Leonora Speyer, an American poet and concert violinist who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1926 collection *Fiddler’s Farewell*, published “Song” in her earlier book *A Canopic Jar* (1921). Though she wrote during the rise of modernism, her lyric remains almost defiantly musical, shaped by her training as a performer. The poem is less a description than an incantation: a speaker imagines what it would mean to sing the essential songs of dawn, dusk, and love. In three parallel stanzas, she builds a quiet argument that the act of singing—of finding the perfect voice—would be enough to satisfy her deepest longings.
The opening stanza sets a condition: “If I could sing the song of the dawn, / The carroling word of leaf and bird / And the sun-waked fern uncurling there.” The dawn is not just light but a vocabulary—a “word” spoken by leaves and birds, a fern stirring awake. If the speaker could voice this, she declares, “I would go lonely and would not care.” Loneliness would lose its sting because the song itself would be companionship enough. The second stanza turns to dusk, and the stakes rise. The imagery shifts from green growth to a luminous deathbed: “The stars and moon of glistening June / Lit at the foot and head of me.” Candles at foot and head imply a body laid out, a wake. The speaker says, “The Spinner might break the thread of me.” That Spinner is Fate, the mythical figure who measures and cuts life’s thread. If she could sing the dusk, she would accept mortality calmly. Art would reconcile her to death.
The final stanza narrows to love, but with a surprising reversal. She does not ask to be loved; she asks for a voice: “Fill my throat with each sounding note.” Then comes the crucial turn: “Others might kiss and clasp and cling, / Mine be the lips that would sing, would sing!” The physical intimacy that others crave is set aside. The speaker claims a different kind of lips—not for kissing but for singing. The repeated “would sing” pulses with longing and certainty, as if the repetition is itself the song she desires.
The poem’s construction reinforces this musical drive. Each of the three quatrains begins with the same anaphoric phrase “If I could sing,” creating a litany. The lines are loosely iambic but often break into anapestic ripples, as in “The carroling word of leaf and bird,” so the rhythm feels like a voice testing its range. Rhymes are not rigid, yet each stanza closes with a strong chime: “there” and “care,” “me” and “me,” “cling” and “sing.” The effect is of a thought reaching completion, a note resolving. Within lines, sounds knit together: the alliterative “kiss and clasp and cling” mimics the very clinging it describes, while the long vowels of “stars and moon of glistening June” open the stanza like a night sky.
What makes “Song” significant is its quiet radicalism. Speyer does not present the poet as a passive observer of nature or a lovelorn lyricist. Instead, she imagines the singer as someone who could be satisfied by expression alone, who would trade both human companionship and earthly life for the ability to voice dawn, dusk, and love. For a woman poet of the early twentieth century, this is a confident claim to artistic vocation. The poem is not ultimately about what is sung but about the power of the singing voice itself—and that voice, Speyer suggests, is its own reward.