The Sunday Poem/Song: Longitude
It feels weird to try to follow up “Ode to Code”, which is easily the most popular poem I have ever posted on the site. Most of the Sunday Poems get a few dozen reads, and that one has crested 1500.
Well, here’s a song that is in some ways similarly geeky. After all, it’s about orreries, sextants, Dava Sobel’s wonderful book Longitude, determinism, and even name-checks Aristotle. It also has a shipwrecked sailor hallucinating, of course. For those who don’t know or haven’t read the book (which I highly recommend), before John Harrison developed his clock, longitude was fiendishly difficult to calculate, which led, of course, to sea travel being extremely dangerous and unpredictable.
I ended up making it the title track on that “full band” CD that I still haven’t finished after all these years (it’s been since 2001!). I should probably just call it “done” and put it up somewhere. Oh well. Read on for the lyrics and also how to play it on the guitar:
Longitude
Sailing across to the Banda Islands in search of clove, nutmeg and spice
One eye of the sailor has long since been blinded and now we take sightings at night
Sweep the camera all around, we circle the ship and its sails abound
With waves glinting with sun and stars in their spheres whirling the salt air through town
How does it feel, longitude leading the way?
With Harrison’s clock and a sextant besides we measure the length of the days
How does it feel, longitude leading the way?
As deep as a heart and as long as there’s love, magical clocks have their say
Some say there’s a fleet guarding astronomers counting comets on St Helena’s
They wind up the orrery and tune the meridians and keep our sun falling on us
Is it all but a clockworking world, the gears and the spheres Aristotle saw
Reduced to diamond crustings on pocketwatch springs and design becoming law?
How does it feel, longitude leading the way?
From far across oceans I measure the loss and measure the length of the days
How does I feel, longitude leading the way?
As deep as a heart and as long as there’s love, magical clocks have their say
Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick
If a sailor should fall onto some rough atoll off of the lands of the Sultan of Run
With seashells and sands rough at his hands and signal fires but no one will come
Can we be shipwrecked without any time? Could years go by without losing one’s mind?
He’d miss you, his love, and miss good strong tea
And breakfast abed where the sky isn’t grace
And the mornings don’t sharpen their claws on his face
And he feels soft the skin under his hand and he’s back on the Queen’s own land
How does it feel, longitude leading the way?
From far across oceans I measure the loss and measure the length of the days
How does it feel, longitude leading the way?
As deep as a heart and as long as there’s love, Harrison’s clock has its say
— Nov. 20th, 2001
Guitar stuff: this is just the main acoustic part, of course, not the bass part.
Standard tuning, partial capo 3-4-5 2nd fret.
Verse: { 772200 772207 054200 054250 022454 022450
072600 076200 054200 052400 442200 552200 772200 } 2x
Chorus { 026200 hammering on the 6, slide to 024200 and quickly to 052200 } 3x
026200 hammering on the 6, slide to 024200 and quickly to 042200
442200 552200 022450. Riff: 022770 022650 022430 022770 022450.
Bridge: as verse, but fourth line changes to 44xxxx 55xxxx 77xxxx 054xxx 076xxxx 027770 029990
13 Responses to “The Sunday Poem/Song: Longitude”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
My favorite couplet (this counts as couplet even though it’s part of a quatrain, right?): Is it all but a clockworking world, the gears and the spheres Aristotle saw Reduced to diamond crustings on pocketwatch springs and design becoming law? https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/04/the-sunday-poemsong-longitude/ I also feel touched by the chorus: How does it feel, longitude leading the way? From far across oceans I measure the loss and measure the length of the days [edit:] I’m listening to it for the third time. His voice is growing on me. =P And my mind
You know, you can use software such as Guitar Pro to create tablature.
That way when you post chords or riffs, your transcription doesn’t look encrypted.
Thanks for the song. Where would you expect to find this song in a record store?
I’m not going to spend all that time creating tab for a blog post! Besides, for a song like this, which is mostly arpeggiated chords, the chord fingerings should be all someone would need… This is the second time you’ve commented that this is weird notation, but it’s actually pretty standard:
EADGBD = 772200
______
||||||
|XXX|| <- partial capo |||||| |||||| |||||| |||||| xx||||
As far as where I'd see this is a record store... uh, probably with the contemporary singer-singwriter stuff, folk/americana. That category is kind of broad these days, but it ranges from the very folky/country stuff (Greg Brown) to the bluesy Americana stuff (James McMurtry), to the pop-folk (Shawn Colvin)... so somewhere in that vicinity?
Second time? That’s news to me. 🙂
I can’t remember which song it was that you commented on that same notation. 🙂
I think this is my favorite of the Sunday Poems (except maybe for the Wii and Areae ones — I’m a sucker for doggerel). I like the old, simple words, and the rhyme of “St. Helena’s” and “falling on us”, and the line with mornings and claws. Thanks for sharing it.
About a quarter the way through it I started hearing Roger Whitaker singing it. I hadn’t thought of him or his popular song ‘The Last Farewell’ in years.
I may be hearing things (it’s past midnight and it’s been a bad few… umm… weeks? how long has it been?), but is there a second voice running alongside?
You’re hearing a studio trick, it’s just a processed version of my voice moved up a fifth or fourth.
A song about Longitude puts me in mind of a poem with a verse about one attempt to solve that problem. It’s called Five Visions of Captain Cook.
The verse I’m talking about is III.
Kenneth Slessor is the poet. If that whets your appetite in any way I should mention that it’s far from his best, which is IMO Beach Burial.
Hehe
[…] Thread… must… not… slip… off… front… page….!Recent musicky stuff I have posted:https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/02/04/the-sunday-poemsong-longitude/https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/26/the-sunday-song-the-coming-gloria/ […]
[…] while back I posted the song “Longitude.” This here is that song as it was originally born: just a flatpicked guitar piece. This has a little […]