Aslan's Creation Song

The Music of the Spheres will hopefully stay audible to us all semester (in its own way, that quote from Joyce's Ulysses I had on the board this past Monday is another permutation of the idea in the sense of the air being "made richer" when music disappears into it), but I did want to make good on one of my references from the first day of class. You have that wonderful creation scene from Tolkien's The Silmarillion in your portfolios, but there's also C.S. Lewis, who was equally drawn to the idea of the world being created through music, of the world and music sharing a mutual (and mathematical) orderliness. There's a wonderful extended sequence in The Magician's Nephew, which commences The Chronicles of Narnia, in which Aslan brings the world into being through song. Here's just a paragraph from that section:

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out -- single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made appear and made them sing.

I can imagine putting an episode like this into conversation not only with the Tolkien chapter, but also with poems like Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and "Kubla Khan," Shelley's "To a Skylark," Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," etc. Creation not only bespeaks God-like presences in these diverse works, but also the questions and desires of the creating poet.