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BOOK REVIEWS165 B. H. Fairchild. Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1980. 114p. Such Holy Song treats a subject — Blake's use of music — that is important and underexplored. The subtitle describes accurately the scope of the study, which has a kind of simple ABA sonata form. The first chapter outlines what the book will cover. Three middle chapters contain the substance: a description of the theoretical and mythic meaning of music for Blake; an analysis ofthe "melos" of Songs of Innocence and of Experience; and a treatment of The Four Zoas in terms of its sound effects, its musico-dramatic form, and its musical imagery. The brief concluding chapter summarizes the book, and internal recapitulations on a smaller scale occur here and there. The book thus lends itself to casual skimming by readers content to get the main gist without the details, but any such impatient readers will miss agood deal of excellent musical/literary criticism. The best part of the book is the long chapter on the Zoas, especially the explication of the poem's sound effects, which Fairchild brings excitingly alive, and his demonstration that several important formal aspects of the poem are related to music. Fairchild sees the poem's form as an explosive blend of epic with something like oratorio (the possibility that Blake knew Handel's music is suggested convincingly ), complete with arias, choruses, narrative, and dialogue analogous to recitative . Throughout the book Fairchild attempts to use musical terminology more strictly than is often true in literary criticism, and at least in discussing the Zoas I think he succeeds. Perhaps the best examples are his analyses of the demonic nuptial hymn in Night I and of Enitharmon's sinister aria about female domination in Night II. Fairchild proves to my satisfaction that a technical knowledge of musical form and techniques is essential to a full understanding of such passages. Fairchild also argues, convincingly, that the musical line — that is, melody — corresponds in Blake's mythic scheme to the visual line and the poetic line, these representing the right, healthy form of imagination, as opposed to the blurring found in harmony, which ismathematic, rationalist, antiimaginative, Urizenic. But, even more than Blake's intolerance of painters like Rembrandt, this principled objection to harmony seems an absurdly narrow position from which one would like to redeem Blake. Fairchild sometimes suggests that we can in fact do so, for he mentions also something called true harmony that Blake does approve of. That it isn't clear what Blake means by true harmony is probably more his fault than that of Fairchild, who states (p. 5) that Blake probably had in mind "music of a relatively simple texture in which the clarity of the melodic line was dominant, whatever its harmonic context. ..." I suggest, though, that this description is paradoxical; if we advance beyond mere melody, it is precisely in homophonic music that we get both the most straightforward tunefulness and the greatest "blurring" of simultaneous harmonious sounds. Blake ought theoretically to have preferred the linearity of polyphonic music, but such music is generally considered much more cerebral, more "Urizenic," than homophony. Of course, if true harmony is just another synonym for melody, we are back with the unsettling sense of an absurdly primitivist Blake. The chapter on the Songs argues the rather bold case that the poems' rhythms, vestiges of the tunes Blake is said to have composed, have a distinct role in conveying archetypal, preverbal meanings (pp. 35,90). Whether the reader is persuaded or not may depend on the attunement of his ear and sensibility to Fairchild's. The book contains also some interesting facts and speculations about the place of music in 166ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Blake's actual life — the influence of pleasure gardens situated near his home, for ;nstance. The prose style is good and the knowledge of scholarship impressive. BRIAN WILKIE, University of Illinois Robert Fleming. Willard Motley. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. 168p. The case here is one of alleged mishandling of a writer by his critics. The defendant is Willard Motley, an American novelist of this...

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