Reading Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus I came across the lines:
'Music, too, keeps building anew with the insecurest
stones her celestial house in unusable space.'
I recalled the beautiful lines of Tennyson quoted by Oscar Wilde:
'They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built for ever.'
There is a reason that many of the greatest mystic poets- Rilke, Tagore- have expressed their spiritual joy in musical terms. The tension between the concrete and the infinite, as Wilde observed, is greatest in music among all the arts.
I next came across these lines:
'Does the farmer, anxiously arranging,
ever reach to where the seed is changing
into summer? Does not Earth bestow?'
I.XII
which made me wonder if Rilke was deliberately echoing one of my favourite parables from the Bible, which appears only in Mark- the Parable of the Growing Seed.
'And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”'
(Mark 4:26-29) (ESV)
Which always reminds me of this verse from Wordsworth's cutting Expostulation and Reply:
'"Think you, mid all this mighty sum
"Of things for ever speaking,
"That nothing of itself will come,
"But we must still be seeking?'
I have a soft corner for the simplicity and gentle hues of Early Renaissance paintings. They have an austere piety which can be quite moving, as in this painting of the Annunciation by Domenico Veneziano. I love the plain white walls, the mild, unambitious colour scheme, and the bare, open space. This is not a painting which emphasises the dazzling nature of the moment, but rather seeks quiet contemplation.
I like the fact that Mary is in a small, closed space, while Gabriel kneels in the open courtyard. It seems to symbolise their respective human and immortal spheres.
It's fascinating to contrast this with an Annunciation painted in 1898 by the American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner:
I have been reading the Divine Comedy books backwards (starting with Paradiso), and landed this week on Purgatorio. 11.100-117 features a lovely description of the transience of fame, here beautifully translated by Robin Kirkpatrick. It's the bare simplicity and naturalness of the imagery and wording, compared with the powerful imagination behind the analogy, which really makes this. Dante may have meant this passage as a lament, but I find it a beautiful painting of transience. Oddly, it reminds me a little of the end of Wuthering Heights, where Lockwood stands by the dead lovers' graves:
'I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.'
Italian | English (tr. Robin Kirkpatrick) |
Non è il mondan romore altro ch'un fiato di vento, ch'or vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nome perché muta lato. [..] La vostra nominanza è color d'erba,che viene e va, e quei la discoloraper cui ella esce de la terra acerba.
| 'The roar of earthly fame is just a breath of wind, blowing from here and then from there, that changes name in changing origin. [...] All your renown is coloured like the grass, which comes then goes. And he discolours it who made it first appear from bitter earth.' |
Another line which I loved were from the 16th canto, which describes the birth of a soul:
'Leaving the hand of him who holds it dear
(before it truly is), it weeps and laughs,
that little simple soul, and baby-plays,
as young girls do, and does not know a thing-
save, being moved by its Maker in joy,
it willingly turns to every playful thrill,
It tastes the flavour, first, of some small good,
and, fooled by this, it chases down its track,
unless a brake or guide bends such love back.'
(Purgatorio 16:85-93, tr. Kirkpatrick)
This poem reminded me so strongly of Arthur Symons' beautiful poem, The Soul's Progress, that I wonder if Symons, who spent a lot of time in Italy and translated from Italian, was influenced by Dante. He was also almost certainly influenced by James 4:14 ('For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes' (ESV)).
The Soul's Progress
It enters life it knows not whence; there lies
A mist behind it and a mist before.
It stands between a closed and open door.
It follows hope, yet feeds on memories.
The years are with it, and the years are wise;
It learns the mournful lesson of their lore.
It hears strange voices from an unknown shore,
Voices that will not answer to its cries.
Blindly it treads dim ways that wind and twist;
It sows for knowledge, and it gathers pain;
Stakes all on love, and loses utterly.
Then, going down into the darker mist,
Naked, and blind, and blown with wind and rain,
It staggers out into eternity.
Arthur Symons, Days and Nights (Macmillan 1889).
I wanted to post a fantastic Cortot recording of the 2nd Chopin sonata. It's notable, as the uploader highlights, for the tremendously patient and terrifying crescendo starting at 13:36, during the funeral march. It goes from whisper-light to gnarled and raw over the course of about a minute. Out of curiosity, I went and looked up Cortot's own edition of the score; he hasn't marked such a long crescendo there, just stated the passage should start piano and end forte. I suspect a lot of pianists would be happy to just belt the forte out of nowhere (a perfectly effective approach in its own right).
While we're on the funeral march, one of its two highlights is that D-flat chord in bar 15, announcing a triumphant little ascent, which for me always suggests a stirring triumph over death, along the lines of Tennyson's In Memoriam (Canto 30):
'Our voices took a higher range;
Once more we sang:
‘They do not die
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us, although they change;
Rapt from the fickle and the frail
With gather’d power, yet the same,
Pierces the keen seraphic flame
From orb to orb, from veil to veil.'
Joint recording of the week is Clifford Curzon's rendition of Liszt's Berceuse (a piece I hadn't known of until recently). Curzon's powerful old-school bel canto lifts his recording well above the careful but relatively feeble interpretations of later pianists.
Browsing in Waterstone's earlier this week, I came across a magnificent book titled 'The Barberini Tapestries.' There's a great curator's talk here for those interested in some stunning Baroque tapestries.
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