NAPOMO: The Strange Music, GK Chesterton

[tree_and_leaf]

I must admit that I was surprised to find Chesterton had written rather erotic love poetry, but it's exactly what I would have I expected, had I been expecting it. Though I can't help feeling that the lyrical-I is giving himself a hell of a lot to live up to... (to the point that I wonder if it isn't actually intended as bridal mysticism, and the speaker Christ, but that's probably just the result of Too Much Mysticism).


The Strange Music.

Other loves may sink and settle, other loves may loose and slack,
But I wander like a minstrel with my harp upon his back,
Though my harp be on my bosom, though I finger and I fret,
Still, my hope is all before me: for I cannot play it yet.

In your strings is hid a music that no hand has e'er let fall,
In your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;
Pleasure subtle as your spirit, strange and slender as your frame,
Fiercer than the pain that folds you, softer than your sorrow's name.

Not as mine, my soul's anointed, not as mine the rude and light
Easy mirth of many faces, swaggering pride of song and fight
Something stranger, something sweeter, something waiting you afar
Secret as your stricken senses, magic as your sorrows are.

But on this, God's harp supernal, stretched but to be struck once,
Hoary time is a beginner, life a bungler, death a dunce.
But I will not fear to match them - no, by God, I will not fear.
I will learn you, I will play you, and the stars stand still to hear.

GK Chesterton.

Comments

[oursin]

This reads a bit like one of those novels that appears to have been misdirected somewhere in the aether to the wrong authorial address - i.e. would one guess it was Chesterton? (though for some reason it connects for me with The Last Hero, possibly simply be because they were both in the Other Men's Flowers anthology.)

Though these days it reminds me perhaps rather too closely of Balzac's apothegm about most men making love to a woman being like apes trying to play the violin... a perennial favourite in early C20th marriage advice.

[tree_and_leaf]

would one guess it was Chesterton?

Not from the subject matter, but the metre and vocabulary might give it away - not to mention the combination of religiosity and gusto.

it reminds me perhaps rather too closely of Balzac's apothegm about most men making love to a woman being like apes trying to play the violin

Ye-es, I know what you mean. I do like the poem, if nothing else because it's a very Catholic poet being positive about sexuality and women as well as men taking pleasure in it, but I cannot help feeling that anyone who spends that much time going on about his proficient fingering is likely to be lacking in a certain musical sensibility. Quite apart from the fact that it's not really a matter of a musician and an instrument at all, nor even a soloist and an accompanist, but counterpoint.

Also, I can't help wondering what the fingering and fretting poet is fingering *is twelve*