After the Heavenly Tune: English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song. (Reviews).

Marc Berley, After the Heavenly Tune: English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song.

(Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies.) Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000. xii + 418 pp. $59. ISBN: 0-8207-0316-8.

Marc Berley's study examines the "complex relationship between poetry and music" (5) and argues that, ever since writing and then printing led to the separation of the two modes, the "aspiration to song [has been] central to many poets' conceptions of themselves and their poems..." (2). "A claim to song," Berley writes, "is for some poets merely a figurative literary gesture; for others it is as near as possible to a literal expression of what a poet is and does -- a deep examination of the potential musical activities of human consciousness" (11). I find in this recognition a compelling subject for investigation. Sensing the ephemerality of written words, poets have always tried to push beyond them to an image of permanence -- the poem as song, as music, as hieroglyph, as sacred text.

In addition to much Platonic and neo-Platonic theorizing, After the Heavenly Tune contains analyses of works by Shakespeare, Milton, several Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats), and several moderns (including Dickinson, Pound, Yeats, and Stevens). Interesting by itself, often the theory is not clearly integrated into the analyses, or it crushes them with its weight. In his discussion of The Merchant of Venice, for instance, Berley contends that Portia shows "a knowledge of the need to temper Neoplatonism with Platonism when Bassanio chooses the right casket..." (116). Earlier, Berley quotes Marsilio Ficino in order to "locate important differences between Neoplatonism and Platonism" (45-46) and argues that "Whereas Plato wrote about striving to achieve justice of the soul by achieving self-rule, Ficino wrote about ecstatic frenzy that put one in possession of divine beauty..." (47). Doubtless this distinction is accurate, but I wonder how much we really need it to understand Portia's practi cal advice to the ebullient Bassanio that he "allay [his] ecstasy" and "scant [his] excess."

The discussion of the Merchant of Venice occupies forty of the fifty-seven pages of chapter 2, "Shakespeare and the 'Sweet Power of Music,'" and is far too long and repetitive. Worse, Berley has an exasperating tendency to ask important questions, sometimes several times, and then withhold their answers. "What exactly does Jessica mean when she says, 'I am never merry when I hear sweet music'?" Berley asks on page 87 and implicitly several times thereafter, finally answering it only on page 121: "In her last line, Jessica seems to remark not her unmusical Jewish soul but the unmusicality of a 'poor rude world.'" This answer is extremely important to Berley's reading of the play, but it would be more effective without the context of artificial suspense.

Sometimes Berley's commentary is astute. Other times I wonder if the words I read are really what he meant to write. "Portia," he tells us, "secures her man with the help of music.... Bassanio appears to be a good match for Portia, for he chooses the right casket, but the words to Portia's song provide him with hints." That the rhyming words of the song, "bred," "head," and "nourished," rhyme also with "lead" is of course true and anciently observed; that they are intended to tip Bassanio off to the right casket and in fact do so is another matter, one that cannot be simply assumed. Berley continues: "It is possible [Portia's] father's trust in music could fail to prove true. But if Portia cheats with her hints, her father's wisdom might prevail, and therefore not her love" (116). If Portia hints and cheats, she is subverting the conditions of her father's will; the notion that he wished for her to do so contradicts the facts of the play.

Keats's declaration in the Ode on a Grecian Urn that "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter" understandably resonates through After the Heavenly Tune, and that poem and the Ode to a Nightingale receive much attention in the section on Keats. "The nightingale," Berley writes of the bird in the latter poem, "not being made for death, is, paradoxically, not born for life. A soul that is not made by experience cannot truly be immortal" (258-59). That is very well said, and is entirely faithful to Keats's poem and to his general meditations on the failure of the not human to instruct the human. What follows, however, undermines this fine perception. "Keats's 'immortal bird' is immortal only in the limited sense that every nightingale sings the song of the nightingale. It dies, but is replaced by another indistinguishable singer of that song. Keats's nightingale is immortal in the sense invoked by Shakespeare in Sonnet 18 ['Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?']. The 'eternal summer' of his p oem surpasses the idealized summer of its admired subject" (258-59). The nightingale is immortal because the species, which is what matters, will survive in nature. Shakespeare's young friend is immortal because he will be preserved as an individual in Shakespeare's sonnet. Immortality may be a figure of speech in both cases, but the two are vastly different figures.