Morning Glory

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Ipomoea purpurea (Morning Glory flowers): photo by PiccoloNamek, 2005

I lit my purest candle close to my
Window, hoping it would catch the eye
Of any vagabond who passed it by,
And I waited in my fleeting house

Before he came I felt him drawing near;
As he neared I felt the ancient fear
That he had come to wound my door and jeer,
And I waited in my fleeting house

-- from Morning Glory: Tim Buckley and Larry Beckett, 1967

There are many tests that may be applied to a song or a poem, but perhaps the most important of these is the test of time: it sounded good back then, but how does it sound now?

Much of the poetry and song of bygone epochs is best left buried in the tar pits of recycled history. It sounded good back then, but now, well, kindness compels a silent nod, and nothing more, as one passes on, and the song or poem recedes into the distance.

Songs and poems may be like mirrors in that respect. Once they may have offered a fair reflection of the feeling and colour of a time. But now most of them are like broken mirrors, cracked and clouded-over. All one can discover in them is the past. There is nothing left to learn about that. It's done and dusted.

But then there are the marvelous exceptions.

Ipomoea tricolor ("Blue Star" Morning Glory flowers): photo by DMaciver, 2007

One of these special exceptions, for me, is the Tim Buckley/Larry Beckett collaboration Morning Glory, recorded by Buckley on his 1967 album Hello, Goodbye.

Tim Buckley was twenty-one at the time that record came out. Here he is a year later, performing the song live on the BBC. (The lip-synching on the video clip is approximate, as per most of the clips one sees from that period.)

Morning Glory (live)

Several things about this song continue to engage.

The hobo is a character who has lingered. Nowadays he might be called homeless person or street person. He is the other. He is definitely still around, in fact more so than ever. You may have stepped over or around him on the public pavements just last night.

The fleeting house which the hobo approaches, in which the narrator waits with an ancient fear, and in which he lights his purest candle, remains to be understood.

Some have suggested that the fleeting house is the house of fame, in which Tim Buckley very briefly dwelt.

Briefly is meant here in a literal sense. Tim Buckley died of a heroin overdose in 1975, at the age of twenty-eight. Since then the song has taken on retrospective meanings that could not have been foreseen at the time of its composition.

The lyric of the song was probably penned by Larry Beckett, Buckley's close friend and collaborator.

Buckley is said to have asked Beckett to write a song with a hobo in it.

The Hobo: Charles Burchfield, 1931 (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.)

Introducing it in one extended clip of that recorded performance from 1968, Buckley recounts an anecdote whose bearing upon the song does little to dispel its mysteries.

"This new song," he said, "is about a hobo beatin' up on a collegiate kid, outside of Dallas, Texas."

Buckley is said to have been troubled by problems of guilt and deficient self-esteem deriving from the early experience of an abusive father.

His own "collegiate" career, at Fullerton State, which is in California, not Texas, lasted but a few short weeks.

In any event, the possible autobiographical elements in the song appear to have virtually nothing to do with its lasting impact as a poem and a piece of music.

All houses are fleeting. Many have wished to leave their purest candle in a window as a signal of compassionate receptiveness.

But offerings of warmth and light and refuge may be tentative; such offerings may be withdrawn; candles may be snuffed out, lights extinguished, windows shuttered and closed.

These complications seem to enter the song, as Tim Buckley sings it.

December Twilight: Charles Burchfield, 1932-1938 (Wichita Museum of Art)

The poet Robert Creeley spoke in his later years of life as a long solitary journey in the dark, in the course of which one is always looking for that light in a window which signals rest, or relief -- some distant yet emotionally securing memory or reminder of whatever it is one means by home.

Twenty years ago, in remarks recorded in a small book we did together about his life, in which he addressed at some length his sense of the meanings of the terms the common, and the common place, Creeley parsed one of his own poems, a poem dedicated to his wife Penelope, titled So There, which has the lines "Happiness, happiness -- / so simple... / It's one world, / it can't be another... / I don't want to / argue the point..."

"I don't want to argue the point," he said. "That's, again, the common language.... I love the commonplace, but I have no interest in the argument that follows. I used to be really bemused by that statement of Wittgenstein's 'a point in space is a place for an argument'. My reaction was 'Don't tell me that!' I mean, the light in the window, the hills of home -- forget it! It can't be simply a place for an argument." (Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place)

But Creeley's comments on this subject came, as I say, in later life.

Ipomoea nil (Morning Glory flower): photo by Frank J. Gualtieri, Jr., 2008

Morning Glory, on the other hand, is a young man's work.

But it has, as they say, aged well, though the singer himself did not.

The singer not the song -- no. It's the song and not the singer that is the purest candle, the light in the window, the signal that even though the house may be fleeting, the flickering life of spirit is not to be so easily extinguished by time.

Tim Buckley at Fillmore East, New York City, October 19, 1968: photo by Grant Gouldron, 1968; image by Leahtwosaints, 2010