The idea of the musical glass came from the Crow whose poem you can read here. This is an attempt to tease out the idea in a different way.
The glass is humming in my head,
thrummed by a moistened finger,
idly following the tune,
the hand that pointed from the cloud.
Crystal fills with starlight, moonlight,
gathers silver chords glissando,
building music of the spheres.
The hand with moving finger falters,
having lost its song moves on
to write its orders in the wind.
Wind and water rise and turn
about the pristine crystal rim,
while the greybeard stops his ears.
The glass still hums its monologue,
for who can stop the wind, the tides?
No finger pointing from the clouds
can silence music of the stars
and tell the music of the moon: be not.
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Lovely Jane
Thank you 🙂
My pleasure 🙂
But beware, when the musical glass was mechanised as the Glass Harmonica, in the eighteenth century, the strange music it created was said to send young ladies mad!
I bet it sent cats mad. They react quite strangely to high-pitched noises. I’ve heard of the glass harmonica. Must look it up…
Benjamin Franklin: http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_inquiring_glass.html
Thanks for that, Merril. You might have known Ben Franklin was behind it 🙂 Not sure about the lead poisoning theory though. Surely you’d ingest more of it by actually drinking from the glass, so everybody would have been barking mad at that rate.
Yeah, I think people were more likely to get lead poisoning from other sources.
Well, if it was from drinking glasses, you’d think entire populations would have got it.
Yes, you would. I’m not actually sure how common drinking glasses were, but lead was in other substances.
Right. Ordinary people didn’t uses glasses until fairly recent history. They were for rich people.
There were glassworks here in the 18th century–actually here in S. Jersey–but I think they mostly made bottles.
People drank from pewter or wooden pots, I think.
Lead was a very common metal then, but lead in glasses is fixed and cannot affect a person touching or drinking the glass. The most dangerous utensils were made of pewter, a lead alloy, particularly plates. the metal is soft and if you look at an old pewter plate you can see grooves in the metal where a knife has scraped a little bit of the metal into the food.
Worst of all were some foodstuffs, it was found that lead salts acted as artificial sweeteners and they were deliberately added where sugar would be unsuitable (in drinks for example where sugar could cause the liquid to ferment).
It’s astonishing we’re still around really. Certainly a reason population growth didn’t really accelerate until the industrial revolution with its spinoffs into science and medecine, and (cynically) a greater incentive for keeping the necessary work force alive.
I particularly like the last stanza. Can’t stop the moon from humming. 🙂
I hope no one ever tries.
I agree.
Lovely poem. I hopped over to check out Crow’s website and followed. Thanks.
I’m glad you did. He writes excellent poetry, for a big black bird 🙂