tics, tics & tics

 

On a found marginalium to John Dryden’s "Song for St. Cecilia's Day"

I wrote this in 2023 for someone who's doing a project on found marginalia. In the event, he or his editor didn't like it enough to publish it (as I discovered after he'd ghosted me on the subject for nearly a year). I suspect he or they felt it was too "academic," or something. 

Following a Renaissance tradition that understood musical harmony as a paradigm of cosmic order, Dryden’s encomium to the patron saint of music and musicians rewrites the Creation as a symphony wrested by God from the cacophony of chaos. In an essay of 1961, Earl Wasserman remarks that the poem performs what it describes, transforming metrical chaos to order as it represents the Arch-Musician forming the universe from disordered atom-notes: “After six unrhymed lines the rhymes begin in perfectly systematic order, picking up first the fifth and sixth and then the third and fourth, and finally the first and second. Each of the second six lines, moreover, has the same metrical form as its fellow rhyme-line among the first six” (“Pope’s Ode for Musick,” ELH 28.2 [June, 1961]: (167). Here an unknown hand charts these correspondences in shaky black ballpoint. The notation “6 days” conveys Wasserman’s observation that Dryden’s “poetic account of the first six days of Creation is itself a structural hexaemeron, and the poet is the microcosmic Creator who uses the harmonic devices available to him to create his analogous verbal world” (loc. cit.). As in Genesis 1, Dryden’s musical cosmogony ends with the creation of Man, in whom, as one made in the image of God and thus a microcosm to His macrocosm, the full tonal range of Creation’s harmony is reflected: the diapason closes in Man. Human imperfection, however, enters already with Genesis 3. “But oh!” exclaims Dryden’s sixth stanza (not pictured here), following four melophrastic stanzas of all-too-human “loud clangor, […] anger / And mortal alarms, […] woes of hopeless lovers, […] jealous pangs, and desperation, […] Fury, frantic indignation, / Depth of pains and height of passion”: “But oh! what art can teach / What human voice can reach / The sacred organ's praise?” The poet lauds St. Cecilia for the gift of vocal music – and, by extension, also of poetry – to Man: “bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; / When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, / An angel heard, and straight appear'd / Mistaking earth for Heav'n.” Wasserman observes that here the penultimate line falls out of the rhyme scheme, but rhymes internally: “Angels, perpetually singing around God, are their own harmony.” Yet the harmony described is Cecilia's; it rests on an imperfection not angelic, but human. At a second remove, the singer of this song of praise is the man Dryden, its microcosmic Creator. Its reader, perforce, is no less imperfect. Following the Republic and the Timaeus, Renaissance theorists sought a Platonic Idea of universal order in music's mathematical proportions, only to be faced with the real divergence of current systems of intonation from the ratios of the Pythagorean scale (D.P. Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance, London 1978, 1-13). Plato himself, of course, insisted upon the gap that persists between the realms of the perceptible and the intelligible, and upon ever striving to narrow that gap. To trace out order, even in tremorous ballpoint, is to aspire to sing like the angels along with the harmony of the spheres.