The Big In The Small, The Form In The Matter: Starting With The Literal In Tennyson's Tears, idle tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh at the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ad, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

What is art? It begins as something imagined. An artist imagines something and turns that imagined thing into something concrete. The thing imagined can be a scene, a character, an event, or a whole bunch of these strung together in relationship to one another to make up a story. The medium by which it is made concrete can be marble, sound, movement (as in the case of dance), or spoken or written words. This concretezation (or we can even say incarnation) is what makes it possible for others to share the artist's vision. The artist's skill is greater or lesser depending on the level to which he is able to convert his interior vision into his medium. This is what makes the difference between an artist and the rest of us. We all have imaginations. One is only an artist when one can accurately incarnate a vision into stone, music, or words.

This is the sense in which God is the first artist. It was he who had a vision of Creation and caused it to come into being. Of course, rather than making the universe out of something, God made his art out of nothing. So in fact we should not be comparing Creation to art, but our work to God's. J.R.R. Tolkien did just that when he called the artistic process "sub-creation."

The artist's vision is not the art. The work of art itself is the art. Nevertheless, if the artist is successful, the nature of the concrete work of art flows out of the artist's vision. As such, if we are to truly understand the nature of the work of art, we must come to understand the artist's vision. That being said, it is only by studying the work of art itself that this can occur, since it is the work of art which expresses the artist's vision. It is as the work of art that the vision exists.

This is called the "literal level" of the work of art. It is the incarnated, material form of the artist's imaginal vision. To be sure there are deeper, more spiritual levels of meaning. Nevertheless, if they are truly there, they must develop by way of analogy out of the literal level, for that is what the art truly is. As such, in works of art (like some poetry) where it is not immediately evident what exactly is going on in the poem, the first job of the interpreter is to determine of what the poem itself actually consists.

In Tennyson's poem Tears, idle tears a man looks "on the happy Autumn fields," and the vision conjures up thoughts "of the days that are no more." These thoughts give rise to "idle tears," because it's not like crying over heartbreak or the death of a friend, it's just crying. T reason he can't figure out why exactly the tears are coming is that they're "from the depth of some divine despair." The sadness is too profound, too fundamental to understand completely. All he knows is they have something to do with days gone by. Not sad days, but happy days. The sadness comes in realizing they're gone forever.

He goes on to compare the sadness of lost time to that "fresh" pang "as the first beam glittering on a sail" when one is waiting at the dock for a loved one to return by sea. It is like those tears of "joy" upon reuniting with a long lost friend, which rise because, even if one doesn't realize it at the time, deep down it is always a bittersweet reunion knowing that it will eventually come to an end. It is also like the sadness that accompanies the farewell when the reunion does come to an end.

Tintern Abbey, "the casement"

It is like the birds' first morning chirps with the sunrise for which one has waited up all night. Sad because it too is but a fleeting moment, gone too soon. It is like "remembered kisses after death," or imagining what it might be like to kiss a beautiful woman one will never. It is "deep as first love, and wild with all regret." Is there anything else the realization that time is passing us by can make us do but regret? Regret how poorly we spent it, and how little we have left? "Life" itself is "Death," for all living is really only dying.

By describing a single imaginal and emotional experience, Tennyson has hit at the "deep," "divine despair" at the heart of what it means to be human. This is the essence of humanity: temporality, passability, transitoriness, loss, lamentation, death. For all humanity, all life is an ache for immortality, for eternity, for a perfect world. For all Creation, all life is a longing for the Garden that was lost and that shall be remade better even that it was: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail," (Rom. 8:22-3) awaiting the coming of the Kingdom.

The Mountain Goats’ "Sax Rohmer #1" As Tragedy

Around the middle of the last century, T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis found themselves on opposite sides of an important literary debate. Lewis thought that the matter of Modern and post-Modern Literature was inherently flawed. That is to say, he was convinced that no literary device, conceit, or convention was worth it's salt unless it preceded 1517. (This position is analogous to that of many hyper-Traditionalists as regards the Liturgy and Duncan Stroik as regards ecclesiastical architecture.) Eliot on the other hand saw nothing wrong with adopting the style of Modernity, as illustrated by his plays and poetry. Why should these materials, this style be any less capable of incarnating reality than the older? Eliot himself proved his hypothesis to be correct, and it is largely as a result of his literary corpus that I agree with him.

A particular style is relatively arbitrary when it comes to a work of art. That is to say, a particular work of art could utilize any, so long as it appropriately incarnates the vision of the artist. Pop music is no exception. There is no reason at all why it should not be possible to produce art in this style. In an effort to show that it is possible and has, in fact, already been accomplished many times over, here beginneth a new feature here at PopSophia: Tunesday (awful, I know), in which I shall endeavor to feature relatively contemporary music which I believe attains to the level of art.

To start then, a song from The Mountain Goats' album Heretic Pride. The full lyrics are included below the embedded mp3. I suggest reading along as you listen. Here's the direct link to the music video in case the audio doesn't work for some reason.

Fog lifts from the harbor, dawn goes down to day
An agent crests the shadows of the nearby alleyway
Piles of broken bricks, sign posts on the path
Every moment points toward the aftermath
Yeah

Sailors straggle back from their nights out on the town
Hopeless urchins from the city gather round
Spies from imperial China wash in with the tide
Every battle heads to war, surrender on both sides

And I am coming home to you
With my own blood in my mouth
And I am coming to you
If it’s the last thing that I do

Elves move in the tower, wolves howl in the hills
Chalk marks show up on a few high windowsills
And a rabbit gives up somewhere, and a dozen hawks descend
Every moment leads toward its own sad end
Yeah

Ships loosed from their moorings capsize and then they’re gone
Sailors with no captains watch awhile and then move on
And an agent crests the shadows and I head in her direction
 All roads lead toward the same blocked intersection

I am coming home to you
With my own blood in my mouth
And I am coming to you
If it's the last thing that I do

As expounded eloquently by Dustin Hoffman's character in Stranger Than Fiction, if Tragedy were reducible to one fundamental element it would be death. Death as inescapable. “Every moment leads toward its own sad end.” In Tragedy time always seems to be running out. It presses on the protagonist, reminding him there’s only so much left. The Tragic protagonist is pursued relentlessly be the agents of death and damnation. The entire song encapsulates this feeling of impending doom: “Piles of broken bricks, sign posts on the path / Every moment points toward the aftermath.” Enemies are everywhere. “Agents” and “spies” always upon us. Nature itself seems evil and unhinged, turning on itself and the protagonist with ferocity: “Elves move in the tower, wolves howl in the hills / . . . And a rabbit gives up somewhere, and a dozen hawks descend.” Life becomes but a horridly painful struggle. There is no grace, no mercy, no salvation: “Every battle heads to war.” Even more than that, the song speaks to this struggle’s Tragic futility. Ships are engulfed while leaderless sailors watch and do nothing. No one cares about anything or anyone else because there is no meaning. “All roads lead toward the same blocked intersection.” There is no right choice. No matter what I do, I end up gone, swallowed by the Abyss closing in around me. Soon I will be done for. For what? Nothingness awaits me in this life and the next.

Why, then, would anyone still fight? Why not just commit suicide and be done with it if there's no point to anything and it's all going to end up in death anyway. The refrain offers a glimmer of hope—the person waiting at home. To get back to her. It’s going to cost me dearly—blood at least, if not my life. But there’s nothing left to try for except to get back to her. She is Cordelia to my Lear, Antigone to my Oedipus (see Oedipus at Colonus), there to wrest me out of the arms of Nothingness. She is the one agent of grace left in the world, the only chance to make something of life. And death. To give it meaning and purpose. To make the fighting, the suffering, the humiliation that is life count for something. She is the Beloved of Scripture and countless lyrics. She is the Church, the Bride for which Our Lord lived our wretched life and died our wretched death, thereby making it possible for our life and our death to become a participation in the Divine life and death.

The Garden: The Decemberists' "June Hymn" As Lyric

It's incredibly interesting to me how music functions artistically. Somehow the meaning is contained in both the text and the music simultaneously, and the forms of each complement each other as a result. I have a theory that if a piece or song is musically beautiful, it must also be so poetically. That is to say, if a song touches my heart and mind with its music and fails to do so with its lyrics, it's likely due to my own lack of poetic sensibility and not the song's lack of poetry.

Take "June Hymn" from The Decemberists' most recent album The King is Dead. As usual, here's the direct link to the music video in case the embedded audio below doesn't work.

Here's a hymn to welcome in the day

Heralding a summer's early sway

And all the bulbs all coming in

To begin

The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens

Disrupts my reverie again

Pegging clothing on the line

Training jasmine how to vine

Up the arbor to your door

And more

You're standing on the landing with the war

You shouldered all the night before

Chorus:

And once upon it

The yellow bonnets

Garland all the lawn

You were waking

Day was breaking

A panoply of song

And summer comes to Springville Hill

A barony of ivy in the trees

Expanding out its empire by degrees

And all the branches burst to bloom

In the boom

Heaven sent this cardinal maroon

To decorate our living room

[Chorus]

And years from now when this old light

Isn't ambling anymore

Will I bring myself to write

"I give my best to Springville Hill!"

[Chorus]

Lyric poetry is the most basic, most fundamental form of Literature; as such, it is the most difficult to understand. I think the reason it so easily frustrates so many is that it seems like the meaning should be self-evident, it's staring us right in the face, and yet we often can't see it. It's analogous to the way in which Metaphysics (i.e., the study of being in itself) is the most basic and fundamental branch of Philosophy, and yet, the hardest to grasp...at first. Once understood it contains the simplest, most obvious principles. In fact, it contains those very principles upon which the rest of Philosophy is founded. All of this is to say that, like Metaphysics in Philosophy, in Literature Lyric is last chronologically but first ontologically.

Unlike Tragedy, Comedy, or Epic, then, Lyric isn't saddled with the baggage of plots and characters. In many ways, Lyric simply is. Tragedy, the form of Literature closest to us (in our very hearts, in fact), overflows with exciting and dramatic events and over-the-top characters who do things like murder people and gouge their own eyes out. It's good stuff, and no less good or beautiful than Lyric. It is simply the earthy, gritty, concrete way in which Tragedy goes about incarnating those larger realities which all art does.

Lyric, on the other hand, largely steers clear of such complicated and individual concerns. A poem doesn't incarnate the life of one man as Tragedy does, but of all men simultaneously. Or perhaps we should say that Lyric doesn't incarnate the life of one man, but the life of Mankind himself. This is why every poem retells the story of Adam (who is Man) and Eve (who is Woman) and whose union together constitutes Mankind (and produces life). The usual way to speak about this phenomenon is to use the image of the Lover and his Beloved, the quintessential example of which we find in Biblical Wisdom Literature. All Lyric poetry deals with the Lover and his Beloved, and their union together. Always, too, this union occurs in the fertile Lyric Garden of Paradise.

"June Hymn" tells the uncomplicated story of a man and his wife and their prosaic life together. The vast majority of the song is spent describing the garden which surrounds their home. This garden that they have created isn't just a facade, however, they bring it into their very life, allowing it to penetrate every intimate facet of their being: "Heaven sent this cardinal maroon / To decorate our living room."

Theirs is a love which cannot be contained, like the "barony of ivy in the trees / Expanding out its empire by degrees / And all the branches burst to bloom." The garden is not a romantic ideal, though. It is never a dream, never ethereal: "The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens / Disrupts my reverie again." The garden is never a place to escape the world. It is the world, the world to which their loving union, so infectious, brings beauty and life. Their life together, in harmony with that of the world and their garden, produces beautiful music: "You were waking / Day was breaking / A panoply of song."

Though beautified, the world which they inhabit is still imperfect. We are not told exactly what "the war / you shouldered all the night before," but it is unimportant. All that matters is that these are lovers doing their best to  live a good life faithful to each other and the world, working through the pain and toil of everyday life. Like their life together, the garden too must be tended carefully and dutifully, lest it wither. They must sweat through the work day in and day out, making sure their life together bears fruit in themselves and in the world around them: "Training jasmine how to vine / Up the arbor to your door / And more."

This is Lyric. Life, Love, Beauty, "Heaven," the Garden, Paradise, the Divine, encountered in everyday life, in the smallest, most insignificant things you can imagine. Things like one's spouse, a home, plants and flowers in a garden, for that matter, a baby born in a stable, water, and bread and wine.