Blakey '64 takes the measure of Franklin McDuffee's "Dartmouth Undying."

I LEARNED SOMETHING about myself at my 25th Reunion. I found out, as no doubt hundreds have before me, that I was unable to listen to the Glee Club sing "Dartmouth Undying" with dry eyes and unstreaked cheeks. I bought a Glee Club tape and a copy of the Dartmouth Song Book and returned home to examine how "Dartmouth Undying" casts its emotive spell. Part of its power has to do with the elegant simplicity of music professor Homer Whit ford's setting. But for me there is even greater vibrancy in the lyrics English professor Franklin McDuffee '21 wrote at the urging of President Ernest Martin Hopkins '01.

With McDuffee's words before us, let's tease apart the rhetorical strands wherewith he wove his magic.

• Structure: The poem, a mere 121 words, 16 lines, four quatrains, shows that there is power in simplicity.

• Timing: "Dartmouth Undying" takes only two minutes and 13 seconds to sing. The brevity allows for unbridled emotion before it becomes maudlin.

• Alternating meter: Even-numbered lines of tensyllable iambic pentameter (the life-pulse of the Elizabethans) alternate with odd-numbered lines of iambic pentameter's II-syllable hypermetric variant. By using the most time-honored of English meters, McDuffee places the work firmly within the tradition of formal English literature.

FIRST STANZA

• Hymning: T echnically, "Dartmouth Undying" is a hymn, a song of praise. Our College must have one, for poignant memory demands voice, according to line three. Oblivion is the upshot of failure to commemorate.

• Invocation: "Dartmouth!" With a single word, McDuffee simultaneously addresses alma mater and summons our loyalties.

• Adynata: The first two lines assert the impossibility of expressing oneself adequately to the topic—in this case, either musically or poetically. The hallowed strains of Homer Whitford's setting came later. As for the words, McDuffee forthwith provides them. The poet needs no rhetorical tricks, however. His genius lies not in that he makes the impossible possible, but that he makes it look so easy.

• Antitheses: The first stanza draws attention to the contrasts between music and silence, and between memory and forgetfulness.

MIDDLE STANZAS

• Images: Images of Dartmouth flood the middle stanzas, fleshing out "the splendor and the fullness of her days." References to light interplay with references to time and seasons; hectic activity is counterweighted by contemplative quietude, the yearly and daily pace effectively sketched in allusive vignettes.

2:13 121W/14L

Dartmouth! There is no music for our singing, No words to bear the burden of our praise; Yet how can we be silent and remember The splendor and the fullness of her days?

Who can forget her soft September sunsets? I Who can forget those hours that passed like dreams? The long cool shadows floating on the campus, The drifting beauty where the twilight streams?

Who can misty mornings. The clanging bells, the crunch of feet on snow, Her sparkling noons, the crowding into Commons, The long white afternoons, the twilight glow?

See! By the light of many thousand sunsets Dartmouth Undying like a vision starts Dartmouth, the gleaming, dreaming walls of Dartmouth, Miraculously buided in our hearts.

• Anaphora: The repeated rhetorical question "Who can forget?" unifies and moves forward the rush of unforgettable and recurrent impressions which McDuffee compacts further by asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions.

• Alliteration: "soft September sunsets." The sibilants showcase the radiance of the image.

• Chiaroscuro: The phrase "long cool shadows" is a masterstroke of chiaroscuro, representing darkness and light without referring to color. (Is it also a transferred epithet? Shadows can chill us, but aren't cold in themselves.)

• Metaphor: "Floating," "drifting," and "streams" are water words. They must stem from the Connecticut River which, for the most part out of sight, nevertheless suffuses the College and town with its elemental stolidity and placid flow. Think about where those "misty mornings" come from.

• Connotation: For me the word "sharp" is shorthand for a New Hampshire winter. I'll never forget that crinkle in the nostrils on contact with the outside air. That's a personal resonance, but I assume we all have it. McDuffee appeals to shared experience.

• Synecdoche: McDuffee uses a part to signify the whole when he makes us hear our shared experiences: "the clanging bells, the crunch of feet on snow." "Crunch" stands for the icy surface of crusted snow, "feet" stands for students. It's trope within trope.

FOURTH STANZA • Anastrophe: The inverted word order of the simile "Dartmouth Undying like a vision starts" places emphasis on our alma mater and sets the stage for the poem's final rhyme.

• Epanalepsis: Placement of the same word at both ends of a line, as in "Dartmouth, the gleaming, dreaming walls of Dartmouth." Note McDuffee's internal rhyme as well.

• Deceleration: The last line has ten syllables, beginning with the five-syllable adverb "miraculously." The archaic participle "builded" takes up two more beats. Each of the last three words is a single syllable. The effect is a remarkable deceleration, in pacing if not in tempo, to a hushed and reverential close.

Jonh M. Blakey is professor of classics at LenoirRhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina, and father of Margaret Blakey '98.

"Dartmouth Undying"