Spring

April 21st, 2006

Don’t worry, I won’t start inflicting my home movies on you. But this evening I was out walking in the woods and heard a thrush sing, and I got this idea for a short video. Whenever I hear the first thrush of the season, I think of a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring,” which my friend Sarah Van Arsdale taught me years ago. It perfectly captures the piercing flutelike song.

So I typed the line into iMovie as separate titles, then imported a short audio clip I’d recorded last year–for which I didn’t even use a mike, I just took my laptop out in the woods. And voilà! It’s like a cartoon, but with a soundtrack instead of drawings.