don't you think the
point may be the common essence (so to say) of all these outward and
inward matters?—as if one thread (the
musical ‘monochord’, but not in the sense of any weight
or measure) ran through all, vibrated through all? Thus we should
get the sort of truth which the blind man so neatly conveyed who
likened
” (see WMR, scarlet to the sound of the
trumpet“ground”
(line 8) that DGR is imagining
for all art. In this case, he uses a Pythagorean understanding of perfect
harmony (at once a musical and a mathematical idea; hence the figure of the
monochord). The musical and Pythagorean motifs connect to the rest of the
sequence at various points (see especially
The whole sonnet depends upon a few crucial wordplays where the relation
between visual, musical, physical, and ideal orders are fused into an
essential relation within the textual order of the sonnet: these are
“draws
” (lines 2,
12), “notes”
(line 7), and
“ground”
(line 8). We are to
understand, as WMR suggested, that the landscape conjured in the text from
the first line is purely imaginative, a function of the perception or
experience of the monochord that “vibrate[s] through
all”
. To the extent that the monochord is an instrument
rather than an harmonic ideal, it is this sonnet itself, through which the
ground harmony is measured and exposed. last in the book
”.
This was among the last of the pieces added to the 1870
The 1870 text was revised in 1881 to accommodate the sonnet to
First printed as a separate sonnet, the last in the volume, in
According to WMR and Theodore Watts-Dunton, the sonnet was written
“on an occasion when [DGR] was listening to
music
” (see WMR,
(Written during Music)” was part of the title in 1870.
“Is it the moved air or the moving sound”.
draw” (or its cognates) clearly has graphic as well as psychological and physiological meanings. Those wordplays carry forward to this sonnet. See also line 12.
“Three images in one: the sky piled with clouds, the roar of the ocean, the climax of the music”(Baum,