These Beauteous Forms

The "beauteous forms" for Wordsworth's speaker in "Tintern Abbey" are, of course, the sylvan glories of the natural scene he sees from the banks of the Wye, which offer an antidote to his current life in "lonely rooms, and 'mid the din / Of town and cities" (l. 25-26). For us, though, the beauteous forms might also be the vessels that, in both poetry (in Wordsworth's and Keats's case, the ode) and in music (the sonata), somehow concretize time and help us to learn how to handle (with some measure of grace and acceptance, hopefully) the passing of time.

At issue during much of our discussion during the past few class meetings, I guess, was the juxtaposition (available to us in both musical and poetic works) of elements that are referential, mimetic, or conceptual with elements of pure form and experiences of pure sensations. In that crucial section early in "Music, Language, and Composition," Adorno asserts that musical communication exists somewhere between the poles of no signification and absolute signification. Good music (whatever that may be) has something to say to us and somehow gives us insight and comprehension about the human condition -- but of course we struggle to understand how that works ("no art can be pinned down as to what it says," proposes Adorno, "and yet it speaks" (122)). We think of poetry as more unambiguously providing such insight, and yet the poems we read last week ("Kubla Khan," "Ode to a Skylark" etc.) seem to valorize joy and spontaneity rather than intellectuality, as if the authority of a poem derives from its (ecstatic) pleasure ("such harmonious madness / from my lips would flow" (Skylark l.103-4); these poems show us, I think, that we also respond to poetry in terms of the texture of the sounds of words, and that this "music", this semiotic excess or untranslatability, somehow conveys to us something more than pure abstraction. I think the third stanza of Keats's "To Autumn," which we'll talk about on Monday, is another example of this. What I guess we should be seeing at this point is that we're implicitly raising big questions about the experience and interpretation of art, generally -- questions that relate to the interpretive vs. sensory dimension of that experience. That's why I thought you might like to refer at some point to those optional essays on Moodle by Sontag and Iser. We remember that Poe sees the "Poetic Principle" as being "always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul," a sentiment with which Sontag seems sympathetic when she stresses that "what is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all." But then there's Adorno's rejection of the notion that music is pure expression; he finds in music (including purely instrumental music like the music we listened to in class this past Wednesday) a form of cognition through which we can understand things about the world. Big questions for sure, ones I hope you'll continue to wrestle with and perhaps write about.

So, back to "Tintern Abbey." Might you continue to try to find access points into this poem with the assistance of what we now know about sonata form? Does the idea of tonal stability being established, then lost, then recovered help us with the journey of Wordsworth's speaker in this poem? Do the ode and the sonata form movement share structural rhythms? Can we say that Wordsworth's speaker, Mozart, and Beethoven are all giving us a very similar personal response to temporality in these works? Clearly time is at the center of the poem as surely as it is at the center of those symphonic movements: they all involve hearing and memory, and they are all about trying to recover something that has been challenged, and perhaps lost. Like the first themes in the Mozart 40th and the Beethoven 5th that get deconstructed and broken apart, Wordsworth's speaker finds his attempt to recover those "sensations sweet" (l. 27) that come to him via an unmediated encounter with Nature imperiled by a "sad perplexity" (l. 60), by "the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world" (l. 39-40). Like a first theme that is put to the test (and recall that moment in the Beethoven movement when that single, solitary note gets passed back and forth, when we perhaps see just how profoundly things have been broken down) and then is able to reappear with at least some of its former glory in the recapitulation, Wordsworth's speaker transcends "the still, sad music of humanity" (l. 91) and finds again, however chastened his spirit may be, that Nature is still "the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being" (l. 109-111). This sounds like the crescendo, the big conclusion of a sonata-form movement, and yet the poem doesn't end here. Like Beethoven in that opening movement of the 5th, when he nearly adds more development in the extended coda, Wordsworth, too, seems to resist or be suspicious of closure. He hedges and seems to question whether what he has just affirmed is enough. And so even this return and resolution comes with a difference: he needs the appearance of his "dearest Friend" (l. 115), his sister, a kindred spirit who might bolster him by creating a communal experience (notice how the first person pronoun yields to the collective "we" throughout that final prayer-like verse paragraph), who might carry on ("nor wilt thou then forget" (l. 155)) with the buoyant relationship with Nature even if he himself is unable to.

Well, that's just a start. You all can add to that, especially since I'm now feeling "the burthen of the mystery" (l. 38) in trying to make sense of all this! I guess what I find most persuasive and helpful here is that both the music and the poem are trying (in very similar ways, I think) to find affirmation in the face of loss, to find ways of discovering recurrence to combat the linear march of time: to play with Keats's famous concluding lines from "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we might say "'Meaning is loss, loss meaning,' -- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."