Song and Story

There is nothing like a song for cutting straight to the heart, for establishing mood without any ado and igniting the senses. Of all the art forms, music is perhaps the least reliant on intellectual processing—unlike stories, which are expressed through a layer of language that the brain must interpret and whose interpretation must be learned.

The very first installment of Story Euphoria explored the idea of story as a mighty unifier, a channel causing readers and listeners to identify with others. Song, too, is something we identify with, become one with as it transports us. And, being written in a universal language that all who hear can understand, a song we listen to together causes us to identify together, building a bridge of identity. People bond while listening to music.

Interestingly, from what clues we have today, it appears that the oldest stories—like the myths discussed last week—were also songs. Inanna’s Descent, for example, was likely chanted during religious rites. Modern songs also tell us stories, sometimes using nothing more than shifts in pitch and rhythm or the choice of instrumentation (as in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf). Other musical stories can be more obviously interpreted in lyrics that fit snugly with the melody.

A poem is a little like lyrics without music. But poems also create their own music using melodies of assonance and alliteration; rhythms of syllables and punctuation. More than that, poems are like sheet music for the imagination, and when we read a poem we create images instead of sounds. The effect is immediate, distilled. A poem is to prose like a shot of Turkish coffee is to a cup of decaf. I think Archibald MacLeish said it well in his 1926 poem, Ars Poetica, as he begins:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown --

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

It seems ridiculous to try to imagine a wordless poem, and yet such a feat is ultimately what everyone who transmutes life into language strives to achieve: the experience and sentiment of the story-moment is what we really care about. The words are ancillary.

And poems and songs tend to be very good with moments, focusing on a certain mood or epiphany. While there are ballads that indulge in more lengthy stories, such as L’Morte de Arthur, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among countless other examples, even these tales-in-verse rely more on moments of metaphor and sudden imagery than on novelistic elements like character development—are more akin to the stories your dreams make from the mishmash of nighttime visions than to what you would write about the dream in your diary next morning. So perhaps poems and songs imitate life more closely than prose, as life is made up of these bright moments and is equally without the helpful framework of exposition. As Archibald MacLeish concludes:

A poem should not mean
But be.