Cutting sounds (Cicadas, pt. 3)

My last post included quotations in which the sound of cicadas was compared to that of a blade-grinding wheel. The blades being sharpened included scissors, knives, and razors. 

Eugenio Montale likens cicadas to cutting instruments in his poem "L'ombra della magnolia": "On the treetop intermittently a cicada shrills ... . . . The thin cutting file will soon be hushed, the empty husk of the erstwhile singer will soon be dust, it is autumn, it is winter...." (trans. Glauco Cambon in Cambon's "Eugenio Montale's 'Motets': The Occasions of Epiphany," PMLA, v. 82[7] [Dec., 1967]: 471-484 at 482)  

In her poem "Cicadas" (2000), Margaret Atwood complains of the male cicadas' "maddening racket" and "piercing one note of a jackhammer." In "Nocturne for Cicada," William Wright describes the insects as "Red-eyed dusk-chisels: they whittle the mind." In "The Cicadas" (1985), Jamie Grant says the insects are "raucous as lawnmowers." 

Sawing devices are commonly invoked. Pablo Neruda mentions the cicadas' "sawing song." ("Oda a la luz encantada," c. 1957; trans. as "Ode to Enchanted Light" by Ken Krabbenhoft) In Henry George Fischer's "Cicada Cadence," cicada sounds are "ripsawing inspissated heat." For Martin Walls, in "Cicadas At the End of Summer" (2000), it is "as though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of titanium." In his sequence "Island of Summer" (Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968), Robert Penn Warren writes, "All day, cicadas, / At the foot of infinity, like / A tree, saw." 

Machine music (Cicadas, pt 2)

Cicadas figure in poetry as little artists singing with the Muses, but, for many, these insects' mechanical drone is the antithesis of music. 

Here's Nathaniel Potter in 1839: 

The cicadae breed annually, the locust once in seventeen years. ... The cicadae of Greece must have been highly gifted with musical powers to have been celebrated by Homer .... How differently would the ear of the imperial poet have decided, if he had been condemned to listen to the monotonous, protracted twang of the American locust! (Potter, Notes on the Locusta Septentrionalis Americanae Decem Septima [Baltimore: J. Robinson, 1839], p. 7)

In 1843, the noise of cicadas (i.e., seventeen-year locusts) in Staten Island impressed Henry David Thoreau, who describes them in a letter to his mother. 

Pray, have you the Seventeen year locust in Concord? The air here is filled with their din. They come out of the ground at first in an imperfect state, and, crawling up the shrubs and plants, the perfect insect bursts out through the back. ... In a few weeks the eggs will be hatched, and the worms fall to the ground and enter it, and in 1860 make their appearance again. ... Their din is heard by those who sail along the shore, from the distant woods, Phar-r-r-aoh. Phar-r-r-aoh. They are departing now. Dogs, cats and chickens subsist mainly upon them in some places. (Thoreau, July 7, 1843)

While this plague of locusts' pharaonic din impressed Thoreau enough for him to mention the creatures in the Conclusion of Walden, he does not call their sound music. 

The noise is often said to be metallic or mechanical. Walt Whitman calls it "that brassy drone" and compares it to "the whirling of brass quoits." (Specimen Days, Aug. 22, 1876) John Burroughs mentions "the brassy crescendo of the cicada." (Locusts and Wild Honey, 1884) 

The entomologist Thomas Workman characterizes the sound of Brazilian cicadas this way:

There is a cicada or some other insect that goes on Ping-ing-ing-ing like a fine wire vibrating and a liliputian triangle working at the same time; there is also another insect making a somewhat similar sound, but not so mechanical or peculiar. (Workman, "A Recent Visit to Brazil," Report and Proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society for the Session 1882-83 [Nov. 7, 1882], p. 16)

"A fine wire vibrating"—perhaps, then, it is a kind of music. For Archibald Lampman, "The dry cicada plies his wiry bow/ In long-spun cadence." ("Among the Timothy," 1888) " Or is it a strumming? "Cicadas strum the metal miles of air" in Chicago. (John Frederick Nims, "The Woolen Bug," 1944) The "metal miles" of industry, of whirring mechanisms and gears.

Robert Penn Warren imagines cicadas sawing and churning out "filings of brass." ("Island of Summer," Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968) In Japan, "a gross cicada tunes its brassy gear." (D. J. Enright, "Sumiyoshi [i]: First Impressions," Bread Rather Than Roses, 1956) In her novel The Clock Winder, Anne Tyler assimilates the noise to the "metallic, whanging sound" of a toy gun. Even in Greece, where cicadas used to be pastoral, they now grate and whirr:

It came from the shore in rhythmic, grating, metallic waves like the engines of an immense factory in a frenzy—the electric rattle of innumerable high-powered dynamos whirling in aimless unison. (Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani, 1958, p. 41)

We link the cicada noise to that of "machines to power daylight," (Jamie Grant, "The Cicadas," 1985) "your electric razor," (Chungmi Kim, "Being In Love," 2004) an "electric appliance," (Dana Levin, "My Sentence," 2012), and "the dog days' electrical buzz." (Madeline Bassnett, "Life Cycle" -- scroll way down -- 2011) 

Strange, that something so natural should call to mind such artifice.

Later comparisons invoke later machines. In the 19th century, the machines in question were pushed through neighborhoods by scissor-grinders, tradesmen who went door-to-door offering to sharpen household blades. The machines contained a metal wheel, which enters into Whitman's description of the cicada's sound: 

A single locust is now heard near noon from a tree two hundred feet off, as I write—a long whirring, continued, quite loud noise graded in distinct whirls, or swinging circles, increasing in strength and rapidity up to a certain point, and then a fluttering, quietly tapering fall. Each strain is continued from one to two minutes. ... Let me say more about the song of the locust, even to repetition; a long, chromatic, tremulous crescendo, like a brass disk whirling round and round, emitting wave after wave of notes, beginning with a certain moderate beat or measure, rapidly increasing in speed and emphasis, reaching a point of great energy and significance, and then quickly and gracefully dropping down and out. Not the melody of the singing-bird—far from it; the common musician might think without melody, but surely having to the finer ear a harmony of its own; monotonous—but what a swing there is in that brassy drone, round and round, cymballine—or like the whirling of brass quoits. (Whitman, Specimen Days, 1876)

In a passage from which I quoted at the start of this post, Nathaniel Potter says, 

How differently would the ear of the imperial poet have decided, if he had been condemned to listen to the monotonous, protracted twang of the American locust! He would have been as much pleased with the scraping of a scissor-grinder, or the grating of a file. (Notes on the Locusta Septentrionalis Americanae Decem Septima, 1839, p. 7)

He adds that the sound "rises and falls through the gradations; crescendo, minuendo et cadendo." 

About thirty years later, Cuthbert Collingwood writes, 

There are two or three species of Cicada which are no whit inferior in noisy powers .... I shall never forget the first time of hearing the scissor-grinder in the jungle at Pappan when approaching the island in a boat, the noise being distinctly audible for at least a quarter of an hour before we reached the shore, and when there the resounding whir-r-r--whir-r-r--whir-r-r of the insect .... After continuing this deafening sound for some time, it winds up with a protracted whiz-z-z, which dies away just like the scissor-grinder's wheel when the treddle stops. (Rambles of a Naturalist on the Shores and Waters of the China Sea [London: John Murray, 1868], p. 176)

Writing from Guyana in 1883, Sir Everard Ferdinand im Thurn mentions

certain curious insects, locally called razor-grinders (Cicada), from the extraordinary sounds that they make, ... The whole place rings with the whirr of these insects, as though fifty pairs of scissors were being sharpened at once on half a hundred grindstones. (Among the Indians of Guiana: being sketches, chiefly anthropologic from the interior of British Guiana, 1883, p. 153)

The simile recurs in Babette Deutsch's poem "July In Dutchess County": 

Late, the dry / Timbal of the cicada, / Like the pledge of the knifegrinder's wheel, / Refines / Summer's declining edge. (Coming of Age, 1959, p. 111)

In 2000, Millicent Bell made a similar comparison in her translation of Eugenio Montale's poem "Meriggiare pallido e assorto" (1925). In the poem's third stanza, Bell writes, "the cicada calls like a knife on the grinder’s stone." In the original Italian, Montale does not compare the insect's sound to that of a blade-grinding instrument. (The last two lines of his third stanza are, "mentre si levano tremuli scricchi / di cicale dai calvi picchi.") 

Singing cicadas (Cicadas, pt 1)

Singing cicadas abound in ancient Greece. Already, before the CE, they sing like a king in Anacreon's "Ode to the Cicada" (6th century) and sing ... well ... better than donkeys in the prologue to Callimachus' Aetia (3rd century). 

Cicadas prefer singing to eating in Plato's Phaedrus (259b-e). One there finds them liaising with the Muses while, in Meleager of Gadara's "To the Cicada" (1st century), they're singing to the nymphs. They "pour forth their lily-like voice" in the Iliad (3.151, trans. A. T. Murray). (Wait ... their voice sounds like a lily...?)

Further afield, cicadas sing themselves hoarse in Virgil's second Eclogue. One "sings all his life" in Richard Wilbur's "Cigales" (1947) and another "sang itself utterly away" (Basho, trans. R. H. Blyth). 

Singing cicadas greet the dusk in Tennyson's "Mariana In the South" (1842), accompany dry grass in Eliot's Waste Land (1922, lines 354-5), and fill the night with "insensate zest" in Aldous Huxley's "The Cicadas" (1931). 

A cicada goes solo in Richard Aldington's "To a Greek Marble" (1912). Another serenades "the absent" in John Haines' "Cicadas" (1977). They're used to it, singing their "rustic song that sounds in lonely places" (Meleager again, "The Cricket to the Cicada," trans. Rory B. Egan).

A whole choir of them break the surface "already singing" in David Lunde's "Cicadas" (1999), and "the cicada, that brazen jongleur of the trees, shaking his iridescent rapture" (Conrad Aiken, "The Cicada," 1958) keeps singing all the way up a "persimmon tree" in George Scarborough's "The Cicada" (1977). 

From such heights, the "insistent song" spins "a web of silver o'er the silence" (Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, "The Cicada in the Firs," 1893). 

Robert Hass anticipated "maniacal cicadas tuning up to tear the fabric of the silence" ("Between the Wars," 1989), and Gary Snyder heard "cicada singing / swirling in the tangle" ("Song of the Tangle," 1968). Truman Capote utterly lost patience with them: 

A cicada called. Another answered. "Shut up, bettle-bugs! Whut you wanna be makin' so much racket fer? You lonesome?" (Truman Capote, "Preacher's Legend," 1945)

Billions of cicadas will soon be singing in the eastern USA.