Song

Songs can go on for a while (take "Stairway to Heaven"), or stick together long song cycles, but normally we expect songs to be brief: three to five minutes, and in modern popular forms, up to three choruses and one bridge. This sense that songs—and earlier works whose genre name, rendered in English, is something like "song"—are by definition brief goes back far beyond modern recorded music, beyond modern sheet music, beyond English. Take Sappho. Or take Korean changga and sijo.

And yet when poets—especially Romantic and post-Romantic poets—try to define the essence of poetry as something like song, the poems they write are not always brief, nor are they necessarily songs. The best-known contemporary poem titled "Song" is not a song, song lyrics, or a song anybody would sing. Instead it is a poem about a song; the poem itself is more than a page long (so not, by modern standards, brief), and takes the Orphic lament as its subject. The poem, written by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, begins:

Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree.All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard itFelt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearingThe song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and thenThey lay back down again.¹

Of course, as with other stories about origins and about Orpheus, that severed head, we do not hear the song. The actual poem, read by human beings and written by a mortal human being, takes place at one remove from the inspiration.

That inspiration, the song that sounds like a "night bird" (like John Keats's nightingale) but comes from a goat (as in trag-oidos, tragedy, goat-song), stands for the ideal of poetry to which no true poem can hold a candle: the ideal of efficacious song, no sooner heard than understood. This is the Orphic ideal, placed sometimes in the preliterate past and sometimes in the childhood of the poet, and sometimes—as in Ben Lerner's recent polemic The Hatred of Poetry—in the cultural unconscious. Lerner argues that we continually complain that actual poems do not meet our ideals for poetry. "Even the most impassioned Romantic defenses of poetry"—Keats's, or Shelley's, or Kelly's—"reinscribe a sense of the insufficiency of poems."² We never get to hear the perfect original poem: we are stuck reading later, lesser poems about it. Allen Grossman conceived of poetry in this way too, in his inimitable, metaphorical style: "The Orphic machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings."³

This ideal ur-poem takes place, always, in the past, in a face-to-face, real-time exchange that sometimes appears as the presence of a person; for Grossman, again, "The poem is, therefore, the dead friend."⁴ That analogy explains why people distrustful of claims for poetry (Paul de Man, for example) sometimes present it as failed or deceptive or untrustworthy speech from beyond the grave. The same analogy explains why so many modern accounts of what poetry really is, or what it really does, take their ideal-typical examples from poems of mourning, or poems about the dead, or poems about people who seem (one way or another) irrecoverably lost, from John Milton's "Methought I saw my late espoused saint" to Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art."

But the ur-poem is often figured not first as a dead friend, but as "song," the song that we as readers of what we call poetry in a literate culture do not ever quite hear. "That music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more," writes William Wordsworth, who could not understand the reaper's semantics even when he heard them in real time: she might have been singing (in Scots Gaelic) something scurrilous or topical or absurd.⁵ The relationship between the idea of song and the idea of Romantic and post-Romantic (and perhaps pre-Romantic: John Donne, or Catullus, or Callimachus) poetry looks like the...