Of Abbeys, Nightingales, Urns, and Swallows ...

Hi again, LitMusicians (or, rather, selected LitMusicians: we have to lure more of our classmates into the club!),

Well, I guess we're leaving the exposition stage of the course, and, with the trio of weighty novels that approach (Woolf, Woolf, and Kundera), we enter the development stage. I hope some of the important questions (theoretical, structural, thematic, musiccological, etc.) are circulating productively. We will create more, I'm sure.

I hope the musical contexts informed and even enhanced your experience of Wordsworth and the Keats odes. We're realizing, I hope, that we can study the presence of music in literature, or literature in music, or, perhaps most interestingly, the seemingly shared structures of literature and music. The ode and the sonata format both provided public models/genres for artists, and to that end tended to produce similar expectations and "landmarks." Our comments in class seemed to be emphasizing the treatment of time in each genre and artistic form. Sculpture and painting, we might say, unfold meaning in the context of space, while music and literature reveal themselves as arts of time (and here I'm remembering Nancy Cluck's book, Literature and Music: Essays on Form). Reading "Tintern Abbey" and listening to Beethoven's 5th, we learn important lessons about human life and about dealing with the passage of time. It would be useful for us to map the movements in time (i.e. present time, past time, and future time) in Wordsworth's poem, and what these movements mean in the context of the overall meaning of the poem. It is no doubt a work of crisis (and here you might think of our experience listening to the Mozart and Beethoven movements, where the first theme must undergo crisis and fragmentation before "coming home again" in the recapitulation): the speaker must struggle between confidence in the truth and in the moral power of the imagination (especially in the context of the human heart's ballet with nature) on the one hand, and the ravaging effects of time on the other, the irrepressible sense of mortality. The speaker achieves an affirmation at the end, but it's not without a sense of loss and anxiety.

We didn't talk about the Preface to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, and we probably should have. We might have thought about (in the context of literary and musical composition) Wordsworth's famous lines that poetry constitutes "emotions recollected in tranquility." Romanticism in some respects becomes obsessed with recovering a sense of lost wholeness.

The Keats odes trace a similar effect, I think. They reflect a kind of lost tonal stability in the midst of the anguished strivings and questions of "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," but arguably turn a corner in that stanza in "Grecian Urn" when the urn (now a funeral urn) begins to suggest not an art of escape from the conditions of mortality, but an art that can soothe and console human suffering. This leads to the deeply consoling treatment of time in "To Autumn," which, in a season-spanning day, and a life-spanning metaphorical trajectory (sunrise to sunset), finds the speaker ultimately perceiving that life means life in time, and that, contemplated properly, we can find beauty and consoling meaning even in the moment that we know must now pass The swallows are gathering to leave, but in order that they might come back. The sounds of nature and animal life in that gloriously elegant third stanza become a kind of a music in the poet's soul (John Minahan writes convincingly about this in his study, Word Like a Bell) -- music becomes a path to insight, teaching the speaker (and us) that even in passing, time leaves something of value behind. (This kind of reminds me of when we listened to Coldplay's "The Scientist," and how, as we listen to a captivating, well-constructed, emotional song, we must somehow both relish where it takes us and be prepared for that moment when it ends, and the notes vanish into the air).

I also now remember why I once, in a survey class, played that R.E.M. "Find the River" song on the same day we were to discuss "To Autumn." The song quite simply has an autumnal sensibility in its minor-key cadences and in its lyrics ("the river to the ocean goes"), but it quite brilliantly manages simultaneously to stop time and suggest time's continuance at the very end. Listen to it again, if you can. The momentum of that closing poetic verse carries us definitively (and emotionally) to an end-stop, but then the song, in its very last moments, yields to the soft and fading repetitions of the acoustic guitar (as if the notes -- and we the listeners -- are being stretched like gossamer into an unending future). It's nearly like the effect of that word "oozings" near the end of stanza 2 of "To Autumn": the word is so sticky that we're nearly held there in a frozen moment, but we know nonetheless that we'll be pushed forward into another stanza.

Well, I haven't used this posting to pose any questions for you, but it would be great, now outside of the limits of class discussions, to hear any reflective comments on this poetry. Details we missed, questions to carry with us, emotions recollected in tranquility ... that kind of thing!

Happy weekending.