Ch.1
The first chapter begins with “Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music, too.” Now Sexson has been lecturing lately on how “all art strives to have the affect of music on the soul (music being defined as the ultimate route to the soul). To begin, first I would invite you to view ‘my fingers on these keys” as Wallace’s hand upon a pen drawing the letters of this poem, and second that the “self-same sounds” are again his writing being done through (on) his soul, what Wallace refers to as “spirit”, what Pullman defines as a Daemon, Blake as Poetic Genius, And what the Greeks define as the singing of a muse.
If we conclusively define the aspiration of art being to appeal to the soul, no matter what medium, we can see how music, notes, and sounds, can be exchanged for writing, letters, and actions. And this is exactly what Wallace is saying in the next lines “Music is feeling, then, not sound.” Writing is the appeal to the soul, then, not letters.From this point of view we see that artists do not create art, but merely mediums of transportation. I would speculate that art speaks to the immortality of “things” natural in life; in refrain, art speaks of the things eternal to our nature. With this conception in mind we can see the transparency of things between Wallace’s only all to natural feelings and that of the Elders from the Book of Susanna when he says,
“And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
Waked plays an especially important feeling in this poem as it speaks to the emergence of the very epiphany the artist wishes you, insists you must understand. But this is a regression that we will be getting to in a moment. Do not worry as it’s relevance does not truly come into play until the end.
“Of a green evening clear and warm,”
Green and Evening both play important notes in that they speak of the passing of time, an extremely relevant conception in understanding chapter IV. In the flow of time green speaks of the living, the growing, the vivid life of the present in the past (think of the structure of “She went running”). Evening follows the same rule in that it defines the maturity of the event while still existing in the past flow of time. Now you maybe thinking that the passing of time has no context in the aforementioned line, and you would be correct. It is in the next line where Wallace writes “she bathed in her still garden”. Still is to set outside of time, in a perpetual present, an always eternal, precise Now. To recapitulate, we have Wallace assimilating the fullness of that which must fleet in the eternity of a still moment (the Now).
Let’s look at the lines “she bathed”. Bathed is a past tense of bathing. Here we have the past caught in between the ever fleeting presentness of “green evening” and the always present now of “still”. Paradoxically, you cannot “bathed” in the “now”, yet that is exactly what is happening “while The red-eyed elders, watching, felt The basses of their beings throb.” Earlier we discussed how feeling is the appeal of art and that art speaks to the eternal natures of our lives. Again my point is reiterated by the Elders “Watching” an unattainable object (the fullness of the fleeting moment in which Susanna bathed stilled in an ungraspable place) and thus feeling “the basses” which simultaneously serves both as a musical instrument and as the essential characteristics “of” (a human, i.e. its nature) “their beings throb”. “Being” itself defines the perpetual still now.
The next lines, which describes the Elder’s throb “in witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse Pizzicati of Hosanna,” plays to the conceptions of gods and God. Mayan earlier described Paganism as the worship of aspects (gods) of nature; Dr. Linda Sexso defined gods in the Old testament as abstractions of the human mind (something Xenophanes philosophizes of the Greek Gods in the 6th century BCE); and Dr. Michael Sexson described Paganism as anyone that did not worship the Monotheistic Lord God. They are all right partially, and partially incorrect (not wrong, never wrong) under my deeply felt speculation that we “see through a glass darkly” or observe obscurely that which our sensations cannot see. The lines “In witching chords” tells that the Elder’s feelings are being abstracted from paganism, or “false gods”, or “thoughts” which do not coincide with the monotheistic Deity. “And their thin blood” is a biblical term that details the lack of “Character”, later defined as “wickedness” that “Pulses (remember music is feeling) “Pizicatti” (plucking of string piano strings comparative to Wallace’s first line) “of Hosanna”. Hosanna, a Judeo-Christian word to the Lord meaning “Save, I pray”, is being used blasphemously here, as well as being a counterpoint to my definition of witching, in the respect that the Elder’s are not shouting “Save, I pray!” to the monotheistic god but to our collective understanding of what “gods” are.
Ch.2 With the almost refrained verse “In the green water, clear and warm” we are transported back to the vivid fullness of the present in the passing of time. “Susanna lay. She searched the touch of springs, And found concealed imaginings.” Here Wallace is playing to the wants (touch, concealed imaginings) that susanna had in her youth (springs, the birth of the seasons). The wants are the same feelings or thoughts that the Elders themselves suffer from. With the lines “She sighed, for so much melody” we see that Susanna does indeed suffer the same natural temptations of the Elders. In the next lines “Upon the bank, She stood In the cool of spent emotions” we can decipher that the melody (feeling) that plays to the elders is no longer monetary to her in Steven’s scoped sense that these natural feelings are no longer a currency of her soul, which belongs to God. My synopsis of this line is further argued into stone with the next lines “She felt, among the leaves, the dew of Old devotions.” Old devotions felt being defined as her eternal nature being devoted to a covenant with the Lord (there also exists a reason for dew and leaves which have already been explained as seasonal descriptions of our natural live so I feel more explanation borders upon redundancy).
“She walked upon the grass,
Still Quavering.”
Quavering is again a double entendre which stands for the melodic trill, or a tremble that serves as prevalence of weakness created by the natural temptation upon the soul and body.
“The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.”
We already know the role the maids play in Susanna, but what are the winds? And why are they wavering? Perhaps by looking at a few literary examples from Shakespeare, and William Blake, we can come to a better understanding.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest’s main character, Prospero, has enlisted to him a spirit called Ariel which was capture by a woman (then long dead) named Sycorax. Sycorax, who also left Prospero a son named Caliban (Cannibal), had captured Ariel within a tree (paper) to which Propsero (to prosper) sets her free. Within these four names exists a story directly related to the conception created by the first four lines of Wallace’s Poem we are discussing; but first we must define Sycorax. Sycorax comes from two Greek derivates; to sow (sy) and raven (Corax). Due to the origin of Corax, as well as Shakespeare’s well known immersion in Greek mythology, it is safe to assume that Shakespeare had the Greek myth of the Raven in mind when he digested this play, and thus we can look into myth for our explanations. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses The Raven is transformed from a white bird to a black bird by Hera for gossiping, or sharing a person’s intimate nature of Coronis, the Love of Apollo. With this mythological understanding that the gossiping raven stands for one who share intimate nature coupled with the first Greek derivative of Sycorax we get Sower of a Person’s intimate Nature.
Caliban, also a seeming anagram of Caliban, was left to Prospero with the Island as baggage with Ariel, the sprit. In act 1, scene 2, Caliban describes himself thus, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse”(314-6). Caliban is the human learned ability to write. Thus if we look at the story as a whole, we see that Prospero (Shakespeare himself actually break Character in the final siloliquy) visits a long dead story (sycorax, i.e. the sowing of a person’s intimate nature) and steals from it two things which are inseparable; Ariel, the spirit, the intimate nature, or what we have defined as eternal nature of humans; and Caliban- the writing, the book, the equivalence of a medium from which the nature is presented. Thus the connection exists between Shakespeare’s Ariel And Wallace’s feeling as well as Shakespeare’s Caliban and Wallace’s sound.
With these connections made I can now point out that Ariel is of the wind, I would even surmise the “wind” iself. One of Ariel’s lines in The Tempest goes “To answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curled clouds” (act1,sc2 vrs 190-3). Paradoxically, John Milton’s Paradise Lost describes Ariel as an evil angel, a pagan god, while in Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock Ariel is the Narrator. Even in Gnostic lore Ariel serves as an Angel. William black surmises it best saying “… the Poetic Genius is the true Man.
Now with a rather clustered understanding of the transparency between ariel, winds, angels, spirits, and, demons let’s take another look at the passage from Peter Quince At The Clavier.
“The Winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.”
We can see that the Angels (winds) are being compared as protectors that are holding off at a distance with wove (sown) protection ready to come to her aid at a moments notice. Ye why do they waver? And how is it demons are protecting her? To the second question I would like to misquote the Movie Jacon’s Ladder in which Louie says to his patient “If you fight death, they’ll come like demons grasping and torturing you away form everything you’ve ever known, but if you invite it, they come as angels whisking you to heaven.” A great quote that serves to show that it is our perceptions of how things work that causes us the most strife. A better answer would be something lost on most seemingly monotheistic persons is that Jacob’s God has control over all the spirits, good or bad. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of god, is even cited in the bible as sending seven spirits out of a possessed man into a bar of pigs, who maddened, drowned themselves in the sea. From this point of view we can see that the wickedness is not of the Demons or Angels but of the Elder’s own abstractions of wickedness that serve to praise anything but the highest God.
But why are the angels of the Lord wavering when they could be helping? The temptation that visits Susanna in her bath is still wet upon her feet, and while she still holds her covenant (her connection with Jacob’s God), the choice of what she shall do with her music is not up to the winds to protect her from. Jacob’s God does not protect her from choosing as this would do away with the doctrine of free will, but that He protects Susanna from the punishments she will receive by choosing him. Thus the swooping of her maids to her in the book of Susanna and the treble of noise in Wallace’s poem which reads
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned—
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.
Ch.3 In this chapter, by far the simplest of the four, we have the Byzantine Greeks come rushing in to judge verdict.
Soon with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.
They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.
The last line is a play upon the Greek myth of Pan & Syrinx as it is involved with the Wind in the Willows which Ashley from Sexson’s Mythologies ties together quite nicely. Syrinx, chased by Pan transforms into a marsh reed, which Pan unknowingly due to his lust, picks her up and plays her. The Transparency is that while Susanna is shouting her refrain, all the Byzantines see is through the lens of lust.
In the next lines, which begins with Anon, or everywhere, Wallace again plays with the obscurity of our sensational sight by showing “a lamp’s uplifted flame which would be carried by the Greed god Hymen at weddings to signify that the covenant of marriage was valid and that know adultery was committed. Yet here, through the plank obscured eyes of the Byzantines her obvious piety is unobserved and their own lust “Revealed Susanna and her shame.” But why is it her shame? It is not that she has acted shamefully, as she has not, but that our very natures are shameful; it is because of their shallow and near sided perspective that this is all they can see. Soon after this Daniel arrives and reveals (or de-veils) the truly wicked.
“And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like Tambourines.”
Ch.IV Stories are transported throughout ages by word of mouth, books (paper) and now via the internet. These are the portals Valace Alludes too in the upcoming verses, and by momentary in the mind” he is referring to how the mediums by which we describe art become less and less transparent as the progression of minds through history and culture changes. Beauty is something that is always eternally present innature, but we forget how to see it It dies, becomes lost, unseen, and survives only as a fitful tracing inside a long forgoteen story. Dead stories tell no tales. It is up to us, as it is up to every culture, to take the Sycorax and peel away the dead cannibalistic mediums from the spirits, that which is eternal to our nature, What Wallace defines here as Beauty and what the poet John Keats equates as the only Absolute Truth; We must peel back the bark of old forgotten mediums and re-vent art through our own mediums, our writings, our paintings, our songs, so as to make “flesh” (as in seen) the beauty that live immortaly in the now. This is what Wallace aspires of us when he writes
“Beauty is momentary in the mind—
the fitful tracing of a portal;
but in the flesh it is immortal.”
Wallace returns us once again to the fleeting of time and the very still immortal now of nature saying
“the body dies; the body’s beauty lives/
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
Many students are perplexed by the lines “So maiden’s die,” asserting that Susanna didn’t die in the Apocrypha but lived. The key lies in the next lines “to the auroral Celebration of a Maiden’s choral” in which choral stands for a chorus and not a hymen. Wallace is telling how the maiden dies with the story, further reiterating his point of the momentary of beauty in the mind.
The last six lines serve as Wallace’s own rejuvenation of a Sycorax saying “Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, and makes a constant sacrament of praise,” a praise of Hosanna in the true perspective, to the true abstraction. But why have I skipped the first three lines? And Why are the Elders White?
Earlier I stated that Waked in ch.1, line 9, was extremely relevant to this poem. We’ve spoken of how we need to illuminate people on seeing beauty with art. The Elders are further proof of this. “Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings of those white elders” and “waked” them to a beauty that, just like the once white Raven, they could view only obscurely through a lens of desire and lust, and thus they perished like Actaeon to the teeth of the Philistine masses.
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