O Pioneers!
First, I saw the glorious 1992 Hallmark Hall of Fame movie starring Jessica Lange - and loved, loved, loved it. This lead me to read the 1913 Willa Cather novel it was adapted from. Ms. Cather's writing had a beautifully familiar feeling to it, like coming home. She has a gift for the descriptive, vivid and poetic, and touches on truths we didn't know we knew. Finally, I re-discovered the Walt Whitman poem from 1865 which had inspired her. That which I had studied and dismissed in high school. But reading it again through different eyes, I saw Whitman's ideals, his passion and fervor, expertly brought to life on the page. (If anyone should be a presidential speech writer, it's this guy.) In fact, I'd have to say of all the poems I've read, this one feels the most exciting and alive. Maybe it's just all the quotation marks. Kidding. There's a reason Levi chose it for their ad campaign. I'm glad they did because it's now been exposed, with a cool image, to the younger generation. Something that just doesn't happen in English class, I'm afraid. Unless your English teacher happens to be Robin Williams.
For those who haven't yet experienced all the O Pioneers! goodness, I will pass along the inspiration by doing a little medley just for you, combining some favorite bits and pieces from the novel and poem*. Think of it as a mash-up like they do on Glee.
Angela's O Pioneers! Mash-up
The Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. Pioneers! O pioneers!
Fresh and strong the world we seize. Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go, the unknown ways. We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, the grain so heavy that it bends toward the blade and cuts like velvet. Pioneers! O pioneers!
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while. Pioneers! O pioneers!
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they have never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same notes for thousands of years. All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying, Pioneers! O pioneers!
Now for a couple more treats I present the movie trailer and the Levi's TV commercial:
Now go forth and party -- barbecue meats, drink alcoholic beverages, have picnics at the lake, bonfires at the cabin, and enjoy aerial fireworks displays -- you youthful pioneers of this great land!
* Excerpts from the novel O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, 1913 and the poem Pioneers, O Pioneers! by Walt Whitman, 1865. I do not own this material, I simply compiled it.
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