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Rise, child of the valley, rise into the gale’s eddying voice and quit the roots gnarled upon your feet.
What world is this, mangled and replete—may it cease upon the trumpets, may it renew with the silent touch of dawn’s light!
I have been feeling the pull of the elemental.
It scents the best parts of my daily living: the pines through our window, the cardinal couples in tandem at our birdfeeders, the black sheen of my dog’s coat as he ploughs his snout through grass. It evokes what has come before and will persist, and it is helped by my mounting fatigue with all that is streamlined, data-driven, and shorn of wildness or idiosyncrasy.
It feels like I am trying rise from the gnarled mundane and into the eddying elemental visage, though (to crib C.S. Lewis) that visage is merely a created symbol of the Sublime, an after-image of heaven.
To rise is also why I read daily poems. Beautiful poems are impressions, singularly and infinitely deft, of their subjects upon the mind. In a way few texts can, poems leave after-images both wavering and tactile.
But they only become replete as I read them aloud. I’ll begin reading a poem silently only to feel the poem’s words moving my lips, invisible marionette-masters. And then they renew also my voice itself and I am reading aloud the verses of the dead and their sound resonates like a tuning fork in my ear.
Movimento 1: To Be Spoken into Dawn
If you listened to that poem, you might have heard the enigmatic, extra-resonant element that exists in poetry as sound, rather than mere words. Levertov wrote this resonance first, to her credit, but it doesn’t fully appear without a human voice, like banks of pastel clouds suddenly visible upon morning. It doesn’t fully appear without desperate word-to-word listening.
How, then, do the sounds of our voices reveal this after-image within a poem? Why does this form enable the ecstasy of music when spoken aloud?
FORTISSIMO: Poetry, read aloud, transports the listener into the plane of its own elemental experience. When we read poetry aloud or hear it spoken, we enter it more fully that we do reading it within our minds, where our attention darts to distraction with liquid ease. We rise into the world of the poem when we depend on its every sound, as though we’re feeling our way—with bare toes, groping hands—out of a valley in utter darkness.
The poet Seamus Heaney coined a term for this landscape: the “auditory imagination,” “a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the levels of conscious thought and feeling, invigorating every word.”
Movimento 2: Burrowing Memory
Music also perfects this ascent, especially grand hymns that marry lyricism to melody for a tingling, transcendent effect. At its strongest, that effect is like the crushing beauty of arrayed trumpet blasts against me. At its gentlest, it is like fingertips trailing through my inner forearm and upon my palm. At their most beautiful, hymns are impossible to forget.
Memory is just one note in the higher plane of auditory imagination, but it’s integral to the movement there. The English poet (and Anglican priest) Malcolm Guite says memorability in poetry is the point, given that poetry was auditory before widespread literacy and printing: “all culture—all of what we think of as literary culture—wasn’t literary culture at all before the invention of writing. It was oral culture. And one of the reasons people believe poetry has rhythm and rhyme and certain set patterns was partly to do with making it memorable, because it couldn’t be written down.”
It is no great feat to memorize the first four words of a 35-stanza poem. And yet, those first words—“Thou mastering me / God!”—have moved beyond the page and into my memory. I memorized it partly for its representation of my faith in God but more because of its auditory character: the alliteration in “mastering me,” the phrase’s fragmented immediacy, its blunt declaration like a hammer upon the air. There in my memory, it rooted. There, it drifts on its own breeze.
Secular poets, worshipers in their own right, also acknowledge how poetry’s musicality lures the memories of those who hear it aloud. Ryan Ruby, for the Poetry Foundation, notes that “[Percy] Shelley wrote, ‘The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.’ The error—by vulgar Shelley means ‘widespread’—is forgetting, the literal enemy of truth since Homer’s time. What has been forgotten is that at first, meter was not a formal feature of poetry at all. Poetry is not originally a literary genre; it is a medium, and meter is not ornamental—it is functional.”
Meter as “functional”? Ruby could be speaking of those hymns I’ve mentioned—their features are as functional as they are beautiful and variable. A song of praise, comprised of movements which are themselves comprised of notes which are themselves fully sound, is meant to be recalled, not simply heard. There’s an inelegant but descriptive term for a song that lingers in listeners: an “ear-worm.” A small, burrowing creature transported into the mind on the air, just as the mind is transported by its sound.
Memory, within the world of days yet also removed from it, aloft in the singing breeze and burrowed also below the roots.
It cries as the trumpets in the end of days, and yet it also speaks as the silent touch of dawn.
Movimento 3: At the Heart of All, There is Song
Why does music, and poetry in its shared sound, so move us through memory and transcendence? Think of the inception of sound.
“I’m sure [iambic pentameter] is in fact the heartbeat,” Malcolm Guite says. “That’s the first music we hear; it’s music we hear before we ever have ears.” The heartbeat as our first drum, our first sample of the life’s metronome, rings true to the unique cosmic place of musicality.
For the Christian, musicality has two places in the cosmos: the beginning and end of all things. In Plough, Joel Clarkson writes an essay whose themes circle how the earliest Christians worshiped in the light of the Christ’s apocalyptic return, welcoming it with songs. They lived what Clarkson calls “the belief that the whole of the created order is made from music, and that to sing is to prepare for the end of the world.”
The whole of the created order is made from music. Did not God speak His creation into being? And if He had sung it? The first hymn in all of existence, hovering in luminous repose with Him above the void. The first poem in all of existence.
By God’s lips, that first hymnic poem brought the formless world into form. By God’s lips, it transported nothingness into being. The musical word spoken aloud still plays a gentler version of that ascendant song, and Clarkson describes just where it still brings us:
“To sing as a Christian isn’t to deny or avoid the fallen realities of the world in some sort of escapism; rather, it is to enter into the midst of them, and to declare that though the darkness may seem strong, a light shines in the darkness which the darkness cannot comprehend (John 1:5), and which, in the fullness of time, will banish the darkness for good. In song, the signs of Christ’s coming continue to shine brightly for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and lungs to sing.”
The song and the poem have this same movement: they enter us into the “fallen realities of the world” while also bringing to us “the signs of Christ’s coming.” Both are an inner passage. Both inner passages are the foundation of our transportation by song, by poetry. And both are hand-crafted by God, our Great Composer, Stellar Musician, and Waiting Guide.
Movimento 4: The Resonance of the Other-Worldly
“And he said, ‘Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.’ And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”
This encounter between Elijah and God Himself is the fount of the themes I first introduced: an elevated and isolated place; overpowering external sensations felt internally; approach to the divine from earth. But notice the final sound: “a still small voice,” where the Lord is present.
I can easily imagine the goosebumps along the forearms and shoulder blades and neck of Elijah, because I’ve felt them. They are the proof of being moved by musicality. They are the tingle of aesthetic experience.
Given the Spanish, there’s a chance you felt nothing at all when I read it. But listen again to the poem, not for your comprehension but for its sound.
It is called “Me Gustas Cuando Callas” (“I Love When You Are Still,” in my translation) by the Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. Its sound is melodious and melancholic, at the level below meaning where we encounter poetry’s aesthetic experience. Odd how the best poetry, through only the symbols used for making meaning, plays its most powerful movements beyond meaning itself.
Pianissimo: Recapitulation
Whose created world is this, ordered and replete?
Let it rest upon the trumpets, let it sing anew with a still small voice.
Can you rise, child of the valley at dawn? Can you recall the first drumbeat of living?
Rise, the mundane is rent before you! By the galesong, transcend the rooted world in joyful noise…
I’ve long wanted to experiment with audio in A Stylist Submits. Not in a podcast (I hem and haw like a dope in conversations), but in readings. To read a poem aloud is an aesthetic experience very much like a divine touch, and I’d like to share more poems aloud. For now, I’ll just say this newsletter has a future place for them.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on August 18 with an essay on the novelist Kathryn Davis and her use of the “cosmic time” present in the gospel of John.
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Literary Christianity, with humble rigor.
Beautifully curated, Kevin. 🔥
To go even further than Mallarmé: poems are made, not of words, but of sounds.
A book you might want to read is "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form" by Paul Fussel. For such a short book, there is a surprising depth of content; he goes into great detail about why poems are presented and structured as they are, and touches on some of your points as well. https://www.amazon.com/Poetic-Meter-Form-Paul-Fussell/dp/0075536064/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=poetic+meter+and+poetic+form+paul+fussell&qid=1658487714&sprefix=poetic+meter+and+poetic+form%2Caps%2C85&sr=8-1