My aunt, who loved and wrote poetry, lives, post-stroke, in Brooke Grove. UD has inherited her poetry collection – three boxes of hardbacks which UD‘s cousin delivered to Rokeby Avenue yesterday afternoon. Today – a very quiet Sunday – UD unpacked them, glancing at their spines and setting them in little piles on the dining room table.

In the background as she worked, Philippe Jaroussky sang, repeatedly, Sposa Son Disprezzata — a song UD has fallen for and is trying to learn. Can she become a brilliant countertenor by listening to Jaroussky night and day? She’s giving it the old college try.

She’s got the music (follow along here) and has spent a lot of time, this weekend, at the piano, desperately seeking the calm lyrical mastery she notices Jaroussky and, among females, Cecilia Bartoli, have hold of. In place of the sustained, emotionally intense line, the subtle and thrilling lift from piano to forte and back down to piano on raaaaaaaaaaaaanza, and the poignant catch in the voice as the plaint picks up, UD cannot help noticing that her own performance features a paint-by-numbers pedantry. Hers is a patchy stomp-through in which the singer struggles under the weight of musical signage in this after all quite easy to play piece (at least in my version).

I try to slow myself down – part of my lack of calm lyrical mastery is my anxious tendency to speed things up – but it’s not working. I remind myself to be a Buddhist about it for God’s sake, to get over myself and get in there and be in the moment and let the fucker unfold etc. But it’s like I’m a thirteen year old doing a piano recital.

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Anyway, my brain runneth over with this music, which I guess is reward enough – the swirl of its sounds as I mow the lawn… as I wake from a midday nap…

When I’d piled all the books, I went out to the deck with The Oxford Book of English Verse.

With my weary-of-life aunt in mind, I found myself reading aloud Swinburne’s Garden of Proserpine.

… I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

… There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.

And then, toward the end, there was the stanza Richard Rorty found himself repeating as he lay near death. He was, he said, “oddly cheered” by this verse, which he “had recently dredged up from memory.”

We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Rorty writes that

neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

In point, rather, and even comforting, were

those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.

The slowly shaped charges of the baroque aria (if you’ve read this blog for any time at all you know of my Purcell fandom) possibly have the same sort of function for UD – compressed comfort.