Comments

Thank you, Marc! So nice to hear from you. I'm in total agreement, and you've given me food for thought for Part 2. So much depends on your immediate family, not its history, and not just how much money they have, but whether or not they take the time to teach and model good behavior, kindness, initiative, respect for others and yourself, confidence, and all the other virtues that help to insure, not wealth, necessarily, but happiness and joy in being alive. I know that sounds like Maria tra-la-la-ing through flowering hills alive with the "Sound of Music," but how can you argue with what works?

Yours sincerely,

Roman Sympos

Absolutely. Modeling is the most important tool for children.

Thank you, Mr. Perry! I must say, I'm feeling very let down by my editor, Professor Rzepka, for not catching that howler, but even more disappointed in myself. Duly noted, and corrected.

Sincerely,

Professor Roman Sympos

Dear Steve,

How lovely to hear from you! Thanks for those kind words! Card Carrying was the toughest story in the Hart/Fallon series to pull off. I wrote it as a challenge to myself to do something with an idea of Toby's--what if a panhandler at a freeway exit was tossed a credit card instead of money? Glad to know someone believes I succeeded. Sorry to have taken so long to respond. Preparations for the new issue--now online with the announcement to appear shortly--have taken me on long sojourns to other pages on the website, and led me to neglect my editorial responsibilities on the "Comments" page. I hope you've managed to stay warm in the 9th Circle of Hell, and pleased to think that Card Carrying may have helped see you through those long hours you had to spend indoors.

All the very best,

Professor Roman Sympos

Dear Arline,

Thank you so much for reading, and for your comment! I apologize for not responding sooner--just had a tooth extracted the day before last. (Maybe that should be the topic for the next "Precipice" piece--extractions . . . .) I would love to see a photo of you in your cap.

Warm regards,

Roman Sympos

Thanks, Lynn! So kind of you to let me know.

RS

Ah, Marco, mio caro amico! Delighted to hear that. Thanks so much for letting me know.

I'm saddened to hear the end of the year weighed so heavily on your spirits. Sounds like you found some pin-points of light in the great darkness,. May they grow broader and brighter with each passing day.

Cari salluti,

Roman Sympos

Great to hear from you again, Timmer! One of these days I'll time the seconds, minutes, and hours I waste online or on the phone navigating the maze of endless "Press" commands leading to a door that opens on silence, the maddening disconnections and redials, and the even crazier-making musical brain worms that corporate American serves up as entertainment for its customers on hold. I bet they'll add up to way more than the time I spend on life necessities or things I enjoy.

Great choice of death-bed lullaby!

Yr obedient servant,

Roman Sympos

Thank you most heartily for your kind remarks, Timmer. I'm trying to imagine you as a drill master! (Did you have a whistle, too?)

When I read McNeill's book, I was reminded of being on the receiving end of what you describe, being drilled (like a patient in a dentist's chair), when I played the trumpet in my high school marching band, strutting up and down the gridiron at half-time. Can't really say I felt euphoric, but I think it was because, unlike close order military drill, half-time shows and rehearsals involve too much memorization of new routines and steps and individual turns for each show--all very anxiety-producing and not conducive to euphoria.

Your comment also reminds me that making music together, whether with instruments or vocally, is still another example of "muscular bonding," and, in that way, fundamentally, a dance, just like football.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Roman Sympos

What a lovely example, Marshall! Thank you for calling it to our attention.

Before going any further, here's a translation for readers unversed in German. I found it in Marlboro Music: German Vocal Texts in Translation, An Anthology, edited and translated by Philipp O. Naegele, 2005 (https://www.marlboromusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Naegele_Book_2008.pdf) (It's worth reading Naegele's preface and thumbnail biography in the introductory material--the preface for its intelligent reflections on the challenges of translating song lyrics to meet the needs of audiences listening to performances in the original, the biography for its gripping account of Naegele's experiences in the Second World War.)

EVENING

When men's loud delights fall silent:

Rustles then the earth as if in dreams

Wondrously with all its trees,

What to the heart is scarcely known,

Bygone ages, gentle sorrows,

And soft shudders sweep

Like summer lightning through the breast.

Naegele can't, of course, capture in English the ambiguity of the German original. "Schauer," for instance, has to be rendered in English as either "shudders" or "showers," and while their meanings are linked analogously or metaphorically, neither can be taken, lexically, to mean the other. "The weather forecast is for shudders this afternoon" would leave us scratching our heads.

I think "reversal of tone" is a good definition of irony, and clearly demonstrated in "To Celia." But what's missing from "Der Abend," I think, is mutual exclusivity, which I take to be an essential trait of the ambiguous visual figure: the old woman/rabbit, for instance, can't be perceived as both A (a rabbit) and B (an old woman) at the same time, nor can "To Celia" be read and experienced as both a hapless lover's complaint and a bitter insult simultaneously.

The emotional oppositions in "Der Abend," as in much of Romantic poetry generally, can, I believe. This is one of the great achievements of the Romantic lyric, the realization that human emotions are not mutuallly exclusive, but complex blends and contrasting shades of emotions that are typically understood to be opposites. The contrast or opposition, far from diluting or displacing the primary emotion, deepens it.

Wordsworth's poetry is full of examples. Take "The Two April Mornings," for instance. We'd expect that Matthew, standing forlornly beside the grave of his nine-year-old daugher, would, upon suddenly beholding a "blooming girl, whose hair was wet/ With points of morning dew" nearby, experience an intense longing for her, someone to take his dead daughter's place. A lesser poet than Wordsworth might even have Matthew, for a brief bewildered moment, mistaking her for the dead girl, as if she were her ghost. But Matthew feels exactly the opposite: "I looked at her, and looked again,/ And did not wish her mine!"

That exclamation point is so eloquent. It registers Matthew's own surprise at his indifference to this girl--after all, he tells us, "To see a child so very fair,/ It was a pure delight!" But Matthew's delight intensifies, rather than diminishes, his sense of loss and despair, along with our vicarious participation in his grief. His heart will accept no substitutes. His daughter, dead for some thirty years at the moment he tells the poet this tale, cannot, ever, be replaced.

Here, as in von Eichendorff's poem, the opposite emotions in play are not mutually exclusive, as in a tonally ambiguous poem like "To Celia," but mutually reinforcing--not contradictory or ironic (except superficially) but contrastive and complex and tightly integrated.

I could go on to provide a similar close reading of "Der Abend," but I've gone on long enough. In any case, I don't think the poem's contrastive and complex integration of quiet, wondrous rustling, shuddering showers, and gentle sorrows, on the one hand, and piercing, if distant, summer lightning, on the other, could survive the kind of mutually exclusive readings demanded by a poem like "To Celia."

Many thanks, again, for your contribution to the discussion--it was a real, undiluted pleasure for me to trace its implicaitions for our understanding of this poem, and poetry in general!

With warm regards,

Roman Sympos