Each Song Is a Spell

The Tin Man's Heart

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The Incantation Is Hitting Play

In Harry Potter, you say Expecto Patronum and the guardian appears. You concentrate on your happiest memory — specific, embodied, irreducibly yours — and something silver emerges to stand between you and the thing that drains the warmth from the world.

In Spirit Songs, the spell has already been cast. The incantation happened when someone gave the Tin Woodman a first-person voice and asked him to account for the paradox at the center of his story: the character who was told he had no heart, who experienced grief, love, longing, and the capacity to be wounded — and who wept, repeatedly, throughout the journey, because the heart he supposedly lacked kept producing tears.

When a child who has been told they do not feel things the right way — who has been informed that their emotional responses are insufficient, excessive, or not the correct kind — hears every tear I could not shed / still shimmered in the words I said — that is not the spell beginning.

That is the spell landing.

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The Spell: The Tin Man's Heart

The Paradox Baum Built

The Tin Woodman's backstory is one of the strangest and most philosophically dense origin stories in American children's literature. He was once a flesh-and-blood woodsman named Nick Chopper who was in love. A wicked witch cursed his axe, causing it to cut off his limbs one by one. A tinsmith replaced each limb with a tin prosthetic. Eventually, the axe cut out his heart — also replaced with tin — and then his entire torso, and Nick Chopper became the Tin Woodman: fully artificial, still ambulant, still capable of thought, but now convinced that he could not love because his heart was metal.

The paradox Baum built is visible in the very first scene with the Tin Woodman: he weeps when he accidentally steps on a beetle. He is afraid of stepping on insects because he might hurt them. He cries at the thought of Dorothy leaving at the end of the journey. He demonstrates more consistent emotional responsiveness than any other character in the novel — and spends the entire narrative convinced he has no feelings because his heart is made of tin.

The wizard gives him a heart-shaped clock stuffed with sawdust. It works. Not because sawdust is emotionally functional, but because the Tin Woodman had been waiting for permission to acknowledge what was already true.

For every tear I could not shed / still shimmered in the words I said. The poem names the paradox precisely: the tears were impossible (he is made of metal, the tears would rust him) and the longing was present anyway, finding its form in words rather than water. The expression of the feeling survived the physical impossibility of its most natural form.

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The Dementor: Being Told You Do Not Feel

They said I lacked a human heart / but pain still bloomed in every part / not blood, but longing filled my core / for love I lost, and felt no more.

The Dementor this spell protects against is the specific experience of being told that your emotional responses don't count — that they are not the right kind, not the correct form, not valid evidence of feeling because they don't match the expected template.

The Tin Woodman was told his feelings were invalid on ontological grounds: he was made of tin, tin things don't feel, therefore he didn't feel. The logic was clean. The experience was otherwise. Pain still bloomed in every part. The pain's validity did not depend on the philosophical argument about whether tin things can feel. The pain was present regardless of the argument.

Every child who has been told you don't really mean that or you're not actually upset or that's not real sadness — every child who has had their emotional experience dismissed on grounds that had nothing to do with the experience itself — is living the Tin Woodman's specific predicament. The external authority's claim about what is real does not alter the interior fact. The interior fact remains, regardless.

I'd freeze mid-thought, mid-reach, mid-cry / and wonder if machines can sigh. The self-doubt that the external dismissal produces is named here: the wondering whether one's own inner life is real, whether the question of validity might be answerable against you. The poem gives the child both the experience (the wondering) and the answer (and wonder if machines can sigh — the question is still a question, not yet answered, because the poem is honest about the period of uncertainty before the resolution).

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The Body That Carries What It Cannot Express

Each drop of rain, a threat to me / each joint a lock, no fluid free / I'd freeze mid-thought, mid-reach, mid-cry.

The Tin Woodman's physical condition is both literal and metaphorical in a way that Baum designed and the poem develops. He cannot express emotion through tears — the tears would rust him. He cannot express emotion through spontaneous bodily response — his joints lock, he freezes. The body that is supposed to be the vehicle for emotional expression is, in his case, the obstacle to it.

This is the specific experience of many children: the feeling is present and the expression is blocked. The tears that won't come because the situation doesn't allow them. The voice that locks when the feeling is most urgent. The body that freezes mid-reach, mid-cry. The physical impossibility of the Tin Woodman's emotional expression is a precise metaphor for the experience of having a feeling you cannot produce in the expected form.

For every tear I could not shed / still shimmered in the words I said. This is the poem's most important claim about emotional expression: the feeling that cannot take one form finds another. The tears that couldn't be water became words. The longing that couldn't be demonstrated through conventional grief became the sustained carefulness of a person who was afraid to step on beetles. The heart that was supposedly absent left its evidence everywhere.

For a child, this is a vocabulary for the experience of feeling that cannot be conventionally expressed: the feeling is still real. It finds a form. The form may not be the expected one. The shimmer is still there.

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The Companions' Role: Being Heard

Then came a girl with storm-lit eyes / and strangers bearing dreams and ties / they wound my key, they heard my plea / they dared to say there's hope for me.

The companions in the Tin Woodman's verse are not described as brave or wise or strong. They are described as hearing and daring. They heard my plea. They dared to say there's hope.

The hearing is prior to the hope. The Tin Woodman had been standing frozen in the forest, alone with his paradox, before Dorothy and her companions arrived. The freeze is broken by the oiling — a physical intervention. But the deeper break is the hearing: the companions who encountered the Tin Woodman and received his self-report without dismissing it, who did not tell him that tin things cannot plead or hope.

They dared to say there's hope for me — the daring is the poem's most important word in this stanza. It is not obvious that hope is appropriate for the Tin Woodman. The philosophical argument against him is coherent: he is made of metal, metal does not feel, the feeling he reports is therefore not what it appears to be. To say there is hope for him is to take his self-report seriously against the argument. That requires a kind of daring — the willingness to trust a person's account of their own experience over the theoretical argument that the experience shouldn't be there.

For a child, this is a description of what it means to be heard in the specific sense that matters: not agreement, not understanding, but the willingness to take the experience seriously as real, to say there is hope for it, in the face of whatever arguments might say otherwise.

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Identity Beyond Category

Through haunted woods and witch's flame / I clanked along in search of name / not just "Tin Man" — but something whole / a beating truth, a living soul.

The Tin Woodman's quest is for identity as well as heart. Not just "Tin Man" — the category name that describes the material without describing the self. The journey is toward something whole, a beating truth, a living soul.

The three phrases that describe what he is seeking are each slightly different. Something whole — the wholeness that was taken by the piecemeal replacement, the integration that Nick Chopper lost when he became tin one limb at a time. A beating truth — the truth that beats, that is alive and rhythmic, that pulses the way living things pulse. Not just the truth as proposition but the truth as ongoing, active, something that continues to beat. A living soul — the soul not as theological concept but as the quality of being alive in a way that registers, that matters, that cannot be dismissed on grounds of composition.

For a child learning about identity, the poem's framing is important: identity is not the category you occupy (Tin Man) but what you seek to become. The seeking itself is the beginning of wholeness. The clanking along through haunted woods and witch's flame is not the failure to have arrived — it is the being-on-the-way, which is what identity formation looks like during the years when the journey is still in progress.

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To Hope Is to Feel

For every tear I could not shed / still shimmered in the words I said / and though I'm made of bolts and steel / I learned: to hope is to feel.

The poem's final claim is a definition, like the Lion's poem's courage is the act of near. To hope is to feel. Not: to feel is to hope. The direction of the claim is specific: hoping — the act of directing oneself toward a future that is not yet — is itself the evidence of feeling. The Tin Woodman could not perform grief in the expected way. He could hope. The hoping was the feeling made available.

This is a broader definition of feeling than the one that requires conventional emotional expression. The child who cannot cry at a funeral but is present and attending is feeling. The child who cannot speak about their fear but is trying to find out whether it will be okay is feeling. The child who cannot perform the expected emotional response but is hoping — toward something better, toward resolution, toward the voice that will say there is hope for them — is feeling.

The Tin Woodman spent the journey convinced he could not feel because his heart was metal. The poem ends with him having learned that the hoping was the feeling all along. The tears he could not shed shimmered in the words he said. The heart he was told he lacked kept producing evidence.

Though I'm made of bolts and steel / I learned: to hope is to feel. The concessive though — the same grammatical structure the Lion used — holds the contradiction without resolving it. He is still made of bolts and steel. The feeling was real anyway. The though is the form that can hold both.

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The Maker's Concentration

Someone concentrated on the paradox Baum embedded and did not resolve: the character who demonstrated the most consistent emotional responsiveness in the novel while being convinced he had no emotions.

The AI built the narrative — the backstory, the freeze, the journey, the wizard. What required the maker was the poem's central claim: every tear I could not shed / still shimmered in the words I said. The tears that couldn't be water becoming words. The feeling that couldn't take its expected form finding another form. The shimmer.

And the final line: to hope is to feel. Not you have a heart after all. Not the fear was an illusion. The definition that makes feeling available to anyone who is hoping — regardless of the expected form their feeling was supposed to take.

The making was the incantation.

The child who cannot cry but is hoping — who has been told their feeling doesn't count because it doesn't look the way feeling is supposed to look — and who hears every tear I could not shed still shimmered in the words I said — that child is the spell delivered.

The Tin Man's Heart " | Lyrical Literacy Oz Sung

The Lyrical Literacy podcast presents "The Tin Man's Heart," a poignant first-person narrative exploring the journey of the beloved character from L. Frank Baum's classic tale. This episode delves into themes of identity, humanity, and the discovery that emotional connection exists even within a body of tin.

 

The Tin Man's Heart " | Lyrical Literacy Oz Sung

 

LYRICS:

I once was flesh with hands so sure
A woodsman strong, with love so pure
But curse and axe and rusted fate
Turned me to tin, to mourn and wait

Each drop of rain, a threat to me
Each joint a lock, no fluid free
I’d freeze mid-thought, mid-reach, mid-cry
And wonder if machines can sigh

They said I lacked a human heart
But pain still bloomed in every part
Not blood, but longing filled my core
For love I lost, and felt no more

Then came a girl with storm-lit eyes
And strangers bearing dreams and ties
They wound my key, they heard my plea
They dared to say there’s hope for me

Through haunted woods and witch’s flame
I clanked along in search of name
Not just “Tin Man”—but something whole
A beating truth, a living soul

At Oz I knelt, not for a crown
But for a heart to write love down
And what I found, or what was shown
Was that I’d never be alone

For every tear I could not shed
Still shimmered in the words I said
And though I’m made of bolts and steel
I learned: to hope is to feel

Origin

This podcast draws inspiration from "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," published by L. Frank Baum in 1900. In the original story, the Tin Woodman was once a human who was gradually transformed into tin after a witch's curse caused his axe to cut off his own limbs. He joins Dorothy's journey to ask the Wizard for a heart, only to discover he had the capacity to care and love all along.

Hashtags

#WizardOfOz #TinMan #LiteraryAdaptation #ClassicFairytale #ChildrensLiterature #LyricalLiteracy #HeartAndIdentity #MusicEducation

 

Nik Bear Brown
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