Ode to Apollo

It was late in the day when the maples and alders bordering the swamp cast their long shadows across the path. I had thought about returning to the trailhead before darkness when I noticed this Yellow Warbler, the color of the evening sun with its breast and flanks streaked as if with layers of crimson clouds. This tiny bird, a living and flying sunset, sat perched nearby, singing in sweet, melodic phrases as if in praise of Nature.

I thought of an unremarkable paper I had written for a college class forty-plus years ago about John Keats’s poem Ode to Apollo (he wrote two poems with the same name - I was thinking about the one that starts with the line “In thy western halls of gold…”). From what I remember, my paper was somewhat sophomoric, but the sentiment of that poem was a turning point for me - of learning not just to hear nature (a not intentional state) but listening (an intentional state) to it.

Cutting through the presentation of a proud Englishman from the early 1800s, Keats writes about the great bards Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, and a few others. But it is the god Apollo (the sun) the greatest poet, who sings his songs at the end of the day (in thy western halls of gold) after the earthly poets have gone silent. He still sings these songs today. Listen, and you will hear it in the sound of Nature in all its purity just before the sun sets.

For all the time I have spent in the fields and woods in my youth, I don’t think I ever noticed the intense poetry of a windless dusk - the number of birds singing, the tree frogs calling, crickets chirping…until I studied this poem.

And so, that recent evening when I noticed the Yellow Warbler, I did not go back to the trailhead right away. Instead, I walked further into the forest to a little rise above the swamp bordering the river where I had a good view of the western halls of gold. There I listened to Apollo sing his sweet poetry until he disappeared behind the low crimson clouds on the horizon as the gentle night blanketed the forest.

Have you ever listened to Apollo at sunset? What was it like?