Hearing Periodicals, Part 1: Gibson's "The Dancing Seal"

By Julie Wilson

What if we could hear periodicals?

In today's culture, a large proportion of the media that we consume has auditory qualities, from television shows and movies to podcasts and the radio. Even objects that are primarily visual, such as books and written music scores, can be converted into auditory media such as audiobooks and musical recordings, respectively. But can visual objects in and of themselves invoke auditory features? What about periodicals, for example? We can't hear journals; we see and touch them (and, for those of us who are more adventurous, we may even smell and taste them, too). The only sound that one received from a journal came from turning the pages (or tearing the pages). This led me to wonder: how do primarily visual materials, such as periodicals, call aural features to the reader's mind? And how could we convert these primarily visual materials into audio files?

In this first installment of "Hearing Periodicals," I will be exploring the ways in which poetry can bring music to mind through a study of the 1912 poem "The Dancing Seal," published in the British periodical Rhythm. In the first half of this blog post, I will examine the ways in which the poem invokes music, musicality, and sound from a literary perspective. In the second half, I take a more creative and multi-media approach to the poem by setting the poem to music and talking through my creative process.

Discovering Skua Light: A Literary Analysis

"The Dancing Seal" appeared in the spring 1912 issue of the London periodical Rhythm and was written by the British poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962). In this poem, an unnamed and un-gendered narrator describes an unusual experience while building a light house on Skua Island, an island located at the northern tip of Antarctica. (I, whether correctly or incorrectly, presume the narrator to be male and hereafter will use "he/him/his" when referring to the narrator in this piece.) Below I have included the full digitized text of the poem, though it is not accurate to the size of the actual pages on which the poem first lived. I have adjusted the presentation of the pages in an attempt to mimic how the reader would have initially seen and experienced the poem.

Figures 1 (above) and 2 (below): Screenshots of "The Dancing Seal" from a digitized copy of Rhythm.

Just as the reader first encounters Gibson's poem through their eyes, so too does the narrator initially engage with the Skua Island seals through vision. The narrator notes how the seals "watch us...As though they'd not seen men before" (Gibson [stanza]1.[lines]6, 7; stanza divisions are explained in "Bringing the Fiddle to Life: Representing Stanzas" sub-section below). Rather than being the object of the men's gazes (as one might expect), the non-human seals are the ones who objectify and study the laborers. Any unsettling feelings about this inversion between the typical "voyeur" and their "object," however, are alleviated by line 7. The narrator classifies the seals' gazes as indicative of the seals' ignorance and naïve curiosity; there is no evidence that the seals threaten or exploit the men through their gazes. In fact, the men are aware of the seals' gazes and welcome them: the workers rejoice at this sign of "friendliness" and are content to let the seals "watch us: for their eyes were kind / Like women's eyes, it seemed to me" (Gibson 1.12, 15-6). The narrator connects the seals' eyes to qualities of kindness and femininity, further reducing any sense of threat or danger to the male workers. Instead, the "feminine" seals set the narrator at ease, as they are less of a threatening presence and more of reassuring and comforting one. (Whether one agrees or disagrees with Gibson's depictions of gender is a different matter.) At this point, the lines of sight between the two groups are more of an exchange: both gaze at each other, and perhaps this reciprocity works alongside the gendering and characterizing in order to cause the men to not just tolerate but also encourage the seals' presence.

While Gibson continues to use sight and other sensory imagery throughout the poem, the one sense that most contributes to the poem's narrative is sound. In fact, what draws the seals nearer to those men are the sounds that the men produce:

So, hour on hour, they sat: I think

They liked to hear the chisels' clink:

And when the boy sang loud and clear,

They scrambled closer in to hear;

And if he whistled sweet and shrill,

The queer beasts shuffled nearer still:

But every sleek and sheeny skin

Was mad to hear his violin. (Gibson 2.1-8)

Stanza 2 is a stanza of sonic progression. With each new couplet comes a new sound, both in terms of the rhyme produced and in terms of the sounds created by the poem's characters. With each new rhyme, the reader progresses farther into the poem; with each new sound, the seals draw closer to the working men, and a deeper level of intimacy is established between the men and the seals. The first sound, "chisels' clink," is a collective, almost mechanical, and impersonal by-product of the men's masonry and labor. By contrast, the next two sounds, the boy's song and whistle, are individual, innocent, and intimate: they are produced by only one agent; the person who produces them is identified as a "boy," suggesting that he is young in years and thus may not have as much life experience as some of the other workers; and the sounds result from a pleasure in performance that is absent in the men's laboring chisels. The boy's whistling could also be a means of summoning his listeners to come to him, like how one might whistle for their dog. In this case, the shift from singing to whistling creates another type of progression in this stanza, as the seals physically move from passive listeners of the boy's sounds to active responders when they draw closer to him. The "But" at the beginning of line 7 marks a shift in the stanza: whereas the first six lines focus on how sound affects the seals' physical position and movement, the last two lines attend to changes in the seals' emotions. Until this point in the poem, the seals have only been described as "friendly" and "kind," with no mention of their internal feelings (Gibson 1.5, 15). Now, the introduction of the boy's violin elicits an emotional reaction from the seals: they are "mad to hear" it (Gibson 2.8). The usage of the word "mad" followed by an infinitive is a British phrase that means one is "wildly desirous (to do something)" ("mad, adj."), so the "mad" in Gibson's line represents eagerness rather than anger or insanity. By using sounds to show how both the seals and the men transform from impersonal and emotionless collectives into active and passionate individuals, the narrator reminds the reader of the men's humanity and hints that the seals, too, are more human than they are animal.

The humanity of the seals, to which stanza 2 alludes, begins to manifest in more physical ways when the fiddle appears in stanza 3. Indeed, this manifestation begins when the boy plays his fiddle--note that the word "[w]hen" (Gibson 3.1), which begins stanza 3, implies both A) a guarantee that this event will occur or has occurred and B) a causality between the subordinate "[w]hen" clause (lines 1-3) and the resulting independent clause (lines 4-5) in stanza 3. When the seals hear the boy's "merry tunes," they experience a physical reaction to the music: "Their eyes grew brighter and more bright, / And burned and twinkled merrily" (Gibson 3.3, 4-5). The bright and joyful characteristics of the music are transferred into the seals' eyes, which become imbued with star-like qualities of light, life, power, and movement. The word "merry," used to describe both the music and the seals, emphasizes this sense of life and motion, as the word can mean, among other things, "full of animated enjoyment" ("merry, adj."). The narrator takes this sense of merriment and animated delight a step further by suggesting that such liveliness could cause the seals to physically "rise" and "dance...heel and toe / Unto the fiddle's heady tune" (Gibson 3.8, 10-11). In the narrator's eyes, the fiddle becomes an active source of potent power that causes the seals to move and physically respond to the music in the same way that humans would: by dancing. And as the narrator watches how the fiddle entrances the seals' eyes, he himself begins to see the human qualities that the fiddle magnifies within the seals. Thus, the fiddle not only affects the seals physically but also, through the seals' shining eyes, affects the narrator's imagination, pushing him to consider a magical reality in which seals are like humans and can even become human.

The music of the fiddle sets the stage for the seals' physical embodiment of human traits, but it is the narrator's voice that ultimately brings about the complete transformation of a seal into a human. Only after the narrator approached a female seal and "called on her to dance with me" does the seal fully transform into a "young maiden" (Gibson 4.4, 10). His words and her transformation are a literal call-and-response that begins through speech and that leads to other transformations. Only after the seal becomes a maiden do we readers encounter other seals in stanza 5 that (I presume) stand as humans and begin dancing alongside the narrator and the seal-maiden. (Do the other seals actually transform into humans? The poem does not clearly answer this question.) This sequence of call-and-response would indicate that a human sound is needed spark the transformation, as if the seals cannot or will not transform without a human's active request. If this is indeed the case (and it may not be), then the narrator exerts a certain amount of power over these seals and what forms they take, a power that he himself does not seem to be fully aware of. He describes himself as "[h]alf-daft" and not thinking clearly when he asks the seal to dance with him, and he notes that "it seemed scarcely strange" when the seal becomes a maiden (Gibson 4.2, 5). The "s"-alliteration in "seemed scar-cely strange" connects and emphasizes these three words through the repetition of the "s"-sound in each syllable, causing the reader to linger over this phrase. This transformation is clearly strange and unusual--whoever heard of a seal turning into a maiden? Thus, the narrator's usage of "scarcely strange" paradoxically emphasizes how strange both the seal-maiden's transformation and the narrator's normalization of her transformation are. Perhaps the narrator called to the seal with the expectation that this transformation would occur. Given the presence of "[h]alf-daft" earlier in the stanza, though, I would argue that the narrator is actually so carried away by the moment that he has no idea what is happening and willingly accepts the situation, however incredulous and unrealistic it may "seem." The seals' transformation may possibly be dependent on the narrator's words. The narrator's words may possibly be spoken with the clear intention of eliciting a particular response from the seals. What makes this scene surreal and magical is the fact that neither the reader nor the narrator seem to know what sound, if any, causes the seals' transformation and why.

​A Closer Look at the Seals' Transformation

​On the one hand, I deeply enjoy imagining the seals' transformation into humans: the scene reminds me of the mágicorealismo (magical realism) that permeates the work of later Hispanic authors such as Isabel Allende, one of my favorite writers. On the other hand, the manner in which this transformation is described in terms of color/race and religion puts a damper on my merriment. When the seal becomes a maiden, she sheds her "black" skin to reveal one that is "white as snow;" the poem twice more calls attention to the "white" coloration of the narrator's dancing partner (Gibson 4.7, 10; 5.9; 7.10). Is the contrast between black and white simply intended to emphasize the dramatic change from seal to human? And/or is this choice of colors racializing the seal-maiden, framing her as black/African in her seal form and as white/European in her human form? And if so, is this poem implying that only white Europeans are considered "human," and that those who are non-white and non-European must "shed" their racial and cultural identities in order to become white and therefore human? Similar questions arise when one considers the phrase "the friendly seals / Like Christian folk were dancing reels" (Gibson 5.4-5), where the dancing (and thus, I assume, now in human form) seals are compared to members of a specific religion. I do not know what Gibson's intentions were behind the usage of these colors and this simile, but regardless, I do disagree with the implications (I believe that humanity is not defined or conferred by either skin color or religion). Some of you may be wondering, "Why is Julie bringing this up? This has nothing to do with music or sound in 'The Dancing Seal.' Is she just trying to be 'in-tune' with all the recent conversations that call out racism in older texts?" To these questions I respond that yes, I am trying to be cognizant of how race is depicted in these texts because racism has become such a hot topic in the United States. My intention for including this text-box in this post is not to preach to my readers but to acknowledge what is going on in this poem and how that might affect my readers who identify as non-white and/or non-Christian. I also include this text-box in order to help myself think through representations of race in the early twentieth century and how those representations are part of larger conversations on race and racism in our country today.

In the midst of unheard-of transformations and unusual dance partners, the one thing that remains constant is the presence of the fiddle. Everyone and everything dances to this violin: the narrator, the seal-maiden, the other seals (possibly human, possibly still seals), the "dancing moon," and the "dancing sea" (Gibson 5.1, 2). The violin sets the musical rhythm and stage to which these animate and inanimate objects move. Furthermore, the violin's tune is "endless" and "kept on spinning merrily / As though it never meant to stop" (Gibson 5.6, 7-8). In addition to being constant, the violin's music is seemingly infinite and untiring. The fantastical qualities of the stanza 5 dancing scene come not only from the diversity of dancing partners but also from the sense that this dancing is eternal, defying the laws of human endurance (as seen in the rhyming lines 7 and 12: the fiddle "never meant to stop," the narrator is "fit to drop") and natural rhythms (as if the moon will never set but will instead dance forever in the sky). The fiddle's sound creates this sense of eternity...and ends it. "Then, with a skirl / The fiddle broke," the narrator suddenly states, adding, "The moon went out: / The sea stopped dead: / And, in a twinkling, all the rout / Of dancing folk had fled... / And in the chill bleak dawn I woke" (Gibson 6.1-7). The fiddle is an instrument of sound, and even as it breaks, it lets out a dying, shrill wail that signals and mourns the end: the end of the fiddle, the end of the song, the end of the moon and its light, the end of the sea and its movement, the disappearance of the seal-dancers, the end of this dream-like reality, and the end of the night as dawn breaks. The sudden shortness of the first four lines in stanza 6 emphasize the abrupt silence and stark loneliness that spring upon both the narrator and the reader after the fiddle stops.

The end of the fiddle does not necessarily end the auditory images in the poem, as the narrator in stanza 7 "laugh[s]" and "chip[s] the stone," actions which both produce sounds (Gibson 7.1, 3). The narrator even claims that his senses still detect features from Skua Isle: he "smell[s]" the sea, he "see[s]" the maiden's hand, and he physically moves his mouth in order to "meet[s] again her merry smile" (Gibson 7.5, 6, 7). But he never "hears" the fiddle. Granted, he dreams that he is "dancing all the while, / I'm dancing ever...For ever and for evermore" (Gibson 7.8-9, 12), words that do recall his original dancing to the endless fiddle. Does he hear the fiddle in his dreams, or are his dreams soundless? If there is no fiddle, then are his dreams just dreams, never again to become the strange, seal-filled reality to which he longs to return?

Bringing the Fiddle to Life

When I was paging through the spring 1912 volume of Rhythm, searching for possible sources of musical inspiration, “The Dancing Seal” was the first piece that caught my eye. This is no surprise, as the poem is the second written piece in this volume. But as I read this poem, I was struck by the presence of a fiddle in the poem. I began to wonder, “What might the fiddle’s tunes sound like if the reader could actually hear it?” The poem's frequent mentions of a violin and other sounds, as well as its meter and rhymes, seemed to lend the poem perfectly to be set to music. I decided to create my own auditory version of the poem and to see what a musical score could contribute to, and/or alter one's perspective about, the poem. I first created an instrumental score for the song by using a website called Noteflight (https://www.noteflight.com/). I then recorded myself singing on the software Audacity and used this program to combine my vocals with the Noteflight mp3 file. The results of my labor are below.

Video File: "The Dancing Seal" (2022 [1912]). Lyrics by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Composed and sung by Julie Wilson.

Representing Stanzas

Just as Gibson attempts to invoke auditory sounds through his written poem, so do I attempt to recreate the visual line breaks of the poem in my musical score. To be specific, I use key changes to convey the page’s stanza breaks on the page as well as the different narrative stages of the poem: stanza 1, the introduction of the seals, is in concert A minor; stanza 2, the seals drawing nearer, is in B minor; stanzas 3 and 4, the beginning of the dance, are in C minor; and stanzas 5 and 6, the escalation and abrupt end of the dance, are in D minor. By causing the song to constantly rise from one key to another, I hope to communicate the sense of building anticipation and transformation that I see in the poem.

The one section in the song that is an exception to the key change principle is stanza 7, which first reverts back to a lower key, A minor, before switching halfway through to D minor. I chose to use multiple keys in stanza 7 because I view stanza 7 as a stanza of extensive remembrance, in which the narrator refers back to previous yet distinct moments in the poem. As on Skua Island, where a collective "we" built a lighthouse through stone-craft ("chisel touched the stone": Gibson 1.1, 4), the narrator describes a similar collective and constructive labor when he states, "I chip the stone, / Among my fellows here" (Gibson 7.3-4). The narrator further highlights the parallels between these two circumstances by explicitly mentioning "Skua" in the first lines of both stanzas (Gibson 1.1, 7.1). His description of the geographical identity of Skua is equally similar in both instances: he twice describes Skua as an "isle," twice places that word "isle" at the end of a line, and twice rhymes "isle" with the word "while" later in the stanza (Gibson 1.3 and 7.1; for "while," see Gibson 1.6 and 7.8; Gibson also rhymes "isle" with "smile" in 7.7). The word "isle" stands out both because it ends a line and because it forms rhymes with later words; likewise, the dry ground of Skua Island stands out against the ocean waters, and the narrator mnemonically "rhymes" (a.k.a., connects) the physical island with his labor and with the seals. Through this language, the narrator is not just remembering the island in stanza 7 but is calling the reader back to a specific moment in stanza 1. Consequently, I wrote the beginning of stanza 7 in A minor and returned to the melody of stanza 1.

As with the first lines of stanza 7 and their syntactical similarities to stanza 1, so the last few lines of stanza 7 recall several earlier instances in which the poem describes dancing. The narrator states in stanza 4, "And I was dancing, heel and toe, / With a young maiden white as snow" (4.9-10); in stanza 7, he reiterates, "I'm dancing ever, heel and toe, / With a seal-maiden, white as snow" (7.9-10). The syntactical construction of both quotes is strikingly parallel. The first line in each describes how the narrator dances, and the second line describes his dancing partner almost word-for-word, varying only between "young" in stanza 4 and "seal" in stanza 7. Additionally, both quotes refer to the same body parts, "heel and toe," at the end of the first line when describing the dance. This phrase occurs elsewhere in the poem and in connection with other dancing incidents: the narrator wondered if the seals would dance "heel and toe" around the whistling boy and later danced beside the seal-maiden "With tripping toes and skipping heels" (Gibson 3.10; 5.3). This repeated phrase "heel and toe" is, quite frankly, difficult for me to decipher. It could be functioning as a synecdoche, in which these two individual body parts are being used to represent the entire dancing body. The phrase could also be referring to a type of late nineteenth-century dance known as the "heel-and-toe polka," certain steps of which involved distinct tapping of the heels and toes (Late Nineteenth-Century Dance). And if the narrator is recalling a certain type of dance with "heel and toe," then he would also be referencing a particular type of musical style that would accompany that dance. Regardless of what the narrator means by "heel and toe," the repeated phrase suggests to me that the narrator in stanza 7 is recalling certain sensory features, specifically touch and movement, from his earlier dancing on Skua Isle. The muscle memories shared between stanza 4 and stanza 7 coincide with repeated, visual memories of the seal-maiden as a "maiden white as snow" (Gibson 4.10; 7.10; see also Gibson 5.9 "snow-white maid"). In short, the final lines of stanza 7 act as repositories of visual, physical/tactile, structural, and potentially auditory memories that the narrator recalls and reimagines in his "dream" (Gibson 7.8). I decided to mimic this memory and repetition in my stanza 7 by switching to the key of D minor and returning to the main melody of stanza 5. Theoretically, I could have switched the key to C minor and thus referred back to stanzas 3 and 4, but I wanted to return to stanza 5's melody and rhythm at the end of the piece order to recall that sense of excitement and twirling and dancing that the narrator describes in that section of the poem. (Also, stanza 5 is my favorite part in the song, and I wanted be able to listen to it more than once in the song.)

In the course of deciding when to insert the key changes, I did keep some stanzas in the same key. I kept stanzas 3 and 4 in C minor because I consider their content to be related: both describe the beginning of the dance. Furthermore, I am unclear whether stanzas 3 and 4 are separate stanzas or actually a single stanza in the poem. On the one hand, the content of the two stanzas is different, as stanza 3 talks about the seals’ collective itching to dance and stanza 4 describes the narrator’s personal interactions with the seal-maiden. This content separation is mirrored by a physical separation between the stanzas: there is a page break between stanzas 3 and 4, so they are visually separate—the reader has to physically turn the page (or scroll down the PDF) in order to get from stanza 3 to stanza 4. On the other hand, it is possible that the page break may not be representing a line break, and the editors of Rhythm needed to split the poem at this instance in order to fit the page length. Evidence to support the later theory includes the fact that the last line of stanza 3 and the first line of stanza four rhyme (“tune…moon”). That does not happen across the first and last lines of any other adjacent stanzas, so I wonder if stanzas 3 and 4 are actually meant to be one stanza. In the end, I compromised: I kept stanzas 3 and 4 in the same key but altered the main melody in each to distinguish between the two stanzas (though the end of stanza 4 reverts back to the original melody of stanza 3).

Similar key change exceptions arise with stanzas 5 and 6. Both stanzas clearly talk about different content: stanza 5 describes the frenzy of the dance, while stanza 6 narrates the abrupt end of the dance. But, for some reason, I felt like they were connected. Gibson could have written the first two lines of stanza 6, “Then, with a skirl / The fiddle broke” as one line, and maintained his iambic tetrameter. Instead, he broke the line in two, thus suspending the information about the fiddle’s demise until the end of the second line. The simultaneous change in poetic meter and holding back of information felt like a surprise, a moment of building tension and expectation. For some reason, reading those lines seemed to me like an attempt at deception, so I, too, trick my reader by having the first two lines of stanza 6 be in the same key and melody as stanza 5. Then, when the reader learns that the fiddle has broken and everything has stopped, I cut out all other instruments except for one or two that play melody and/or harmony at any given time for the rest of stanza 6.

As with stanzas 3 and 4, a page break separates stanzas 6 and 7 and thus creates some ambiguity about whether these are separate stanzas. With stanzas 6 and 7, however, I felt that they were more clearly separated than stanzas 3 and 4. For one, they take place in different geographic locations and different temporalities. Stanza 6 occurs in the past and on Skua Isle; stanza 7 uses the present tense and talks about the narrator’s new yet unknown location. For another, the stanzas' narrative content differs. Stanza 6 conveys feelings of abruptness when the dancing suddenly stops (mirrored by the suddenly shorter lines: Gibson 6.1-4), followed by silence and the narrator's loneliness (perhaps illustrated most clearly in the placement of the word "alone" at the end of the last line in the stanza). By contrast, stanza 7 returns to a more consistent iambic tetrameter and a memory of endless, fiddle-filled, exuberant dancing. The third factor that led me to consider stanzas 6 and 7 as separate is the fact that, unlike with stanzas 3 and 4, the last line of stanza 6 does not rhyme with the first line of stanza 7. For these reasons, I treat stanzas 6 and 7 as separate and therefore use different melodies and keys for each one.

Representing Meter, Rhyme, and Punctuation

Gibson writes "The Dancing Seal" using an iambic tetrameter meter. In layman's terms, "iambic tetrameter" means that each line has four iambs, or four sets of an unstressed beat (_) followed by a stressed beat (X): _ X _ X _ X _ X. Gibson is fairly consistent in following the iambic tetrameter, though there are several moments when he cuts the line short (e.g., Gibson 1.3; 5.10-12, 16; 6.1-4, 6). When creating the melody for my musical version of "The Dancing Seal," I drew inspiration from Gibson's iambic tetrameter (though I, like Gibson, also have moments where I stray from my general rhythm/meter). Typically in my written music, the odd and "unstressed" beats in a line are on an upbeat, which one would not typically emphasize when conducting, and the even and "stressed" beats are on a downbeat, which does get emphasized when conducting (see Figure 3). When one wishes to write down downbeats and upbeats, downbeats are typically represented by Arabic numbers, while upbeats are typically represented by a "+" sign (see Figure 4). (Of course, it gets more complicated when one starts introducing different kinds of note patters and time signatures, but I'll try to keep things simple here.)

Figure 3: Conducting in 4/4 time. (Image entry in Works Cited: [Conducting in 4/4 time].) This is one of several ways in which to conduct in 4/4 time, and it also happens to be my personal favorite because of the distinct hand positions for each downbeat. Note that downbeats (1, 2, 3, 4) are emphasized as a result of the hand's sudden changes in direction, whereas the upbeats (the "+"s) are not even present in the conducting motions.

Figure 4: Screenshot of the first three measures for the bassoon in Gibson and Wilson's "The Dancing Seal" song. Observe that the odd syllables "When," "were," "-ing," and "-a," which would be unstressed in Gibson's iambic tetrameter, fall on the upbeat "+" in the music. The even syllables that would be stressed in the iambic tetrameter--"we," "build-," "Sku-," and "Light"--are on the downbeats (1, 2, 3, 4).

The same pattern generally holds true in the triplet sections (stanzas 3, 5, and the second half of 7), though I further emphasize the unstressed-stressed pattern by lengthening the amount of time that the stressed syllables are held (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Screenshot of measures 49-52 for the violin in Gibson and Wilson's "The Dancing Seal" song. Measures 49 and 50 are written in 6/4 (6 downbeats per measure), and measures 51 and 52 are written in 4/4 (4 downbeats per measure). Let's say that we decide to represent the three beats in a triplet by using the word "blueberry," which has three syllables (and which my violin instructor used when teaching me triplets). Syllables that would typically be stressed beats in Gibson's iambic tetrameter ("take...fid-...down...mer-...tunes...-side...eyes") take up the first ("blue") and second ("ber") syllables of the triplet "blueberry." Syllables that would typically be unstressed beats in the iambic tetrameter ("He'd...his...-dle...and...-ry...be-...the...Their...grew") take up only the third syllable ("ry") of the triplet "blueberry," meaning that it takes a half as much time to play these "ry" syllables than it does for the "blueber" ones. Observe that there are exceptions to this rule: the word "His," an unstressed syllable in Gibson's iambic tetrameter, takes up all three syllables of the last triplet in measure 50, as shown by the tie symbol (alias the upside-down arch) that stretches across the three separate notes in the triplet.

Unlike Gibson's meter, his end-rhymes do not follow any particular patterns. Below is a schematic of Gibson's rhyme schemes, where each letter represents a different syllable that ends a line:

• Stanza 1 = A A B C D B D C E E F G G F F G

• Stanza 2 = H H I I J J K K

• Stanza 3 = L L G A G A M M N N O

• Stanza 4 = O D D G G G K K N N K

• Stanza 5 = O G P P P O G Q R R S Q G G T S

• Stanza 6 = T U V W V W U C

• Stanza 7 = B N C X D X B B N N X D

Sometimes Gibson uses couplets (AA) or three end-lines in a row (GGG), other times he rhymes every other line (GAGA), and still other times the rhymes are repeated in more complex patterns (BCDBDC, OGPPPOG). Some end-rhymes occur frequently within and/or across stanzas (G in stanzas 1, 3, 4, 5; N in stanzas 3, 4, 7); some end-rhymes only occur in one stanza (H, I, and J in stanza 2; P and R in stanza 5; U, V, and W in stanza 6), and some end-rhymes do not rhyme with any other lines in their own stanza but do rhyme with lines in other stanzas (O in stanzas 3, 4, and 5; T in stanzas 5 and 6). I did attempt to aurally represent the rhyme pattern in my score, such as having the D-lines in stanza 1 ("The friendly beasts would come ashore...As though they'd not seen men before"; Gibson 1.5, 7) contain a different sequence of notes than the other lines. But I quickly dropped this technique of using different note-patters for different end-rhymes, in large part because Gibson does not use a singular rhyming pattern and because I did not feel burdened to exactly represent the varieties of end-rhyme patterns through the musical notation. Doing so would have felt like a little too much work without enough of a reward, at least for me.

When writing the music to "The Dancing Seal," I tended not to give much thought to representing and recreating Gibson's punctuation. The main exception to this rule is in stanza 7, where I add an extra measure at the end of lines 5 and 7 in order to emphasize the elongated ellipses that end these lines and that, for me, marked distinct shifts in the narrator's remembrance of Skua Isle, namely from the island's natural landscape to the seal-maiden herself. I do a similar move 6 in stanza 6, where an ellipsis ends line 6 and separates the suddenness of the dance's end (and, possibly, of a dream) from the narrator's groggy awakening to reality in lines 7 and 8.

Instruments of Sound

Aside from the fiddle/violin, “The Dancing Seal” mentions no musical instruments. This left me with some leeway on what instruments I could include. I decided to craft an orchestral score because I was already familiar with that genre: I had played in band from fourth through eleventh grade, I frequently listen to soundtracks and orchestral arrangements, and I had already written multiple instrumental scores on Noteflight. The instruments for this piece include woodwinds (flute, oboe, clarinet in Bb, and bassoon), brass (French horn, trumpet in Bb, trombone, and tuba), percussion (timpani), and strings (violin, viola, and cello).

In the first stanza, I used plucked strings to mimic the staccato sounds of chiseling and chipping away at stone. The woodwind instruments take turns carrying the melody and harmonies. The brass instruments enter with a counter-melody when the "chisel touched the stone" (Gibson 1.4) in order to represent the moment when the seals are first drawn to the workers. In stanza 2, which delves more deeply into the seals' physical movement and emotional state, the brass take the lead in providing melody and harmonies. The bassoon and clarinet pick up the strings' short eighth notes and continue to mirror the auditory labor of the men's masonry, while the flute briefly trills as a sonic salute to the boy's whistling. I kept the cello in and had it play whole notes alongside the trombone and tuba, but I dropped out the violin and viola because I wanted to make the introduction of the strings more dramatic when the word "violin" ends stanza 2 (Gibson 2.8).

The third stanza is where the violin (alias fiddle) takes center stage and introduces both a new melody and a new time signature. As the seals become more human-like and the fiddle leaves the narrator wondering if seals can dance, I wanted to make it more dancing music and less reflective. I wanted the reader to be able to feel the beat. That's why I add timpani and tuba to play quarter notes that make it easier for the audience to hear (and hopefully dance to) the beat. When the fourth stanza arrives and the narrator approaches the seal-maiden, the brass and timpani drop out and the beat slows as the strings and woodwinds play long, held-out whole notes. Such notes are meant to mimic the reflectiveness and suspension of disbelief as the narrator asks the seal to dance with him. When the seal begins her transformation into a maiden, the instruments switch to occasional eighth notes and steadily progress in chords (C minor to D minor to E minor to F minor) in order to emphasize the disorienting suddenness of her transformation. Once the transformation is complete and the narrator is dancing with the seal-maiden, the instruments return to the original melody and tempo that began stanza 3.

The fifth stanza possesses the same tempo and melody as the third stanza, but I slowly add in more instruments to represent the steady increase of other dancing parties (moon, sea, seals) on the beach. In my mind, the eagerness and franticness of the dancing increases in the fifth stanza, and I reflect this energy by adding more complex rhythms in the timpani line as if to invoke the narrator's quickening heart-beat as he dances more exuberantly; I also do it to get the listener's heart-beat to equally increase. (I know that mine does, especially when I sing this part of the song.) The energy in the fifth stanza also increases in part to contrast with the sudden cutting-out of instruments and decrease in tempo that is part of stanza 6, showing the suddenness in which the magical dance stops after the fiddle breaks. I only have one or two instruments play at a time in stanza 6 (and never the strings) in order to mimic the narrator's feelings of aloneness and disorientation when he discovers that the singing fiddle and dancing seals no longer exist.

In the seventh stanza, the plucked strings return as the narrator goes back to his masonry labor. The woodwinds resume the original melody, tempo, and time signature (4/4) of the first stanza; similarly, the brass instruments come in when the poem once again refers to the activity of "chip[ping] the stone" (Gibson 7.3). Contrary to stanza 1, however, the instruments that come in during stanza 7 stay in, creating a sense of building and of hope as the narrator senses more and more features that step out of his memories of Skua Isle and into his current reality, as shown by his present tense "I smell...And see...And meet" (Gibson 7.5-7). As the song reflects on the last five lines of the poem, the strings strike up the familiar melody from stanza 5 and draw the rest of the instruments back into the frenzied and exuberant melody that the narrator had danced to, and still dances to, even in dreams. Though the singing ends after line 12, I had the instruments continue playing the stanza 5 melody to mimic how the narrator's memories and experiences on Skua Isle continue to reverberate through his senses. The music and the dancing echo in a seemingly interminable manner as the song itself slowly fades out into silence. My hope is that, even when the song ends, the listener finds themself still humming the main melody of stanza 5 just like the narrator continues revisiting Skua Isle and the seal-maiden in his dreams.

Recording "The Dancing Seal"

The voice singing the words in the above recording of "The Dancing Seal" is indeed my own. I did not edit the tone or pitch of my voice in Audacity, so I apologize if at any point I sound pitchy, breathy, or slightly out of tune. I recorded myself singing the words four different times and ended up using the fourth take for this song. In this fourth take, I sang straight through from beginning to end without pausing the music at any point. In addition to deleting random background noises that were audible when I was not singing, I did re-record certain sections before inserting them into the fourth recording. They are as follows:

• "As though they'd not seen men before" (Gibson 1.7) = I originally sang this an octave higher and had a rather pitchy "As"; the new recording lowered the words to the present octave and hopefully produced a cleaner-sounding "As."

• "To watch us: for their eyes were kind" (Gibson 1.15) = The original "kind" was a little breathy and weak in volume. I re-recorded this section so that my "kind" was fuller in tone and volume.

• "The queer beasts shuffled nearer still" (Gibson 2.6) = I re-did this section because my original timing and volume/pitch for these words was off.

A Closer Look at "Queer Beasts"

Today, the word "queer" is used as one of several words to identify someone who does not identify as heterosexually normative. The word currently has a positive valence. Before, it was used as a derogatory term. But even before that, the word "queer" was used in contexts that had nothing to do with sexuality. The word originally meant "strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric" and was used to describe individual characteristics that were not typical nor always associated with sex ("queer, adj.1"). Because I believe that this is the usage of "queer" here; and because the usage of "queer" in terms of sexuality has shifted to more positive usages, I keep it here.

• "Was mad to hear his violin" (Gibson 2.8) = In the original recording, my "violin" was a little too pitchy. In the newly recorded section, the "violin" is less pitchy, though my voice is a little quieter than I would have liked. But I decided to opt for less pitchy and quieter than fuller in sound but more pitchy.

• "That kept on spinning merrily...And never once the snow-white maid...Though we should dance to death" (Gibson 5.7, 9, 16) = Singing stanza five is incredibly difficult and taxing for me. The tempo is faster, the notes come quickly, and there are not many opportunities for me to catch my breath in between lines. Whenever I sing this part, I feel like the narrator who was "fit to drop," and the song is the seal-maiden who "never...stayed / To take a breath" (Gibson 5.12, 9, 10-11). In the original recording, I trail off in the last two syllables of "merrily" so that I can literally catch my breath before I resume singing. I added an additional "merrily" recording so as to make the word easier for the listener (and to mask the moment where I gasp for air). I also substituted re-recordings of "and never once" and "dance to death" because I originally sang these words so loudly and high in the original recording that they sounded like screeching and blew out my audio.

• "For ever and for evermore" (Gibson 7.12) = When I originally sang these words in my recording, my "more" was so loud and high that it blew out the volume on my audio. I switched in a slightly quieter version of "more" that hopefully still maintains the intensity of the line without hurting my listeners' ears.

Dancing Still: A Small Reflection

The process of setting "The Dancing Seal" to music was not always a straightforward one. I frequently played with how loud certain instruments were and which ones played the melody line at any given time. I spent a lot of time recording and re-recording my voice, trying to get the sound as accurate as I could to what I was envisioning in my head. I pondered how the fiddle functions in the poem and how/when I wanted the violins in my own piece to play. I identified what kind of meter Gibson uses and thought about how to represent his line breaks and rhythm across musical measures. I thought about the seal-maiden, the mysteries and problematics of her transformation, the alternate feelings of community and loneliness that the narrator experiences. I debated whether the final stanza is one of hopeful return (look, the seal-maiden!) or hopeless remembrance, especially given the absence of the fiddle in stanza 7. I considered how sound moves the seals, moves the narrator, and ultimately moves the reader as they interact with the poem. And I hope, as you listen and read to this blog piece, that the work I have produced somehow moves you, too.

Works Cited

[Conducting in 4/4 time]. Digital image. "The Orchestra Moves with Movement." Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, https://www.carnegiehall.org/Education/Programs/Link-Up/National-Program/The-Orchestra-Moves/The-Orchestra-Moves-with-Meter. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.

Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson. "The Dancing Seal." Rhythm vol. 1, no. 4, spring 1912, pp. 4-6.

Late Nineteenth-Century Dance: Heel-and-Toe Polka also known as the Bohemian. Monographic. Video. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/musdivid.064/.

"mad, adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press, Dec. 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/112000. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.

"merry, adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press, Dec. 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/116864. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.

"queer, adj.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, Dec. 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/156236. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.