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

After the Heavenly Tune: English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song. By Marc Berley. (Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies.) Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000. [xii, 418 p. ISBN 0-8207-0316-8. $59.]

"Why do almost all of the world's greatest poets, from Virgil to Wallace Stevens, write that they 'sing' when in fact they are writing?" (p. x). This lengthy and closely argued book is devoted almost entirely to this focal question. In these terms, as Marc Berley defines them, to "sing" is to prophesy or (by whatever means) to discover and enunciate absolute truth. His study comprises five chapters, devoted respectively to Plato's "true musician," Shakespeare, Milton, the English romantic poets (principally Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats), and modernism (principally Yeats and Stevens). A broadly allusive set of conclusions touches on subjects from Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida to the Beatles, but arrives essentially at Berley's starting point: "to be a singer is to be more than a poet" (p. 368).

After the Heavenly Tune has virtually nothing to do with music except in philosophical terms. Anyone expecting an enterprise in any way connected with James Anderson Winn's Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) may be disconcerted. Winn's book is not even cited. For Berley, "song" is concerned with linguistic expression of metaphysical truth, whether intuited by imagination or made accessible to the poet by divine inspiration. Chapter 1 offers an extended explication of Plato's concept of universal harmony ("speculative music") in contrast with "practical music"--or in other words, the "conflict between divine inspiration and poetic skill, which Socrates discusses in Plato's Ion" (p. 3). Song is divinely inspired; poetry is merely a human skill. The problem, from the poet's point of view, is how to be certain that he (the male pronoun seems to apply) has a reliable source of access to absolute truth and hence is not merely deluding himself with wishful thinking. Conceived in these terms, if poetry matters, it cannot be merely beautiful or entertaining or even wise: it must be true.

Of the very selective little group of "English" writers studied here, Milton is the most obviously relevant to the exalted and prophetic concept of poetry that Berley privileges. Milton did indeed aspire to the Virgilian model, and he devoutly prayed that he be granted the power of prophecy so that he would not "merely soar 'in the high region of his fancies'" (p. 173). I could wish, however, that more attention were paid to the effects of the collapse of the English revolution post-1658, after which Milton definitely ceased to imagine that his England would become the new Jerusalem. Shakespeare is a far less comfortable inhabitant of Berley's definition, largely for generic reasons. The argument for Shakespeare's concept of the potentialities of "song" is extrapolated from an ingenious close reading of The Merchant of Venice. I must confess to some discomfort with it: if Shakespeare was telling us important but subtle truths about philosophic conceptions of music (an odd thing to attempt in an edgy comedy), why did no one understand his point until the year 2000? The reading derives largely from Jessica, whom even Berley admits is a "minor character" (p. 122). The results seem to me to turn Shakespeare's use of Renaissance commonplaces into a very inflated case for his confidence in "his status as a singer, divinely inspired by a God who tuned his musical cosmos" (p. 139).

Because the more upbeat English romantic poets attempted to replace the verities of revealed religion with imaginative intuition of the truths of nature, they unquestionably aspired to "song" as Berley defines it. None, however, achieved more than a very temporary conviction of success. Berley admits this, but shies away from the implications of the admission. The romantics wanted the impossible, and they were doomed...