The Rocking Chair

AUTHOR NARRATION

Hear the poem.

Read by the author in the original English.

The Rocking ChairEnglish narration

THE POEM IN IMAGES

Trajectories Hung Helical.

“in vapor trails of dandelion seeds wished into the wind, trajectories hung helical in August air like stale forests of kelp?”

Move across the image—or use the arrow keys—to let the same trajectories pass from August air into an underwater forest.

A child blows a dandelion while the seeds trace luminous helical paths through the sky.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

The Music Man.

The first five poems in Section II are about the same man, and his passion for music was central to his character. Fittingly, this short sequence of poems begins and ends with references to this affinity with music.

THE SEQUENCE BEGINS

“He asked me what my passions were and offered his: people, music, running, learning, dance…”

THE SEQUENCE ENDS

“& for the night your song hears
in my native silence
summons home.”

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

The Unicorn and the Lion.

Hermann Hesse · 1943

The Glass Bead Game

Hesse’s final novel is set in Castalia, a future society devoted to intellectual life. There, Joseph Knecht becomes a master of the Glass Bead Game: an imagined discipline that seeks the shared structures connecting music, mathematics, logic, philosophy, the arts, and the sciences.

The game makes music and mathematics into languages capable of meeting—one way of joining intuition with structure, feeling with system.