Eric Racher — Socrates on the Beach

Epithalamion: Pound, Milton, Music, Poetry — Eric T. Racher

In his sonnet To Mr. H. Lawes, on his Aires, Milton praises the composer, ‘whose tunefull and well measur’d Song / First taught our English Musick how to span / Words with just note and accent.’ The cadence of that first line resolves in the long monosyllable of the final substantive—sibilant onset sliding into the vowel, the resonance of which lingers into the nasal coda after rising with the assonance of the second epithet. The resultant weight accorded to those words, ‘well measur’d,’ is apt, since the question is one of proportion, that is, the relation between language in the poet’s art and sound in the composer’s, and even of the composer’s recognition of the limits of said art when it takes upon itself the burden of the body, that is, of being bound and bounded by words, which entails a further obligation, not only to the poet as such, but to the language itself. For ‘Voice’ and ‘Vers’ to be implicated in such a manner implies both the ‘worth’ and ‘skill’ of the composer, who must weigh the relation between what I am tempted to call the genius of the language and the ‘just note and accent’ that is best fitted to ‘humor’ it.

As a poet, Milton was attuned to the resonance and rhythms of the English language, from the light and airy simplicity of the song On May morning, to the stately power of Satan’s speech in Paradise Lost, infused with what George Steiner has called ‘the weight and noble violence of Latinity.’ His poetry overflows with words and images and figures drawn from the world of music that environed him from an early age. His father was a composer, ‘for his skill in which hee stands registred among the Composers of his time,’ described as ‘an ingeniouse man,’ who instructed his son in the art of music. John Milton the younger is said to have been a talented organist and singer, with ‘a delicate tuneable Voice’ and ‘an excellent Ear, and could bear a part both in Vocal & Instrumental Music.’ These quotes from John Aubrey’s Minutes of the Life of Mr. John Milton and the Anonymous Life of Milton bear witness to the poet’s immersion in a life of music, to the practice that undergirds his praise. Milton’s life and poetry exemplify the Poundian adage that ‘poetry withers and “dries out” when it leaves music, or at least an imagined music, too far behind it.’ (Note 1) To Mr. H. Lawes is not by any means among Milton’s best poems; nonetheless, the trappings of panegyric mask something more substantial than the usual ephemera that grace the front pages of old folios. Milton’s lines reveal the profound entanglement of a serious artist with the most fundamental demands that ground his art in material existence and circumstance, as well as its place in the economy of human culture. They reveal something of the values of the artist.

By all accounts, including his own, Ezra Pound possessed neither ‘a delicate tuneable Voice’—in a letter to Joyce he confessed that he had ‘the organ of a tree toad’—nor ‘good skill’ in playing his chosen instruments, the clavichord and the bassoon; however, few poets have taken the intercourse of the verbal and musical arts as seriously, and consequently devoted as much energy and thought to exploring and explicating their intimate mappings. Whether in his critical writing, his poetry, or in his actual musical compositions, Pound never ceased his dogged insistence upon the inherent gravity of this relation; indeed, Pound’s very definition of poetry—cribbed from Dante’s description of the canzone in De vulgari eloquentia—as ‘a composition of words set to music,’ as well as his approach to the composition of both poetry and music, hinges on this relationship.

In his essay A Retrospect (1918), Pound advised poets to ‘behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music,’ since the musical aspect of poetry is governed by the same laws as music itself. The Greeks and the troubadours taught him that ‘poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it.’ Knit together. Textile. Texture. Voice and verse as warp and woof. The abstraction of music away from language, from the body, unravels the threads of the art, and thus poetry is unable truly to become, incapable of transforming its dynamis into entelechy. For this reason, he affirmed that ‘poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets,’ and he was steadfast in his opposition to ‘the immorality of bad art,’ that is to say, ‘inaccurate art’ of the sort ‘that makes false reports,’ whereas ‘good art’ is that which ‘bears true witness,’ or ‘the art that is most precise.’ (Note 2) In spite of his own substantial ethical and political failings, Pound kept this ideal as a lodestar that would guide his work, and at times lead him to create poetry that defied even his own false reports. One reason for this is that Pound’s poetry at its best, like Milton’s, never ‘leaves music, or at least an imagined music, too far behind it,’ as evinced in the sounds and rhythm of the following lines from Canto LXXIV:

What you depart from is not the way
and olive tree blown white in the wind
washed in the Kiang and Han
what whiteness will you add to this whiteness,
what candor?

These lines from Canto XIII bear more directly upon the theme of poetry and music:

And Kung said, “Without character you will
be unable to play on that instrument
Or to execute the music fit for the Odes.
The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.”

There is, then, a music fit for the Odes, one which is ‘born in the words’ and ‘conserve[s] the proportions of the original,’ that is to say, it arises out of the rhythmic and melodic structure of the poet’s language. (Note 3) The act of fitting returns us to Milton’s phrase ‘to span / Words with just note and accent,’—and I cannot but notice the polysemous resonance of the word ‘just’—to that careful attention to the sound of words that led Thomas Campion to write in his Observations on the Art of English Poesy that ‘in a verse the numeration of the sillables is not so much to be observed, as their waite and due proportion.’

Kung’s words, like the ‘worth’ in Milton’s ‘worth and skill,’ postulate an ethical dimension to the relation of words and music, since they are intimately entangled with our mode of being in the world. The dimension rests, ultimately, on material social relations, as the economic root of ‘worth’ suggests. In order ‘to execute the music fit for the Odes,’ one must be attentive to the demands of ‘character’—not ‘character’ in an individualist sense or the commoditized product packaged and sold by contemporary pop-psychologists, self-development gurus and life-hack influencers, but character as it relates to the obligations that human beings have to one another, to their language, and to their art—the attempt to keep the apricot blossoms from falling.

Between 1923 and 1933, Pound, in addition to two operas based respectively on the lives of François Villon and Guido Cavalcante, composed a series of pieces for solo violin. Most of these compositions are based on poems, that is, Pound uses a poem as a base text, and endeavors to score the music connoted by the poem’s rhythm, interpreting that rhythm and the musical form implicit in it. Rather than setting the words of poetry to music, Pound reinterprets the rhythmic and structural elements of the verse for the violin, organizing his musical structure on the basis of the poetic structure, with certain formal aspects of the literary text represented by analogous structures in the music.

There is, however, no attempt to interpret the poem on the semantic level, to represent the ‘meaning’ of the poem as in program music or tone poems designed to suggest a narrative or evoke the images or feelings present in a poem or other text, such as Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, or Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, although Pound’s final piece, based on Dante’s sestina Al poco giorno e al grand cerchio d’ombra, hints at such; instead, by isolating the rhythmic, temporal qualities of poetic language and construing them in music Pound drills down to the bedrock of the relation of voice and verse, excavating the foundations necessary to answer questions he was pondering in an undated and unpublished typescript titled Song:

Extent to which music may “arise” FROM words.
i.e.
IT must be born in the words.
Limit to which it may develop, expand
the verbal indications ?????
perhaps almost no limit ?? , but the proportions
the underlingin [sic] indications of origin must remain (Note 4)

Pound’s notion of music arising from ‘verbal indications,’ being ‘born in the words,’ is a question of interpretation rather than mere setting—the words indicate, point toward some potential musical structure as a limit, and interpretation is an act of criticism, a translation of these verbal indications into another form, while remaining mindful of their ‘due proportion’ and of the obligation to choose ‘the most beautiful tone lying within the limits of the verbal indication.’ This concern with interpreting words by means of music is reflected in the subtitle to the violin piece Frottola, believed to have been written in late 1931 and based on a poem by Guido Cavalcante: Ritmo della frottola interpretata per violino dal traduttore—Rhythm of the frottola interpreted for violin by the translator. It also calls to mind Pound’s five categories of criticism in the essay ‘Date Line,’ first published in Make It New (1934), where he includes criticism via music, which, he says, is second in intensity only to criticism by means of new composition. (Note 5) Considered as an act of criticism, the intensity of the interpretation as opposed to mere ‘setting’ of words to music lies in the need to feel down to the ‘verbal indications’ from which the music is born. From this perspective, the violin works may be understood as a form of literary criticism.

Sestina: Altaforte (1924), based on his own poem of the same name, provides an example of his compositional practice. As a poem, the sestina form consists of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoi of three lines. The lines do not rhyme within the stanza, but the same six end words repeat from stanza to stanza (in the case of Pound’s Altaforte: peace, music, clash, opposing, crimson, rejoicing) in a changing order according to a particular pattern. In the violin composition, we find a musical phrase for each line of the poem, although it must be understood that this is not a setting—no words are to be sung or spoken. The music corresponding to each verse presents certain motifs, which, like the end words in the text of the poem, reappear in specified positions throughout the composition, with certain variations. Thus, the lines from each stanza with repeated words in them—for example, lines 1, 8, 16, 23, 27, 36 and 39 all end with the word ‘peace’—correspond to musical phrases with specific repeated elements that make audible in the music the structural organization of the poem, that is, the repetition of end-words from stanza to stanza as found in the text of the poem. To illustrate this, here

are the measures that correspond to the first line of the poem, Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace. (Note 6)

Each chord of the music corresponds clearly to each (monosyllabic) word of the original text, and the music here may be fruitfully juxtaposed to the recording of Pound reading the poem. Comparing these measures with those that correspond to the fourth line of the third stanza, Better one hour’s stour than a year’s peace,

and to the third line of the fifth stanza, But is fit only to rot in womanish peace,

the repetition and variation of musical motifs, which echo their appearance in earlier lines and are analogous to the repetition of end-words in the sestina, becomes clear. Initially, each syllable of the text corresponds to one note or chord played on the violin, in a relatively direct rendition of the rhythmic qualities of the text in musical form. However, beginning in the section of the piece that corresponds to the second stanza of the poem, this one-to-one correspondence is abandoned in favor of a more exploratory relation of text to music, although the structure of the poem is never entirely abandoned. The music based on the first stanza of the poem, by following so closely the textual basis of the piece, asserts the stanzaic structure most directly; once this structure has been established, then variation develops the rhythmic possibilities of the poem by developing and expanding the verbal indications of the text, as Pound proposed in the above quote from Song.

Evocative in their similarities and dissimilarities to Pound’s practice are the explorations of poetic rhythm and metrical resources in the work of the Russian composer Vladimir Kobekin. For example, in his piano piece Песня Молота и Наковальни (гекзаметр)—Song of the Hammer and the Anvil (hexameter), Kobekin begins with a bass figure in two measures of 3/2 time, representing the prototypical dactylic hexameter: | – u u | – u u | – u u | – u u | – u u | – – |. (Note 7)

This figure forms the basic rhythmic structure of the piece, and as it progresses, the metrical pattern is developed in various ways, for example in the left hand figure through substitutions of spondees for dactyls according to the rules of Greek prosody, with the dactylic short syllables taken up by the right hand part, or with legato runs within the rhythmic structure of the dactylic foot. Another hauntingly beautiful example of Kobekin’s use of ancient Greek metrical forms as an organizing principle of his music is Sappho, a composition for violoncello and piano. While Pound’s violin pieces might best be designated as a poet’s music, Kobekin’s treatment of poetic meter, being the work of a trained, professional composer, is most definitely a musician’s music. Kobekin writes that he would like ‘to convey the rhythmic originality of ancient Greek poetry,’ which, due to the different phonological structures of the Greek and Russian languages and the consequent differences in their metrical practices, cannot be directly translated into Russian verse. This difference of approach is reflected in the difference of starting point: Pound bases the violin pieces on specific poems, and his aim is the interpretation of the poem for its own sake, in order to apprehend and perceive more deeply the rhythmic qualities of individual poems, while Kobekin begins from a higher level of abstraction, taking forms (rondel, the Sapphic stanza) or meters (dactylic hexameter), rather than individual poems, as the basis of his compositions.

A similar concern for patterns of speech in poetry, but in this case also in spontaneous spoken utterance, is echoed in the music and writing of the American composer Harry Partch, whose early experiments in ‘speech-music’ were contemporary with Pound’s compositional practice. Being dissatisfied with his previous, more traditional, work, in 1930 Partch determined ‘to allow the spoken words of lyrics to govern the melody and rhythm of the music.’ (Note 8) As he describes it in Genesis of a Music, the musical traditions of the ancient cultures of China, Greece, India and the Middle East retained the close relation between speech and music. Like Pound, Partch intuited the import and consequence of this relation, and the detrimental effect that their divergence has on both arts. Partch conceptualized this relation within a conflict between Corporeal music—a music whose impetus arises from the rhythmic and melodic aspects of human speech and bodily movement, ‘a music that is vital to a time and place, a here and now,’ a music that is ‘physically allied with poetry or the dance’ and ‘emotionally ‟tactile”’—and Abstract music, which has abandoned the fleshly heft of its bodily origins in favor of unsubstantial system, a ‘mental or spiritual’ music that ‘grows from the root of non-verbal ‟form”’. (Note 9) In his attempts to achieve this Corporeal speech-music in his own compositional practice, Partch set English translations of lyrics by Li Po, Biblical Psalms, selections from Shakespeare and Finnegans Wake, even newsboys’ cries and the speech of hoboes he met in his own ramblings, at first performing this music himself, both intoning the words and playing an adapted viola with an elongated neck and indications of where microtonal divisions of the octave should be played, and later composing larger ensemble pieces still steadfastly based on monophonic utterance. Partch’s emphasis on speech rhythm is epitomized in the score for Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po (1930-1933), in which each syllable of the text is assigned a pitch value but not a rhythmic or durational value, as Partch composed the pieces to be intoned according to the natural rhythms of speech.

Pound’s music does not merely result from a desire for musical expression on the part of a less-than-talented amateur, nor should it be seen as the failed attempt of a tone-deaf crank and would-be composer whose arrogance led him to consider himself an expert in music despite his lack of formal training. His compositions are better construed as acts of research, of poetics rather than music in a pure sense, attempts at understanding poetry by means of isolating the rhythmic elements of speech in a different medium. Pound wrote of the music of the troubadours:

One reads the words on which the notes indubitably depended; a rhythm comes to life—a rhythm which seems to explain the music and which is not a “musician’s” rhythm. Yet it is possible to set this rhythm in a musician’s rhythm [for] both poet and musician “feel around” the movement, “feel at it” from different angles. (Note 10)

This process of finding the rhythmic form of the melodic line in the rhythm of the spoken word parallels Partch’s notion of speech-music:

I discovered that speech itself had a natural rhythm; natural because the words were not forced into a preconceived pattern. In this music the words flow just as they flow in speech. I have a good tonal memory and can recall days later the exact inflections someone used in a phrase. That phrase and inflection become the melodic basic for my harmony. (Note 11)

In another undated and unpublished typescript, titled Dissertation on Rhythm, Pound refers to the decades he had spent studying poetic rhythm, noting that if he is known to readers of poetry, then it is mostly because of his ‘sensitivity to rhythm.’ He adds the following: ‘For purely personal reasons it might also be to my advantage to annul the idea that when I “broke into” melody (about the year 1920) I committed a definite rupture with my particular past.’ (Note 12) Pound thus conceived of his compositional practice, both in the operas and in his violin works, as an extension of his poetic practice, and, in particular, of his intense study of poetic rhythm.

It is useful to think of Pound’s music as a form of what Roman Jakobson, in his essay On linguistic aspects of translation (1959), refers to as ‘intersemiotic translation (transmutation)’. For Jakobson, the interpretation of verbal language is three-fold: ‘it may be translated into other signs of the same language, into another language, or into another, nonverbal system of symbols.’ It is the last of these three that he calls intersemiotic translation. Jakobson puts forward the by-now commonplace claim that ‘poetry by definition is untranslatable,’ since non-semantic elements of the poetic text, such as ‘[s]yntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their components (distinctive features)—in short, any constituents of the verbal code— […] carry their own autonomous signification.’ For this reason Jakobson believes that poetry translation is always ‘creative transposition,’ be it ‘intralingual—from one poetic shape to another, or interlingual transposition—from one language to another, or finally intersemiotic transposition—from one system of signs to another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.’

William Butler Yeats, whom Pound had met in 1909 and to whom he would grow quite close, had written of his experience intoning poetry to the music of the psaltery in his essay Speaking to the Psaltery (1903), where he tells of his desire ‘to hear poems spoken to a harp, as [he] imagined Homer to have spoken his.’ Spoken, not sung, for when he heard poems sung he was not able to ‘hear the words,’ or ‘their natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was altered, or it was drowned in another music.’ Yeats experienced directly the loss of consonance between what Milton called those ‘Sphear-born harmonious sisters,’ voice and verse, and the need to uncover a more ‘undiscordant’ interconnection: ‘we tried speaking through music in the ordinary way […], until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms that were so often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm of the verse and the tune and rhythm of the music.’ In these early experiments, Yeats had to unlearn his way of reading poetry in order to convince those sisters to ‘Wed [their] divine sounds,’ and speak to the music rather than through it. Perhaps more curious, as it relates to Pound’s violin music, is the following anecdote of how Yeats first approached this idea of chanting poetry together with a musical instrument:

Like every other poet, I spoke verses in a kind of chant when I was making them, and sometimes, when I was alone on a country road, I would speak them in a loud chanting voice, and feel that if I dared I would speak them in that way to other people. One day I was walking through a Dublin street with the Visionary I have written about in The Celtic Twilight, and he began speaking his verses out aloud with the confidence of those who have the inner light. He did not mind that people stopped and looked after him even on the far side of the road, but went on through poem after poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of music, but was certain that he had written them to a manner of music, and he had once asked somebody who played on a wind instrument of some kind, and then a violinist, to write out the music and play it. The violinist had played it, or something like it, but had not written it down; but the man with the wind instrument said it could not be played because it contained quarter-tones and would be out of tune.

By the time he began composing for the violin, Pound knew Yeats personally and had worked closely with him for several years, and perhaps this story of a violinist transcribing the music of a visionary’s manner of speaking his verses out loud remained with Pound when he later began work on the violin pieces.

An analogous process of intersemiotic transposition is found in homophonic translation, of which two well-known modern examples are David Melnick’s Men in Aida and Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s Catullus. Whereas Pound’s violin compositions isolate the rhythmic qualities of the poem and interpret that particular aspect in another medium, the homophonic translation focuses on the phonological form of an utterance, and attempts to transfer this aural aspect of the poem into another language’s phonological system, extending the scope of the bilingual pun from the word or phrase to an entire text. Louis Zukofsky said that his and Celia’s aim was ‘to convey the sound of his Latin,’ to ‘follow it syllable for syllable and get the noise across.’ (Note 13) If indeed Jakobson is correct in saying that all elements of language, including ‘phonemes and their components […] carry their own autonomous signification’ in the poetic text, then this mode of translation must be capable of conveying aspects of meaning that cannot be brought across by means of other, more usual modes.

Already in 1912, in the article ‘On Music’ from the series I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, Pound had noted that when ‘verse is made to speak […] it may have a rhythm which can […] be translated into a music subtler than either poetry or music would have separately attained.’ In the same article, while discussing ‘tone-leading’ and harmonic direction, he asks the following:

...in the interpreting of the hidden melody of poetry into the more manifest melody of music, are there in the words themselves ‘tone-leadings’? Granted a perfect accord of word and tune is attainable by singing a note to each syllable and a short or long note to short or long syllables respectively, and singing the syllable accented in verse on the note accented in the music, is there anything beyond this? (Note 14)

Pound returns to the question of the degree to which music might arise out of the poet’s language in the introduction to his translation of The sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcante, from the same year:

Rhythm is perhaps the most primal of all things known to us. It is basic in poetry and music mutually, their melodies depending on a variation of tone quality and of pitch respectively, as is commonly said, but if we look more closely we will see that music is, by further analysis, pure rhythm; rhythm and nothing else, for the variation in pitch is the variation in rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these varied rhythms. [...] Whence it should be possible to show that any given rhythm implies about it a complete musical form—fugue, sonata, I cannot say what form, but a form, perfect, complete. Ergo, the rhythm set in a line of poetry connotes its symphony, which, had we a little more skill, we could score for orchestra. Sequitur, or rather inest: the rhythm of any poetic line corresponds to emotion.

Poetry and music are not disparate animals yoked together by the song-setter’s effort of will; rather, they arise out of the primal element of rhythm. Whereas the first passage above, published at the beginning of February 1912, speculates about the possibility of there being some quality of poetic language that implies a particular musical form, in the Cavalcante introduction, published in May of that same year, Pound formulates an answer: although the circumstances of language are different from those of music, rhythm is ‘basic in poetry and music mutually;’ rhythm is the origin of both poetry and music’s tone quality and pitch, of melody, and ultimately, the origin of harmony as well, an idea which anticipates the themes of the Treatise on Harmony (1924). Although musical rhythm is generally understood as the patterns in which unaccented beats are grouped in relation to accented ones, Pound sees rhythm as the ultimate source of all the aural qualities of poetry and music, since the vibrations that create what we perceive as pitch and determine our perception of harmony are nothing more than a regular succession of weak and strong elements, like any rhythmic movement. The entire sonorous world of melopoeia arises out of a ‘primal,’ or ‘absolute’ rhythm. This calls to mind a statement from Jay Wright’s essay Desire’s Design: ‘We may say that a language’s truth lies in its rhythm, but any language’s rhythm remains more subtle and flexible than many of our poets lead us to believe.’ The knowledge of this rhythmic truth, of its subtlety and flexibility, was the ultimate purpose of Pound’s musical pursuits. The incandescent pleasure of that knowledge is witnessed in these lines from the troubadour Peire Vidal’s Ab l’alen tir vas me l’aire:

E s’ieu sai ren dir ni faire,
ylh n’aia·l grat, que scïensa
m’a donat e conoissensa;
per qu’ieu sui guays e chantaire.

If ‘the rhythm set in a line of poetry connotes its symphony,’ then there ought to be an absolute music to accompany the absolute rhythm, a single symphony that follows, in an almost deductive manner, from the rhythm of the poem, as implied by the definite article in the line from Canto XIII quoted above: the music fit for the Odes. This exact correspondence between rhythm and emotion is attributed to the almost mystical idea ‘that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it,’ because feelings and emotions create ‘pattern-units, or units of design’ in the mind. (Note 15) For Pound, emotion is

an organiser of form, not merely of visible forms and colours, but also of audible forms. This basis of music is so familiar that it would seem to need no support. Poetry is a composition or an ‘organisation’ of words set to ‘music’. By ‘music’ here we can scarcely mean much more than rhythm and timbre. The rhythm form is false unless it belong to the particular creative emotion or energy which it purports to represent. (Note 16)

Emotion organizes the rhythmic patterns that appear in poetry and music, and this rhythm in some sense ‘belongs’ to this emotion, it arises out of the energy or corporeal exigencies of the emotion itself. Emotion brings into being a certain rhythmic form; it is accompanied by that form, which is embodied in various ways depending on the contingencies of the individual in whom the emotion manifests, and of the particular artistic medium used in its embodiment. For Pound there is a different emotion for each thought that is capable of being expressed in poetry. Each emotion has its own rhythm, and if the poet is not ‘false’ to this rhythm, then the poem as written enacts something of the original emotion, which also ‘implies about it a complete musical form,’ the ‘symphony’ of that particular poem. He says in the introduction to Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcante: ‘It is the poet’s business that the correspondence be exact, i.e. that it be the emotion which surrounds the thought expressed.’ The requirement of exactness in correspondence announces the corporeal marrow of Pound’s poetics, grounded in the demands of a bodily rhythm.

Rhythm, Juri Lotman writes in Analysis of the Poetic Text, ‘always, in the final analysis, turns out to be the phenomenon of meaning,’ and the phenomenon of meaning is fundamentally involved in what Marx called ‘sensuous human activity,’ or ‘practice,’—not merely an ‘objective’ quality of the world. He contrasts this with the general understanding that rhythm deals with ‘the repetition of identical elements,’ as in the rhythmic movement of a rower, in which each stroke is the repetition of the same elements, or the cyclical procession of the seasons. Susanne K. Langer, in Form and Feeling, echoes this view, criticizing those ‘countless studies of rhythm, based on the notion of periodicity, or regular recurrence of events.’ The sort of rhythm that matters to the poet and the musician is not the mere ‘repetition of identical elements;’ it is instead a phenomenon of meaning, that is, of social practice: ‘The ticking of a clock is repetitious and regular, but not in itself rhythmic; the listening ear hears rhythms in the succession of equal ticks, the human mind organizes them into a temporal form.’ (Note 17)

Contrary to the common view, then, rhythm is not found in nature (Milton might, perhaps, qualify: in fallen nature); rather, rhythm is always already a form of interpretation. The rhythm of poetry and music is therefore of an order wholly different from ‘the repetition of identical elements.’ As Lotman has it:

The rhythmicity of poetry is the cyclical repetition of different elements in identical positions with the aim of equating the unequal or revealing similarity in difference, or the repetition of the identical with the aim of revealing the false character of this identity, of establishing differences of similarity. (Note 18)

And here is Langer once again:

The essence of rhythm is the preparation of a new event by the ending of a previous one. A person who moves rhythmically need not repeat a single motion exactly. His movement, however, must be complete gestures, so that one can sense a beginning, intent, and consummation, and see in the last stage of one the condition and indeed the rise of another. Rhythm is the setting-up of new tensions by the resolution of former ones. They need not be of equal duration at all; but the situation that begets the new crisis must be inherent in the denouement of its forerunner. (Note 19)

Pound wrote that rhythm is ‘a form cut into time;’ there are certain ‘primal elements,’ the articulate sounds of language, the phonemes that are built up into syllables of ‘differing weights and durations,’ which ‘are the medium wherewith the poet cuts his design in time.’ (Note 20) Louis Zukofsky wrote that poetry is ‘the movement (and tone) of words,’ and that ‘Rhythm, pulse, keeping time with existence, is the distinction of its technique.’ (Note 21) It is something of a commonplace to refer to music as an—or the—art of time, in the sense that durations of sound and silence, the temporal succession, overlapping and coincidence of tones, as well as the ordering of time in the form of indications of tempo, time signatures, and measures, are all formal elements of music, the organization of which are some of the primary techniques of the composer’s art. Langer states that music is not an art of sound, but the art of ‘moving forms of sound,’ which produce an image of what she calls ‘lived’ or ‘experienced’ time, as ‘music creates an order of virtual time, in which its sonorous forms move in relation to each other.’ (Note 22) In this time our experience diverges from everyday clock time—it removes us from the other orders of time that impinge upon us by its particular way of organizing time, specific to the individual work. As Langer puts it: Music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible. In the Treatise on Harmony, Pound noted that all treatises on harmony before his had omitted ‘the element of time,’ that is, ‘of the time-interval that must elapse between one sound and another if the two sounds are to produce a pleasing consonance or an interesting relation.’ (Note 23)

Rhythm is intimately involved with beginnings and endings: ‘beginning, intent, and consummation,’ Langer wrote; or, ‘the setting-up of new tensions by the resolution of former ones.’ Time in a piece of music has a beginning and an end, for the piece itself has a beginning and an end, just as, in the Christian tradition in which Milton moved and found sustenance, time has cosmogonic and eschatological dimensions, the latter of which is evoked in the youthful poem On Time:

For when as each things bad thou hast entomb’d,
And last of all, thy greedy self consum’d,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood,
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,
With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine
About the supreme Throne
Of him, t’whose happy-making sight alone,
When once our heav’nly-guided soul shall clime,
Then all this Earthly grosnes quit,
Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.

Time itself, the greedy devourer, shall itself be consumed when our souls are taken into Eternity ‘about the supreme Throne,’ where, in At a Solemn Music, the ‘Sphear-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Vers, / Wed [their] divine sounds’ in an ‘undisturbed Song of pure concent, / Ay sung before the saphire-colour’d throne / To him that sits thereon.’

At a Solemn Music, however, gestures back towards a pre-lapsarian golden age. The wedding of voice and verse in human song refracts, however imperfectly, the harmonia mundi, the pure music of the spheres, and is ‘able to pierce’ our fallen nature (‘Dead things’) ‘with inbreath’d sense’ in order

That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportion’d sin
Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good.

Before the Fall, in Eden, voice and verse were perfectly consonant, there was a music fit for the Odes. This Golden Age was ruptured by ‘disproportion’d sin,’ in revolt against the ‘due proportion’ or the ‘just note and accent’ which is necessary to the wedding of verse and voice. The fall from a state of grace is a loss of harmony, of consonance, a discord in the most literal sense. The poem ends with the following four lines

O may we soon again renew that Song,
And keep in tune with Heav’n, till God ere long
To his celestial consort us unite,
To live with him, and sing in endles morn of light.

in which redemption is figured as a renewal of that pre-lapsarian song, a return to harmony with heaven—and remember that Pound sees all harmony as ultimately a function of primal rhythm—in which we shall ‘sing in endles morn of light,’ an eternal wedding of voice and verse. An eternal morning. A return to the beginning. In my beginning is my end, Eliot wrote. In my end is my beginning. A beginning that clutches its verbal, participial root—in revolt against the force of nominalization. Moving forms of sound.

The linear movement of time undergoes a striking reversal in On the morning of Christ’s Nativity, where music is said to be able to cause time to run in reverse, and thus bring back the Golden Age.

Ring out ye crystal spheres!
Once bless our human ears
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time,
And let the bass of Heav’n’s deep organ blow;
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th’angelic symphony.

For if such holy song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl’d Vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous Sin will melt from earthly mould;
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering Day.

Yea, Truth and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Orb’d in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Thron’d in celestial sheen.
With radiant feet the tissu’d clouds down steering;
And Heav’n, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.

The audacity of the figure here—that time itself should reverse its course under the influence of music, seen as ‘holy song,’ not pure sound, not instrumental music, but song, that is, ‘Voice, and Vers,’ ‘when of old the sons of morning sung’—is striking. This personified Time ‘will run back and fetch the age of gold,’ which Hesiod, in his Works and Days describes as the time of Kronos, the Titan. Later writers, such as the author of the treatise known as De Mundo, attributed to Aristotle, associated Kronos with Chronos, the personification of Time: the high God is described as ‘the son of Kronos and of Time (Chronos), for he endures from eternal age to age.’ (Note 24) Plutarch, in his On Isis and Osiris, also noted that the Greeks saw Kronos as a figurative name of Chronos. Milton alludes to this identification in On Time—‘And glut thyself with what thy womb devours’— for Kronos is said to have devoured his children when they were born so that they would not overthrow him as he had done to his own father. Time, then, as ruler of the Golden Age; Time also, then, as the one who can ‘run back and fetch’ this Golden Age. Rhythm is cut in time. For Milton we lost the Golden Age when we lost Eden, his descriptions of which in Paradise Lost owe much to Ovid. And yet… And yet the wedding of voice and verse might yet cause time to reverse its course. Paradise Lost is followed by Paradise Regained, and that indeed is the point of that ‘holy song’—for Milton, the birth of Christ resets the clock, so to speak.

Pound, perhaps, grasped that the absolute rhythm that lies at the foundation of poetic and musical practice in their highest form could ‘fetch the age of gold,’ and that therefore the wedding of voice and verse is a necessary practice in striving to ‘make a paradiso / terrestre,’ as he writes in one of the fragments for The Cantos. Immediately after these lines, in another fragment, he writes, ‘I have tried to write Paradise.’ That movement from making paradise to writing paradise is a movement that is not movement, but rather a restatement, a rhythmic repetition of similarity in dissimilarity. A movement from one form of ‘sensuous human activity,’ or social practice (making), to another (writing). To write Paradise. To cause the paradiso terrestre to come into being by means of writing. ‘Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise.’ Run back and fetch the age of gold. In my end is my beginning.

In Milton’s ode On the morning of Christ’s Nativity, nature itself ‘knew such harmony alone / could hold all heav’n and earth in happier union,’ and Pound theorized that all harmony is at root a function of rhythm. The music of language is put to use by the poet in organizing the emotion embodied in the poem, creating a sense of movement that is not essentially different from that of music, a movement that represents the experienced movement of life itself. The music of language ultimately comes down to rhythm, and rhythm, as ‘a form cut into time,’ is also a form of knowledge. Here is Archilochus of Paros, writing in the 7th century BCE: γίγνωσκε δ ̓ οἷος ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει—Know what sort of rhythm governs man. This rhythm ‘governs’ or ‘holds’ us, and we are enjoined to know, a knowledge which cannot be expressed discursively, as Langer and Jakobson stress, because it is untranslatable into any form other than the one in which it is embodied, for any other form would be, by definition, other, that is, it would express something different, and the import of the music of poetry is implicit. This form of knowledge is involved in what has been called artistic truth, or ‘a language’s truth’ in the words of Jay Wright, that is, what Susanne Langer called ‘the truth of a symbol to the forms of feeling—nameless forms, but recognizable when they appear in sensuous replica.’ (Note 25)

For Milton, this knowledge necessarily rests upon a theological foundation, since the aforementioned obligations are only meaningful inasmuch as they arise from the obligations of creature to creator. In At a Solemn Musick, ‘Voice’ and ‘Vers’ are figured as ‘Sphear-born harmonious Sisters,’ whose ‘divine sounds,’ when wedded together, ‘mixt power employ / Dead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce.’ Thus the unification of poetry and music in human song mirrors the music of the spheres, whose ‘pure concent’ represents an original harmony that finds its ultimate consonance in God: ‘That we on Earth with undiscording voice / May rightly answer that melodious noise.’ It is sin that brought discord into the world, ‘Jarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din / Broke the fair musick that all creatures made / to their great Lord,’ while the right relation of creature and creator is figured as a ‘perfect Diapason.’

One need not follow Milton in his theological concerns to recognize the value of ‘that Song’ as what Louis Zukofsky called the upper limit of poetry as contrasted with speech as the lower limit:

music
∫
speech

An integral
Lower limit speech
Upper limit music (A-12)

In order to perceive more fully the wedding of the divine sounds of voice and verse, Zukofsky imagined a divorce of speech from ‘all graphic elements,’ a return to a Golden Age of what one might call primal orality, a unified harmony, that would allow speech to ‘become a movement of sounds.’

It is this musical horizon of poetry (which incidentally poems perhaps never reach) that permits anybody who does not know Greek to listen and get something out of the poetry of Homer: to ‘tune in’ to the human tradition, to its voice which has developed among the sounds of natural things, and thus escape the confines of a time and place, as one hardly ever escapes them in studying Homer’s grammar. (Note 26)

As I read Zukofsky’s words, I find myself unable to resist the obvious quote from Walter Pater: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ Zukofsky’s comment on Homer is precisely what Kobekin reveals in the Song of the Hammer and the Anvil: by raising the metrical structure of Homer’s poetry into the realm of pure music, Kobekin gives us another tool to help us tune in to the human tradition, just as Pound attempts to do with his composition. Music horizons language, horizons us. That mathematical metaphor. Poetry as a continuum of sorts, spanning a range from sublunary speech—the workaday language of our daily life—to music as a horizon which ‘poems perhaps never reach,’ a harmonia mundi forever beyond our discursive ken. There are neither synonyms nor paraphrases in poetry, because any rhythmic change is a falsification, a change in essential meaning. One may quibble with Pater as regards the musical aspirations of the arts more generally, but it is something more than mere metaphor to talk about the ‘music’ of poetry or of language, as the aural qualities of language can indeed claim something like kinship with music, and the two have always been inseparable in practice. Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, makes a similar connection:

Of all which we leave to speake, returning to our poeticall proportion, which holdeth of the Musical, because as we sayd before Poesie is a skill to speake & write harmonically: and verses or rime be a kind of Musicall utterance, by reason of a certaine congruitie in sounds pleasing the eare […]

Returning to Campion’s ‘due proportion,’ the ear perceives further resonances. It is, of course, a technical term in music and prosody, but the array of meanings brought down by the OED all orbit around the notion of relation, as well as the act of measurement, or judgment, which provides for an apperception of the whole, a denomination of value.

Yet music and poetry are not the same thing, and thus, in the work of poetry, the covenant of voice and verse is an act of cleaving—a cleaving to and at the same time a cleaving off. In poetry the word becomes itself. No longer a mere means of expression or communication (if indeed it has ever been such), language returns to its origins in music, to its roots in the rhythms of the body as a mode of being in the world, in the rhythms of the world itself, the pattern of life and sentience. No longer a mere tool by means of which we speak, the word itself speaks—or better yet, sings—in poetry, and in so doing bodies forth the form and pattern of our and its world, the singular claim and climature of the poem as ‘sensuous human activity.’ Thus the centrality of sound, of rhythm in particular—the rhythmic qualities of speech, the sounds of individual phonemes and their various realizations, the rising and lowering of pitch in the spoken phrase, all of which are, in the final analysis, products of rhythm—to any account of the poet’s art. Poetry moves toward that horizon and rises toward that upper limit as the smoke of the burnt offerings in the Temple rose toward the Lord, as the melodious noise of the psalms rose toward the heavens together with the smoke of burning incense. The lightness of the poem is the lightness of song. A song of ascents.

1 Ezra Pound. Literary Essays (New Directions: 1968), page 437.

2 Ibid.: pages 43, 44, and 437.

3 Ezra Pound. Song [and Music], Yale University Library Digital Collections – Ezra Pound Papers YCAL MSS 43, Box 136, Folder 5938: page 18.

4 Ezra Pound. Song [and Music]: page 19.

5 Literary Essays: pp. 74-75.

6 The examples here are taken from Ezra Pound. Robert Hughes (ed). Complete Violin Works 1923-1933 (Second Evening Art: 2004). Reproduced with permission from the publisher.

7 Vladimir Kobekin. A Book of Songs without Words: Strophes, The Hours of Centuries (Планета музыки: 2022).

8 Harry Partch. Exposition of Monophony. Unpublished typescript (1933). The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music. Music and Performing Arts Library Harry Partch Collection, 1914-2007, Series 13: Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 6: Partch, Harry/‘Exposition of Monophony’, 1933.

9 Harry Partch. Genesis of a Music: Second Edition, Enlarged (Da Capo Press: 1974), page 8.

10 ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: On Music’ (1912), in Schafer (ed) Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (New Directions: 1977), page 32

11 This quote from Partch comes from the Milwaukee Journal (2.11.1945), and was taken from Philip Blackburn’s introduction to Partch’s work in the liner notes to Enclosure Two: Historic Speech-Music Recordings from the Harry Partch Archives (innova Recordings: Minnesota Composers Forum: 1995).

12 Ezra Pound. Dissertation on Rhythm: typescript, Yale University Library Digital Collections – Ezra Pound Papers YCAL MSS 43, Box 96, Folder 4068: page 2.

13 The first quote is from ‘Zukofsky's Homemade Tape for the Library of Congress, November 3, 1960.’ Introductory remarks followed by Catullus 1-3 (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Zukofsky.php). The second is from ‘Louis Zukofsky — USA: Poetry, NET Outtakes Series: March 16, 1966.’ Poetry Center Digital Archive (https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/239683).

14 ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: On Music’ (1912), in Schafer (ed) Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (New Directions: 1977), pages 33-34.

15 ‘A Retrospect’ in Literary Essays (New Directions: [1918] 1968), page 9; ‘Vorticism’ in Early Writings (Penguin: [1914] 2005), page 281; ‘Affirmations’ in Early Writings (Penguin: [1915] 2005), page 292.

16 ‘Affirmations’ in Early Writings (Penguin: [1915] 2005), pages 293-4.

17 Jurij Lotman. Analysis of the Poetic Text. (Ardis: 1976), page 42; Susanne Langer. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. (Routledge: 1953), page 126.

18 Jurij Lotman. Ibid.

19 Susanne Langer. Feeling and Form, pages 126-7.

20 Ezra Pound. ABC of Reading (New Directions, New York: [1934] 2010), pages 198-9.

21 Louis Zukofsky. Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays (University of California Press: 1981), page 20

22 Susanne Langer. Feeling and Form, page 109.

23 Ezra Pound. Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Da Capo: [1927] 1968), page 9.

24 Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: Volume One (Princeton University Press: 1984), page 640.

25 Susanne Langer. Philosophy in a New Key. Third Edition. (Harvard University Press: 1957), page 262.

26 Zukofsky. Prepositions, page 20.

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Eric T. Racher lives in Riga, Latvia. His work has appeared in Exacting Clam, minor literature[s], Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, ballast, and elsewhere.