Recess! Media

Brief sound clip 

You’re hearing the first part of the Emily Dickenson poem, “Hope is the Thing With Feathers,” sung by Tahkus Ekedal and Amy Deegan from a collection of well-known 19th and early 20th century American poems for young people that have been set to music by Ted Jacobs and others. The CD is called “The Days Gone By,” and it includes works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, and several by Miss Dickinson. The musical treatments of the poems that Jacobs and his colleagues have created are respectful and appropriate — all acoustic instruments, nothing to overwhelm the words and their rhythms, and everything to preserve these graceful verses — the sound of the ocean in Longfellows’ “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls,” the tumult and longing of Poe’s “Alone,” or the wistful fantasies of Field’s “The Sugar-Plum Tree” and “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.” What a way to experience poetry, and it will leave you and your children wanting to hear all your favorites woven into melodies like this.