Comments

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

Exactly, Marco! I knew you'd pick up on the language learning analogy instantly! Thanks for your contribution.

With warm regards,

Roman Sympos

Dear Faithful Reader,

First of all, thanks so much for your fidelity! It is most appreciated!

You have an excellent point here--it reminds me of Wordsworth insisting, in his "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, that there's no essential difference between poetry and prose. I don't think he had syntactic units of meaning in mind, but rather topics, emotions, and ideas--content, in other words. He does spend a lot of time, however, on trying to justify poetry's (especially his poetry's) almost exclusive reliance on versification, after knocking the legs out from under the distinction.

But if the basic syntactic unit of meaning in the poem is the sentence, as it is in fiction, what do we do with poems that lack sentences entirely? For example:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals, on a wet, black bough.

Pound has disguised the genre of his poem--it's a haiku--by separating the first line from the next two and making it look like the title. In fact, the juxtaposition of images without the use of sentences is common to haiku--that's why an Imagist like Pound was so drawn to the form.

As for sentence fragments "evoking" sentences, I don't think it's fair to call phrases like these "sentence fragments" when there are no whole, intact specimens anywhere in sight. Sentence fragments appear in lots of fiction, in which the basic syntactic unit (or molecule) is in fact the sentence, but they serve only as momentary deviations from the norm. You can't write a entire story (let alone a novel) in nothing but nouns, prepositions, and modifiers, can you? I can't think of a single example that would work except as a prose poem, and that's off the table, as we both agree.

So, I'll stand by my "molecular" distinction.

Over to you!

With warm regards,

Roman Sympos

Hi, Lynn,

Thanks so much for that--glad to hear it will be useful. You're not the only one to have experienced serendipity. Adam contacted me with similar news--he's been writing up a paper proposal on a Renaissance psychomachia, using Inside Out as an example. Something's in the air!

Your humble servant,

RS

Thanks, Laura! So nice to hear that, and so nice of you to write. There's another story in the works, set on Cape Ann, which I'll post after all the parts of "The Flight" have been posted, so stay tuned!

RS