Kile Smith Commission for The Village Trip

Kile Smith receives RSF commission to set Melville’s Tom Deadlight (1888) for TVT 26, for voice, mandolin and guitar.

Tom Deadlight (1888)

Farewell and adieu to you noble hearties,—
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain,
For I ’ve received orders for to sail for the Deadman,
But hope with the grand fleet to see you again.

I have hove my ship to, with main-top-sail aback, boys ;
I have hove my ship to, for the strike soundings clear—
The black scud a-flying ; but, by God’s blessing, dam’ me,
Right up the Channel for the Deadman I ’ll steer.

I have worried through the waters that are called the Doldrums,
And growled at Sargasso that clogs while ye grope—
Blast my eyes, but the lightship is hid by the mist, lads :—
Flying Dutchman—odds bobbs—off the Cape of Good Hope !

But what ’s this I feel that is fanning my cheek, Matt ?
The white goney’s wing ?—how she rolls !—’tis the Cape !—
Give my kit to the mess, Jock, for kin none is mine, none ;
And tell Holy Joe to avast with the crape.

Dead reckoning, says Joe, it won’t do to go by ;
But they doused all the glims, Matt, in sky t’other night.
Dead reckoning is good for to sail for the Deadman ;
And Tom Deadlight he thinks it may reckon near right.

The signal !—it streams for the grand fleet to anchor.
The captains—the trumpets—the hullabaloo !
Stand by for blue-blazes, and mind your shank-painters,
For the Lord High Admiral, he ’s squinting at you !

But give me my tot, Matt, before I roll over ;
Jock, let ’s have your flipper, it ’s good for to feel ;
And don’t sew me up without baccy in mouth, boys,
And don’t blubber like lubbers when I turn up my keel.

—Herman Melville (1819–1891)

During a tempest encountered homeward-bound from the Mediterranean, a grizzled petty-officer, one of the two captains of the forecastle, dying at night in his hammock, swung in the sick-bay under the tiered gun-decks of the British Dreadnaught, 98, wandering in his mind, though with glimpses of sanity, and starting up at whiles, sings by snatches his good-bye and last injunctions to two messmates, his watchers, one of whom fans the fevered tar with the flap of his old sou’wester. Some names and phrases, with here and there a line, or part of one ; these, in his aberration, wrested into incoherency from their original connection and import, he involuntarily derives, as he does the measure, from a famous old sea-ditty, whose cadences, long rife, and now humming in the collapsing brain, attune the last flutterings of distempered thought.

The original tune is “Farewell and Adieu to You, Spanish Ladies”, which shows up as early as 1769 (in a journal of the Nellie). Melville references the song and others in his 1850 novel White-Jacket. Upon deeper inspection this poem is full of images of uncertainty, fear, and peril (unlike the typical, cheery rendition of the original). Traveling the coasts of England, the song’s narrator is far from rounding the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa), unless we take that too as a metaphor.

A Deadlight is a nautical term for a piece of heavy glass set into a deck or ship’s side to allow light.

The Deadman (or Deadman’s Point), is today known as Dodman Point on the south Cornwall coast, near Plymouth.

The Sargasso sea is the bulk of the Atlantic ocean just east of mainland North America.

The Doldrums is “a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters.” Now known for periods of boredom or depression.

The Flying Dutchman is the legendary ship of Dutch captain Van der Decken, condemned to cruise forever off the Cape of Good Hope (ill luck).

A flipper as in “tipping your flipper” (waving) must just mean “hand”

A goney or gooney is another name for the albatross, a sea bird. One of the few companions a lonely sailing crew has.

Kile Smith (born August 24, 1956) is an American composer of choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. The Arc in the Sky with The Crossing received a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance, and The Dawn’s Early Light received a 2022 Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance with Conspirare. A Black Birch in Winter, which includes Smith’s Where Flames a Word, won the 2020 Estonian Recording of the Year for Voces Musicales.

He has been Composer in Residence for the Helena Symphony, the Jupiter Symphony, Lyric Fest, and the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia. Kile was curator of the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1993–2011. He hosted Fleisher Discoveries on radio and podcast from 2002 to 2024, and is a contributor to the arts and culture magazine Broad Street Review. He is the recipient of an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts for his first opera, The Book of Job.