Aubade

“Aubade.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aubade. Accessed 25 Feb. 2025.

Have you ever heard of this word—”aubade?” I had not. I read a poem by Billy Collins in his new collection, Water, Water, titled “Aubade.” Because I know my phonics, I assumed the pronunciation was aw-bade. No. I went to the Merriam-Webster entry on the interwebs and discovered it is pronounced oh-bawd. It is from a French word meaning dawn. Those French, they have a different word for everything. (In case you don’t know, that line references an old stand-up comedy routine by Steve Martin.)

Ok, back to “aubade.” Below is the poem I read. If you clicked on the link to the Merriam-Webster website, you may have noticed what a fun place it is! Well, that is if you a word nerd like me. For a couple years of my career I sat next to a fellow word nerd and we would often have fun talking about strange words we heard such as “puce” and “fob.” Sometimes, we would look in the dictionary—a real-with-pages-book—and go down a rabbit hole finding more fascinating words. Look at the Merriam-Webster website. It has definitions, a link to hear the word pronounced (Can’t you just see a snobby Frenchman saying, “oh-bawd”? But of course), the story of the word, which has phrases like “first romanced speakers of the English language” and “the meaning that English-speakers originally fell in love with” and the meaning “blossomed” into something else. I love it! They even include a link to “dictionary entries near” the word—just like what would happen when you looked into a dictionary—your eye would fall on nearby words, and before you knew it, you had spent an hour reading about all kinds of words.

“Aubade” usually means a poem or song greeting the dawn. The Billy Collins poem is that. I wonder, what else might be called an aubade? Collins references birdsong. That’s the first thing I thought of—or at least birds greeting the dawn. Is a rooster’s crow an aubade? I’m not sure I’d call it a song, exactly. In our San Jose house, for many years, a mockingbird greeted the dawn every summer in our backyard with a neverending litany of many birdsongs, one after the other. Often, before I reach for my phone in the morning, I sing to myself “This is the day, this is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice…” I think I can call that an aubade. How about you? What aubades can you think of?

“Aubade” by Billy Collins

If I lived across the street from myself
and I was sitting in the dark
on the edge of the bed
at five o’clock in the morning,

I might be wondering what the light
was doing on in my study at this hour,
yet here I am at my desk
in the study wondering the very same thing.

I know I did not have to rise so early
to cut open with a penknife
the bundles of papers at a newsstand
as the man across the street might be thinking.

Clearly, I am not a farmer or a milkman.
And I am not the man across the street
who sits in the dark because sleep
is his mother and he is one of her many orphans.

Maybe I am awake just to listen
to the faint, high-pitched ringing
of tungsten in the single lightbulb
which sounds like the rustling of trees.

Or is it my job simply to sit as still
as the glass of water on the night table
of the man across the street,
as still as the photograph of my wife in a frame?

But there’s the first bird to deliver his call,
and there’s the reason I am up–
to catch the three-note song of that bird
and now to wait with him for some reply.