Sweet Sadness

Well, our time with the Romantics is starting to run short (though the incomparable Keats still awaits us)! If anyone wants to begin the climb up "Mont Blanc" by leaving some comments in this space in advance of tomorrow's class, so much the better. As for this past Wednesday's class, it reminded me that I'm always drawn to that stanza late in "To a Sky-Lark," highlighted by Brittani, when the speaker laments that "We look before and after, / And pine for what is not -- / Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught -- / Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought" (l.86-90); in his "A Defence of Poetry," by the way, Shelley refers to that "melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody." I wonder to what extent you agree with the psychology of this proposal? Do we have any lived data/examples to confirm or challenge it? It reminds me, too, of Blake's Introduction to the Songs of Innocence when, after hearing the piper's song, the child "wept with joy to hear" (l.12): such a strange notion when you stop to think about it, isn't it -- "weeping with joy"? ...

Re-directing the matter into a less weighty/scholarly direction, and mindful of Shelley's melancholy/sweetest melody pairing, I wonder what you might offer as being among the most melancholy songs/musical pieces of all time (The "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" awards, perhaps, with a nod to that Smashing Pumpkins record of many years ago!). I always think of Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year." The Beatles's "Yesterday"? Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" (strangely)? Simon & Garfunkle's "Bridge Over Troubled Water"? "Puff the Magic Dragon"?! Oh, for me, one of the sweetest melodies that makes me feel deeply melancholy is "Greensleeves." What would you add to the compilation?

Also related to the "Sky-lark" discussion, we'll continue to talk about birds as emissaries from another world, another (higher) reality. And certainly these early poems will resonate quite profoundly when we get to a poem like Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" at the very end of the nineteenth century (and Hopkins's "The Windhover," too). The question of whether birdsong can be considered music was a very active one through the centuries, especially during the Middle Ages, whose most prominent thinkers tended to conclude that, no, it's not: they argued that birdsong contains elements of musicality (distinct individual pitches, well-modulated melodies, etc.), but that since there's no expression of rationality in the music we can't understand them as musica (which may help us understand why instrumental music, at least before the late eighteenth century and beyond, was considered to be inferior to vocal music). The music of Nature is at the heart of British Romanticism, though (witness, of course, Coleridge's Eolian harp and then these various birds), in ways that suggest that Nature itself is the invisible performer, and in ways that remind us that there were big ontological questions being worked out related to how human beings understand music. It's a long way from this to the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, and Macklemore & Lewis -- or, then again, maybe it's not!