Today’s Poem: A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day
The trumpet shall be heard on high / . . . And music shall untune the sky.
A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687
by John Dryden
Stanza 1 From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony This universal frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead. Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And music’s pow’r obey. From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man. ◦ diapason = a grand burst of harmony (also the stop for the principal organ pipes) Stanza 2 What passion cannot music raise and quell! When Jubal struck the corded shell, ◦ Jubal = first musician in the Bible His list’ning brethren stood around And wond’ring, on their faces fell To worship that celestial sound: Less than a god they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot music raise and quell! Stanza 3 The trumpet’s loud clangor Excites us to arms With shrill notes of anger And mortal alarms. The double double double beat Of the thund’ring drum Cries, hark the foes come; Charge, charge, ’tis too late to retreat. Stanza 4 The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper’d by the warbling lute. Stanza 5 Sharp violins proclaim Their jealous pangs, and desperation, Fury, frantic indignation, Depth of pains and height of passion, For the fair, disdainful dame. Stanza 6 But oh! what art can teach What human voice can reach The sacred organ’s praise? Notes inspiring holy love, Notes that wing their Heav’nly ways To mend the choirs above. Stanza 7 Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees unrooted left their place; Sequacious of the lyre: ◦ sequacious = following unreasoningly But bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r; When to her organ, vocal breath was giv’n, An angel heard, and straight appear’d Mistaking earth for Heav’n. Grand Chorus As from the pow’r of sacred lays The spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator’s praise To all the bless’d above; So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky. ════════════════════════════════
The natural world begins in music: the Let there be of Genesis a call to harmony — for the “universal frame” of nature begins when material atoms leap up and “music’s pow’r obey,” culminating in the creation of humanity.
Or so, at least, John Dryden (1631–1700) proclaims in his 1687 ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, which is today: the November 22 feast of Cecilia of Rome, patron saint of music. A Christian noblewoman who converted her husband and his brother, she “sang in her heart to the Lord” at the pagan wedding to which her parents forced her — and thus became associated with music when, around 230 A.D., she, her husband, and his brother were executed. A mention in near-contemporaneous martyrologies suggests she was a real historical figure, but the pious details of her story, popularized in the 13th-century Golden Legend, were filled in over the thousand years after her martyrdom.
In his 14th-century Canterbury Tales, Chaucer names the Golden Legend as the source for his own account of St. Cecilia in the “Second Nun’s Tale”: And whil the organs maden melodie, / To God allone in herte thus sang she. And it’s tempting to trace from there Cecilia’s place in the English poetic and musical imagination.
But it seems that it wasn’t until the late 17th century that her feast day became an acknowledged occasion for composition in England. A London musical society began annual November 22 celebrations in 1683. Henry Purcell composed “Hail! Bright Cecilia” to words by Nicholas Brady in 1692. Dryden himself produced a second song for St. Cecilia’s Day in 1697 (“None but the brave deserves the fair”). Alexander Pope wrote a 1708 “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day.” George Frideric Handel set Dryden’s Cecilia ode to music in 1739, in a tradition that would continue through Benjamin Britten’s 1942 setting of a St. Cecilia poem by W.H. Auden. (Britten, with a November 22 birthday, seems to have felt a special connection to the patroness of music.)
As for the poetry of Dryden’s original St. Cecilia ode, the apocalyptic ending is so tremendous — a triplet rhyme, “The trumpet shall be heard on high, / The dead shall live, the living die, / And music shall untune the sky” — that Samuel Johnson actually complained that its power was unfitting for the poem.
I think Johnson may mistake Dryden’s composition here. It’s not clear what we are to make of the varying lengths of the stanzas. From the 15 lines of the first stanza, with its three paired-mentions of “harmony,” we drop to 9 lines in the second stanza, then 8, then 4 in the fourth, before building back up with 5, 6, and 7 lines in the next three stanzas, culminating in the 9 lines of the concluding “Grand Chorus.”
I presume that Dryden means something musical with this decrescendo and returning crescendo — the overture dropping away to the “dying notes” of the “soft complaining flute” in stanza four, before building back up to Cecilia’s favorite instrument, the organ. Yes, there are the trumpet, drum, flute, and violin, each with its own sound and emotion, says Dryden. But “When to her organ, vocal breath was giv’n, / An angel heard, and straight appear’d / Mistaking earth for Heav’n.”
The biblical Jubal’s primitive harp (“corded shell”) could engender such passions that his human listeners mistook the sound for something heavenly. And Orpheus “could lead the savage race” of ancient peoples, when even the unthinking trees “unrooted left their place” to follow his lyre. But “bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r.” Her organ harmonies echoed the divine unity of reason and passion that made nature itself in the beginning — the divine sound that will, with the cry of the last trumpet (presaged by an organ’s trumpet stops) in time undo the world.
That has to be one of the greatest final lines ever! Freaking awesome!
Wonderful Poem!!!
Have thought for awhile, that where the Bible writes: "And God spake, Let There Be Light", was written so for the likes of me, that cannot carry a tune. Instead he sang from the lowest depth, to the highest note, at which Light broke free. Why speak if one can sing? Having lived with people, who had wonderful voices, it is a gift beyond compare.