Sunday
The other day I was thumbing through Harold Bloom’s anthology American Religious Poetry and came across an Anthony Hecht poem that caught my fancy. “Saul and David” refers to the episode in 1 Samuel 16 where Saul is haunted by an evil spirit and assuaged by David’s lyre playing:
Now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil[a] spirit from the Lord tormented him. Saul’s attendants said to him, “See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the lyre. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes on you, and you will feel better.”
So Saul said to his attendants, “Find someone who plays well and bring him to me.” One of the servants answered, “I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the lyre. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the Lord is with him.”
Then Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, “Send me your son David, who is with the sheep.” So Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine and a young goat and sent them with his son David to Saul….Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.
Here’s the poem:
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 stringsAnd 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.
Pythagoras is the supposed inventor of musical harmony who believed that music reflects the divine order of the stars. As Yeats references the philosopher in “Among School Children,”
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard…
In this case, the “sweet laudation of the Lord” is the psalms, which “make Saul cease to tremble.” Such is the power of art.
