How Late Their Fathers Be!

I was at a Lunch Hour Concert yesterday. Greta Bradman sang The Sunset, which is Respighi's musical version for soprano and string quartet of Robert Ascoli's Italian translation of Shelley's poem The Sunset.

That meant there was a lot to do. Follow the Italian, follow the English, listen to the music, listen to Greta and watch Greta. Impossible to do them all. I chose to pay attention to Greta, because she was so pretty, and she wore a shot silk lilac dress with a ruffle on one shoulder. Her voice was high and pure.

It was the right choice. The Sunset is Shelley at his dippiest. A young man and his lady walk into a forest at sunset, to 'know the unreserve of mingled being', after which the the young man says, Is it not strange Isabel? I never saw the sun. They agree that they will look at it tomorrow, but the next morning the young man is dead and cold. The young lady has to spend the rest of her life looking after her aged father. You see what I mean.

The second song that Greta sang was a setting of an Emily Dickinson poem, How Slow the Wind.

It's a short poem, and it goes like this:

how slow the wind-
how slow the sea-
how late their Fathers be!

Greta sang it so beautifully you could almost think it made sense, but what does it mean? I didn't know. When I got home I googled Emily Dickinson to see if anybody knew. At first I thought I was in luck. One site quoted the last line as : how late their Feathers be.

Oh I thought, Feathers, that makes a lot more sense. But on further reflection I concluded that Feathers made no more sense than Fathers.