In
Wednesday’s post I said I was surprised to find that I hadn’t shared Dryden’s “Song
for St. Cecilia’s Day” before. I’ve just come across a post I started writing
early last summer and never posted, and I mentioned the poem there. It’s only a fragment, and I don’t remember where I’d planned to go with the post,
but I’m going to share it anyway.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
My friend Esther and I have been reading the classic Introduction to Arithmetic by
Nicomachus of Gerasa, who lived about a century after Christ. In the last
chapter of the book he discusses the relationship between numbers which he
calls, following Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, the harmonic proportion.
Harmony
is a three dimensional number and “is most useful for all progress in music and
in the theory of the nature of the universe.”
The
ancient philosophers, and the medievals after them, believed that the motion of
the cosmos was musical in nature.
In his discussion,
he uses the word “diapason,” which I learned from John Dryden’s poem, “A Song
for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687.” Here is the first stanza:
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.
In C.S.
Lewis’s creation myth in The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan sings Narnia into
existence. J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation myth in The Silmarillion is part of this
tradition, too: Eru Iluvatar’s creates the Ainur from his own thoughts, and
their songs after Iluvitar’s pattern bring everything else into existence.
Lewis’s
version, being written for children, is the simpler, more straightforward one—everything
in Narnia is made by Aslan. But Tolkien’s is an image not only of God the
creator, but of Man, made in his image, acting as sub-creator, following the
pattern of order, harmony, beauty.