Spiritual Sunday
I’m writing today’s post in an Omicron haze, which is why this Antony Hecht poem about Saul and David speaks to me at the moment. A “villainous spirit” has possessed Saul, and while my own illness is not like Saul’s—his is more psychological or spiritual than physiological—I feel that I too have been intimately acquainted with what the poet describes as “snub-nosed, foul of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent.” For three days, I have felt “no peace on pillow or on throne.”
In the poem, the psalm-singing David breaks through Saul’s illness. Hecht describing David’s lyre as “Pythagorean strings” may be an allusion to W.B. Yeats’s “Among School Children”:
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddlestick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard…
In any event, “father of music” Pythagoras not only discovered musical intervals but he believed that music could function as medicine.
If David’s “modal artistry” is healing, it’s because through it he assembles the “very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired/Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord.” Perhaps these “Sons of Morning” are those mentioned in the Book of Job (38:7). Where were you, God asks of Job, “while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Saul and David
By Anthony Hecht
It was a villainous spirit, snub-nosed, foul
Of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent,
That squatted within him wheresoever he went
…….And possessed the soul of Saul.
There was no peace on pillow or on throne.
In dreams the toothless, dwarfed, and squinny-eyed
Started a joyful rumor that he had died
…….Unfriended and alone.
The doctors were confounded. In his distress, he
Put aside arrogant ways and condescended
To seek among the flocks where they were tended
…….By the youngest son of Jesse,
A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon,
Unnoticed but God-favored, sturdy of limb
As Michelangelo later imagined him,
…….Comely even in his frown.
Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings?
Heaven itself delights in ironies such
As this, in which a boy’s fingers would touch
…….Pythagorean strings
And by a modal artistry assemble
The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired
Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord,
…….And make Saul cease to tremble.
Yesterday, as I lay wrapped in my misery, unable even to read, I googled a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute (by the Hamburg State Opera)and just let the musicwash over me for two and a half hours. I did the same with Schubert’s Mass in G and Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. I didn’t entirely cease to tremble—I still felt awful after the pieces concluded —but they got me through some rough spots. I didn’t feel “unfriended and alone.”