poetry | MEMETERIA by Thomas May

September 4, 2013 • 9:39 pm 3

The Sea, The Sea

To prepare for a new essay, I spent some of last week immersed in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s breakthrough composition from 1910, A Sea Symphony – also known as the First Symphony (though he didn’t get around personally to numbering the first three of his nine symphonies).

While it has its weak moments, I wish this work were performed more often, but it’s never really caught on with American audiences, and the score poses a huge challenge for the chorus. By a remarkable coincidence, A Sea Symphony premiered exactly one month after Mahler’s Eighth (that incredible amalgam of medieval Church hymn and the final scene of Faust). Both works represent unclassifiable hybrids of cantata, symphony, and oratorio, taking the “model” of Beethoven’s Ninth to new extremes. And five years before that, Debussy’s La mer was first performed in Paris. (There was also a growing body of sea-oriented compositions by Vaughan Williams’s compatriots.)

For Vaughan Williams, though, the real impetus wasn’t to somehow paint the sea in orchestral-choral terms but, instead, to give shape to the oracular insights he’d gleaned from his immersive reading of Walt Whitman. He chose texts from Leaves of Grass that use the sea to figure the human soul’s yearning for “restless explorations” and the like:

O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Covered all over with visible power and beauty,
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.

(Talking about our favorite VW symphonies, my friend Q said, “I think I often want Sibelius to be more pastoral, and Vaughan Williams less so, in the matter of symphonies.”)

What would a composer who was setting out today to write an ambitious work inspired by the metaphorical possibilities of the sea come up with, I wonder? Would it even be possible not to take account of the dire state of the oceans? There’s no escaping it, from the ongoing radioactive leakage at Fukushima to this recent study by Australian scientists concluding that “humans have put so much plastic into our planet’s oceans that even if everyone in the world stopped putting garbage in the ocean today, giant garbage patches would continue to grow for hundreds of years.”

Filed under: environment, nature, poetry, symphonies

September 2, 2013 • 1:20 pm Comments Off on “Noli Timere”: Seamus Heaney Lives On

“Noli Timere”: Seamus Heaney Lives On

Seamus Heaney in 1970; photo (c) Simon Garbutt

Sad news of the death of Seamus Heaney on Friday. Today his funeral was held at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook in south Dublin. Heaney’s final words to his wife, Marie — via text message from his hospital bed — were reported to have been in Latin: “Noli timere” (“Don’t be afraid”).

Heartening to see evidence of a culture where poetry still seems to matter: The Irish Times has been offering widespread coverage of Heaney’s legacy, and, according to The Guardian, at Sunday’s All Ireland Galiec football semi-final between Kerry and Dublin, “more than 80,000 spectators clapped for two minutes in appreciation of Ireland’s national poet.”

In a post for The New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey recalls what he learned from Heaney, including “the un-teachable part” of writing poetry, the part related to “Lorca’s notion of duende, a mysterious dark fire of inspiration, a demonic rage, which, as I remember, Lorca associated with bullfighting and flamenco.”

“Some poems were like drawings, he used to say, gesturing with a quick downward zigzagging stroke of the pen, and some were like paintings. You were lucky if the poem came quickly, all in one piece. He would often quote Frost, from “The Figure a Poem Makes”: “like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”

The continued outpouring of tributes and memories has been remarkable. Here’s a sampling:

Robert Pinsky remembers the Irish poet

Tributes from the poetry world

Videos of Heaney reading his poems

Dan Chiasson’s appreciation

Andrew O’Hagan recalls his travels with the poet

And Maria Popova recounts Heaney’s
Nobel Prize acceptance speech and includes a clip of the poet reading the title poem from Death of a Naturalist.