Home: Leila
Rosen—English Teacher and Aesthetic Realism Associate
Report of an Aesthetic
Realism Class, about a lecture by Eli Siegel titled:
How Musical Can Sadness Be?
—or, Grief, Anger, Hope
The lecture I’m honored to
report on was given by Mr. Siegel on July 13, 1969. In it, as he discussed elegies—poems of
mourning—spanning the centuries, he showed richly what Aesthetic Realism
explains: a large reason for saying the world can be liked is that even a sad
or painful situation can be described beautifully. “The most cheerful fact in man’s history,” he
began,
is that the presentation of sadness in art,
the drama, poetry, could please people, and this meant that grief was closer to
happiness than people surmised. There
are quite a few people listening with satisfaction to music that is sad, and
also, tragedy has been enjoyed. The
meaning of this is the most hopeful thing in the world.
Aesthetic Realism shows that
art has the resolution to the questions of our lives, because in it, the
opposites which can confuse us are made one.
“Poetry,” Mr. Siegel said, “is a great gathering of illustrations that
grief with form can please, and music is, too.” Explaining that the musical form expressing
mourning—the requiem—was never more popular, he spoke of Verdi, Mozart, and
Berlioz as composers whose requiems are loved, and also of how something like a
requiem can be part of a longer musical composition, as in works of Bach and
Chopin.
“One thing that has been in the poetry of the world has
been lamentation,” said Mr. Siegel, and he read from the Bible “a great
instance of sadness that can be enjoyed”: “David’s lamentation over Jonathan
and Saul,” from the Second Book of Samuel.
“The Hebrew sounds strong, massive, angry,” he said. “That is important, because in grief, there
is anger.” It begins:
And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his
son:
(Also he bade them teach the children of
“This
is something that has puzzled the commentators,” noted Mr. Siegel—“there’s a
sort of let-down.” He explained that
this goes from something mighty in the first sentence, to something more
ordinary in the second: “(Also he bade them teach the children of
Mr. Siegel read these musical lines, the first of which, he
said, has something that often accompanies grief—a person telling the physical
world what to do:
Ye
mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither lelt there be rain, upon you,
nor fields of offerings: . . .
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their
death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger
than lions. . . .
“Well,” said Mr Siegel,
“that is a great part of the Bible, and within this greatness. . .the mood
changes.” We saw, for instance, that
this chapter has grief, tenderness, sarcasm, love, and more. “In elegies,” he said, “there are all kinds
of twirls, mutations, transformations.”
Persons in the class were very moved as Eli Siegel then
read this same passage in Yiddish, saying “it is a mighty thing [and]
musical. The Yiddish takes on
dignity.” I loved hearing these words
read with such sweetness and sincerity in a language I often heard as a child,
and whose beauty I did not value. This
is verse 19, which Mr. Siegel said “is one of the few places where the [Bible]
gets somewhat aesthetic”:
The beauty of
Die sheinheit oi Isroyel, iz oif deine
hoiche erter der schluhgen gevohren: oi, vi zenen die giboirim gefallen!
“I compared the Yiddish to
the Hebrew,” said Mr. Siegel, and he explained that while in the Hebrew, the
anger came through more, “the Yiddish wanted to tremble and get to the shaking
intimacy of love.” He noted that grief
is accompanied by other emotions, including anger, and he said this, which is
so surprising, and which everyone who has felt grief should be able to hear:
“The reconciliation of grief and anger does make for hope, and hope, when truly
seen, makes for rest.”
I was thrilled by this and wanted to understand it
better. In the discussion following the
lecture, Class Chairman Ellen Reiss asked me if I thought grief and anger are
different. She explained that anger is
thrusting, while grief seems to sink.
“For grief and anger to be reconciled,” she asked, “would there be a
certain oneness of thrust and retreat, force and sinking?” “Yes,” I said. Thinking about this has me understand better
what I felt when each of my parents died.
I am boundlessly grateful to Aesthetic Realism for teaching me, at those
important times and now, how to see the opposites in my mother and father, in
myself, and in the world in a way that makes me proud—and a large way is
through the study of poetry. Aesthetic
Realism teaches that the oneness of opposites we are looking for is in every
beautiful poetic line; seeing it makes for deep composure and hope.
“There are all kinds of mournful tones, expressions, words
in the grief of man,” continued Mr. Siegel.
“Nearly every newspaper has words from a family telling of one who has
died. There is feeling, but most often
the words are not grand.” He then read
the “Exequy on His Wife,” by Bishop Henry King, who lived from 1592-1669, which
does have grandeur, and which he said
“hasn’t been superseded as a poem of mourning by a husband.” In its short couplets, it has the oneness of
thrust and sinking Ellen Reiss described.
Two lines are famous. “There is
strength and sadness.” I read these, and
the two that follow:
Stay for me there: I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
And think not much of my delay:
I am already on the way. . .
“This is music,” said Mr.
Siegel. “The drum and the violin
meet. There’s a military musical
manner. [This strength] has to be,” he
continued, “because sincerity is looked for more than ever; the strength makes
the sadness sincere. That is one of the
messages of the requiem in music and the elegy in poetry.”
We heard elegies of the 17th, 18th,
and 19th centuries. Some are
great, including “Lycidas,” the 1637 poem by John Milton, mourning his friend,
and “Thyrsis,” by Matthew Arnold, which Mr. Siegel said had “a
Of the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson which he read next:
“This is grief with drums and pomp and all the apparatus of a nation showing
its power”—“Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” who was seen as the
greatest British warrior of the time—the man who defeated Napoleon at
Waterloo. It begins:
Bury the Great Duke
With
an empire’s lamentation,
Let us bury the Great Duke
to
the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation. . .
Referring to the fact that
Tennyson was Poet Laureate of England—official poet of the court—Mr. Siegel
said humorously:
I’m not sure how much Tennyson really cared
for the Duke.
He’s doing a very good job—but it is a job. The Queen expected
something. This is not reprehensible,
[but] it is an example of some of the difficulties of official mourning, and
requiem by request.
“Then,”
he said, “there is the requiem which is so utter, it brims over the edges of
the world”—Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—about
Abraham Lincoln, which he called the greatest in English, and he read from a
poem he said was among its rivals, and “the most diverse elegy in the
world”—“Adonais,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, about the poet John Keats, of whom,
he said, very few people had heard when he died in 1821. Here, there is complaint—“Why weren’t the
forces of the world more careful?” I was
stirred to my center by the sweeping music of this poem, and the way Mr. Siegel
read and spoke of it. The second stanza
begins with anger and grief as one thing:
Where wert thou,
mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay,
pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? Where was lorn Urania
When
Adonais died? With veilèd eyes,
’Mid listening
Echoes, in her
She sate,. . .
“This is Shelley at his
very best,” said Mr. Siegel. Speaking
technically about the music in the phrase: “where was lorn Urania/When Adonais
died?”—he said, “We have the suggestive power of syllables. The ‘n’ sound, which is loved by the violin,
is here.” And with great respect for
Shelley, who saw the large value of Keats early, Mr. Siegel said:
The claim he makes for Keats’ immortality
could have been laughed at
. . .but [he] was right. Keats is
immortal. [This] summer, there will be
talk of [him] in all the central universities of these states. Shelley took a long chance, but he was right.
“The point,” he said,
concluding this gorgeous lecture,
is to associate music with sadness in such a
way that the world looks somewhat better—this is the meaning of tragedy as
beauty
. . . .It goes on, because the requiem was never more popular
. . . .There is a reason for it, because people are still trying to be faithful
to the world which, as world, loves and retains its mystery.
Hearing this lecture was a
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