Music has been called the Queen of the Arts since it is the most abstract and the most direct of all art forms. These qualities, it has been also said, are what all the others strive for. I, for one, have been deeply affected by music, and agree with this assessment. Well, which art form is King? Poetry, of course, even though most people today think the King (Emperor) has no clothes. Or worse: many poets these days have been dressing him in rags. But the King is still King: a unique combination of intense language, meaning and, not least--actually foremost--music. Music can and should be subordinated to meaning in prose; whenever that is the case in poetry, the King's realm is a banana republic.
As a poet and (amateur) musician, I am interested in other poets' relationship to music. It is not always what I expect. Thomas Mann was passionate about music, but was certainly no poet. And my mentor in poetry, the late, great Jose Garcia Villa, whose poems are quite musical, had little appreciation for music per se. (I remember that he once told me, with some disdain, that at a party he attended, 'Leonard Bernstein sat down at the piano and played some fluff'--as if the latter were a six-year-old at her first group piano recital.) Nevertheless, some poets, especially the most musical among them, have had a profound relationship to music. I intend to discuss in this essay two poems about music by two very musical kings of poetry: Rilke and Hopkins--followed by a little poem by one of the most minor musical poets of all.
1. RILKE; AN DIE MUSIK (TO MUSIC)
AN DIE MUSIK
Musik; Atem der Stauen. Vielleicht:
Stille der Bilder. Du Sprache wo Sprachen
enden. Du Zeit,
die senkrecht steht auf der Richtung vergehender Herzen.
Gefuehle zu wem? O du der Gefuehle
Wandlung in was?--: Du uns entwachsener
Herzraum. Innigstes unser,
das, uns uebersteigend, hinausdraengt,--
heiliger Abschied:
da uns das Innree umsteht
als geuebteste Ferne, als andre
Seite der Luft:
rein,
riesig,
nicht mehr bewohnbar.
Translation:
Music: statues' breath. Perhaps:
images' rest. You language where languages
end. You time,
vertically above the direction of hearts that pass away.
Feelings to whom? O you our feelings'
transformation into what?--: O you
heart space grown out of us. Most inner element,
which, transcending us, swiftly drives on,--
Holy departure:
since the Inner surrounds us
as most accomplished Distance, as the other
side of the air,
pure,
enormous,
in which we can no longer dwell.
This poem says it all! It is astoundingly beautiful; perhaps the most profound poem ever written about music. It is also a watershed from a technical aspect; let's discuss that first. We know Rilke as a writer of formal poetry, sonnets especially, but also rhyming verse and formal elegies. Here we have a very rare example of free verse by Rilke, a very seminal example--It is a direct link to the poetry of Paul Celan, who wrote in this fashion. (Rilke has been considered the greatest European poet of the first half of the twentieth century, while Celan has been considered to be the greatest European poet of the latter half of the twentieth century.) Most modern poets, especially since World War ll, compose poems in free verse, which are all too often unmusical; free verse for Rilke and Celan does not mean chopped-up prose. Their music, liberated from meter, does not trade in this freedom for less intense musicality; to the contrary.
I have always thought that writing good poetry is even more difficult than writing good music, since the poet has a double hurdle to leap over: all poems must be musical, but the best poems also have profound meanings. It's not easy balancing these two elements; music without meaning in poetry has been criticized as being merely "rhetorical," while meaning without music falls flat. Although Rilke's poem is quite musical, we will limit our discussion to what the meaning of the words conveys.
Music as the breath of statues and as the repose of painting--(Bild in German means either painting, picture or image--We suppose that Rilke means the repose of an image that represents an action in time, such as someone riding a horse.) This paradoxical action in inaction and inaction in action indicates not only that music is beyond the prosaic, but that the Queen of the Arts is also the essence of both sculpture and painting--and presumbably of the other arts as well. As spirit becomes more subtle it can only be expressed paradoxically; since music embodies this paradox, Rilke is indicating that it is the most subtle of all arts and is included in them all. This is a very important point, since Rilke was very much involved with sculpture and painting. He learned a good deal from Rodin while serving as his amanuensis in Paris; he lectured all across Europe as an art expert of Cezanne's oeuvre. He knew many painters, sculptors and writers--but very few musicians. Why is this? Rilke admitted that he kept away from music for the fear that it would overwhelm him. If he let the walls be breached, he worried that the beautiful artificial lake that he constructed out of words would be swept away by a tsunami of notes. Poetry and music are two different disciplines; he felt he had to limit his exposure to music, because it affected him so deeply and might interfere with the concentration needed to write poetry.
In the last line of the first stanza, notice that music stands above "mortal hearts that are passing through time"--the repose of the image, once again.
Rilke writes, "Feelings to whom"--not for whom. Music at its best seems to address someone beyond the phenomenal--someone whose name we don't know and inadequately call God. Rilke goes on to say that music is a great expanse of inner spirit that has grown out of us--it is an inner revelation, not an outer one. But, Rilke asserts, this inner element transcends us and leads into the beyond. It is a departure, since we cannot follow it to its endpoint, which is beyond us. We live with music that is in ourselves, but cannot dwell in that realm into which music extends--heaven, as it were. It is like a modern theory of gravity, which states that gravity is the only one of the four elemental forces which extends beyond our world into the next universe. (Specifically, gravity extends beyond our braneworld into the bulk.) Like gravity, music is part of our everyday world but not completely contained by it. Anyone who has experienced music profoundly is aware of the "fact" that what is so immediate is also transcendent--like God, fully and completely here and there at the same time.
I hope I have demonstrated the profound understanding of music evinced by this poem. The poem might sound a little abstract to some; one should remember that Rilke wrote for many years what he called "Dinggedichte" poems that deal with images and eschew abstract words. That this poem arose after so many years of "following the rules" is all the more remarkable. The poem is heartfelt, wise and musical; as stated earlier, it is perhaps the greatest poem about music ever written.
2. Henry Purcell by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.
Have fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell.
An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal
Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.
Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:
It is the forged feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.
Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I'll
Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under
Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while
The thunder-purple seabeach plumed purple-of-thunder,
If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile
Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.
First a few words of technical analysis. I will do this for the first two lines; I invite the reader to proceed with the rest of the poem, keeping in mind what I have discussed regarding the first two lines. Hopkins is indeed a great master of verbal music. He is a genius of what my mentor in poetry, Villa, called "verbal correlation," the connection of the sounds of the words, independent of meaning, that fuse into a euphonious whole. Once the concept of verbal correlation is mastered, it is easy for the reader to tell when a poet is proceeding by meaning only--the music falls flat, since the conveyance of meaning is the realm of prose. Not that meaning is unimportant; Hopkins, especially in this poem, definitely has thoughts, profound thoughts, to convey. But the music comes first. Note how Hopkins accomplished this in the first two lines--the diphthong ai played against (or half-rhymed with) the diphthong ea (dear and heaves); the correlation of 'especial' and 'fallen'; the accented a of 'arch' played against the more gentle a's of the first line; the alliteration, extensive but not overdone; the accent of the first syllable of the composer's name, a delightful note which echoes the accent of 'arch'--all these factors--and much more--make the reading of these first two lines an utter musical delight.(It is interesting that both Whitman and Hopkins wanted to free poetry from strict meter--Hopkins called his system of doing this 'sprung rhythm'-- a liberation which both poets accomplished musically. Many of their followers freed themselves from meter prosaically.)
The meaning of the first stanza is another matter, something not 'musical' at all; it strikes most of us as a bit bizarre. Hopkins is at first hoping that Purcell has entered heaven, even though he is in a sense deserving damnation, since he was not a member of the sole true Church. He is thus "listed to a heresy, here," on earth; however, since Purcell is so "arch-especial," Hopkins does not doubt that the composer has been judged with mercy, "O fair, fair have fallen." Hopkins drops this theme with the first stanza, for which I, for one, am grateful.
The second stanza has something more essential to convey. Purcell is so great a composer that his individual expressivity, without ceasing to be individual, has become universal: we find the very nature of humanity in his music. It is pleasing to find my own views corroborated by such a genius as Hopkins, for I heartily agree with the poet's assessment. I have been moved to the very core by Purcell's Dido and Aeneas--there is nothing like it. In Purcell, the roiled waters of entertaining Baroque dance rhythms become periodically quieted; the water becomes clear and we get a glimpse of depths hitherto almost unheard of. An element of deep feeling entered the English Baroque with Purcell. And he often expresses deep emotion with such economic, simple means--a true mark of genius. You don't have to wait for the stunning Dido's Lament to be moved to the quick; just listen to the beginning of the overture--if you are sensitive to music, you will know what I mean.
How beautifully Hopkins expresses individuality that transcends itself: an exact correlation with Rilke's poem ("Most inner element, which, transcending us, swiftly drives on.") The music of Purcell thus becomes a perfect illustration of Rilke's poem--two musical geniuses in full agreement.
Hopkins was not totally pleased with the sestet of this sonnet; it is, in parts, a bit forced but beautiful nevertheless, musically and conceptually. The stormfowl, Purcell, soars above the earth but is still a creature of the earth. The wind (vicissitudes that help the composer reveal his true nature?) uncovers his unique markings which "scatter a colossal smile." This is an interesting phrase, and correlates sublimely with Rilke's "Feelings to whom" in the first poem. Something, somebody, seems to respond from the other side. Notice the extraordinary tenth line: "the thunder-purple seabeach plumed purple-of-thunder." The stormfowl's "plumed thunder-of-purple" which the wind has revealed, is the mirror image of "the thunder purple seabeach!" Do you know any better image that indicates art's glorious mirroring of outer nature by our inner nature? And the loveliness and profundity of the last phrase, "but meaning motion fans fresh or wits with wonder." Here we have the essence of poetry: meaning conveyed by motion (music.) Hopkins does not divide these two aspects, they are combined with a unity, "meaning motion." Extraordinary! And extraordinarily, divinely, and humanly, true.
3. AT THE CUSP OF OLD AGE BY THOMAS DORSETT
Please don't accuse me of hubris for including one of my poems; I am doing this for a different reason than to elicit a comparison between two great poems and one of mine. My purpose is to give an example of passion for something, whether that passion is for music, poetry, or for something else that is worthwhile. (In my poem, the objects of profound interest are poetry and music, an intense concern for which is in accord with the theme of this essay.) A friend of mine told me that she is content most of the time but is not passionately involved with anything. Though she is well-adjusted and mostly upbeat, I don't think this is the way to live, and that's what the poem implies. I find that my life, not without its miseries, has been transformed by my love for poetry and music into something that mirrors a higher reality--once again, it is a good feeling to have my views corroborated by two great artists. It is a sublime "up" that compensates for life's many "downs." I am including my poem as a sort of proof that you need not be a genius like Hopkins or Rilke to experience the view from the heights--provided that you spend much of your time climbing. As Joseph Campbell put it: follow your bliss! And, as a physcian, I am aware of increasing research that indicates that persons who are passionate about their work live longer--and, I would add, live better. It's an invitation to put more music, music in the broadest sense, into your life, if it does not have a prominent place there already.
You will not regret it.
AT THE CUSP OF OLD AGE
To transcend time before she calls the ambulance
I shall play music and write for many more years.
I imagine they'll come to get me
just after I've mastered the simplest Bach prelude
(the one on your cell phone in C)
--If I work hard that will take decades--
Some day--perhaps soon--some professional
stranger will tell her I'm sorry,
it's too late to help him
(This I've known for over sixty years)
Until then, it's Mozart, Shakespeare and
doing my best to make others happy;
Life's music, life's poetry. They're here!
Still writing? They'll just have to wait.
As a poet and (amateur) musician, I am interested in other poets' relationship to music. It is not always what I expect. Thomas Mann was passionate about music, but was certainly no poet. And my mentor in poetry, the late, great Jose Garcia Villa, whose poems are quite musical, had little appreciation for music per se. (I remember that he once told me, with some disdain, that at a party he attended, 'Leonard Bernstein sat down at the piano and played some fluff'--as if the latter were a six-year-old at her first group piano recital.) Nevertheless, some poets, especially the most musical among them, have had a profound relationship to music. I intend to discuss in this essay two poems about music by two very musical kings of poetry: Rilke and Hopkins--followed by a little poem by one of the most minor musical poets of all.
1. RILKE; AN DIE MUSIK (TO MUSIC)
AN DIE MUSIK
Musik; Atem der Stauen. Vielleicht:
Stille der Bilder. Du Sprache wo Sprachen
enden. Du Zeit,
die senkrecht steht auf der Richtung vergehender Herzen.
Gefuehle zu wem? O du der Gefuehle
Wandlung in was?--: Du uns entwachsener
Herzraum. Innigstes unser,
das, uns uebersteigend, hinausdraengt,--
heiliger Abschied:
da uns das Innree umsteht
als geuebteste Ferne, als andre
Seite der Luft:
rein,
riesig,
nicht mehr bewohnbar.
Translation:
Music: statues' breath. Perhaps:
images' rest. You language where languages
end. You time,
vertically above the direction of hearts that pass away.
Feelings to whom? O you our feelings'
transformation into what?--: O you
heart space grown out of us. Most inner element,
which, transcending us, swiftly drives on,--
Holy departure:
since the Inner surrounds us
as most accomplished Distance, as the other
side of the air,
pure,
enormous,
in which we can no longer dwell.
This poem says it all! It is astoundingly beautiful; perhaps the most profound poem ever written about music. It is also a watershed from a technical aspect; let's discuss that first. We know Rilke as a writer of formal poetry, sonnets especially, but also rhyming verse and formal elegies. Here we have a very rare example of free verse by Rilke, a very seminal example--It is a direct link to the poetry of Paul Celan, who wrote in this fashion. (Rilke has been considered the greatest European poet of the first half of the twentieth century, while Celan has been considered to be the greatest European poet of the latter half of the twentieth century.) Most modern poets, especially since World War ll, compose poems in free verse, which are all too often unmusical; free verse for Rilke and Celan does not mean chopped-up prose. Their music, liberated from meter, does not trade in this freedom for less intense musicality; to the contrary.
I have always thought that writing good poetry is even more difficult than writing good music, since the poet has a double hurdle to leap over: all poems must be musical, but the best poems also have profound meanings. It's not easy balancing these two elements; music without meaning in poetry has been criticized as being merely "rhetorical," while meaning without music falls flat. Although Rilke's poem is quite musical, we will limit our discussion to what the meaning of the words conveys.
Music as the breath of statues and as the repose of painting--(Bild in German means either painting, picture or image--We suppose that Rilke means the repose of an image that represents an action in time, such as someone riding a horse.) This paradoxical action in inaction and inaction in action indicates not only that music is beyond the prosaic, but that the Queen of the Arts is also the essence of both sculpture and painting--and presumbably of the other arts as well. As spirit becomes more subtle it can only be expressed paradoxically; since music embodies this paradox, Rilke is indicating that it is the most subtle of all arts and is included in them all. This is a very important point, since Rilke was very much involved with sculpture and painting. He learned a good deal from Rodin while serving as his amanuensis in Paris; he lectured all across Europe as an art expert of Cezanne's oeuvre. He knew many painters, sculptors and writers--but very few musicians. Why is this? Rilke admitted that he kept away from music for the fear that it would overwhelm him. If he let the walls be breached, he worried that the beautiful artificial lake that he constructed out of words would be swept away by a tsunami of notes. Poetry and music are two different disciplines; he felt he had to limit his exposure to music, because it affected him so deeply and might interfere with the concentration needed to write poetry.
In the last line of the first stanza, notice that music stands above "mortal hearts that are passing through time"--the repose of the image, once again.
Rilke writes, "Feelings to whom"--not for whom. Music at its best seems to address someone beyond the phenomenal--someone whose name we don't know and inadequately call God. Rilke goes on to say that music is a great expanse of inner spirit that has grown out of us--it is an inner revelation, not an outer one. But, Rilke asserts, this inner element transcends us and leads into the beyond. It is a departure, since we cannot follow it to its endpoint, which is beyond us. We live with music that is in ourselves, but cannot dwell in that realm into which music extends--heaven, as it were. It is like a modern theory of gravity, which states that gravity is the only one of the four elemental forces which extends beyond our world into the next universe. (Specifically, gravity extends beyond our braneworld into the bulk.) Like gravity, music is part of our everyday world but not completely contained by it. Anyone who has experienced music profoundly is aware of the "fact" that what is so immediate is also transcendent--like God, fully and completely here and there at the same time.
I hope I have demonstrated the profound understanding of music evinced by this poem. The poem might sound a little abstract to some; one should remember that Rilke wrote for many years what he called "Dinggedichte" poems that deal with images and eschew abstract words. That this poem arose after so many years of "following the rules" is all the more remarkable. The poem is heartfelt, wise and musical; as stated earlier, it is perhaps the greatest poem about music ever written.
2. Henry Purcell by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.
Have fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell.
An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal
Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.
Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:
It is the forged feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.
Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I'll
Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under
Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while
The thunder-purple seabeach plumed purple-of-thunder,
If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile
Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.
First a few words of technical analysis. I will do this for the first two lines; I invite the reader to proceed with the rest of the poem, keeping in mind what I have discussed regarding the first two lines. Hopkins is indeed a great master of verbal music. He is a genius of what my mentor in poetry, Villa, called "verbal correlation," the connection of the sounds of the words, independent of meaning, that fuse into a euphonious whole. Once the concept of verbal correlation is mastered, it is easy for the reader to tell when a poet is proceeding by meaning only--the music falls flat, since the conveyance of meaning is the realm of prose. Not that meaning is unimportant; Hopkins, especially in this poem, definitely has thoughts, profound thoughts, to convey. But the music comes first. Note how Hopkins accomplished this in the first two lines--the diphthong ai played against (or half-rhymed with) the diphthong ea (dear and heaves); the correlation of 'especial' and 'fallen'; the accented a of 'arch' played against the more gentle a's of the first line; the alliteration, extensive but not overdone; the accent of the first syllable of the composer's name, a delightful note which echoes the accent of 'arch'--all these factors--and much more--make the reading of these first two lines an utter musical delight.(It is interesting that both Whitman and Hopkins wanted to free poetry from strict meter--Hopkins called his system of doing this 'sprung rhythm'-- a liberation which both poets accomplished musically. Many of their followers freed themselves from meter prosaically.)
The meaning of the first stanza is another matter, something not 'musical' at all; it strikes most of us as a bit bizarre. Hopkins is at first hoping that Purcell has entered heaven, even though he is in a sense deserving damnation, since he was not a member of the sole true Church. He is thus "listed to a heresy, here," on earth; however, since Purcell is so "arch-especial," Hopkins does not doubt that the composer has been judged with mercy, "O fair, fair have fallen." Hopkins drops this theme with the first stanza, for which I, for one, am grateful.
The second stanza has something more essential to convey. Purcell is so great a composer that his individual expressivity, without ceasing to be individual, has become universal: we find the very nature of humanity in his music. It is pleasing to find my own views corroborated by such a genius as Hopkins, for I heartily agree with the poet's assessment. I have been moved to the very core by Purcell's Dido and Aeneas--there is nothing like it. In Purcell, the roiled waters of entertaining Baroque dance rhythms become periodically quieted; the water becomes clear and we get a glimpse of depths hitherto almost unheard of. An element of deep feeling entered the English Baroque with Purcell. And he often expresses deep emotion with such economic, simple means--a true mark of genius. You don't have to wait for the stunning Dido's Lament to be moved to the quick; just listen to the beginning of the overture--if you are sensitive to music, you will know what I mean.
How beautifully Hopkins expresses individuality that transcends itself: an exact correlation with Rilke's poem ("Most inner element, which, transcending us, swiftly drives on.") The music of Purcell thus becomes a perfect illustration of Rilke's poem--two musical geniuses in full agreement.
Hopkins was not totally pleased with the sestet of this sonnet; it is, in parts, a bit forced but beautiful nevertheless, musically and conceptually. The stormfowl, Purcell, soars above the earth but is still a creature of the earth. The wind (vicissitudes that help the composer reveal his true nature?) uncovers his unique markings which "scatter a colossal smile." This is an interesting phrase, and correlates sublimely with Rilke's "Feelings to whom" in the first poem. Something, somebody, seems to respond from the other side. Notice the extraordinary tenth line: "the thunder-purple seabeach plumed purple-of-thunder." The stormfowl's "plumed thunder-of-purple" which the wind has revealed, is the mirror image of "the thunder purple seabeach!" Do you know any better image that indicates art's glorious mirroring of outer nature by our inner nature? And the loveliness and profundity of the last phrase, "but meaning motion fans fresh or wits with wonder." Here we have the essence of poetry: meaning conveyed by motion (music.) Hopkins does not divide these two aspects, they are combined with a unity, "meaning motion." Extraordinary! And extraordinarily, divinely, and humanly, true.
3. AT THE CUSP OF OLD AGE BY THOMAS DORSETT
Please don't accuse me of hubris for including one of my poems; I am doing this for a different reason than to elicit a comparison between two great poems and one of mine. My purpose is to give an example of passion for something, whether that passion is for music, poetry, or for something else that is worthwhile. (In my poem, the objects of profound interest are poetry and music, an intense concern for which is in accord with the theme of this essay.) A friend of mine told me that she is content most of the time but is not passionately involved with anything. Though she is well-adjusted and mostly upbeat, I don't think this is the way to live, and that's what the poem implies. I find that my life, not without its miseries, has been transformed by my love for poetry and music into something that mirrors a higher reality--once again, it is a good feeling to have my views corroborated by two great artists. It is a sublime "up" that compensates for life's many "downs." I am including my poem as a sort of proof that you need not be a genius like Hopkins or Rilke to experience the view from the heights--provided that you spend much of your time climbing. As Joseph Campbell put it: follow your bliss! And, as a physcian, I am aware of increasing research that indicates that persons who are passionate about their work live longer--and, I would add, live better. It's an invitation to put more music, music in the broadest sense, into your life, if it does not have a prominent place there already.
You will not regret it.
AT THE CUSP OF OLD AGE
To transcend time before she calls the ambulance
I shall play music and write for many more years.
I imagine they'll come to get me
just after I've mastered the simplest Bach prelude
(the one on your cell phone in C)
--If I work hard that will take decades--
Some day--perhaps soon--some professional
stranger will tell her I'm sorry,
it's too late to help him
(This I've known for over sixty years)
Until then, it's Mozart, Shakespeare and
doing my best to make others happy;
Life's music, life's poetry. They're here!
Still writing? They'll just have to wait.
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