A clear unwrinkled song. . . .
Thread turns to silver wire: the fingers slide, smoothly, smoothly, till the wire becomes a rod of crystal, a fountain congealed—clear, unwrinkled—the crystal melts to wetness; we have “slippery song,” “lubric throat!” “liquid melody,” Then, suddenly, drought;
In ripened airs
A golden-headed harvest fairly rears
His honey-dropping tops;
The cool wet music has been modulated into warmth and colour and sweetness and the sunshine of early autumn. And so on, through sparklings and flashings to a “sea of Helicon,” to a sweetness “softer than that which pants in Hebe’s cup.”
So much for purely sensuous images. The poet uses them to render the quality of the immediate experience of music. He finds them inadequate, however, when he wants to express the significances and values of music. To render these, he has recourse to two other classes of images—images of Nature and images of the Supernatural.
It is not only in “some world far from ours” that
. . . music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
They are also, as the practice of the poets shows, mysteriously one even in this world. Consider these lines from Shelley’s “The Woodman and the Nightingale.”
A woodman, whose rough heart was out of tune,
(I think such hearts yet never came to good)
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,
One nightingale in an interfluous wood
Satiate the hungry dark with melody;—
And as a vale is watered by a flood,
Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness—as a tuberose
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie,
Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,
The singing of that happy nightingale
In the sweet forest, from the golden close
Of evening, till the star of dawn may fail,
Was interfused upon the silentness.
It is evident that the poet feels the need to escape from the implications of an almost suffocating nearness and immediacy contained in the pure-sensuous images. Music is more than a delicious stroking of feathers and wool, more than a taste of honey, a gleam of amber and silver. It leads the mind out of itself, gives it access to a wider world,—to valleys (in Shelley’s imagery) with their lakes and streams, to open skies and moonlight. Even the scent-image is associated with a landscape—and a landscape, moreover, which imagination must travel far to see; for the dell which the tuberose peoples with its odours is Indian.
Many of Shakespeare’s numerous references to music are associated in the poetical context with the grandeurs and the serenities of Nature. I say “associated with” rather than “rendered by,” because Shakespeare, so far as my memory goes, never sets out to give a complete poetic rendering of music. It was unnecessary; he had the real thing ready to hand—actors who could sing, players of instruments. When he wanted to produce the effects which belong to music alone, he produced them directly, not at second hand, in the necessarily inadequate terms of another art. Still, the circumstances in which he writes of music, the contexts in which the word occurs, are significant. One remembers the last act of The Merchant of Venice.
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica; look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
One remembers Oberon’s speech to Puck in the second act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou remember’st
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
One remembers the dying Gaunt who speaks in one breath of “the setting sun, and music at the close.” Night, the sea, stars and sunset—it is in terms of Nature at her serenest that Shakespeare expresses what music makes him feel. Nor is Shakespeare the only poet to go to Nature for expressive analogies to music.
“My spirit,” writes Shelley,
My spirit like a charmèd bark doth swim
Upon the liquid waves of thy sweet singing,
Far far away into the regions dim
Of Rapture—as a boat with swift sails winging
Its way adown some many-winding river,
Speeds through dark forests. . . .
The same image is developed at length in Asia’s song from Prometheus Unbound.
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing:
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside the helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.
Readers of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu will remember the elaborate landscape-imagery in terms of which Proust tried to give a literary rendering of his favourite music—tried, and was on the whole remarkably successful. Vinteuil’s Sonata is almost, for a careful reader of Proust, a real piece of music. And here I take the opportunity of saying that this paper deals only with successful writers. It is unnecessary, except perhaps in a systematic thesis, to quote from those who have tried to do the job and failed. To take a single example, Wordsworth is the author of a most elaborate “Ode on the Power of Sound”—one of the worst poems ever written by a great man (and that, heaven knows, is saying a good deal). I might have quoted this piece—but only to demonstrate Wordsworth’s complete and absolute failure to render in poetical terms either the quality of music, or its significance, or its value. Writing about negative quantities is uninteresting; I have confined myself to the more fruitful discussion of what actually exists.
It is time now to discuss the third class of images, in terms of which poets have expressed the quality and significance of music. Images of the Supernatural, as I have called them, abound in all poetical renderings of music. My first example is taken from Prometheus Unbound—from the song whose opening stanza appears on the preceding page. It will be seen that the images of Nature, with which the poem began, are gradually transformed into images of the Supernatural.
Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In music’s most serene dominions,
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,
Without a course, without a star,
But by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets,
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided:
Realms where the air we breathe is love,
Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,
Harmonizing the earth with what we feel above.
We have passed Age’s icy caves,
And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,
And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray:
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth to a diviner day:
A paradise of vaulted bowers
Lit by downward-gazing flowers,
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee;
Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously.
In another of Shelley’s poems (“To Constantia, Singing”) we find supernatural images following, not on images of Nature, but on pure-sensuous images of smell and touch. The poet begins by expressing the quality of the music heard, then passes to an interpretation, in the highest possible terms, of its significance.
Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die
Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia, turn!
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,
Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn
Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;
Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour, it is yet,
And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet;
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!
A breathless awe, like the swift change
Unseen but felt in youthful slumbers,
Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange,
Thou breathest now in fast-ascending numbers.
The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven
By the enchantment of thy strain,
And on my shoulders wings are woven,
To follow its sublime career
Beyond the mighty moons that wane
Upon the verge of nature’s utmost sphere,
Till the world’s shadowy walls are past and disappear.
Music, then, is another world—heavenly not only in its profound, supernatural significance, but also in its quality of immediate, sensuous delightfulness. (Lovers also find their pleasures unearthly; and in the literature of religious mysticism intense sensations are heaven.) In rendering music, poets seem to turn quite naturally to the Supernatural. It is almost casually and in passing, as though the association of ideas were perfectly obvious, that Chaucer brings together music and heaven.
Antigone the sheen
Gan on a Trojan song to singen clear
That it an heaven was her voice to hear.
Milton is more systematic and technical in his employment of supernatural images.
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voicèd quire below,
In service high and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.
In “At a Solemn Music” he elaborates the theme and presents us with an actual picture of that heaven which the sweetness of music in the ear brings (such is the magic of imagination) in moving forms and colours before the eyes.
Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy,
Sphere-born harmonious sisters Voice and Verse,
Wed your divine sounds; and mixed power employ
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce,
And to our high-raised phantasy present
That undisturbèd song of pure
