John Greening, Poetry and Anthology

The Silence by John Greening. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Books, 2019. 112 pp. $14.99 (paperback)/$14.99 (e-book)

Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composer from Thomas Tallis to Arvo Pärt edited by John Greening. Rochester, NY: 2015. 235 pp. $25.95 (hardcover)/$24.99 (ebook)

In the years between the two world wars, the most popular living composer, among music lovers in North America and Britain, was Jean Sibelius. That popularity was based mainly on his seven symphonies, written between 1899 and 1924, each different from the others but evolving, as a group, towards ever more concentrated musical structures. Their sweeping melodies and restless energy were largely a reponse to the beauties of his native Finland, which Sibelius never tired of observing. (His works were performed less often in Germany and Austria; that bothered Sibelius considerably, but audiences there were content, for the most part, with Brahms, Mahler and Richard Strauss.)

With this in mind, we can imagine the excitement in 1927, when word came of a new Sibelius symphony. He had worked out the entire score in his head, the composer told a New York music critic, and he’d already committed two movements to paper. But, over the next few years, the symphony failed to appear, despite occasional reports that it was nearly ready and repeated announcements of premieres in Boston and London.

In the summer of 1936, pianist Harriet Cohen visited Sibelius in Helsinki and had the temerity to tease him about the long-promised work. Rumor in London had it, she said, that the new symphony did not exist. Sibelius emptied his pack of cigarettes, drew a musical staff on the wrapper and jotted down “a large, spreading chord,” Cohen reports in her memoirs. “This,” he said, “is the first chord of my Eighth Symphony.” Very well, but what became of the rest? And why the mystery surrounding it?

These are the questions that animate John Greening’s poem, “The Silence,” which occupies 33 pages of his new collection from Carcanet. It’s a loving and inventive meditation on the sources of creative inspiration; the vagaries of artistic confidence; and the ability of the mind to keep observing, associating and struggling to build connections, even when those connections unravel, again and again. The first stanza sums up the problem: it gives us the elderly composer, sitting at his lakeside home near Helsinki and gazing out the window: 

Looking into the forest, he looks through a window with bars:
three kinds of bar, then common juniper, spruce and pine.
He hopes to see something moving there but he seldom can,
except the warder camouflaged, holding a bunch of keys. (p. 77)

From the beginning, we have a sense of something long sought for, but elusive; some secret waiting to be unlocked. The search involves many illusory hints and guesses and never follows a straight line for long, as Greening immerses us in the radiant muddle in which Sibelius found himself during the last three decades of his life. He keeps things moving– and the reader engaged – with lines of varying lengths, arranged in quatrains that often spill over into the next, and rhyme and assonance that come and go, as the sought-for inspiration drifts in and out of focus.

It’s not a reverie that can be productively summed up, but some excerpts may convey the poem’s texture and intentions. In the first of its four sections, the speaker says he is searching for “the breath of an ember of a final chance of making a start.” (p. 77). In a note, Greening tells us the speaker in the poem “is based on the historical Jean Sibelius, imagined late in life when past and present are less distinct. But he is also (to use T.S. Eliot’s phrase) a ‘compound ghost’, the representative of any artist who is struggling to create.”

The signs the speaker needs to guide him seem to be everywhere: he “catches the gist of a point the black woodpecker made as it passed.” (p. 77) But his task is devilishly hard: it’s not enough for a person to make music, the speaker implies; the music must make sense in a universe that seems to challenge the very idea of meaning. The composer must find a way to become both “the one who’ll make/a desk from wood, and the one who’ll sit at it confronting chaos.” (p. 78)

Nonetheless, he knows what he must do to make it all cohere: “ . . . once the Oceanides have sung/you are alive again, if you can catch that wave, control it,/rise enough to reach what’s in the air, in the single movement.” (p. 80) (In Greek mythology, the Oceanides were the innumerable nymphs of the sea, the offspring of two Titans; Sibelius wrote an orchestral work named for them in 1913-14.) As the first section closes, a reader knowing nothing about Sibelius might suppose a happy resolution lay ahead: “The pieces fall before him as he rows on.” (p. 86)

The poem’s second section asks us to consider many forms of silence: not just the silence the composer faces on the empty page, but also the silence the speaker’s daughters must maintain, as their father tries to work; the silence he himself had to endure when he was treated for throat cancer; the traditional silence of the Finns as a people: “When foreigners visit us, it’s invariably the silence they remark on./Out here, but in the cities, too. A reticent people.” (p. 89) But the silence afflicting the speaker runs deeper than reticence. He dreams of wandering through a snowy forest, where he finds the ruins of an abandoned forge:

He imagines the blaze within. The anvil, the hiss of red shoes
kissing water, but above all, the hammer, hammer, hammer.
Silence will not acknowledge this, does not remember
a blacksmith, his smallest spark. It has eliminated every noise. (p. 92)

When the third section reverts to an earlier decade, readers may need to reach for a Sibelius biography (Robert Layton’s is a good choice). There’s a war on, but which one? It’s Finland’s civil war, ignited when the country declared independence from Russia, in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution. The “Whites,” backed by Germany, support the new government; the “Red” forces try to keep Finland tied to Moscow. The fighting cuts off royalty payments from Sibelius’s publisher in Leipzig and puts an end to lucrative concert performances, as well. For weeks at a time, it’s not safe for the family to venture outdoors, and food is scare. We hear a new voice, apparently that of Aino, the composer’s wife:

“Unless his drinking destroys us first, his work is my sacred mission.
That I had to lower myself when I married him I do not resent
though others delight in reminding me. Such values hardly count –
his work does, our children – in the face of this social revolution.” (p. 92)

That mission continues, and eventually peace is restored, with Finland an independent state. Over the next few years, Sibelius completes his Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and Tapiola, his awestruck evocation of the forest god from Finnish folklore. But what happens now? “Press on to the lake and the mute swans gathered at the end,/out of reach, but ready to fly, given the word – if only/I knew the word.” (p. 95)

At this point, if not before, Greening clearly assumes we know the history of the Eighth Symphony or will look it up. It’s easy to find online. (See this article from the Finnish Music Quarterly: https://fmq.fi/articles/sibelius-eight-what-happened-to-it.) In 1933 – three years before Harriet Cohen teased Sibelius about the work – he had sent the first movement to Paul Voigt, his long-time copyist, to make a fair copy. He sent additional manuscripts to Voigt that autumn. Then came a silence, deepening over a dozen years, until 1945, when Jean and Aino burned a number of sketches and manuscripts. It seems those sections of the symphony were among them.

Some Sibelius experts theorize that the composer felt he had already made his definitive final statement in the last bars of the Seventh Symphony and could think of nothing more to say, but that’s dubious. Even Beethoven, after completing his Ninth Symphony, kept writing, and the six string quartets he produced during his last four years are among the glories of the repertoire.

Sibelius knew what the real problem was. In June 1943, he told his future son-in-law, Jussi Jalas, “For each of my symphonies, I have developed a special technique. It can’t be something superficial; it has to be something that has been lived through. In my new work, I am struggling with precisely these issues.” Knowing that, we may guess that burning portions of the symphony was an attempt to clear the ground for yet another fresh start. Aino said Jean seemed much relieved after doing that.

The poem’s final section is a kaleidoscopic tumble through the composer’s last years, “an age when it’s not remarkable to die.” (p. 99) An English gardener pays a visit; his daughters marry or move out; the composer stumbles backwards from his radio and lands on the carpet, laughing; connections get harder and harder to come by, but still, “The forest believes in you.” (p. 103)

And Sibelius believes in the forest, and in the stars above them, the reader has come to see. Night still brings dreams: “The same two pages always. It will happen in time,/he reassures them, it will emerge, you simply have to wait.” (p. 108) In the end, the waiting outlasts the life, and Greening leaves us to ponder what that means: to keep looking and listening – hoping for a greater coherence, decade after decade, whether it appears or not. We might call it heroism or stoicism, but – as the poem’s final stanza suggests – isn’t that what we’re all doing?

The title poem is accompanied by 27 shorter poems and three adaptations of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). Three of these thirty poems are especially appealing. “Nebamun’s Tomb” is an extended sequence prompted by Greening’s seeing the ancient tomb of an Egyptian accountant at the British Museum; it reminds us that the poet’s first collection, Westerners, from 1982, was based on the three years he and his wife spent teaching in Aswan. Examining these new fragments from three millennia ago, the poet suggests that those who made them have, like him, only guesses to offer about the secrets of life and death: no wonder the hieroglyphic for “to exist” is a hare. (p. 13)

“Tree Rings (To Katie at 30)” is an affectionate celebration of the poet’s daughter and the trees she grew up with. (p. 43) “After Hölderlin: To the Fates” sticks fairly close to the original (“An die Parzen”), with its admonition that “The soul that missed out on its god-given right/in this life will not find much rest in the next.” (p. 64)

I’ve seen a number of anthologies of poems about music, but none are very satisfying. One might think that verse is even worse at capturing musical beauty than prose is. But poems about composers are another matter. They and the performers who bring their notes to life are far more immediate than music as an abstraction, and there’s a secondary interest in seeing which poets choose to write about which composers. Who knew that Ted Hughes wrote a poem about a Beethoven string quartet, or that Edmund Blunden had written one about Arthur Sullivan, or Penelope Shuttle one about Gabriel Fauré?

Greening’s gathering (I can’t even imagine how long it took) includes one or more poems about 80 composers, from Thomas Tallis (1505-85) to Arvo Pärt (b.1935), and it makes for a surprisingly diverse and entertaining collection. (There are, of course, several poems about Sibelius.) The volume is handsomely produced by Britain’s Boydell Press, and there are helpful notes about the individual musical works the poets mention.

—Reviewer Frank Beck has written extensively about music and serves as a trustee for Elgar Works, which is publishing a uniform edition of the scores, correspondence, and diaries of Edward Elgar. His thoughts on poetry, music, and film can be found at DieHoren.com.