During the 19th Century, composers began to set poems to music. In these “art songs” or Lieder, the piano accompaniment accentuated the emotions and complemented the meaning of the poem. Although Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) was the first cycle of art songs, Schubert was the composer who definitively established the genre. He was followed by Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Mahler. In the British Isles, a golden age of art song occurred in the first 20 years of the 20th Century. Young composers, many trained in the German tradition, set to music both the lines they had learned in school and the poems of their contemporaries. The illustration is a wood cut from 1903 by Wassily Kandinsky.
Songs
Art songs (Kunstlieder in German) are often distinguished from folk songs (Volkslieder): art songs are musical settings for poetry that has been published in print, whereas the words and melodies for folk songs are handed down orally. However, some poets wrote ballads in the style of traditional folk songs, and some folk songs can be poetically complex. Art songs are also differentiated from popular songs by being “through-composed” (durchkomponiert) so that the melody varies with the meaning of the words, whereas popular songs typically use a simple repetitive rhythm. The accompaniment is typically more complex in art songs than in popular songs, often running in counterpoint to the voice. The words to art songs are created prior to the music, whereas words and music for popular songs are usually created simultaneously. Modern art songs are typically written for a solo voice with piano. However, in the Renaissance, similar songs (ayres) were written for lute accompaniment. Some composers, such as Mahler and Vaughan-Williams, arranged their original piano setting for full orchestra. All distinctions tend to be fuzzy, and no one type of song is necessarily better than another. As stated in the Oxford Dictionary of Music (Kennedy et al., 2012) in the entry for “song”
Brave the man or woman who will make a didactic value‐judgement between Dives and Lazarus, Gretchen am Spinnrade and Smoke gets in your eyes.
Poetry and Music
Human speech has its own rhythm – prosody – and this can be heightened or regularized in poetry (Menninghaus et al. 2018). This is what makes poetry more appealing when recited out loud than when read silently. Listening to art song adds another dimension to the perceptual experience: one must attend both to the words and to the music (Campbell, 2023). Since it can be difficult to adjust the melody of the music to the rhythm of the poetry, some poets would prefer their poems not be set to music. Whitner (1957) quotes Victor Hugo who wrote on a manuscript of his verse, “Commit no nuisance along these poems by setting them to music.” Nevertheless, in the better art songs, the music heightens the emotions of the words and makes their meaning more vivid and memorable.
The history of English Song (e.g., Kimball, 2005) suggests two Golden Ages. During the first (1580-1630) poems were set to music, with the lute being the typical accompaniment. In the second (the first half of the 20th Century), the songs were accompanied by piano. The following sections consider nine English art songs composed during first two decades of the 20th Century. Each is presented as text, as recitation, and as song, with some also presented as music alone.
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake: So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip Into my bosom and be lost in me.
This poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was extracted from his long narrative poem The Princess (1847), wherein Princess Ida forswears the world of men and establishes a university for women. The story was likely derived from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and was itself adapted by Gilbert and Sullivan into the operetta Princess Ida. The 14-line unrhymed poem is spoken by the Princess as she cares for the wounded Prince in Canto VII of the poem. As she invokes the sunset, she realizes that she feels more deeply for him than she had thought. The reference to Danaë, the beautiful young woman who was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of golden rain, accentuates the underlying erotic feelings in the lines.
The following illustration shows Gustav Klimt’s Danaë (1907):
The following is a recitation of the poem by Simon Russell Beale
Roger Quilter (1877-1953) set the poem to music in 1902. The following is a performance by baritone Benjamin Luxon accompanied by David Willison on piano.
And the following is a transcription of Quilter’s song-setting by Steven Hough.
Aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven
Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) published this poem in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The speaker is Yeats using the persona of Aedh (a name that means “fire” in Irish), a lovelorn, visionary poet. The poem, clearly related to Yeats’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne, is recited by Greg Wise:
Thomas Dunhill (1877-1946) published a cycle of songs from Yeats’ The Wind among the Reeds in 1904, later revising them for orchestral accompaniment in 1912. The following is a performance by tenor Ian Bostridge with Julius Drake on piano:
The following is the poem in calligraphy as published by the Cuala Press, established in 1908 by Elizabeth Yeats, the poet’s brother.
Bright is the Ring of Words
Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said – On wings they are carried – After the singer is dead And the maker buried.
Low as the singer lies In the field of heather, Songs of his fashion bring The swains together.
And when the west is red With the sunset embers, The lover lingers and sings And the maid remembers.
The poem comes from Songs of Travel (1896) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Faute de mieux the following is my recitation of the poem:
Stevensons considered the poems as “songs,” and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) set the words to music in 1904 as part of The Vagabond and Other Songs. The following is a performance by baritone Bryn Terfel with Malcom Martineau on piano:
The score at the song’s end illustrates the complexity of the accompaniment:
Down by the Salley Gardens
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
William Butler Yeats published this poem in 1889. He extrapolated it from a few lines of an old song sung by a peasant woman in County Sligo. The word “salley” is a variant of a “sallow,” which is another word for the willow tree (Latin Salix). These trees were cultivated to provide materials for baskets, fences and roofs. A weir is a low dam of rocks or wood built across a river to raise the level of the upstream water. Settling and other irregularities can cause portions of the weir to rise above the water level, and become covered in grass. The grass on the weirs thus suggests an islet of rest in the turbulent waters flowing around it. The following is a recitation of the poem by Jim Norton:
Herbert Hughes (1882-1937), an Irish composer, set the poem in 1909 to the tune of a traditional Irish air called The Maids of Moune Shore. The following is a classical performance of this setting by the contralto Kathleen Ferrier with Phyllis Spurr on piano:
And another by countertenor Daniel Taylor accompanied by Sylvain Bergeron on lute. This performance gives the impression of a Renaissance Ayre.
The following is a performance of the Hughes tune adapted for cello (Gerald Peregrine) and violin (Lynda O’Connor):
Loveliest of Trees the Cherry Now
Loveliest of trees the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now of my three score years and ten, twenty will not come again. And take from seventy years a score, It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom, Fifty Springs is little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
This poem, published by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) in his A Shropshire Lad (1896), has been widely anthologized and set to music numerous times. The following is a recitation by Emma Fielding:
George Butterworth (1895-1916) was the first composer to set the poem to music in 1912. The following is a performance by Benjamin Luxon with David Willison on piano:
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d: But thy eternal Summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
All the art songs considered so far used poems published in the years just before the composers set the music. The composers also used earlier poems – particularly those from the late 16th to early 17th Centuries. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) published his sonnets in 1609. The following is a recitation of his 18th Sonnet by Hugh Grant:
Frederick Septimus Kelly (1881-1916) was born in Australia and educated in England. As well as studying music, he was a gold medalist in rowing at the 1908 Olympics. His setting for Shakespeare’s sonnet was published in 1912. According to Banfield (1885, p 141),
The treatment of the opening line, the searching for a comparison, is particularly happy: the intermediate dominant of the relative minor leads in as if with a gradual concentration of the mind.
The following is a performance by baritone Stephen Varcoe with Clifford Benson on piano:
To Gratiana Dancing and Singing
See! with what constant motion Even and glorious, as the sun, Gratiana steers that noble frame, Soft as her breast, sweet as her voice, That gave each winding law and poise, And swifter than the wings of Fame.
She beat the happy pavement By such a star-made firmament, Which now no more the roof envies; But swells up high with Atlas ev’n, Bearing the brighter, nobler Heav’n, And in her, all the Dieties.
Each step trod out a lovers thought And the ambitious hopes he brought, Chain’d to her brave feet with such arts, Such sweet command and gentle awe, As when she ceas’d, we sighing saw The floor lay pav’d with broken hearts.
So did she move: so did she sing: Like the harmonious spheres that bring Unto their rounds their music’s aid; Which she performed such a way, As all th’enamour’d world will say: The Graces danced, and Apollo play’d.
Richard Lovelace (1617-1657) was a Cavalier Poet who fought on the side of Charles I during the English Civil War (1642–1651). Most of his poems, many dedicated to various idealized mistresses such as Althea, Lucasta, and Gratiana (Cousins, 1988), were collected and published posthumously. The following is a reading of the poem by Cavaet from Librivox.
William Denis Browne (1888–1915), an English composer, set Lovelace’s poem (omitting the second verse) to music in 1913. He based his melody on an Allmayne (a dance form originating in Germany, also called Allemande) from the 17th-Century Virginal Book of Elizabeth Rogers. The following is a performance by tenor Ian Bostridge with Julius Drake on piano:
Sea-Fever
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
John Masefield (1878-1967) joined HMS Conway, a naval training ship in 1891 and spent much of his life in the 1890s at sea. This poem comes from his first book, Salt-Water Ballads (1902). The poems from this first volume were published together with later poems in 1916 as Salt-Water Poems and Ballads, which was profusely illustrated by Charles Pears (1873-1958). This is Pears’s depiction of the first two lines of Sea-Fever:
The following is a recitation of the poem by Terence Stamp:
John Nicholson Ireland (1879-1962) set Masefield’s poem to music in 1913. The following is a performance by baritone Bryn Terfel with Malcolm Martineau on piano:
Epitaph
Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she: I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare, rare it be; And when I crumble who shall remember This lady of the West Country?
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) published this brief but powerful poem in The Listeners and Other Poems (1912). In 1934 he made a recording of this and other poems. The following represents my best effort to decrease the high levels of noise:
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), an English poet and composer, set the poem to music in 1920. The following is a performance by the baritone Benjamin Luxon with David Willison on piano:
Lament
Many of the composers active during the early years of the 20th Century died in World War I. William Denis Browne died at Gallipoli in 1915. William Septimus Kelly and George Butterworth both died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Ivor Gurney was irrevocably affected by his injuries during the war, and spent much of his time afterwards in psychiatric hospitals. Two weeks before he died at the Battle of the Somme, Kelly began writing a Lament. His original piano score was recently adapted for orchestra by Christopher Latham. The following is an arrangement for violin and piano with Latham playing the violin and Tamara Anna Cislowska playing the piano:
References
Banfield, S. (1985). Sensibility and English song: critical studies of the early 20th century. Cambridge University Press.
Böker-Heil, N., Fallows, D., Baron, J., Parsons, J., Sams, E., Johnson, G., & Griffiths, P. (2001). Lied. Grove Music Online.
Campbell, S. (2023). “Oh for heaven’s sake, do I need to explain this really?” Translation skopoi in live art song concerts. Translation Review, 116(1), 1–12.
Cousins, A. D. (1988). Lucasta, Gratiana, and the amatory wit of Lovelace. Parergon, 6(2), 97–104.
Kennedy, M., & Kennedy, J. B., Rutherford-Johnson, T. (2012). The Oxford dictionary of music (Sixth edition). Oxford University Press.
Kimball, C. (2005). Song: a guide to art song style and literature. Hal Leonard Corporation.
Whitner, M. E. (1957). The modern art song in English. The American Music Teacher, 6(4), 2–23.
Caravaggio: The Contarelli Chapel
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was born in small community called Caravaggio just east of Milan. He first became recognized as a painter of genius in 1602 when he completed a set of three paintings on the life of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Caravaggio had a ferocious temper and in 1606 he killed a man in a brawl and was banished from Rome. After a period of exile in Malta, Sicily and Naples, he negotiated a pardon. However, in Naples in 1609 he was violently assaulted by his enemies. He died in Porte Ercole as he tried to return to Rome. The portrait by Ottavio Leoni derives from the time when Caravaggio was in Rome at the height of his powers, though it was likely completed later.
Matteo Contarelli
The story begins with Matthieu Cointerel (1519-1585) a French Cardinal who provided support for the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, France’s national church in Rome:
Though construction had started in 1518, all building had been halted during the sack of Rome by mutinous German troops in 1527. The church exterior was not completed until 1589, two years after the death of its benefactor Cointreau. The austere Renaissance façade now contains statues (by Pierre de l’Estache, 18th Century) of the important saints and kings that came from France: Charlemagne and Saint Louis (lower level), Saint Clothilde and Saint Jeanne de Valois (upper level). The interior decoration, much of which was completed in the 18th Century, is far more extravagant than the exterior, tending to Rococo rather than Renaissance. The ceiling has a large fresco showing the apotheosis of Saint Louis by Charles-Joseph Natoire (18th Century).
Saint Matthew
As well as supporting the building, Matteo Contarelli (as he was known in Italy) also provided an endowment for one of the side chapels to be dedicated to his namesake Saint Matthew. Matthew is traditionally considered to be the author of the Gospel of Matthew although it is likely that this gospel was written by another person, perhaps a colleague or follower of the Saint (see discussion by Allison, 2004, pp 7-72).
The calling of Matthew (also known a Levi or Alpheus) to be a disciple is mentioned briefly in the three synoptic gospels, though only in the Gospel of Matthew (9: 9-13) is he named Matthew:
And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.
And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.
And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?
But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
Although this is the only mention of the saint in the Bible, many legends grew up over the years about his exploits after the life of Jesus. These stories were compiled in Volume 5 of The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine (1275). According to legend, Saint Matthew spread the gospel to the land of Ethiopia. While there he came upon two sorcerers who were using dragons to torment the people. By making the sign of the cross, Matthew tamed the dragons and defeated the sorcerers. He also raised from the dead the daughter (or son) of King Egippus. In return for this miracle, the king’s daughter Ephigenia became a nun. After Egippus died, his successor Hirtacus lusted after Ephigenia. Matthew refused to release her from her vows of chastity, and the infuriated king arranged for Matthew to be murdered.
In 1868, Andrea Orcagna (1308-1368) constructed a pilaster for the Church of the Orsanmichele in Florence with scenes from the life of Saint Matthew: on the left are the calling to discipleship, and the taming of the dragons: on the right are the raising of the king’s daughter and the martyrdom of the saint; in the center is the writing of the gospel.
In 1587, the executors of Contarelli’s will commissioned Giuseppi Cesari, Cavalier d’Arpino (1568-1640), to provide frescos for the walls and ceiling of the chapel. He painted the barrel vault of the chapel with a fresco showing Matthew raising the king’s daughter from her death bed. On the sides of the vault were two paintings showing anonymous prophets in the style of Michelangelo but without his genius:
Matthew and the Angel
Cesari completed the ceiling in 1593. Financial difficulties delayed his payment, and the Cavalier went on to other projects. In 1587, the executor had also commissioned a sculpture depicting the inspiration of Saint Matthew from Jacques Cobaert (1535–1615) for the altar. However, he experienced great difficulty finishing the sculpture (Hess, 1951). The figure of Matthew alone was finished in 1602, but the priests deemed it incomplete and refused to take it. After Cobaert’s death, Pompeo Ferrucci provided the angel to go with Matthew, and the strangely disjointed sculpture now resides in the Church of the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini:
In 1599, the financing of the Contarelli Chapel was taken over by the Fabbrica (works office) of Saint Peter’s (Graham-Dixon, 2010, p 192). Cesari was offered a contract to complete the chapel, but by then he was too busy. The contract was therefore given to Caravaggio, a protégé of the Cardinal del Monte. He agreed to complete the side panels by 1600. But he would paint using oil on canvas rather than in situ frescos. Caravaggio did not make preparatory drawings, but painted directly onto the canvas using models posed under carefully controlled lighting. He painted rapidly using a severe chiaroscuro style that came to be known as “tenebrism.”
The Calling of Saint Matthew
The first painting Caravaggio completed was The Calling of Saint Matthew (1600):
Caravaggio has transposed the event to his own time and place. On the left two people enter a darkened office. One of them has a faint halo: this is Jesus. In front on him, standing between the viewer and the savior is Saint Peter in a dull yellow cloak. From what may be an open window bright light streams diagonally into the office illuminating the faces of a group of five people at a table. There is some ambiguity about who is who (Dubouclez, 2024): I shall follow the interpretation of Graham-Dixon (2010, pp 194-197). The central person with a distinguished beard and a luxurious red and yellow doublet is Matthew Levi, a prosperous tax collector. Counting the money on the table is a rueful taxpayer. Looking over his shoulder through spectacles is an elderly man who appears to be checking the calculations. At Matthew’s left shoulder is a young page with a feathered cap and a golden doublet. At the corner of the table with his back to the viewer, dressed elegantly in black and white and wearing a sword, is Matthew’s bodyguard (or bravo). There is a space at the table: the viewer can imagine himself or herself sitting there.
The group at the table is reminiscent of an earlier painting of Caravaggio: The Cardsharps (1597). Paying taxes always seems like being cheated. Both paintings display Caravaggio’s mastery of the feathers and fashions of the day.
The difference is the right hand of Jesus. Jesus points to Matthew and says simply, “Follow me.” In the shadows, he holds out his left hand as though beckoning the viewer to join him as well. After his Matthew paintings, Caravaggio seldom returned to the genre subjects of his youth. It was as if he also felt called to a more meaningful life.
If one look carefully at the feet in the shadows on the lower right, we can see that Jesus is turning to leave the office of the tax-collector (Puttfarken, 1998, p 170). He already knows that Matthew will come after him. Matthew appears uncertain about what to do. But if we look at his legs beneath the table, we note that he is already turning toward Jesus:
Matthew, in his wine-dark velvet hat, points to his own chest as if to say “Who, me?,” but underneath the table where they sit his legs have already answered the call long before the message has reached his brain. We can see Matthew’s legs because Caravaggio has omitted one leg of the table. In the real world, it would crash to the ground. In the world Caravaggio has created, we barely notice: we are too absorbed in the dilemma of an ordinary man whose mind lags behind his heart. (Rowland, 2024, pp 3-4)
The following illustration shows on the left the legs of Matthew (and the absent table leg), on the upper right the hands of Jesus and on the lower right the feet of Peter and Jesus:
Jesus’ right hand is copied from Michelangelo:
The shrouded gesture of Christ, the most noteworthy single motif in Caravaggio’s picture, is a studied quotation from Michelangelo’s most famous image, the Creation of Adam on the Sistine ceiling. Christ’s oddly limp right hand, seen as if stopped by the camera, mirrors that of Michelangelo’s inert Adam, who is about to be invested with life by God. Christ is the New Adam, and “as in Adam all men die, so in Christ all will be brought to life” (I Corinthians 15:22). Caravaggio was no Michelangelo, yet we may see here a kind of identification, perhaps the first that Michelangelo Merisi made with his great predecessor and namesake. (Hibberd, 1983, pp 97-99).
The following illustration shows Michelangelo’s 1511 painting with an expanded view of the hands of God and Adam, and Caravaggio’s hand of Jesus, the mirror image of the hand of Adam:
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
The contract for the painting was very specific:
a long wide space in the form of a temple, with an altar raised up on the top of three, four, or five steps: where St Matthew dressed in vestments to celebrate the mass is killed by the hands of soldiers and it might be more artistic to show the moment of being killed, where he is wounded and already fallen, or falling but not yet dead, while in the temple there are many men, women, young and old people, and children, mostly in different attitudes of prayer, and dressed according to their station and nobility, and benches, carpets, and other furnishings, most of them terrified by the event, others appalled, and still others filled with compassion (quoted in Graham-Dixon, 2010, p 194)
Caravaggio had no previous experience with painting more than three or four people together. He experienced great difficulty with the Martyrdom. Radiographic studies revealed pentimenti with a design completely different from the final painting. It is likely that Caravaggio had begun The Martyrdom before The Calling of Saint Matthew, given up and then returned to it after the latter was completed.
In his original effort, Caravaggio took pains to depict the altar and the temple, and outlined three assassins. The focus of the picture was a helmeted assassin with his back to the viewer. Saint Matthew is shown falling under the blows of his executioners. Caravaggio realized that this design was not working. Saint Matthew’s death was not at the center; everything was far too crowded; the central assassin was faceless.
He decided to start over. He opened up the center of the painting to show the dying Saint Matthew who has fallen to the ground. Members of the congregation turn away from the horror of his murder. Some are without clothes – probably about to be baptized. The artist himself is portrayed in the background watching the martyrdom with a combination of terror and pity. An angel reaches out to the saint to give him a palm branch, symbol of salvation and eternal life. There is now only one assassin and he faces the viewer. He is almost naked. He exudes rage.
The following illustration shows the pentimenti of the earlier versions of the painting (Camiz, 1990; Olson, 2002; Vodret-Adamo, 2011, p 73). There were several aborted attempts to portray the architecture of the temple. Caravaggio soon realized that he was not interested in architecture: most of his later paintings use a background of either dark shadows or bare walls.
The figure on the right of the altar boy recoiling from the murder of the saint derives from Titian’s 1529 painting of The Assassination of Saint Peter of Verona, which Caravaggio has likely seen in the form of a 1560 etching by Martino Rota:
The imposing body of the assassin is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Adam in The Creation of Adam (1511) in the Sistine Chapel (Clayton website).
The head of Caravaggio and the head of the assassin look down in parallel on the dying saint, one in the shadows with pity and one in the light with anger:
The Inspiration of Saint Matthew
In 1602, after Contarelli’s executors had refused Cobaert’s incomplete sculpture of Saint Matthew and the Angel, they asked Caravaggio to produce a painted version for the altar (Graham-Dixon, 2010, pp 234-237). Caravaggio’s first version of TheInspiration of Saint Matthew portrayed the saint as an old man who appears not to comprehend what is going on as a youthful angel guides his hand. The writing on the tablet shows the Hebrew version of the opening two verses of Matthew’s gospel (Lavin, 1974).
The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Abraham begat …
Lavin (p 64) notes that this represents the transition between Old and New Testaments:
The lineage of salvation has been announced, the founding father has been named and his seed is being sown. The light of a new age has dawned.
The Hebrew gospel is an intriguing idea. Saint Matthew was certainly Jewish and, if he was the author of the gospel that bears his name, he would probably have written it in Hebrew. However, as far as we know, the original version was in Greek, perhaps compiled by a follower of Matthew rather than by Matthew himself.
The following shows a black-and-white photograph of the painting, which was destroyed by fire in Berlin in 1945, together with an enlargement of the saint’s writing and the Hebrew text (from Lavin, 1974).
Jesus chose his disciples from ordinary people and Caravaggio wanted to show Matthew as a “simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation” (Graham Dixon, 2010, p 236):
Perhaps the most touching aspect of the painting is the intimacy of the relationship between the stooped saint and the tender young angel, whose wings enfold the whole scene in a hushed embrace. The angel is God’s messenger but also the embodiment of Christian love – a love so generous that it encompasses even those as ragged and gnarled as the cross-legged, doltish St Matthew.
The most striking aspect of Caravaggio’s Matthew is his humility. Thomas (1985) quotes from a description of Matthew by Lazius (1555):
Even though he was most learned, yet he was not at all exalted, but in accord with the meaning of his name, truly strove to present himself as humble and lowly. He would always remark that, “to whatever degree you are great, so much more be you humble in all things.” And this to the wise man: “disgrace follows the proud, but exaltation follows the humble” . . . as a pauper himself he followed Christ the pauper.
The name Matthew in Hebrew means “gift of God” (Matityahu). The gospel was not created by him but given from God.
However, the priests were dismayed by the portrayal of Matthew as a holy fool rather than an inspired saint, and refused the painting. One of Caravaggio’s patrons was happy to take the rejected canvas. He was also able to convince the priests as San Luigi dei Francesi to allow Caravaggio to create another version. In the second version, the saint was far more distinguished, albeit still barefoot:
Matthew the shockingly illiterate peasant has suddenly been turned into Matthew the dignified, grey-haired sage. This scholar-saint kneels at his desk, quill pen at the ready. He is draped in red robes and has been equipped with an expression of dignified attentiveness. Rather than guiding his uncertain hand, the angel now counts off the verses as he dictates them. The pages of the book are no longer visible, but since the angel has got to the index finger of his left hand — number two, in the gestural rhetoric of the time, since Italians counted the number one with their thumbs —it seems that he has once more got to the start of the second verse, and Abraham’s begetting of Christ’s lineage. (Graham-Dixon, 2010, p 237).
Lavin (1974) compares Caravaggio’s two versions:
In the first version the divine word was conveyed mechanically through a laborious and earthbound process of physical instruction to a humble proletarian whose chief virtue lay in his knowledge of his own ignorance. In the second version it is conveyed miraculously to a stunned intellectual through a heaven-sent process of strictly rational analysis and exposition. Again, the key to the irony lies in the divine mystery itself, which brings truth to him who is wise, be he ignorant or learned.
The background is almost completely dark. The figures spiral around each other: divine forces binding the saint to the angel. The saint’s robe is pulled down by gravity; the angel’s robe billows upward toward heaven.
The table at which Matthew is writing is askew, and the bench upon which he kneels threatens to tumble out of the picture frame. This feeling of imminent upset fits with the revolutionary message of the gospel.
Lavin (1974) points out how Caravaggio was indebted to Tintoretto’s The Virgin Appearing to Saint Jerome (1583) which Caravaggio has probably seen in a 1588 etching by Agostino Carracci. And Caravaggio’s painting in its turn inspired Guido Reni’s 1635 depiction of Saint Jerome. The illustration shows the earlier etching on the left and later painting on the right:
However, no one – before or after – could ever rival Caravaggio’s airborne angels. Young and sensuous. they float lightly in the clouds as erotic representatives of the divine. The following illustration compares the angels in the Inspiration and the in the Martyrdom.
Farewell
Caravaggio’s paintings for the Contarelli Chapel made him famous. They also represented a turning point in his choice of subject matter. From then on, he concentrated on religious themes. It was almost as though, like Matthew, he had been called to greater things. To see the chapel and the paintings is a deeply moving experience. But hard to describe, just as the chapel is notoriously difficult to photograph. We say farewell with a photograph by Robert Wash.
And the ending to a poem about The Calling of Saint Matthew by Karen Fish (2021, p 29)
Only a few ways to describe what actually happened—Matthew touches his chest, indicating a confusion with this unlikely enlistment. His companions slouch, dumbfounded amid the flush and feathers and swords. There is the humble disbelief all who are chosen share—that moment when the world seems just a pile of hammers, hatchets, buckets of coins—one thinks plainly how unlikely, absolved from all that is ordinary.
References
Allison, D. C. (2004). Matthew: a shorter commentary. T & T Clark International.
Camiz, F. T. (1990). Death and Rebirth in Caravaggio’s “Martyrdom of St. Matthew.” Artibus et Historiae, 11(22), 89–105.
Dubouclez, O. (2024). Le jeu de l’indécision. « Littéralisme » et ambivalence dans La Vocation de saint Matthieu du Caravage. Dix-septième siècle, 302(1), 5–28.
Fish, K. (2021). No chronology. University of Chicago Press.
Graham-Dixon, A. (2010). Caravaggio: a life sacred and profane. Allen Lane.
Hess, J. (1951). The chronology of the Contarelli Chapel. Burlington Magazine, 93(579), 186–201.
Hibbard, H. (1983). Caravaggio. Harper & Row.
Lavin, I. (1974). Divine inspiration in Caravaggio’s two St. Matthews. Art Bulletin, 56(1), 59–81.
Puttfarken, T. (1998). Caravaggio’s “Story of St Matthew”: a challenge to the conventions of painting. Art History, 21(2), 163–181.
Rowland, I. D. (2024). The lies of the artists: essays on Italian art, 1450-1750. MIT Press.
Thomas, T. (1985). Expressive aspects of Caravaggio’s first Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Art Bulletin, 67(4), 636–652.
Vodret Adamo, R., Cardinali, M., De Ruggieri, M. B., & Leone, G. (2011). Caravaggio: la Cappella Contarelli: Roma, Palazzo Venezia, 10 marzo-15 ottobre. Munus.
Bai Juyi (白居易, pinyin Bǎi Jūyì, or Po Chü-i in Wade-Gilles transliteration, 772-846 CE) was a Chinese poet. In 815, after inappropriately advising the emperor, he was exiled from the capital Chang’an to JiuJiang on the Yangtze River. One night, at a farewell party on the river for a friend, he heard a musician playing the pipa. Entranced by her music, he found out that she had once been a sought-after courtesan in the capital. After her beauty had faded away, she had retired to the provinces, where she played her music and lamented her lost youth. Moved by her plight, Bai Juyi composed his Pipa Xing (琵琶行, “Ballad of the Pipa”). The illustration shows a drawing of the poet and the pipa player from a scroll by Guo Xu (1456–1532).
Life of the Poet
Bai Juyi was born in Northern China and came to the capital Chang’an to pass his examinations for the civil service in 800. There he became close friends with the novelist and poet Yuan Zhen (779-831) (Tan, 2025). He soon became a prolific and popular poet, with the courtesy name Lètiān (樂天, happiness of heaven: optimism) (Waley, 1949). Bai Juyi and his predecessors, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu, are considered the four great poets of the Tang Dynasty (Geng, 2021). He became renowned in Japan where he was known as Haku Rakuten from the Japanese transliteration of his courtesy name (白楽天). In 815, the prime minister Wu Yuanheng was brutally assassinated because he would not agree to the demands of some rebellious warlords. Bai Juyi wrote a memorial calling upon the emperor to seek out and punish the assassins. However, the politics were complicated. Bai Juyi was considered presumptuous – it was not for him, a tutor in the imperial household, to advise the emperor. He was exiled and demoted to a minor position (“master of the horse”, essentially an adjutant) in Jiujiang, then known as Jiangzhou (Waley, 1949, pp 101-104). While there, he heard the playing of a pipa near the river and wrote his famous poem The Ballad of the Pipa. Bai Juyi was allowed to return to Chang’an in 1819. He then served for periods of time as governor of Hangzhou and governor of Suzhou. Bai Juyi was a devoted Chan Buddhist and when he grew old, he retired to a Buddhist monastery near the Longmen caves famous for their colossal statues of Buddha (carved in 672 and 676). At the monastery he was able to compile a full collection of his poems before his death.
The following illustration shows in the upper left a statue of Bai Juyi at the Pipa Pavilion in Jiujiang, in the upper right a posthumous portrait of the poet by Chen Hongshou, a 17th Century painter, and at the bottom a view of the Longmen caves.
Translating the Ballad of the Pipa
The poem is written in rhyming couplets with 88 lines each of 7 characters for a total 616 characters. It is preceded by a preface of 138 characters. The following is the poem in elegant regular-script calligraphy by Guo Dingjing (17th Century CE), now in the Princeton University Art Museum:
The Chinese text of the poem is readily available, as is an early English translation by Witter Bynner in his book The Jade Mountain (1929). Several other English translations have been published: Fuller, 2018, pp 283-289; Giles, 1888, pp 157-160; Harris, 2009, pp 21-26; Watson, 1984, pp 249–252; Xu et al, 1987, pp 292-296: Xu, 1994, pp 18-121; Yip, 2004, pp 288-297. Other translations are available on the internet: Phil Multic and Gan Siowck Lee.
The poem is difficult to translate since its sound patterns are as important as its meaning (Peng, 2023; Yu & Chang, 2024). This post will provide some sense of the Chinese sound patterns of Bai Juyi’s poem with recitations by Pu Cunxin and accompanying pipa by Wu Yuxia, taken from a production by China Global Television Network. After Giles’ s initial prose version, most English translations have use blank verse and made some attempt to imitate the sounds of the original. The translation of Xu Yuanzhong (1987, 1994) uses rhyming hexameter couplets. The translations in red accompanying the character-by-character transcriptions in this post are mine; they are heavily indebted to the other available translations.
The Setting
Bai Juyi provides his poem with a preface that sets the time and the place. During his banishment to JiuJiang, while saying farewell to a visitor one evening on the banks of the Yangtze, he hears the music of a pipa. He finds out that the player had once been a famous musician and courtesan at the court in Chang’an. However, as she had grown old, her beauty had faded, and she had retired unhappily to the provinces. Bai Juyi is struck by the similarity of his fate to hers, and mourns their mutual fall from grace:
Moved by her story, he writes a long poem about the pipa player on the river far from Chang’an
Jiujiang, which had once been known as Jiangzhou, is a city on the Yangtze River. The region of the river near Jiujiang was sometimes known as the Xunyang River. The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world, is about 1.5 km wide at Jiujiang. Lake Pongyi, which was once called Pengli Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, drains into the Yangtze at the eastern edge of the city:
Bai Juyi is throwing a farewell party for his departing friend on a small pleasure boat on the river. As shown in the following illustration from Hangzhou in eastern China, these small rowboats still provide spaces for celebrations on the waters. In Jiujiang it is autumn: the maple leaves have turned scarlet, and the plumes of the silver grass have reached their peak.
The following illustration shows a scroll with calligraphy of Pipa Xing by Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) at the National Palace Museum, Taipei. At the top is the painting at the beginning of the scroll. In the middle is an enlargement of the boat with the poet and his guest listening to the pipa player. At the bottom is the beginning of the calligraphy in semi-cursive (or running) script. The first line (on the left) has the title:
Beginning of the Ballad
The initial lines of the ballad describe the autumn leaves and the silver grass. The farewell party begins but there is no music:
The opening scene of the poem was portrayed in a silk-painting (34 x 41 cm) in an album by Qiu Ying (1494-1552) now at the Palace Museum in Beijing:
The Pipa
As the party laments the absence of music, the sound of a pipa is heard across the water from another boat. The partygoers are completely entranced. They call out and ask the musician to play for them. She agrees but holds the pipa up to hide her face.
The pipa is a Chinese plucked string instrument very similar to the European lute (Wong, 2011). Both instruments have their origin in the Middle East. The pipa came to China via the Silk Roads during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). The instrument typically has 4 strings though some old pipas have 5. Though early pitas have as few as 4 frets, modern pitas can have up to 30. Though occasionally round, the body of the pipa is usually pear-shaped. Traditionally the pipa was played for small intimate groups, but in modern times electronic amplification has allowed pipa virtuosos to play for larger audiences. The following illustration shows some ancient pitas and a photograph of Liu Dehai (1937-2020), one the greatest pipa players of recent times.
The following is a performance of “Xunyang Moonlit Night” (浔阳月夜, Xúnyáng yuè yè) by Liu Dehai.
The Music
The poem then provides a bravura description of the music of the pipa:
These are some of the most famous lines of poetry in China. They have been variously translated. The following version by Xu Yuan-Zhong (1984; 1987) uses the same rhyme scheme as the Chinese poem:
The thick strings loudly thrummed like the pattering rain The fine strings softly tinkled in murmuring strain. When mingling loud and soft notes were together played, ’Twas like large and small pearls dropping on plate of jade.
Witter Bynner (1929) uses blank verse in his translation:
The large strings hummed like rain, The small strings whispered like a secret, Hummed, whispered—and then were intermingled Like a pouring of large and small pearls into a plate of jade.
And the following translation is by Isabel Wong (2011), a musician rather than a poet:
The lowest string hummed like pouring rain; The higher strings whispered as lover’s pillow talk. Humming and whispering intermingled I,ikc the sound of big and small pearls gradually falling into a jade plate.
The architects of the Oriental Pearl Tower (1994) in Shanghai based their design on Bai Juyi’s image of pearls falling onto jade:
Following the music of the pearls, the pipa provides the quiet song of an oriole, and then like a freezing brook the music slows to a stop:
After a brief pause the pipa plays a wild crescendo that sounds like the charge of armored warriors, and then suddenly the player stops.
The Life of the Pipa Player
During the ensuing silence, the pipa player tells her story. She was once a highly acclaimed musician in Chang’an. Her beauty and her talent were the toast of the court.
This description of the life of a successful musician and courtesan in Chang’an has been translated in many ways. One version is especially vivid. In 1917, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) published Three Cantos in Poetry Magazine, and again in the American edition of his book Lustra. This was the beginning of a set of Cantos that ultimately numbered 109. These initial three cantos – often called the Ur-Cantos – were extensively revised when Pound published A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925. Much of the original Canto II is no longer evident in the new sequence. The general theme of Ur-Canto II was the “poetics of loss” (Carr, 2018). Pound describes the ruins of the ducal palace in Mantua, and mourns the loss of most of the music of the troubadours. And then he provides a brief description of the setting of Bai Juyi’s poem and the words of pipa player:
Yin-yo laps in the reeds, my guest departs, The maple leaves blot up their shadows, The sky is full of autumn, We drink our parting in saki. Out of the night comes troubling lute music, And we cry out, asking the singer’s name, And get this answer: “Many a one Brought me rich presents; my hair was full of jade, And my slashed skirts, drenched in expensive dyes, Were dipped in crimson, sprinkled with rare wines. I was well taught my arts at Ga-ma-rio, And then one year I faded out and married.” The lute-bowl hid her face. We heard her weeping.
It was not until much later that Pound’s allusion to Bai Juyi was recognized (e.g. in Weinberger, 2007, p 128; discussed on the Pound Cantos Project website)
Pound had no knowledge of the Chinese language. In his book Cathay (1915), he “translated” a set of 15 Chinese poems based on the notes of Ernest Fenollosa who had studied Chinese poetry with the Japanese professors Mori and Ariga. Despite his lack of training in Chinese, Pound intuitively grasped the essence of the poems (see discussion by Yip, 1969). The brief excerpt from Ur-Canto II is typical of his translations. The meaning is clear though the words are not the same as in the original.
In Pound’s poem, Yin-yo is the Japanese transliteration of Chinese characters for the Xunyang River (Romaji, Jinyō-kō), and Gamaryo is the Japanese version of 蟆陵, which literally translated is “Toad Hill” (Fuller, 2017, p 286). This is the region in Chang’an city near the burial site of the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE). In Bai Juyi’s poem, the pipa player says that this is where she grew up (and learned how to play the pipa).
To return to the poem: The pipa player’s high life did not last forever. Her brother went off to the army, her mother died, her looks faded, and she was no longer as sought after as before. She married a tea-merchant and came to live in Jiangzhou. Her husband is usually away on business. Alone on her boat she plays the pipa and remembers happier days.
Listening to her story Bai Juyi feels an intense sympathy: he too has fallen from grace and now lives alone far away from the capital. The musician plays a final intense song:
We do not know the music that Bai Juyi found so moving. The following is a piece entitled Night Thoughts composed and played by Wu Man (1963- ), who studied with Liu Dehai.
Wu Man’s composition derives from a famous poem by Li Bai, who spent much of his later life in exile from the capital. The following translation is by Xu Yuan-Zhong (1984, p 125).
靜夜思A Tranquil Night
床前明月光 Before my bed a pool of light 疑是地上霜 Is it hoarfrost upon the ground 舉頭望明月 Eyes raised I see the moon so bright 低頭思故鄉 Head bent in homesickness I’m drowned
The Life of the Poem
Bai Juyi’s poem was popular among calligraphers and artists. The following is a scroll by Wen Boren (1502-1575) now in the Cleveland Museum.
And the next illustration is a painting by Lu Zhi (1495-1576), from a calligraphy scroll now in the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution. The boats near the lower shore are as lost as the poet and the pipa player:
And the following is an illustration by Hua Zhangyi from a retelling of Bai Juyi’s poem (Liu Yang, & Hua Zhangyi, 2024) for children: the poet dedicates his poem to the pipa player.
Peng, Y. (2023). A comparative study on two English translations of Song of a Pipa Player from the perspective of translation aesthetics. Frontiers in Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(4), 36-40.
Tan, M. A. (2025). Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen. In Z. Zhang & V. H. Mair (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature (pp. 151–161). Routledge.
Waley, A. (1949, reprinted 2005). The Life and Times of Po Chu-i. Routledge.
Watson, B. (1984) The Columbia book of Chinese poetry: from early times to the thirteenth century. Columbia University Press.
Weinberger, E. (Ed.). (2007). The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Carcanet.
Wong, I. (2011). The Music of China. In Capwell, C., Nettl, B., Bolman, P., Dueck, B., Rommen, T., Wong, I., & Turino, T. (Eds.). Excursions in World Music, 6th Edition. (pp 88-131). Taylor & Francis
Xu, Y., Loh, B., & Wu, J. (1987). 300 Tang poems: a new translation. The Commercial Press.
Xu Yuan Zhong (1994). Songs of the immortals: an anthology of classical Chinese poetry. Penguin Books in association with New World Press.
Yip, W. (1969). Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Princeton University Press.
Yip, W. (2004). Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. (2nd ed., Revised). Duke University Press.
Yu, Y., & Chang, C. (2024). Text complexity and translation styles from the perspective of individuation: a case study of the English translations of Pipa Xing. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 159.
Silk Roads: Paths for the Faithful
The Silk Roads were overland routes connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed the trading of silk, paper, gold, jewels, horses, and other goods. These began during the 2nd Century BCE at the time of the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Dynasty in the East. The Silk Roads remained active until the 15th Century CE, when they were largely replaced by maritime trading routes. At present they are mainly used for archeological research and tourism. The illustration shows a modern camel caravan in the desert near Dunhuang. As well as trade goods, the Silk Roads facilitated the movement of religious ideas. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and Islam followed the Silk Roads into China. Mithraism, Manichaeism and Islam spread into Europe.
Central Asia
A map of the present political boundaries in central Asia will allow us to get our bearings:
The following map shows the topography of the region and traces one of the many possible Silk Roads from Chang’an (Xi’an) in China to Tyre on the Mediterranean.
The following diagram, modified from Wood (2002), shows the changes in altitude (in meters above sea level) over the journey. It also notes the main mountains that are traversed, the deserts that are crossed and the main rivers on the way.
The Silk Roads spanned some 8000 km and were active for about 1700 years. They are described in multiple recent books (Frankopan, 2016; Hansen, 2017; Millward, 2013, Torr, 2018, Whitfield, 2024; Wood 2002). A striking TV series from Japan can be downloaded from archive.org. The following two maps by Simeon Netchev show the Silk Roads at two different points in time: the first map when trade began between the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty in the 1st Century BCE, and the second map when the Silk Roads were at their height during the late 8th Century CE with the Tang Dynasty in China and the Abbasid Caliphate in the West. The first map also shows the maritime routes connecting China, India and Europe, and the monsoon winds that facilitate them. These sea connections are sometimes considered the “Golden Road” (Dalrymple, 2025, pp 4-5).
The Mongol Empires (1206-1368) supported trade along the Silk Roads. However, in the 14th Century CE the Mongol Empires fragmented, and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) blocked overland connections between the Silk Roads and Europe. Trade between China and Europe continued using the maritime routes. Vasco da Gama made his first voyage from Portugal to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. The overland Silk Roads soon became used only for local trade, and desert sands reclaimed many of the ancient trading posts (Beckwith, 2009, pp 232-262; Torr, 2018, pp 105-126).
Many different empires established themselves for periods of time in central Asia (Beckwith, 2009). The following diagram, modified from Waugh (2009), shows some of the most important. Though having its capital in the east, the Mongol Empire (1206-1368 CE) extended all the way to Europe.
The Library at Dunhuang
Since it will play a role in much of what will be said about the movement of religions along the Silk Roads, we shall briefly mention the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang (墩, dūn, tumulus/mound + 煌,huáng, shining/brilliant). Dunhuang, located on an oasis containing Crescent Lake and is surrounded by sand dunes, was an important stop on the Silk Road from the time of its beginning in the 2nd Century BCE (Hansen, 2017, pp 288-335). Nearby is the Jade Gate – an opening in the Great Wall of China that allows entrance to the Hexi Corridor connecting the cities of Chang’an and Luoyang to the deserts of Xinjiang in Western China.
Buddhist monks first arrived in Dunhuang in the early centuries of the common era. In the 4th Century CE, they began carving caves into of the sandstone cliffs 25 km southeast of the city. These Mogao Caves – “Caves of a Thousand Buddhas” – are a system of about 500 separate temples decorated with wall paintings and sculptures and connected by intricate stairs and platforms. By the 9th Century, the monk Hong Bian had made the Three Realms Monastery near the caves into an important center of learning. When he died, his statue was placed in Cave 17. On the wall behind him were painted two banyan trees with a water bottle and a cloth bag hanging on the branches. Under one tree an acolyte holds a fan; under the other, a disciple holds the monk’s staff.
In 1002 CE the Karakhanids spread into the Taklamakan Desert and destroyed the Buddhist City of Khotan (Sinor, 1990). Though they had once followed both Buddhism and Christianity, the Karakhanids had converted to Islam in 934 CE and considered all other faiths as infidels. Fearful that Dunhuang might also be destroyed, the monks put all their treasured manuscripts and paintings in Cave 17 with the statue of Hong Bian, and sealed the cave off from the outside world (Rong, 1999).
In 1900, while sweeping sand from the temple floor of Cave 17, a Daoist monk, a custodian for the caves, realized that the rear wall was false and discovered that the sealed-off chamber contained piles of ancient manuscripts. In sum there were about 50,000 manuscripts and other objects in the cave, which became known as the “Library Cave.” In 1907 the newly discovered treasure trove was examined by the explorer Aurel Stein, who purchased many of the manuscripts for the British Museum (Morgan & Walters, 2012). Paul Pelliot visited in 1908 and bought a set of manuscripts for the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The following illustration shows on the left the entrance to the Mogao Caves. Most of the building is from the 20th Century. On the upper right is the statue of Hong Bian in the Library Cave. On the lower right is an impression of what the cave must have looked like in 1900.
Most of the manuscripts found at Mogao concerned Buddhism and were written in Chinese. However, some of the manuscripts related to other religions such as Manichaeism, Christianity, Judaism and Daoism. Many ancient languages other than Chinese were also represented: Sanskrit, Tibetan, Sogdian, Hebrew, and Old Uyghur.
Judaism
One of the manuscripts from the Library Cave is a Hebrew prayer for forgiveness (selihah). At one time it was folded up, perhaps so that it could be carried easily in a small container as an amulet to ward off evil. The text does not directly quote scripture but is very biblical in its wording. The following illustration shows the complete manuscript on the upper left. The photograph has been lightened to facilitate reading. On the upper right is an enlargement of the first 4 lines together with a transcription (Koller, 2024). The English translation of these 4 lines is below together with a quotation form the book of Numbers showing a similar style.
The manuscript is dated to around 800 CE. This and a few other Hebrew manuscripts from other stations on the Silk Road suggest that Jewish merchants were involved in the trade between China and the West. There may therefore have been Jews in China during the Tang dynasty or even earlier. A group of Jews in Kaifeng in central China petitioned the emperor to build a synagogue in 1163 CE (Berg, 2024). Their ancestors may have originally travelled to China over the Silk Roads. Their descendants still live today in China.
Zoroastrians
The religion of Zoroastrianism was established toward the end of the second Millenium BCE, and became the state religion of the main Persian Empires: the Achaemenid (559-331 BCE), Parthian (559 BCE – 331 BCE) and Sasanian (224–651 CE). Zoroastrian priests were generally called magi.
(i) Biblical Magi
The Gospel of Matthew relates how three magi (translated as “wise men”) came from the East to visit the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem.
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,
Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. (Matthew 2: 1-2)
These wise men may have been Zoroastrian priests from Persia. If so, they would have travelled along the Silk Roads. The illustration below shows a mosaic representation of the magi from the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuove in Ravenna (565 CE). The magi are shown in typical Persian clothing: flowing capes and Phrygian caps.
(ii) Mithraism
Mithraism was a Roman Mystery Cult focused on the God Mithras, one of the many Gods (yazata) worshipped in Zoroastrianism. The cult involved secret meetings in underground temples called Mithraea, archeological evidence for which has been found throughout the Roman Empire:
Mithraism was active from about 50 CE to about 300 CE. In the 4th Century CE Christianity was mandated as the sole state religion in the Roman Empire (Edict of Thessalonica, 380 CE). Thereafter Mithraism essentially vanished.
The Mithraeum was set up for a communal feast for the initiates, who were almost always men and mainly soldiers. One essential part of the temple was a fresco or sculpture of Mithras slaying a bull – the “tauroctony.” No one really understands what this sacrifice means. It might have something to do with redemption and salvation, much like the crucifix in a Christian church.
The iconography was stable across its many different locations. In the center, the God Mithras slays the bull. Above are representations of the sun and the moon, and below the bull is attacked by a crab, a snake and a dog. The following illustration shows a tauroctony from the 2nd Century CE unearthed from the Villa Borghese in Rome:
The cult was originally believed to have been imported into the Roman Empire by soldiers who had fought in the Parthian wars, a series of conflicts occurring from 54 BCE to 217 CE, and who had thereby been exposed to the Gods of Zoroastrianism. However, there are relatively few Mithraea in the Eastern reaches of the Empire. And there is no evidence that the worship of Mithra in Persia involved any of the apparent rituals that occurred in the Roman Mithraea. Some have therefore suggested that the cult was a Roman invention (e.g. Stoll, 2022). Indeed, some of the earliest Mithraea are concentrated near the city of Rome (Chalupa, 2016), Nevertheless, the cult was devoted to one of the Zoroastrian gods, and most of the early descriptions of the cult acknowledged its Persian origins (Boyce et al, 1991, pp 468-490).
One possibility is that Roman Mithraism allowed its cult members to embrace an “otherness” and make themselves distinct from their fellows:
the imagery of Mithras dressed in the Persian garment and soft shoes with Phrygian cap on top of his curly hair alluded to the Greek topoi of Persians who were Rome’s ‘exotic other’ and ‘fiercest foe’. Such an iconography enabled the Roman Mithraists to depict their god as a foreign deity and to identify themselves as those Roman elites who had the knowledge of worshiping the foreign god. The Oriental imagery of Mithras created a boundary for Mithraic brotherhood and distinguished the cultic community from other forms of religiosity and religious groups in the wider cultural and religious boundaries of Rome. Whatever its origin, the Roman mystery cult of Mithras strongly relied on Roman attitudes and romantic visions of Persia and the Parthians in particular. (Mahzjoo, 2024).
(iii)Sogdians
At the time when trading was at its height, the main middlemen on the Silk Roads were Sogdian merchants (Pin Lyu, 2024). Sogdia was the name for the area of land between the Amu Darya (or Oxus) and the Sri Darya Rivers. Its capital was Samarkand. The following map shows the location of Sogdia in Central Asia. The black lines show several of the Silk Roads:
The Sogdians were descendants of the ancient Scythians. At the time of the Achaemenid Empire, when they were known as Saka, they paid tribute to the Persian Emperor in the form of camels and horses.
During the time of the Sasanian Empire, Sogdia was at the eastern limits of the empire and practiced Zoroastrianism (Grenet, 2015). When the empire was invaded by the Muslims, these frontier regions were able to maintain their religious practices for several centuries.
During the Abbasid Caliphate the Sogdians traded extensively with the Chinese and established large merchant colonies in cities of northern China.
The following illustration shows on the left two bas-relief representations of Saka bringing camels and horses to the Emperor at Persepolis (6th-5th Century BCE). On the right is a Tang dynasty porcelain statuette showing a group of Sogdian musicians on a camel. This was found in Xi’an and dates to 723 CE.
Zoroastrian funerary practices mandated that the corpse should not be allowed to pollute either the air or the land. Neither cremation nor burial was possible. Zoroastrians typically laid the corpse out on a stone bed and allowed vultures to strip the flesh from the bones. In China, Zoroastrians compromised by constructing closed tombs within which the deceased was laid out on a funerary couch and allowed to decay above ground. If the deceased was a rich merchant, this funerary bed could be quite ornate. The following illustration shows on the left a carving from a 6th Century Zoroastrian funerary couch in Northern China, now in the Miho Museum in Japan. The upper half of the carving shows a Zoroastrian priest caring for the sacred fire during the funeral service for the deceased. He is recognized by the face mask that prevents him from contaminating the fire with his mortal breath. The mourners are behind the priest. A camel is recognized to the right of the sacred fire, and several pack horses are seen below. The upper right of the illustration shows how the complete funerary couch was set up.
The lower right shows a small ceramic statuette of a Zoroastrian priest with a face mask. Although he is sometimes considered a camel driver, he is more likely a priest tending to the sacred fire. The face mask is just too typical. The statuette was found in northern China and dates to the 8th Century CE.
Buddhism
Gautama Buddha lived in the northeastern region of India in the 6th or 5th Century BCE. After his death his followers taught the new dharma throughout the Indian subcontinent. The Mauryan Empire (320 BCE–185 BCE) expanded to incorporate Greco-Persian lands in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. Ashoka (304–232 BCE), the third Mauryan Emperor, promoted Buddhist thought throughout his domain.
(i) Gandhara
Few representations of the Buddha occur form the first centuries of the new religion. Since the teaching proclaimed that the everyday world was transient and misleading, artistic representations may have been considered unworthy. This changed when the faithful encountered artists of the Greco-Persian world in a region of northwest India called Gandhara. Realistic sculptures of the Buddha and his disciples proliferated. The following illustrations shows sculpture of the Buddha made in the Gandhara from the 1st, 2nd and 5th Centuries CE:
(ii) Colossal Buddhas
As their religion spread along the Silk Roads, Buddhist monks began to carve statues of the Buddha out of the sandstone cliffs along the route. Some of these assumed colossal sizes (Wong, 2019). The earliest large Buddhas, up to 15 m tall, were carved at the Yungang Grottoes near Datong in Northern China beginning in 465 CE. Colossal seated Buddhas, 33 and 23 m tall, were carved in the Mogao caves near Dunhuang in the 7th and 8th Centuries CE.
And around 600 CE, in Bamiyan, located in present-day Afghanistan, 130 km northwest of Kabul, two huge standing Buddhas were carved, one 38 m and the other 55 m tall. Since details such as the folds in the robe and the facial features could not be carved in the sandstone, these were added to the rough-hewn statues using stucco. The arms were constructed using stucco on wooden armatures. Over the years much of the stucco work eroded away leaving the large ungainly limestone forms.
The people in the area when the statues were carved were Hephthalites. These people followed several different religions (Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Manichaeism) and tolerated the work of the Buddhist monks.
In 2001 the Taliban enforced a Muslim edict forbidding artistic representations of human beings. The two Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed.
The following illustration shows at the top a panorama of the Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley before their destruction. The lower left of the illustration shows a close-up of the larger of the two Buddhas. The lower right compares before and after its destruction.
(iii) Avalokistesvara
Avalokistesvara was the bodhisattva of compassion. His name in Sanskrit means “he who looks down,” i.e. he who considers the concerns of the faithful. As Avalokitesvara travelled along the Silk Roads to China he slowly changed gender from male to female (Stein, 1986; Suebsantiwongse, 2025; Yu, 2001). In China she became known as Guānshìyīn, (觀世音, look/observe+people/world +sound/voice: “the one who perceives the cries of the world”) or Guanyin. As the deity moved to Japan, she became known as Kannon, and veered back toward masculinity.
Avalokistsevara characteristically holds a lotus flower and sometimes prayer bead. Sometimes he or she has multiple heads which make her vision and hearing more acute. Occasionally the deity has multiple arms the better to aid those in need. As Guanyin, she often carries a vase of pure water to relieve suffering.
The following illustration shows the transformation of Avalokistesvara. In order from left to right and then form up to down:
Stone, Avalokistesvara, Gandhara, 3rd Century CE
Bronze, Avalokistesvara, Gandhara, 4th Century CE
Stone, Avalokistesvara, Northern China, 6th Century CE
Wood, Avalokistesvara with multiple heads, Northern China 11th Century CE
Wood, Avalokistesvara “seated at royal ease,” China, 11th Century CE
Bronze, Avalokistesvara, Nepal, 14th Century CE
Gilded Wood, Kannon, Japan 11th Century CE
Porcelain, Guanyin, China 17th Century CE
Jade, Guanyin, China, 19th Century CE
Titanium callosal statue (78 m) Nanshan Guanyin, Hainan Island, 21st Century CE
(iv) The Diamond Sutra
As Buddhism travelled along the Silk Roads to China, the sacred texts began to be translated from Sanskrit to Chinese. One of the most important translators was Kumarajiva (344–413 CE) who was born in Kuqa on the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert. His father was a Buddhist monk from Kashmir. Around 400 CE Kumarajiva travelled to Chang’an where he wrote most of his translations of the Buddhist literature.
The original Diamond Sutra was likely composed shortly after the time of Gautama Buddha’s life in the 5th Century BCE. However, it was not formally written down in Sanskrit until the 2nd or 3rd Century CE. The sutra narrates a dialogue between the Buddha and his elderly disciple Subhūti about the nature of reality and how to attain the wisdom that would release one from suffering. The world is transient and illusory; one must release oneself from any attachments; one must seek emptiness. The following is from Red Pine’s introduction to his translation of the sutra (2001):
following his Enlightenment, the Buddha had taught people to free themselves from suffering by realizing the impermanence and interdependence of everything upon which their suffering depended, including and especially themselves. The Buddha called this the realization of shunyata (emptiness), the view that because nothing exists independently of other things, it has no nature of its own, and every-thing is therefore empty, and this emptiness is the true nature of reality. Later, when the Buddha began teaching people to view emptiness itself as empty and to put the emptiness of emptiness to work in the liberation of all beings, few disciples grasped this new teaching, which he called the perfection of wisdom, the wisdom beyond wisdom.
One of the most important discoveries in the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang was a woodblock-printed copy of Kumarajiva’s translation of the Diamond Sutra. The pages were printed by Wang Jie in 868 CE, probably in Sichuan, and then pasted together to form a scroll about 5 m long. The colophon gives the date and notes that the sutra was being made freely available to all who wished to read. This is the oldest printed book of which we have a copy.
The frontispiece of the scroll shows a woodblock drawing of the Buddha surrounded by bodhisattvas, and supernatural guardians. In the lower left is the disciple Subhūti. The following illustration shows this print together with details of the Buddha and his disciple redrawn by Zhao Ming An.
The following illustration shows the first page of text in the scroll along with a character-by-character translation of the title and the first few words of the sutra:
And the following illustration shows the last page of the scroll which includes the famous verse that the Buddha uses to describe the transience of the world. On the left, a character-by-character translation is followed by the English version of Red Pine, based on both the Sanskrit and the Chinese versions of the sutra (2001):
Christianity
During the first 4 centuries of Christianity, the nature of Jesus as both God and Man was extensively discussed. One position was that Jesus was of two distinct natures – dyophysite; another was that his two aspects were conjoined as one – miaphysite; and yet another was that his Jesus became fully divine – monophysite. Though these old distinctions are almost impossible to understand in modern times, in the 5th Century CE they were matters of life and death. The Church of the East (also known as the Assyrian Church) distinguished itself as miaphysite, and became separate from the dyophysite Byzantine and Roman Churches in 451CE. These latter churches condemned as heretical the monophysite teachings of Nestorius, a theologian in the 5th Century. The Church of the East is often known as the “Nestorian Church,” although its views on the nature of Jesus actually differed from those of Nestorius (Brock, 1996). Although the Church of the East remained separate from the Western Churches for many centuries, it has now established communal relations with the Roman Catholic Church.
(i) The Dunhuang Glora
Among the manuscripts found in the Mogao caves was a Chinese Christian Hymn loosely based on the Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Glory to God in the highest), also known as the Greater Doxology (words of praise), especially the version used in the Church of the East. The manuscript was probably written about 800 CE and provides clear evidence that missionaries of the Church of the East had travelled on the Silk Roads to China and were actively proselytizing there centuries before the Jesuits first arrived in the 15th Century CE (Moule, 1930, Teng Li, 2024).
The hymn has 11 verses each containing 4 lines of length 7 syllables, in keeping with Chinese poetic practice. The following illustration shows the beginning of the hymn together with a character-by-character translation of the title and the first line.
The following is a translation of the first three verses of the hymn (Moule, 1930, p 53; Henson, 2017, p 329)
If the highest heavens with deep reverence adore, If the great earth earnestly ponders on general peace and harmony, If man’s first true nature receives confidence and rest, It is due to Alohê the merciful Father of the universe.
All the congregation of the good worship with complete sincerity; All enlightened natures praise and sing; All who have souls trust and look up to the utmost; Receiving holy merciful light to save from the devil.
Hard to find, impossible to reach, upright, true, eternal, Merciful Father, shining Son, holy Spirit, King, Among all rulers you are Master Ruler, Among all the world-honoured you are spiritual Monarch
“Alohê” is a Chinese transcription of the Syriac name for God.
(ii) The Jingjiao Stele
In 781 CE a monument dedicated to the Christian faith (景教,jingjiao, luminous religion) was erected in Chang’an (Keevak,2008; McGrath, 2021). The limestone stele is almost 3 m high. At the top is a cross and a nine-character title. The following illustration shows the stele in situ (before it was moved to a museum), an enlargement of the title, and a character-by-character translation.
The stele summarizes the beliefs of the Christian Church in an inscription of about 1900 characters. This mentions that the Christian church was first established in China in 635 CE through the efforts of the monk Alopen. At the bottom of the stele is a much shorter inscription in Syriac.
After the end of the Tang dynasty 907 CE, Christianity almost disappeared (Teng Li, 2024). The Jingjiao Stele was buried, either for protection by the monks or as an act of desecration by those who reviled the foreign religion. It was unearthed during the 17th Century.
Nevertheless, the Church of the East continued to send missionaries along the Silk Roads and several centuries later, Christian Churches were built throughout the Mongol Empire. The Mongol Empire (1206–1368) and the Yuan Dynasty in China (1271–1368) were tolerant of the different religions. The foreign religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Manichaeism contributed as much to society as the homegrown Daoism and Confucianism.
Manichaeism
Mani (216-274 CE) was a Persian prophet who conceived the world as divided between the light and the dark. He taught that the human soul was imprisoned by birth into the material world, and that the suffering that this entailed would only cease at death, which released the soul from the body. If one died free from sin, one’s soul would return to the realm of light. The dualistic religion that he founded – Manichaeism – flourished in the centuries after his death, spreading all the way to Spain in the west and China in the East.
(i) Spread to Europe
In Europe, Manichaeism declined after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. However, some isolated groups, such as the Bogomils in Bulgaria and the Cathars in Southeast France, continued to follow Mani’s teachings:
(ii) Spread to China
Manichaeism spread along the Silk Roads into China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). During the Uyghur Kahnate (744–840 CE) in what is now Northern China and Mongolia, Manichaeism was acknowledged as the state religion (Mackerras, 1990).
During the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368 CE), a large silk painting (158 by 60 centimetres) was made to illustrate the Manichaean cosmology. This showed the realm of light at the top. In the center was a representation of the judgment that occurs at death: the decision whether the soul is released into the realm of light or sent back to the hell on earth. The following illustration shows the painting with some explanatory analysis (Gulaczi, 2015, pp 247-258), and enlargements showing a portrait of Mani (from the left side of the New Aeon level) and details of the tangled judgement process:
In Cao’an a small town on the west coast of China, a small temple built in 1339 CE was dedicated to Mani, the “Buddha of Light” (Lieu, 1998, pp 188-193). Over the years the temple became used for Buddhist practices. The following illustration shows the bas-relief portrait of Mani over the altar and the inscribed stone in the grounds of the temple.
The inscription reads
Purity (清净, qīngjìng), Light (光明, guāngmíng),
Power (大力, dàlì), Wisdom (智慧, zhìhuì)
Supreme (無上, wúshàng), Ultimate Truth (至真, zhìzhēn)
Mani (摩尼, móní), the Buddha of Light (光佛 guāngfú)
The first four are the attributes of the Manichaean Heavenly Father. Mani considered himself as a prophet in the line of Zoroaster, Buddha and Christ. As such he could be conceived as one of the manifestations of the divine – the Buddha of Light.
Islam
After its founding in Arabia in 622 CE, Islam quickly spread to adjacent regions. By the time of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE), the community of the faithful (Ummah) extended all the way from Spain to the borders of China:
(i) Abbasid Caliphate
The Abbasid Caliphate with its capital in Baghdad oversaw a period of great prosperity and learning, that later became known as the Islamic Golden Age. At a time when Europe was going through the Dark Ages, Baghdad was a place where scholars studied and preserved the literature of the past and contributed to our knowledge such new ideas as algebra and trigonometry. Islamic physicians distinguished different diseases, and Islamic physicists mapped the heavens. Abassid architecture developed gorgeous arches and domes, stucco decoration with arabesque patterns, and walls covered with multicolored tiling.
The Abbasids made great use of the newly discovered paper (Schatzmiller, 2018). The technology of papermaking originated in China around the 1st Century CE and was brought to the Middle East through the Silk Roads. The first paper mill in Baghdad was built in 795 CE. Paper made it easy to provide inexpensive books for scholars to study. Knowledge became no longer limited to the elites.
The following illustration shows on the left a painting of a scholars in a library during the Abbasid Caliphate taken from a 13th Century manuscript. This may represent the House of Wisdom, also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, which was founded in the 8th Century CE. On the right is a photograph of a honeycomb archway (muquarnas) from the Abbasid Palace in Baghdad built in the 12th Century CE.
(ii) The Great Mosque in Xi’an
Islamic merchants came to China along the Silk Roads. By the 8th Century the Muslim population of Chang’an (Xi’an) was sufficient to warrant the building of a mosque in the form of a temple. The Great Mosque of Xi’an (西安大清真寺,Xī’ān Dà Qīngzhēnsì) was first constructed in 742 CE, and rebuilt in its present form in 1384. Islam was referred to as 清真教 (Qīngzhēnjiào: pure and true religion), and a mosque is generally referred to as 清真寺 (Qīngzhēnsì: pure and true temple).
The following illustration shows a plan of the mosque together with photographs of the Phoenix Pavillion (鳳亭, fèngtíng), the “Examining the heart tower” (省心楼,shěng xīn lóu) which probably served as a minaret, and the ceiling of the Phoenix Pavilion:
Epilogue
For many centuries the Silk Roads were a conduit for goods to travel between East and West. The East produced silk, paper, tea, and porcelain. The West gave gold, silver, glass, cotton, and leather. The regions along the Silk Roads provided horses, camels, rugs, lapis lazuli and jade.
As well the Silk Roads allowed different religions to travel to distant countries. Buddhism came to China. Islam spread to both the East and the West. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Christianity also journeyed with the caravans. Travellers on the Silk Roads were missionaries as well as merchants (Foltz, 2010).
Some feeling for the people of the Silk Roads can be found in the poem The Golden Road to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker (1814-1915), a British poet who briefly worked in the consular services in the Middle East before dying at a young age of tuberculosis. The conclusion to his play Hassan, published posthumously in 1922, is a conversation among the members of a caravan about to leave Baghdad for Samarkand:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further: it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
White on a throne or guarded in a cave There lives a prophet who can understand Why men were born: but surely we are brave, Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand
…
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells, When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly through the silence beat the bells Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.
We travel not for trafficking alone; By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.
The following is a reading of these verses by Roger Helmer
And the musical introduction to the Japanese TV series on The Silk Roads by Kitaro:
References
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Foltz, R. C. (2010). Religions of the Silk Road: premodern patterns of globalization. (2nd Ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
Frankopan, P. (2016). The Silk Roads: a new history of the world. Alfred A. Knopf.
Grenet, F. (2015). Zoroastrianism in central Asia. In Stausberg, M., Vevaina, Y. S.-D., & Tessmann, A. (Eds.) The Wiley-Blackwell companion to Zoroastrianism. (pp 129-146). Wiley.
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Koller, A. (2024). A Hebrew text from the Silk Road: a prayer for forgiveness and success from the Eighth Century. In Berger, S. Z. et al. (Eds). Wisdom has built her house.A tribute in honor of and in memory of Mrs. Leah Adler. (pp 181-187). Yeshiva University.
Lieu, S. N. C. (1998). Manichaeism in Central Asia and China. Brill.
Lijuan Li (2021). On the transmission of the Gloria in excelsis Deo: Daqin jingjiao sanwei mengdu zan 大秦景教三威蒙度讃 In Talay, Shabo. (Ed.). Überleben im Schatten: Geschichte und Kultur des syrischen Christentums. (pp 111-113). Harrassowitz Verlag.
Mackerras, C. (1990, online 2008). The Uighurs. In Sinor, D. (Ed.). The Cambridge history of early Inner Asia. (pp 317-342). Cambridge University Press.
Mazhjoo, N. (2020). Being Mithraist: Embracing ‘other’ in the Roman cultural milieu. In A. W. Irvin (Ed.), Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World (pp. 139–153). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Millward, J. A. (2013). The silk road: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
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Teng Li (2024). Christianity on the Silk Roads. In Henderson, J., L. Morgan, S., & Salonia, M. (Eds). Reimagining the Silk Roads: Interactions and Perceptions Across Eurasia. (pp 174-185). Taylor & Francis
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The Letter of Lord Chandos: Hugo von Hofmannsthal
In 1901, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) wrote an essay on the inadequacy of language in the form of a letter (Ein Brief) from the fictional Philip Lord Chandos to the actual Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a famous English philosopher of science, essayist and statesman. The letter is a response to Bacon’s inquiry about the two years of unexpected silence that following Chandos’ early success as a poet. Chandos replies that he has “completely lost the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently.” He feels a deep sympathy with the world, but finds no words whereby to express this experience. He seeks but has not yet, found a language “in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge.” The illustration shows a 1916 portrait of von Hofmannsthal by Karl Bauer.
Synopsis of the Letter
Chandos thanks Bacon for his concern. He says he is no longer the same person who wrote his early poems. He remembers that he had planned to write about the reign of Henry VIII. “Was ist der Mensch, daß er Pläne macht!” (But what is man that he should make plans!). Another scheme that he had entertained was a collection of Apothegmata that he would have called Nosce te ispsum (Know thyself). However, his thoughts ran ahead of his actions, and the world that was once open to him now evades his grasp:
Wie soll ich es versuchen, Ihnen diese seltsamen geistigen Qualen zu schildern, dies Emporschnellen der Fruchtzweige über meinen ausgereckten Händen, dies Zurückweichendes murmelnden Wassers vor meinen dürstenden Lippen? Mein Fall ist, in Kürze, dieser: Es ist mir völlig die Fähigkeit abhanden gekommen, über irgend etwas zusammenhängend zu denken oder zu sprechen.
(This and the following audio clips are from a recitation of Ein Brief by Martin Ploderer.)
How shall I try to describe to you these strange spiritual torments, this rebounding of the fruit-branches above my outstretched hands, this recession of the murmuring stream from my thirsting lips? My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently.
The German language has two ways to express the idea of loss. The common translation of “to lose” is verlieren. Another way to say that something “has come away from my hands” – ist mir abhanden gekommen. Any blame is on that which has been lost rather than on the loser. A famous use of this idiom is in Mahler’s 1902 setting of Rückert’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world).
Chandos’ inability to think or speak is not complete. He is still able to take care of his estate. He has just lost the ability (or the will) to communicate poetically.
Chandos describes an intense, almost mystical, involvement with even the most mundane of his experiences:
Es wird mir nicht leicht, Ihnen anzudeuten, worin diese guten Augenblicke bestehen; die Worte lassen mich wiederum im Stich. Denn es ist ja etwas völlig Unbenanntes, und auch wohl kaum Benennbares, das in solchen Augenblicken, irgendeine Erscheinung meiner alltäglichen Umgebung mit einer überschwellenden Flut höheren Leben wie ein Gefäß erfüllend, mir sich ankündet. Ich kann nicht erwarten, daß Sie mich ohne Beispiel verstehen, und ich muß Sie um Nachsicht für die Kläglichkeit meiner Beispiele bitten. Eine Gießkanne, eine auf dem Feld verlassene Egge, ein Hund in der Sonne, ein ärmlicher Kirchhof, ein Krüppel, ein Kleines Bauernhaus, alles dies kann das Gefäß meiner Offenbarung werden. Jeder dieser Gegenstände und die tausend anderen ähnlichen, über die sonst ein Auge mit selbstverständlicher Gleichgültigkeit hinweggleitet, kann für mich plötzlich in irgendeinemMoment, den herbeizuführen auf keine Weise in meiner Gewalt steht, ein erhabenes undrührendes Gepräge annehmen, das auszudrücken mir alle Worte zu arm scheinen.
It is not easy for me to indicate wherein these good moments subsist; once again words desert me. For it is, indeed, something entirely unnamed, even barely nameable which, at such moments, reveals itself to me, filling like a vessel any casual object of my daily surroundings with an overflowing flood of higher life. I cannot expect you to understand me without examples, and I must plead your indulgence for their absurdity. A pitcher, a harrow abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun, a neglected cemetery, a cripple, a peasant’s hut, all these can become the vessel of my revelation. Each of these objects and a thousand others similar, over which the eye usually glides with a natural indifference, can suddenly, at any moment (which I am utterly powerless to evoke), assume for me a character so exalted and moving that words seem too poor to describe it. Even the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can acquire the mysterious function of being filled to the brim with this silent but suddenly rising flood of divine sensation.
Chandos concludes the letter by thanking Bacon for his kindness:
Sie waren so gütig, Ihre Unzufriedenheit darüber zu äußern, daß kein von mir verfaßtes Buch mehr zu Ihnen kommt, »Sie für das Entbehren meines Umgangs zu entschädigen«. Ichf ühlte in diesem Augenblick mit einer Bestimmtheit, die nicht ganz ohne ein schmerzliches Beigefühl war, daß ich auch im kommenden und im folgenden und in allen Jahren dieses meines Lebens kein englisches und kein lateinisches Buch schreiben werde: und dies ausdem einen Grund, dessen mir peinliche Seltsamkeit mit ungeblendetem Blick dem vor Ihnen harmonisch ausgebreiteten Reiche der geistigen und leiblichen Erscheinungen an seiner Stelle einzuordnen ich Ihrer unendlichen geistigen Überlegenheit überlasse: nämlich weil dieSprache, in welcher nicht nur zu schreiben, sondern auch zu denken mir vielleicht gegeben wäre, weder die lateinische noch die englische, noch die italienische oder spanische ist,sondern eine Sprache, in welcher die stummen Dinge zuweilen zu mir sprechen, und in welcher ich vielleicht einst im Grabe vor einem unbekannten Richter mich verantworten werde.
You were kind enough to express your dissatisfaction that no book written by me reaches you any more, “to compensate for the loss of our relationship.” Reading that, I felt, with a certainty not entirely bereft of a feeling of sorrow, that neither in the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English or in Latin: and this for an odd and embarrassing reason which I must leave to the boundless superiority of your mind to place in the realm of physical and spiritual values spread out harmoniously before your unprejudiced eye: to wit, because the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge.
Fictional Context
Hofmannsthal wrote his essay in the form of a letter from Philip Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon. The letter is dated August 22, 1603. James I had just assumed the throne of England. Shakespeare was at the height of his career: Hamlet was performed in 1600, Othello in 1603, and Measure for Measure in 1604. The work of Copernicus on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) had marked the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Knowledge was becoming free of doctrine, and art becoming independent of religion.
Francis Bacon was an English statesman and philosopher of science. His Novum Organum of 1620 described how new knowledge could be induced from observations rather than deducted from axioms. He also wrote essays on a variety of topics in philosophy and religion. In 1603 there was a young Baron Chandos: Grey Bridges (1580-1621), a politician and a possible author of an anonymous collection of essays entitled Horae Subsecivae (Spare Time). The following illustration shows portraits of Bacon (left, Paul van Somer, 1617) and Bridges (right, William Larkin, 1615). However, Grey Bridges was not a poet. Though Bacon is an actual person, the Lord Chandos of Hofmannstahl’s letter is completely fictional.
Though not an actual person, Lord Chandos serves as an effective counterpoint to Bacon, representing the aesthetic approach to life as opposed to the scientific. Both forces had become strong in English Society at the time of the fictional letter.
Personal Context
The Lord Chandos of the letter is far more similar to Hofmannsthal than to any young Jacobean lord. Hofmannsthal had begun his career as a lyric poet. His poetry was “romantic” in its stress on the individual’s emotional response and “symbolist” in its search for meanings beyond reality. The 1892 poem Erlebnis (Experience) describes a vision of death and time:
Mit silbergrauem Dufte war das Tal Der Dämmerung erfüllt, wie wenn der Mond Durch Wolken sickert. Doch es war nicht Nacht. Mit silbergrauem Duft des dunklen Tales Verschwammen meine dämmernden Gedanken, Und still versank ich in dem webenden, Durchsichtgen Meere und verließ das Leben. Wie wunderbare Blumen waren da, Mit Kelchen dunkelglühend! Pflanzendickicht, Durch das ein gelbrot Licht wie von Topasen In warmen Strömen drang und glomm. Das Ganze War angefüllt mit einem tiefen Schwellen Schwermütiger Musik. Und dieses wußt ich, Obgleich ichs nicht begreife, doch ich wußt es: Das ist der Tod. Der ist Musik geworden, Gewaltig sehnend, süß und dunkelglühend, Verwandt der tiefsten Schwermut. Aber seltsam! Ein namenloses Heimweh weinte lautlos In meiner Seele nach dem Leben, weinte, Wie einer weint, wenn er auf großem Seeschiff Mit gelben Riesensegeln gegen Abend Auf dunkelblauem Wasser an der Stadt, Der Vaterstadt, vorüberfährt. Da sieht er Die Gassen, hört die Brunnen rauschen, riecht Den Duft der Fliederbüsche, sieht sich selber. Ein Kind, am Ufer stehn, mit Kindesaugen, Die ängstlich sind und weinen wollen, sieht Durchs offne Fenster Licht in seinem Zimmer – Das große Seeschiff aber trägt ihn weiter, Auf dunkelblauem Wasser lautlos gleitend Mit gelben, fremdgeformten Riesensegeln.
And a translation by J. D. McClatchy (2008, pp 24-5):
At dusk a silvery fragrance filled the valley, As when the moon is viewed through a veil of cloud. But it was not yet night. In the darkening valley That fragrance drifted through my shadowy thoughts And silently I sank into the wavering, Diaphanous sea, and left my life behind. What wondrous flowers had bloomed there, Cups of colors darkly glowing! And a thicket Amidst which a flame like topaz rushed, Now surging, now gleaming in its molten course. All of it seemed filled with the deep swell Of a mournful music. This much I knew, Though I cannot understand it—I knew That this was Death, transmuted into music, Violently yearning, sweet, dark, burning, Akin to deepest sadness. Yet how strange! A nameless longing after life now wept Inside my soul without a sound, wept As one might weep who on a galleon With giant gilded sails of an evening slides Over the indigo waters past a town, His native town. And there he spies again The streets, hears the fountains plash, breathes In the scent of lilacs, and sees himself again, A child standing on the shore, wide-eyed, Anxious and close to tears, and looks then through An open window to see a light on in his room— But the huge ship is bearing out to sea Without a sound over the indigo waters With its giant gilded unearthly sails.
As the 19th Century came to an end, Hofmannsthal began to feel uneasy about his writing, which no longer seemed to capture what he wanted to say about the world.
There is no question that Chandos’ crisis reflects a crisis of Hofmannsthal’s own; after a decade of astonishing facility and productivity, Hofmannsthal suddenly finds himself unsure of his own verbal mastery. (Bennett, 1988, p 129)
Hofmannsthal composed only a few isolated poems after 1898 (Kovach, 2002, p 86; Schaber, 1970). However, unlike the fictional Lord Chandos, he did not forsake writing. Rather he turned to drama and to opera. His 1903 play Elektra was successful, and was converted into an opera in 1909 with music by Richard Strauss. Over the next two decades continued to write libretti for Strauss operas, among them Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/1916), and Arabella (1933).
Hofmannsthal stopped trying to figure out what is the mystery of life, and began to consider how people live their lives. Toward the end of Act I of Der Rosenkavalier, the Marschallin remarks
Das alles ist geheim, so viel geheim. Und man ist dazu da, daß man’s entragt. Und in dem “Wie” da liegt der ganze Untershied—
It’s all a mystery, so much is mysterious. And we are here to endure it. And in the How, there lies the whole difference—
McClatchy (2008) used this quotation as the epigraph to a selection of Hofmannsthal’s writings.
The following is a photograph of Hofmannsthal and Strauss from 1912:
The Paradox of the Letter
Many critics have noted that, given that his inability to think or speak coherently, Lord Chandos could not possibly have written his letter to Francis Bacon:
Perhaps the most peculiar thing about the Chandos letter is its inherent paradox. While the fictitious author claims to be unable to employ language effectively, the essay itself is a masterpiece of literary artistry. The images are bright, colorful, and vibrant. The selection of words and the organization of ideas are flawless. Each sentence, each phrase is constructed with care and precision, is impregnated with life and meaning. The whole is ordered so as to allow each detail to convey its message with power. In short, it is not the work of a spiritually disturbed Chandos, but of the virtuoso Hofmannsthal. (Bangerter, 1977, p 28)
The Chandos letter, taken literally, rests on the impossible condition, the absurdity, in fact, that a man in Chandos’ condition could write any letter, not to mention one involving such complexity of thought. When Chandos states that he has completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently, he precludes the possibility of writing anything, including the letter in which he makes such a statement. The point is that Chandos, who is an invented figure, did not write the letter, Hofmannsthal did. Hofmannsthal, who does not have Chandos’ problem of disorientation, is able to compose the letter that he imagines Chandos would have written had he been able to write. (Daviau, 1971, p 30)
The letter describes the state of mind of a man who can no longer communicate what he experiences to others. Hofmannsthal has to imagine what this was like. It remains problematic that one so capable of communication could really understand what it is like to have lost that ability.
The Language Crisis
For Chandos expressing his experiences in language has become impossible. Any attempt to do so leads to a whirlpool of words:
Es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder in Teile und nichts mehr ließ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. Die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muß: Wirbel sind sie, in die hinabzusehen mich schwindelt, die sich unaufhaltsam drehen und durch die hindurch man ins Leere kommt.
For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.
Chandos’ description of his difficulty with language relates to the Sprachkrise (language crisis) experienced by Austrian philosophers and writers at the beginning of the 20th Century (Gray, 1986). This was clearly not an aspect of writing in England in 1603: at that time, the English language had no reservations about its ability to discover knowledge or to portray beauty. As the 19th Century came to an end, however, our trust in language was beginning to crumble. Hofmannsthal wished to consider this problem in the context of a time when poets and scientists still had full command of their words.
With the industrial revolution, the place of art in society changed. Poetry was no longer the darling of the aristocracy – elevated thoughts in elevated language. To continue to have any meaning, poetry needed to become more like everyday speech and to consider everyday problems.
Chandos’s letter suggests a real pessimism about the possibility of revivifying language, indicating both that the future lies with a language which is no language and that, until this language is found, the only possibility is silence. Chandos’s pessimism can be seen in the list of objects which, in an imaginative desert, still ignite in him an occasional and momentary vision of eternity: a watering can, a deserted harrow in the fields, a dog in the sun, a wretched churchyard, a cripple, a peasant cottage. All of these ciphers suggest tiredness, desertedness, decrepitude and pathos: all seem residues of a lost unity rather than pointers to a unity to come. A similar sense of pessimism about the possibility of revivifying language, a similar sense that all that remains are a few isolated and arbitrary symbols, runs through the writings of Eliot, Yeats and Rake. Eliot ends The Waste Land by shoring a few arcane fragments of language against the ruin of the present. (Sheppard, 1976, p 324).
The language crisis extended beyond poetry. At about the same time as Hofmannsthal’s letter, Franz Mauthner (1849-1923) published his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language, 1901-2). This called into question the very basis of language as a means of representing reality. Gray (1986, p 335) remarks
Mauthner conceives of language as a fundamentally metaphorical, and thus “mendacious,” phenomenon. The very act in which language is created, the transformation of sense data into articulated sounds, is an act of metaphorization. Due to this inherent metaphoricity, language cannot express “truth,” which, for Mauthner, can only consist in the perfect identity of language with the objective reality it is intended to express.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was significantly affected by the work of Mauthner, though he was less pessimistic about the possibilities of language. He mentions Mauthner in his Tactatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922, 4.0031)
Alle Philosophie ist “Sprachkritik”. (Allerdings nicht im Sinne Mauthners.) All philosophy is “Critique of language” (but not at all in Mauthner’s sense)
The following illustration shows portraits of Mauthner (from the 1900s) and Wittgenstein (from the 1920s)
Though mainly related to poetic language, Hofmannsthal’s letter also suggests the more general problem of the relationship between language and experience:
Chandos’ crisis points to what was to become a central philosophical preoccupation of the twentieth century, reflected in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as in more recent developments such as Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction: namely, the demonstration that language can no longer be relied on as a valid signifier of a reality which exists outside itself, and in fact that we cannot ever experience a “reality” which is not already mediated by our language. (Kovach, 2002, p 94)
Like Staring into the Sun
Although Chandos concentrates on his linguistic difficulties, he also describes his recent experiences as overwhelming:
Ja, es kann auch die bestimmte Vorstellung eines abwesenden Gegenstandes sein, der dieunbegreifliche Auserwählung zu Theil wird, mit jener sanft oder jäh steigenden Flut göttlichen Gefühles bis an den Rand gefüllt zu werden.
Even the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can acquire the mysterious function of being filled to the brim with this silent but suddenly rising flood of divine sensation.
Though he does not acknowledge it, these experiences are inherently mystical. And as such they are perhaps ineffable. Far be it for human minds to put into words the experience of the divine. The concluding proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
However, an experience that cannot be put into words – something that is impossible to understand – can be terrifying. The mystical vision of Lord Chandos is not easy to bear. In a postscript to Elizabeth Costello (2003) J. M. Coetzee imagined what it might have been like to be Chandos’ wife, who tried to share his experiences. She writes a follow-up letter to Bacon, stressing how much they need his help:
All is allegory, says my Philip. Each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation. And perhaps he speaks the truth, perhaps in the mind of our Creator (our Creator, I say) where we whirl about as if in a millrace we interpenetrate and are interpenetrated by fellow creatures by the thousand. But how I ask you can I live with rats and dogs and beetles crawling through me day and night, drowning and gasping, scratching at me, tugging me, urging me deeper and deeper into revelation — how? We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun. Save me, dear Sir, save my husband! (Coetzee, 2003, p 229)
Envoi
The Letter of Lord Chandos has had far-reaching effects. Many writers have provided responses to the letter (e.g. Fraser, 1990; Spahr et al., 2002; Quignard, 2020). None have completely resolved the issues that were raised in Hofmannsthal’s letter. Modernism found a way to allow poetry in an age where language had to communicate present truth rather than talk beautifully about lofty ideas. However, we still have not really found a way to combine beauty with truth. And we have come to realize that there is much in this world that we still do not understand and cannot describe in words. We can keep trying.
References
Bangerter, L. A. (1977). Hugo von Hofmannsthal. F. Ungar.
Bennett, B. (1988). Hugo von Hofmannsthal: the theaters of consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. (2003). Elizabeth Costello: eight lessons. Secker & Warburg.
Daviau, D. G. (1971). Hugo von Hofmannsthal and The Chandos Letter. Modern Austrian Literature, 4(2), 28–44.
Fraser, J. (1990) In defence of language; if it needs it. University of Toronto Quarterly, 59, (2), 269-286
Gray, R. T. (1986). Aphorism and Sprachkrise in turn-of-the-century Austria. Orbis Litterarum, 41(4), 332–354.
Hofmannsthal, H. von (1902). Ein Brief. Der Tag. Berlin, Nr. 489, 18. Oktober 1902 (Teil 1); Nr. 491, 19. Oktober 1902 (Teil 2). Available at Projekt Gutenberg-DE. English translation by T. Stern & J. Stern (1952, reprinted, 2008). In J. D. McClatchy (Ed.) The whole difference: selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. (pp. 69-79). Princeton University Press. Available at Washington University website.
Kovach, T. A. (2002). A companion to the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Camden House.
McClatchy, J. D. (Ed.) (2008). The whole difference: selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Princeton University Press
Quignard, P. (2020). La réponse à Lord Chandos. Éditions Galilée.
Schaber, S. C. (1970). The Lord Chandos Letter in the light of Hofmannsthal’s lyric decade. Germanic Review, 45(1), 52–58.
Sheppard, R. (1976). The crisis of language. In Bradbury, M., & McFarlane, J. W. (Eds.). Modernism: 1890-1930. (pp 323-336). Penguin.
Spahr, R., Spiegel, H., & Vogel, O. (Eds) (2002). Lieber Lord Chandos: Antworten auf einen Brief. S. Fischer.
Wittgenstein, L. (1921, translated by C.K. Ogden, 1922, revised translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, 1961, reprinted 2005). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge.
T. S. Eliot: The Cocktail Party
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote The Cocktail Party in 1948. The play begins with people making foolish conversation at a cocktail party but soon proceeds to a discussion of what it means to be married to another person, and what is required to become a saint. It was initially performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949 with Alec Guiness as the Unidentified Guest and Irene Worth as Celia, the prospective saint, and then moved to Broadway in 1950, where it received a Tony Award for Best Play. Critical reviews were mixed, but audiences were more enthusiastic. The play was revived briefly in 1968 with Guinness as both director and actor.
Synopsis
The play opens on the remnants of a cocktail party. The hostess Lavinia Chamberlayne had been called away, and her husband Edward had tried to cancel the party, but had been unable to contact some of the invitees: two elderly guests Julia and Alex, two youngsters, Celia and Peter, and one unidentified guest not known to the others, who enjoys his gin and water and listens bemused to the cocktail chatter. The party soon breaks up, but Edward asks the unidentified guest to stay behind because he needs someone to talk to. He confesses that Lavinia has left him. After some discussion he realizes that, although he has toyed with the idea of freedom, he wants her to return. The unidentified guest promises to bring Lavinia back the next day and leaves, singing a verse from the Irish song One-Eyed Riley:
Unidentified Guest: As I was drinkin’ gin and water, And me bein’ the One-Eyed Riley, Who came in but the landlord’s daughter And she took my heart entirely.
You will keep our appointment?
Edward: I shall keep it.
Unidentified Guest: Tooryooly toory-iley, What’s the matter with One-Eyed Riley
This and subsequent audio clips are from the Decca recording of the play. Some sections of the play were omitted for the recording which was limited to the length of two LPs.
Other guests return with various excuses, but mainly because they wish to talk to Edward. Peter wants his advice about Celia, with whom he has become enamoured though she does not return his feelings. Edward suggests that Peter accept the fact that that romance is not going anywhere, and that Peter should go to California to pursue his dreams of working in film. After Peter leaves, Celia returns to talk to Edward, and we realize that she and Edward have been having an affair. However, now that Lavinia has apparently left Edward and made him available, Celia realizes that she does not wish to continue their relationship.
The next afternoon everyone returns to the Chamberlayne’s. Lavinia in brought back to Edward as promised by the unidentified guest. The other guests have been summoned by telegram. Peter has decided to leave to work in films in California. Celia says goodbye to Peter and to the Chamberlaynes, Lavinia and Edward are left alone to discuss their relationship. Lavinia suggests that her husband should see a psychiatrist.
The play then skips to several weeks later at the consulting offices of the unidentified guest, who it turns out is the psychiatrist Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly. We find out the Julia and Alex have worked with Sir Henry to get Edward, Lavinia, and Celia to come to his office. Initially Sir Henry talks with Edward alone and then Lavinia is brought in. Lavinia and Edward discuss their relationship. Lavina knew about Edward’s affair, but Edward had not realized that Lavinia had at the same time been infatuated with young Peter. Both now have no one to love but themselves, and they decide to return home together.
Celia then comes in to consult with Sir Henry. She explains that she has begun to feel “an awareness of solitude,” a separation from a world with which she has become disillusioned. Furthermore, she has experienced a “sense of sin” that does not seem to have much to do with morality. Rather it appears to be a feeling that he is not doing what she was meant to do. She needs something to devote herself to. Sir Henry agrees to help her find her calling. After Celia leaves, Julia and Alex return and the three toast together, first to Lavinia and Edward with the “words for the building of the hearth,” and then to Celia with the “words for those who go upon a journey.”
The Guardians mention Peter as also needing their help. Perhaps he might represent a separate road to salvation – that of the artist.
The final act of the play occurs two years later just before another cocktail party at the Chamberlaynes. The same people are there as in the first act. We learn that Lavinia and Edward remain together, and that Peter has become successful in films. Alex reports that Celia had joined an austere Christian nursing order and had gone to Kinkanja to care for patients dying from a pestilence. Agitators had convinced the natives that they could only stop the pestilence by slaughtering the Christians. During the subsequent insurrection, Celia had been crucified on an anthill. Lavinia asks Sir Henry why he appears unconcerned about this, and he confesses that when he first met Celia he had a premonition of her violent death, He had not known exactly how this would occur, but he had acquiesced to Celia’s decision and prepared her for her destiny.
Julia, Alex and Sir Henry leave to attend another party. The other guests remain as the Chamberlayne’s cocktail party begins.
The following illustration shows a 1948 photograph of Eliot by Walter Stoneman on the left and photographs of Alec Guiness and Irene Worth from the original New York production on the right.
Sources for the Play
In his 1951 essay on Poetry and Drama, Eliot noted that he had used Euripides’ Alcestis (438 BCE) “as a point of departure” for The Cocktail Party. In Euripides, in gratitude for the hospitality shown to him, Apollo had granted king Admetus the privilege of living past the time the Fates had decreed for his death. The only problem was that someone else had to die in his place. Admetus’ devoted wife Alcestis agrees to take his place. Apollo tries to get Thanatos, the God of Death, not to take Alcestis, but Death is implacable. Apollo then asks Heracles to wrestle with Death and brings Alcestis back to Admetus. Eliot clearly takes from Euripides the story of Edward and Lavinia’s relationship. And we must presume that the unidentified guest in the first act is Heracles, a hero who liked to drink and to sing.
As the play progresses, the ideas of Heraclitus (c 500 BCE) come to the fore (Jones, 1960, p 132; Lesher, 2013). Just before he returns Lavinia to Edward, the unidentified guest points out that everything and everyone changes – you cannot step twice into the same river.
Ah, but we die to each other daily. What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same Is a useful and convenient social convention Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
In his play Eliot grafts onto these Classical ideas the Christian narrative of Celia’s martyrdom. In this, Sir Henry takes the role of a Priest, who stands in place of God, rather than that of a Hero, who acts for the Gods. Celia confesses to him that she has felt a “sense of sin” – something that is completely Christan, and incompatible with Classical ideas. Sir Henry informs Celia of her options and the dangers she might face, before allowing her to choose her vocation. His
ability to foresee Celia’s death is similar to the doctrine of free will, in which God can see what will happen, but where the choice is still up to the individual (Rexine, 1965, p 25)
Eliot may have also used several modern sources for the ideas he considered in The Cocktail Party. Two recent productions had used a supernatural being to alter the course of human events. In Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey’s guardian angel Clarence Odbody talks him out of suicide and convinces him to return to his family (Llorens-Cubedo, 2022). In Eliot’s play the supernatural intervention is more austere, and the outcome ultimately tragic, despite the play being called a comedy. In J. B. Priestley’s 1947 play The Inspector Calls, a police inspector interrupts a family dinner party and points out to those present how their actions had led to the death of a young woman. As the play ends, the inspector vanishes: he was simply a voice asking for justice. Priestley calls out the entitled; Eliot reconciles them to their fate. Alec Guinness had acted as one of the family in the first production of Priestley’s play. In J.-P. Sartre’s play Huis Clos (“No Exit,” performed in 1944, published in 1947) one of the main characters exclaims L’enfer, c’est les autres (“Hell is other people”). In The Cocktail Party Eliot has Edward rebut this claim:
There was a door And I could not open it. I could not touch the handle. Why could I not walk out of my prison? What is hell? Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
Edward’s description of his state of mind fits more easily with the existentialist idea that we alone are responsible for our actions. As Sartre said in L’existentialisme est un humanisme (“Existentialism is a Humanism,” 1946), we are “condemned to be free”
The Path to Sainthood
In the second act of the play, Sir Henry, with the assistance of Julia and Alex, reconciles Lavinia and Edward to their life together, and sets Celia on her path to sainthood. Carol Smith (1967, pp 157-158) points out that there are two ways to salvation in Christianity:
In the history of Christian mysticism from the time of the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, there have traditionally been two paths by which the soul could come to God—the Negative Way and the Affirmative Way. Followers of the Negative Way believe that God may be reached by detaching the soul from the love of all things that are not God, or, in the terms Eliot most frequently chose to use, by following the council of St. John of the Cross to divest oneself of the love of created beings. The Way of Affirmation, on the other hand, consists of the recognition that because the Christian God is immanent as well as transcendent, everything in the created world is an imperfect image of Him. Thus, all created things are to be accepted in love as images of the Divine. The Way of Affirmation, while less rigorous, has its own implicit difficulties, for the price of loving created beings ultimately involves suffering and loss.
Sir Henry brings Lavinia and Edward together and points out to themthat they both had felt a lack of love in their marriage, both had sought out relationships with others, and both had realized that these relationships had no hope of success. They must become reconciled to their own limitations; they must relearn how to live lovingly with each other. Theirs is the Affirmative Way.
Celia presents a completely different problem for Sir Henry. She has two symptoms. The first is “an awareness of solitude:”
I don’t mean simply That there’s been a crash: though indeed there has been. It isn’t simply the end of an illusion In the ordinary way, or being ditched. Of course that’s something that’s always happening To all sorts of people, and they get over it More or less, or at least they carry on. No. I mean that what has happened has made me aware That I’ve always been alone. That one always is alone. Not simply the ending of one relationship, Not even simply finding that it never existed— But a revelation about my relationship With everybody. Do you know – It no longer seems worth while to speak to anyone!
The second is “a sense of sin”
It’s not the feeling of anything I’ve ever done, Which I might get away from, or of anything in me I could get rid of—but of emptiness, of failure Towards someone, or something, outside of myself; And I feel I must . . . atone—is that the word?
Sir Henry informs her that she can return to normal life
The condition is curable. But the form of treatment must be your own choice: I cannot choose for you. If that is what you wish, I can reconcile you to the human condition, The condition to which some who have gone as far as you Have succeeded in returning. They may remember The vision they have had, but they cease to regret it, Maintain themselves by the common routine, Learn to avoid excessive expectation, Become tolerant of themselves and others, Giving and taking, in the usual actions What there is to give and take. They do not repine; Are contented with the morning that separates And with the evening that brings together For casual talk before the fire Two people who know they do not understand each other, Breeding children whom they do not understand And who will never understand them.
Or
There is another way, if you have the courage. The first I could describe in familiar terms Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it, Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us. The second is unknown, and so requires faith— The kind of faith that issues from despair. The destination cannot be described; You will know very little until you get there; You will journey blind. But the way leads towards possession Of what you have sought for in the wrong place.
Celia chooses the second option – the negative way to salvation – and Sir Henry makes the necessary arrangements.
The Guardians
In The Cocktail Party the characters of Julia, Alex, and Sir Henry bring about the most important elements of the plot. The word “guardian” comes up initially when Edward is describing to Celia how some force within him – his “tougher self” – prevents him from changing the course of his life. Later in their conversation Celia wonders whether Julia might be serving as her guardian. At the end of the play’s second scene, Edward and Celia make a toast to the “Guardians.” We are never sure of their roles. They might be angels or magi: spiritual advisers who intervene in a person’s life to make sure that some transcendent goal is attained (Hammerschmidt, 1981). Though the appear to serve some greater good, we are not completely sure that they are not demonic. For want of any clear name, they have come to be known as the “Guardians.”
The fact that Sir Henry sings a song about “One-Eyed Riley” raises the idea the “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king” (Jones, 1960, p 151). This old proverb was collected by Erasmus in his Adagia (1500) – in regione caecorum rex est luscus – but its origins go back at least as far as the Genesis Rabbah (~500 CE). The following illustration (I believe from the 1968 revival at the Chichester Festival) emphasizes this aspect of the guardians: Sir Henry has a monocle, and one of Julia’s eyes is patched. The Guardians are offering a libation to the success of their charges:
Alex: The words for the building of the hearth.
Sir Henry: Let them build the hearth Under the protection of the stars.
Alex: Let them place a chair each side of it.
Julia: May the holy ones watch over the roof, May the Moon herself influence the bed.
Alex: The words for those who go upon a journey.
Sir Henry: Protector of travellers Bless the road.
Alex: Watch over her in the desert. Watch over her in the mountain. Watch over her in the labyrinth. Watch over her by the quicksand.
Julia: Protect her from the Voices Protect her from the Visions Protect her in the tumult Protect her in the silence.
A Meaningless Martyrdom
In the short final act of the play, we learn that Celia had joined an austere nursing order and had travelled to Kinkanja to care for dying patients. The natives had somehow come to believe that she was the cause rather than the cure for the pestilence. Celia had then been crucified on an anthill. Her death appears as meaningless as it was horrible:
And just for a handful of plague-stricken natives Who would have died anyway
Sir Henry appears undisturbed by her death. When challenged by Lavinia he remarks
When I first met Miss Coplestone, in this room, I saw the image, standing behind her chair, Of a Celia Coplestone whose face showed the astonishment Of the first five minutes after a violent death. If this strains your credulity, Mrs. Chamberlayne, I ask you only to entertain the suggestion That a sudden intuition, in certain minds, May tend to express itself at once in a picture. That happens to me, sometimes. So it was obvious That here was a woman under sentence of death. That was her destiny. The only question Then was, what sort of death? I could not know; Because it was for her to choose the way of life To lead to death, and, without knowing the end Yet choose the form of death. We know the death she chose. I did not know that she would die in this way; She did not know. So all that I could do Was to direct her in the way of preparation. That way, which she accepted, led to this death. And if that is not a happy death, what death is happy?
The story of Celia’s death borders on the absurd. The idea that human life is essentially absurd had just been introduced by Albert Camus in his 1942 book Le mythe de Sisyphe (“The Myth of Sisyphus”). The main idea is that human life is much like that of Sisyphus, who tried to stop death and make man immortal. His punishment was to roll an immense boulder up to the top of a hill. Just before it reaches the summit, the boulder rolls back down into the valley and Sisyphus must begin his task again. This he must do for all eternity. At the end of his essay Camus remarks that
Je laisse Sisyphe au bas de, la montagne! On retrouve toujours son fardeau. Mais Sisyphe enseigne la fidélité supérieure qui nie les dieux et soulève les rochers. Lui aussi juge que toutest bien. Cet univers désormais sans maître ne lui paraît ni stérile ni futile. Chacun des grains de cette pierre, chaque éclat minéral de cette montagne pleine de nuit, à lui seul, forme un monde. La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
[I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy].
The following illustration shows a 1920 painting of Sisyphus by the German painter Franz von Stuck:
In the late 1940s and the 1950s plays like Genet’s The Maids (1947), Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950) and Becket’s Waiting for Godot (1950) ushered in the theatre of the absurd, wherein human beings learned to survive in a world without meaning. Eliot’s play is a harbinger of this type of drama: Celia’s fate is absurd – her death served no useful purpose.
The Magus Zoroaster
Sir Henry tries to explain his lack of concern about Celia’s death by quoting from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820). The lines are spoken by Mother Earth who encourages Prometheus to tell his story but to be aware that there are two worlds – one in which we live, and one which contains our unfulfilled dreams and ideas
Ere Babylon was dust The magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more!
The next lines (unquoted by Sir Henry) are
Dreams and the light imaginings of men, And all that faith creates or love desires, Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes.
Zoroaaster was a mythical Persian religious leader (magus) who may have lived around 1000 BCE. The story of the meeting with his double marks a time when he realized that he had to live up to what he was meant to be (Ranald & Ranald, 1961).
The story of Zoroaster and his image of what he was meant to be was depicted by the Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington in 1960: The following illustration shows her painting. The two enlargements on the right show the supernatural powers (bull and lion), and the mirror writing on the ground that quotes from Shelley. The latter has been lightened and mirror-inverted to make the text legible. The conflict between goodness and evil appear to be represented by the bird and snake at the feet of Zoroaster.
The Problems of Sainthood
As the 20th Century came to an end, the idea of the saint devoting himself or herself to the poor and dying became a little tarnished. Probably the most famous of the modern saints was Mother Teresa (1910-1997), who devoted her life to the poor of Calcutta.
The journalist Christopher Hitchens criticized her contributions in a TV program entitled Mother Teresa: Hell’s Angel (1994). The following are two excerpts:
Mother Teresa’s cult of death and suffering depends for its effect on the most vulnerable and helpless: abandoned babies, say, or the terminally ill, who supply the occasion for charity and the raw material for compassion. (near minute 6).
The Teresa cult is now a missionary multinational with an annual turnover over tens of millions. If concentrated in Calcutta, that would certainly support a large hospital and perhaps even make a noticeable difference. But Mother Teresa has chosen instead to spread her franchise very thinly. To her the convent and the catechism matter more than the clinics. (near minute 28)
This was followed by a book and articles (Hitchens, 1995; 2003). Hitchens was also dismayed that Teresa and the Catholic Church continued to reject birth control – something that would have been fare more effective in reducing the number of abandoned babies that Teresa cared for. Despite Hitchens’ comments, the Catholic Church rapidly advanced Mother Teresa to sainthood: she was beatified in 2003 and canonized in 2016.
Hitchens’ critiques have been supported by others (Larivée et al, 2013; Bandyopadhyay, 2018). Perhaps the most significant defect in her mission in Calcutta was that she did not provide even the rudiments of modern medical care. Compassion is essential to medicine, but dying patients should not be denied the benefit of pharmacological pain relief. Mother Teresa also seemed to represent an obsolete approach to rectifying the ills of poverty. Some adjustment of the world’s inequalities would be of far more benefit than simply treating the poor with compassion. Giving charity to those whom we exploit does not remove the stain of the exploitation.
The following illustration shows saint and critic:
Personal Epilogue
Jones (1960, p 123) quoted from a 1945 interview of T. S. Eliot by J. P. Hogan
When, in an interview, Eliot was asked, ‘How would you, out of the bitter experience of the present time, wish mankind to develop?’ he answered: ‘I should speak of a greater spiritual consciousness, which is not asking that everybody should rise to the same conscious level, but that everybody should have some awareness of the depths of spiritual development and some appreciation and respect for those more exceptional people who can proceed further in spiritual knowledge than most of us can.’
I remember being quite taken by Celia when I first read the play as a young man. I had developed some modicum of spiritual consciousness and feelings similar to those reported by Celia – an awareness of solitude and a sense of sin. I wondered whether I might meet someone like Sir Henry Harcout-Reilly who would show me what I should do with my life. I never saw a production of the play, and I never met anyone that might have been my Guardian. And although when I first read of Celia’s death it seemed noble and right, I now feel it was foolish and mistaken.
References
Bandyopadhyay, R. (2018). Volunteer tourism and religion: the cult of Mother Teresa. Annals of Tourism Research, 70, 133–136.
Camus, A. (1942). Le mythe de Sisyphe. Gallimard. English translation by J. O’Brien (1955). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Alfred A. Knopf.
Eliot, T. S. (1950). The cocktail party: a comedy. Faber & Faber.
Eliot, T. S. (1951). Poetry and drama. Atlantic Monthly (February 1951).
Hammerschmidt, H. (1981). The role of the “Guardians” in T.S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Modern Drama, 24(1), 54–66.
Hitchens, C. (1994). Mother Teresa: Hell’s Angel. Channel 4 Television Program directed by Jenny Morgan, with text by Christoher Hitchens and Tariq Ali.
Hitchens, C. (1995). The missionary position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice. Verso.
Hitchens, C. (2003). Mommie dearest. The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud. Slate Magazine. October 20, 2003.
Larivée, S., Sénéchal, C., & Chénard, G. (2013). Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa. Studies in Religion, 42(3), 319–345.
Lesher, J. H. (2013). The self in conflict with itself: a Heraclitean theme in Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. In Knippschild, S., & García Morcillo, M. (Eds.) Seduction and power: antiquity in the visual and performing arts. (pp 122-132). Bloomsbury Academic.
Llorens-Cubedo, D. (2022). The Cocktail Party and It’s a Wonderful Life. The T.S. Eliot Studies Annual, 4(1), 229–252.
Priestley, J. B. (1947). An inspector calls: a play in three acts. Heinemann.
Ranald, M. L., & Ranald, R. A. (1961). Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster and the image of the Doppelgänger. Modern Language Notes, 76(1), 7–12.
Rexine, J. E. (1965). Classical and Christian foundations of T. S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Books Abroad, 39(1), 21–26.
Sartre, J.-P. (1947). Huis clos; suivi de Les mouches. Gallimard.
Sartre, J.-P. (1946). L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Nagel.
Smith, C. H. (1967). T. S. Eliot’s dramatic theory and practice: from Sweeney Agonistes to the Elder Statesman. Princeton University Press.
Laozi: the Nature of the Dao
Laozi (老子, lǎozǐ, “the old master”) was a legendary character from the 6th Century BCE who put together a collection of philosophical and ethical sayings that has come to be known as the Dàodéjing (道德經 simplified:道德经; or Tao Te Ching in the Wade-Giles romanization, “The Book of the Way and of Virtue”) or Laozi after the name of the author. The illustration shows a depiction of Laozi from a scroll by Sheng Mao. Following the discovery of early versions of the text written on silk and bamboo slips dating to the 2nd Century BCE (Chan, 2016, 2025), several new translations and annotated editions have been published. This essay presents a close reading of the first chapter.
The First Chapter
The following is the Chinese text of the first chapter (which can be followed at the websites of the Chinese Text Project or Wikibooks) and a recent English translation by Fischer (2023).
The way that can be (fully) conveyed is not the abiding Way; a name that can be (fully) descriptive is not an abiding name.
“Formlessness” is the name of the beginning of Heaven and Earth; “form” is the name of the mother of the myriad things.
Thus, if you abide in formlessness, you may thereby observe its wonders; and if you abide in form, you may thereby observe its manifestations.
These two appear together but have different names. This togetherness, we call it “mysterious” mystery and more mystery: the gateway to many wonders.
The following illustration shows on the left the first chapter in clerical script from a scroll by Sheng Mao (盛懋, fl. 14th Century) in the Palace Museum in Beijing, and on the right in regular script from a scroll by Zhao Mengfu (趙孟頫, 1254–1322). The latter includes a portrait of Laozi as a benevolent old gentleman.
The following is a recitation of the first chapter from the dao-de-jing website, and the text in pinyin romanization:
The original book of sayings was likely handed down orally. The earliest extant versions were written in clerical script. However, it is possible that there might have been versions of the book written in the Small Seal script, such as imagined in the following illustration:
Or even versions written in the earlier Great Seal or Bronze script, which was used at the time that the book was supposedly created. The illustration on the right shows a Great Seal version of Chapter 1 as imagined by Wilson (2010):
This essay will concern itself with the first chapter (or verse) of Laozi’s book. Red Pine quotes De Qing (1546-1623), a Buddhist commentator, on this chapter:
Laozi’s philosophy is all here. The remaining 5000 words only expand on this first verse.
The Ineffable Dao
The first section of the chapter concerns the difficulty in expressing the nature of Dao:
The way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
Much of Daoist philosophy is related to the opposing concepts of Yīn (陰 simplified 阴 lunar, feminine, passive, cool) and Yáng (陽 simplified 阳 solar, masculine, active, warm). The prototypical examples of Yin and Yan are the shady north side of a hill and its sunny south side. Yin and Yang are the two opposite but interacting forces that underly the harmony of the universe. They can be represented by the tàijítú (太極圖, utmost extreme symbol), one version of which is shown on the right. The small contrasting circles within in each half show how the opposites are complementary rather than antagonistic.
The first two lines of the Daodejing provides two parallel statements on the Dao and on its name. These lines thus concern the actual Dao and its abstract name, both of which cannot be fully understood by finite beings. Actual and abstract can be considered as one of the dualities composing Yin and Yang.
The first line uses the character 道 dao in three ways: first as a noun describing a way or path, second as a verb in the sense of speaking (telling how to follow a path), and third to express the concept of an eternal Dao underlying all things. The second line acts in the same way for the character 名 (name). All languages can use the same word as noun and verb, e.g. “change” in English, but this is more common in Chinese.
In later versions of the Daodejing the character 恆 (constant) was replaced by 常 (with a similar meaning), probably because the former was the name of the fifth emperor of the Han dynasty, Lui Heng (203-157 BCE), and therefore a taboo word.
The Dao is eternal or everlasting. However,
While everlasting seems apt, describing the Dao as unchanging does not fit. This is because Laozi’s Dao serves as the substance of the cosmos and fundamental source and basis of the things of the world. It is eternally transforming and dynamic. (Chen et al., 2020, p 47)
The following is a description of the Dao by Zhuangzi (莊子, Master Zhuang, Chuang-tzu in the Wade-Giles romanization) a Daoist philosopher who lived in the 4th Century BCE (Palmer et al. 1996, pp 50-51):
The great Tao has both reality and expression, but it does nothing and has no form. It can be passed on, but not received. It can be obtained, but not seen. It is rooted in its own self, existing before Heaven and Earth were born, indeed for eternity. It gives divinity to the spirits and to the gods. It brought to life Heaven and Earth. It was before the primal air, yet it cannot be called lofty; it was below all space and direction, yet it cannot be called deep. It comes before either Heaven or Earth, yet it cannot be called old.
Alan Watts (1975, pp 41-42) commented on the difficulty in describing the Dao:
Thus the Tao is the course, the flow, the drift, or the process of nature, and I call it the Watercourse Way because both Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu use the flow of water as its principal metaphor. But it is of the essence of their philosophy that the Tao cannot be defined in words and is not an idea or concept. As Chuang-tzu says, “It may be attained but not seen,” or, in other words, felt but not conceived, intuited but not categorized, divined but not explained. In a similar way, air and water cannot be cut or clutched, and their flow ceases when they are enclosed. There is no way of putting a stream in a bucket or the wind in a bag. Verbal description and definition may be compared to the latitudinal and longitudinal nets which we visualize upon the earth and the heavens to define and enclose the positions of mountains and lakes, planets and stars. But earth and heaven are not cut by these imaginary strings. As Wittgenstein [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922] said, “Laws, like the law of causation, etc., treat of the network and not of what the network describes.”
Chapter 32 of the Daodejing ends with the statement (translated by Pepper and Wang, 2021):
Dao in this world is like a stream in the valley Flowing into a river, into the sea
Being and Nothingness
The second part of the first chapter presents a brief cosmogeny
These lines have been interpreted in two distinct ways. The first
reads wu 无 [non-presence, lacking, non-being] and you 有 [presence, having, being] as the subjects of statements, and name (名) as part of the predicate. The alternative reading takes wuming 无名 [without name, nameless] and youming 有名 [having name] as the subjects of the statements (Chen et al. 2020, pp 48-49).
Thus we could have
Nothingness is the name for the origin of heaven and earth Being is the name for the mother of all things.
or
Nameless is the origin of heaven and earth Named is the mother of all things.
Since Yin and Yang is basic to Laozi’s thinking, I have opted to use the first reading which stresses the dichotomy of being and non-being. Similar ideas are stated in Chapter 40 of the Daodejing:
天下萬物生於有，有生於無
All the things in the world are generated from you 有, you 有 is generated from wu 无
There is a difference between 天地 (heaven and earth), which encompasses the whole cosmos, and 万物 (myriad things), which refers to the many different things within it. However, this distinction may not be necessary since some early sources used 万物 in both lines. (Huang, 2024, p 14)
The dichotomy between you and wu (Hall & Ames, 1998) reflects a foundational issue in philosophy: the nature of Being. This goes back to some of the very earliest records of human thought. The creation hymn of the Hindu RgVeda (composed around 2000 BCE) states that at the beginning of time there was neither existence nor non-existence. The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides (5th Century BCE) worried about “What is and what is not.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet considered “To be, or not to be, that is the question” and Jean-Paul Sartre compared L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness).
The following is a comment by Zhuangzi (Palmer et al. 1996, p 15) on the origins of the universe:
There is the beginning; there is not as yet any beginning of the beginning; there is not as yet a beginning not to be a beginning of the beginning. There is what is, and there is what is not, and it is not easy to say whether what is not, is not; or whether what is, is.
The Mother of All Things
The fourth line of the first chapter proposes a feminine origin (母, mother) for all things. This idea is repeated in Chapter 6 which describes 玄牝 (xuán pìn, the mysterious female):
谷神不死，是謂玄牝。 玄牝之門，是謂天地根。 綿綿若存，用之不勤
The spirit of the valley does not die; it has been called the mysterious female The gate of the mysterious female is called the root of heaven and earth. It is continuous and uninterrupted; its functioning is inexhaustible. (my translation)
Chapter 25 mentions the 天下母 (tiān xià mŭ, the mother of all under heaven):
There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, born before Heaven and Earth, Soundless and formless, independent and unchanging. Revolving endlessly, it may be thought of as the Mother of all under Heaven. I do not know its name; so I just call it Dao, and arbitrarily name it Great
Anderson (2021) has noted how the Daodejing fully recognizes the female nature of the Dao. Most of the world’s religions are androcentric: they ignore the divine feminine. At its beginning Daoism understoon that the world is based on interacting male ane female forces. And that creation comes from the female.
From One to Many
The first chapter distinguishes between being and nothingness (yŏu 有 and wu 無 无). The 42nd chapter recounts the actual process of creation (translation by Wu, 2016):
道生一，一生二， 二生三，三生萬物。 萬物負陰而抱陽， 沖氣以為和。
Dao gives birth to One; One gives birth to Two; Two gives birth to Three; Three gives birth to Ten Thousand things. All things have Yin on their back and Yang in their embrace; The Qi of the two converge and become harmony.
The idea of Yin on their back and Yang in their embrace refers to how we prefer to sit facing the sun with the shadow at our back.
The basic cosmogeny is that the primordial energy of the universe – qì (氣) – becomes differentiated into two opposing forces of yin and yang. These then interact to produce the myriad things of the world that exist in harmony hé (和).
The one-two-three progression probably just represents the evolution of the many things in the universe. However, Fischer (2023) also considers the possibility
that the “one, two, three” refer to physical energies (氣), Yin-Yang, and harmonized physical energies (和氣). That is: one, a semblance of a form emerges from formless-ness; two, the physical energy that constitutes that semblance is influenced by the Yin and Yang states that characterize all physical energies; three, once the semblance has morphed, chrysalis-like, into its final “harmonious” form, it has become a stable entity.
Mystery and Manifestation
The third section of the first chapter has led to several different translations.
Some editions (e.g. Huang, 2024) substitute 眇 (miǎo, tiny, minute) for 妙 and 噭 (jiao, pursue) for 徼. This leads to the idea of the development from minute origins toward the mature things of the present.
Another difficult is whether the character 欲 acts as a noun meaning “desire” or as an adverb casting the following parts of the sentences in the subjunctive as “may observe.” This would make無 and 有 the subjects of the sentences rather than modifiers of 欲. The Fischer translation quoted at the beginning of this essay follows this approach, as do the versions of Yu (2003), Chen et al. (2020) and Wu (2016).
Translators have more commonly considered that these two sentences compare what happens with or without desire (e.g., Addiss & Lombardo;1993; Leguin & Seaton, 1998; Lin, 2020; Liu, 2024; Loy, 1985; Red Pine, 2004; Wilson 2012). This approach fits with the Buddhist idea that one can find release from suffering by relinquishing desire. As pointed out by Watts (1975, p 96), however, the idea that virtue comes from an absence of desire is paradoxical:
Trying to get rid of desire is, surely, desiring not to desire.
If we follow this approach to the translation, we find that Laozi makes no moral judgement about desire: he just points out the differences between having it or not. Both are possible and both serve a purpose. Relinquishing desire can allow the mind a mystical vision of the origin of everything. Exercising desire allows us to understand the nature of the things of the world:
Free from desire, you can realize the mystery; Following desire, you can see the manifestations.
However, if the chapter is to be consistent, it is probably best to keep to the duality of wu無(无) and you 有:
Therefore in nothingness you may see the mystery; In being you may see the manifestations.
Nevertheless, the different translations are not that distinct. A person can see the mystery by attuning his or her mind to nothingness. One way of doing this might be to relinquish desire.
Yin and Yang
The fourth section of the chapter tells us these two states are just different aspects of the universe, part of the union of interacting opposites that makes up the concept of Yin-Yang:
Whether these lines refer to (者) the concepts of being and nothingness or to the states of desire and non-desire depends on how the previous lines were translated. I have opted for the former.
These two are but different aspects of the same idea This is the mystery of mysteries
The Gateway
The final section of the chapter proclaims the mystery of the Dao:
Laozi uses two words for mystery:
玄 (xuán) is dark, mysterious, unseen, withdrawn, deep. But 妙 (miào) is lighter, a wonderful mystery. (Pepper & Wang, 2021, p 17)
We can stress the “darkness,” as in Denecke (2010, p 223)
Where the dark is darker than darkness, that’s the Gateway of Subtleties.
Or simply stay with “mystery”
Mystery of mystery: the gateway to many wonders
Relations to Western Pantheism
The concept of the Dao has many similarities to Western pantheism, particularly to that proposed by Spinoza (Stamatov, 2019, 2025). Fu (1973, p 390) remarks
Both philosophers think that the ultimate way of freeing oneself from human bondage and attaining total emancipation is to have an ontological insight (Lao Tzu) into or intellectual intuition (Spinoza) of the as-it-is-ness of the world and man.
One significant difference is that Spinoza clearly names the principle underlying the universe as God.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was particularly intrigued by the writings of the Domingo Fernandez Navarrete (1610-1689), a Dominican friar who had spent many years in China and had described the principles of Daoism for Western readers (Murray, 2020). Coleridge and his close colleague William Wordsworth (1770-1850) were responsible for initiating the movement of Romanticism in English literature Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 describes a romantic pantheism that is very similar to the Dao of Laozi:
And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Envoi
We can conclude by putting together the complete chapter:
The way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
Nothingness is the name for the origin of heaven and earth Being is the name for the mother of all things.
Therefore through nothingness you can see the mystery; Through being you can see the manifestations.
These two are but different aspects of the same idea This is the mystery of mysteries
Mystery of mystery: the gateway to many wonders.
The chapter is our introduction to the Dao. The character 道 is composed of two radicals. In the upper right is a representation of the head 首(shŏu), and in the left and below is a radical denoting walking 辶 (chuò). The combination perhaps represents “to go ahead.” As such it depicts the principle that underlies the universe: the way things should and do turn out.
The Dao has several meanings:
In some places the character “dao 道” refers to a metaphysical entity understood as ultimate true existence. In other places, it seems to refer to a type of rule or principle, often reflected in natural laws or patterns. In yet other locations, dao refers to standards, norms or exemplary models for human life. (Chen et al,2020, p 2),
Fu (1973) describes six dimensions of the Dao:
(i) reality – a metaphysical symbol of things as they are (ii) origin – the source of all there is (iii) principle – that whereby all things become what they are (iv) function – the laws governing the processes of change (v) virtue – that which completes the being of each and every individual (vi) technique – the way in which people are governed
The Dao in metaphysical terms should be considered in relation to time. As time passes, thing change. Our science indicates that such changes are not random but follow general rules. Most people also believe that these changes ultimately progress toward something: that the universe has some purpose and is in the process of becoming better. The Dao instantiates these two ideas. It is the overall principle leading the universe toward harmony. Human beings can live their lives best by attuning themselves to this movement.
The final illustration shows on the right 道written in an ecstatic cursive script by Al Chung-liang Huang for Alan Watt’s book on Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975). The fluidity of the calligraphy fits with the idea of water finding its way. On the left is shown the first chapter of the Daodejing as created by Lee Chi-Chang for the same book:
References
Addiss, S., & Lombardo, S. (1993). Tao te ching. Hackett.
Anderson, R. (2021). The Divine Feminine: Tao Te Ching. Inner Traditions.
Chan, A. K. L. (2018). The Daodejing and its tradition. In Kohn, L. (Ed.) Daoism Handbook (Volume 14 of Handbook of Orietnal Studies) (pp 1-29). Brill.
Chan, A. K. L. (2025). Laozi. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Chen, G., D’Ambrosio, P., & Xiao, O. (2020). The annotated critical Laozi: with contemporary explication and traditional commentary. Brill.
Denecke, W. (2011). The race for precedence: polemics and the vacuum of traditions in Laozi. In The dynamics of Masters literature: early Chinese thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. (pp 207-230). Harvard University Asia Center.
Fischer, P. (2023). The annotated Laozi: a new translation of the Daodejing. State University of New York at Albany.
Fu, C. W.-H. (1973). Lao Tzu’s conception of Tao. Inquiry, 16(1–4), 367–394.
Hall, D., Ames, R. (1998). You–wu. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Taylor & Francis. (Retrieved 15 Nov. 2025)
Huang, J. H., (2024). The Dao De Jing: Laozi’s book of life: a new translation from the ancient Chinese. Mariner.
Le Guin, U. K., & Seaton, J. P. (1998). Tao te ching: a book about the way and the power of the way. Shambhala.
Stamatov, A. (2025). Dao in world philosophy: an experimental approach. In A. Stamatov (Ed.) Dialogues with classical Chinese philosophy (pp. 192–204). Routledge.
Watts, A. (1975) Tao: the watercourse way. Pantheon Books.
Wilson, W. S. (2012). Tao te ching: an all-new translation. Shambhala.
Wu, C. Q. (2016). Thus Spoke Laozi: A New Translation with Commentaries of Daodejing. University of Hawaii.
Yu, A. C. (2003). Reading the “Daodejing”: ethics and politics of the rhetoric. Chinese literature: essays, articles, reviews (CLEAR), 25, 165-187
A Way of Writing: The Art of Chinese Calligraphy
Chinese calligraphy (書法, simplified 书法, shūfǎ, literally ‘way of writing’) is the art of writing Chinese characters (漢字, simplified 汉字, hànzì) with a brush. Together with poetry and painting, calligraphy is considered one of the “Three Perfections” (三絕 sānjué) of Chinese art. This essay reviews the development of calligraphy and provides some examples of its beauty. The illustration shows the calligraphy of the characters of shūfǎ in regular and semi-cursive styles.
A Brief History
According to legend, Chinese writing began during the reign of the Yellow Emperor in the 3rd Millenium BCE. The emperor asked Cangjie (倉頡) one of his ministers to create a way to record knowledge. Cangjie was blessed with two pairs of eyes. This allowed him to see the basic shapes and patterns underlying the perceived world.
The first clear evidence for writing in China, however, comes from symbols found on the shoulder blades of oxen and the shells or tortoises. These date to around 1250 BCE. The symbols appear to have been used during divination, and the writing is therefore called Oracle Script (甲骨文,jiǎgǔwén, “shell and bone script”).
Beginning around 1000 BCE, characters were being cast onto or incised into various ritual bronze containers. This type of writing is called Bronze Script,(金文, jīnwén).
Over the years various styles of writing were used. Legend has it that the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BCE) established a standard writing style to be used across his newly unified empire: the Small Seal Script, 小篆 (xiǎozhuàn). Although the histories attribute this to the First Emperor, the script likely developed incrementally rather than by fiat. The script is characterized by thin lines that do not vary in width. The characters tend toward right-left symmetry, and the shapes are curved rather than rectilinear.
The invention of paper (in China in 105 BCE) and the use of writing brushes led to the development of the Clerical Script (隶書, simplified 隶书, lìshū) by around 100 BCE. The lines vary in thickness as befits the use of a brush. The characters show a tendency for the lines to sweep toward the right. The script is rectilinear rather than curved, and the width of the characters tends to be greater than their height.
Over the following years clerks and scholars modified the clerical script to be lighter and more regular. The characters tended to occupy a square form. The individual strokes making up the different characters became standardized. This development occurred over several centuries beginning in the Second Century CE. The final version of Regular Script (楷書, simplified 楷书, kǎishū) became established during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE).
While the regular script was being perfected, the needs of writing speed and emotional expression led to the development of Cursive Script (草書, simplified 草书cǎoshū, literally “grass writing”). As well as denoting “grass” the character 草 can also mean “careless, hasty, draft.” The characters are no longer created by discrete strokes, but formed with one or several continuous movements of the brush. The characters are curved and tend to have widths less than their height. The illustration on the right shows 草書 written in regular script and in cursive script. Regular script requires 20 separate strokes, but cursive uses only 3. Cursive script is variable from one writer to another.
A more legible version of cursive script soon developed: Semi-cursive Script (行書 simplified 行书, xíngshū, “running script”). This script is a compromise between the regular and cursive scripts. Characters are clearly demarcated from each other. Nevertheless, the individual strokes within the character become connected and flow together. There are conventions for depicting various sets of strokes. For example, parallel lines are represented as a z form rather than as = and dots are connected into a line. The style is analog rather than digital.
After the Chinese Communist Revolution, the new government of the People’s Republic of China simplified many of the commonly used highly complex characters. From 1949 to 1986, these changes led to the current Simplified Characters (简化字; jiǎnhuàzì, literally “simple transformed characters”). In writing this name, the traditional character 簡 has been simplified to 简. In the names of the earlier scripts, the traditional 書 was simplified to 书.
The following illustration of the different scripts shows the evolution of the characters 天 tiān sky/heaven, 馬 mā horse, 旅 lǚtravel/journey, and 正 zhĕng straight/correct. Of these, only the character for horse underwent modern simplification. The dates show the approximate times when the different scripts began.
More information about the evolution of Chinese characters is available in Chiang (1973), Qui (2000), Shi (2003) and Li (2010)
Thousand Character Classic (千字文qiānzì wén)
The Thousand Character Classic is a long poem that uses a thousand different characters (Paar, 1963; Sturman, accessed 2025). The poem contains 250 lines, each four characters long, arranged in rhyming quatrains to facilitate memorization. Legend has it that in the 6th Century CE, the Emperor Wu commissioned the poem to teach children the rudiments of writing. Since the text was learned by any literate person, the order of its characters could be used to put documents in sequence in the same way that alphabetical order is used in alphabetic languages. Copybooks showing the thousand characters in different writing styles soon became popular. The following example shows the beginning of the poem in a modern version (“The sky was black and the earth was yellow; space and time vast and limitless”):
Zhang Xu (張旭, ca 675-750 CE)
Zhang Xu was a court scholar and calligrapher. Although adept in regular script, he became renowned for his works in a wild cursive style (狂草 kuángcǎo ‘crazy cursive’), often created under the influence of wine (Jagger, 2023). His friend the poet Du Fu considered him one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine-cup (Li Bai was another):
张 旭 三 杯 草 圣 传 脱 帽 露 顶 王 公 前 挥 毫 落 纸 如 云 烟。
Zhang Xu, the Sage of Cursive Script, after three cups of wine, Would doff his cap from his head before princes and dukes, And let his brushstrokes fall on the paper like misty clouds
The most famous work attributed to him is his Four Ancient Poems(古詩四帖) a scroll (29.5 x 195.2 cm) on multi-colored paper now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang (Ouyang, & Wang, 2008 pp 217-223). The first poem by Yu Xin (513–581) is about the beginning of spring and the New Year celebrations:
The Eastern Light with his nine-petal mushroom canopy And the Northern Candle with her five-hued cloud-chariot Descend and drift into the light of sunset Appearing and disappearing among the clouds. Spring water flows like rain falling on jade, And bluebirds fly towards the Jinhua mountain The Han Emperor examines the peach-tree seeds, And the Qi Marquis inquires about the jujube blossoms. We drink the wine of the Lantern Festival And visit with the Cai family.
The Eastern Light and the Northern Candle are the names of Daoist deities (Luo, 2019, pp 320-321). The ecstatic energy of the Zhang Xu’s calligraphy befits the poem’s enthusiastic enjoyment of the beginning of spring.
The following illustration shows the complete scroll divided into two parts, and an enlargement of the first poem. To compare the characters, note that the calligraphy moves from top to bottom and from right to left, whereas the text above is written from left to right.
Zhao Mengfu (趙孟頫, 1254–1322)
Zhao Mengfu was a calligrapher and painter at the time when the Mongols conquered China and established the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Since he worked for the Mongol emperors, his politics were considered suspect by later historians. However, he is recognized as China’s most talented calligrapher (McCausland, 2011). He wrote in all styles, but was an absolute master of the regular script. Copybooks of his calligraphy are still widely used by students wishing to master kaishu.
The following illustration shows the beginning of the third scroll in an original set of seven for the Sutra on the Lotus of the True Dharma (Chinese: 妙法蓮華經 miàofǎ liánhuá jīng), a basic text in Mahayana or “Great Vehicle” (Chinese: 大乘 dàshèng) Buddhism. The scroll, written in small regular script, is now in the collection of the technology entrepreneur Jerry Yang (Wang Lianqi in Chang & Knight, 2012, pp 70-103). The scroll is 28 cm wide and 275 cm long.
The beginning of the text (4th line from the right) reads 爾時世尊告摩訶迦葉及諸大弟子善哉善哉: At that time the world-honored one [Buddha] spoke to Mahakasyapa [one of his disciples] and the other major disciples “Excellent, excellent …” This is the beginning of Chapter 5 in the Sutra.
Wang Lianqi (Chang & Knight, 2012, pp 98-99) remarks about the calligraphy:
This scroll by Zhao Mengfu has more than ten thousand characters written with seeming effortlessness, and from start to finish they are consistent in that they are steady yet agile at the same time. Unless one has exceptional skill, something like this would be utterly impossible. But what is especially exceptional here—apart from the refined beauty of its dots and strokes, the stability of its composition, the comfortable spacing, and the openness of its forms (all achieved while adhering strictly to the principles of standard script)—is that Zhao is able to impart freshness and vitality to the forms, so that strength emerges amid their graceful charms. As a result, viewers forget the concentration and care that went into their structure and brushwork and see only their naturalness and serenity.
Zhao Mengfu was also a brilliant painter. The following illustration shows his depiction of Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees on a scroll 28 cm widenow in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The painting shows a scene in early spring. Two large rocks are painted in “flying white” (飛白féibái) style, with the upper edge of the right rock accentuated, provide the main structure of the painting. “Flying white” is a style of painting or calligraphy that uses a lightly loaded brush to leave lines with white streaks showing through. Between the rocks are two lightly traced leafless trees. At the outer edge of each rock are trees more darkly inscribed. The tree on the right is leafless but the one on the left has new buds on its sinuous branches. Young bamboo shoots grow in clumps on the ground and between the rocks. On the ground are sprouts of new grass. This is a marvelous portrayal of the transition between winter and spring.
The scroll includes colophons by the painter (right) and three colleagues:
Zhao Mengfu’s colophon reads:
The rocks are like “flying-white,” the trees like “seal script.” Depicting the bamboo draws upon the “eight clerical” method. If indeed there are people that can make these associations, They will understand that calligraphy and painting have the same root.
The “eight” style of clerical script was right-left symmetrical with long sweeping strokes as in the character 八 bā for eight.
The painting and poem provide a fine example of the “Three Perfections” (三絕 sānjué): the combination of poetry painting and calligraphy.
Ni Zan (倪瓚 simplified 倪瓚, 1301–1374)
Ni Zan was another gifted painter and calligrapher who worked during the Yuan Dynasty. One of his most famous paintings, now in the Shanghai Museum has come to be known as The Six Gentleman (1345):
Xu (2022, p 32) describes the striking combination of emptiness and strength in the image:
[T]the composition has been pulled apart, introducing an almost unbridgeable gap between foreground trees and distant hills. Moreover, the gap between the edge of the paper and the sandbank isolates the foreground subject, and refuses to provide us, the viewers, easy access into his landscape. The stark spaciousness of the painting, the tension created by horizontal ground lines and vertical tree lines, enhances this feeling of aloofness.
The six trees are all different:
The six trees in this picture are the pine, cypress, camphor tree, Chinese scholar tree, phoebe and elm — all Confucian symbols of moral integrity (Xu, 2022, p 33).
To the left of the trees, Ni Zan wrote a brief note describing how the painting was created during a visit to his friend Lu Shanfu (Xu, 2022, p 32):
Each time Lu Shanfu sees me, he urges me to paint for him. On the eighth day of the fourth lunar month of the fifth year of the Zhizheng era [May 10th, 1345] I had just docked my boat on the Bow River when he greeted me with a lamp and a piece of paper, insisting strenuously that I paint for him. I was feeling extremely weary from the journey but did my best to answer his request. When the old master Dachi [courtesy name of Huang Gongwang] sees this, he will have a good laugh over it.
Huang Gongwang himself added a poem to the upper right of the painting. This likened the foreground trees to six gentlemen:
远望云山隔秋水, 近有古木拥陂陀, 居然相对六君子, 正直特立无偏颇
In the distance cloudy mountains are separated by the autumn river. Close by, old trees huddle along the sloping shore, Calmly facing one another, the Six Gentlemen, Who stand upright, outstanding, without being lopsided.
Shen Zhou (沈周, 1427–1509)
Shen Zhou was a painter, poet and calligrapher during the early Ming Dynasty. His painting Poet on a Mountaintop(杖藜遠眺, 39 by 60 cm), currently held by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, is probably the most famous example of the three perfections. The painting shows the poet reaching the peak of a mountain and looking out over the mist in the valley below. He speaks a poem, the words of which are written on the sky.
A transcription and translation of the poem follow
白雲如帶束山腰， 石磴飛空細路遙。 獨倚杖藜舒眺望， 欲因鳴澗答吹簫
White clouds sash-like wrap round the waists of mountains, The rock terrace soars into space over a distant narrow path. Leaning on a bramble staff, I gaze far and free; I will reply to the sound of the mountain stream with my flute.
Xu Chu (許初, fl 16th Century CE)
Xu Chu created an album of the Autumn Meditations of the Tang poet Du Fu (712-770 CE) using seal script. The illustration shows the first two leaves of the album, now in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The first poem of the sequence (beginning on the right leaf and extending through much of the second) transcribes the first meditation:
The text of the poem with a translation by Mark Alexander follows:
Wu Gorge is the second of the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River. Chrysanthemums are short-day flowers that can bloom twice a year, once in the spring and a second time in autumn. Baidicheng (White Emperor City) is a hill-top fortress between Wu Gorge and the upstream Qutang Gorge. During the Tang Dynasty heavy cloth was prepared for winter clothes by being beaten on stone.
Zhu Da (朱耷,1626-1705)
Zhu Da, also known by his pen name Bada Shanren (八大山人) came from an aristocratic family who served in the Ming Court. When the Manchus took over the capital and established the Qing Dynasty in 1644, Bada found refuge in a Chan Buddhist temple and became a monk. Over the years he rose to become an abbot. However, he returned to secular life in 1680, producing numerous works of calligraphy and painting in his later years (Chang et al., 2003).
The following is Falling Flower (落花 luòhuā) from an album of paintings created in 1692. The cursive calligraphy gives a sense of gentle falling and the signature in the center of the page appears like another blossom.
In 1699 Bada Shanren transcribed a poem by Geng Wei (fl 8th Century) in memory of Wang Wei (701-761 CE) using a semi-cursive script that was both beautiful and restrained. The poem was dear to Bada, who shared Wang Wei’s Buddhist philosophy and love of nature.
The following provides a transcription of the calligraphy and translation of the poem:
Blending Ruism, Moism, and the Holy Religion, By the cloudy spring, he built his former hut; But Meng Wall Cove is desolate now and still, And Wheel Rim Creek just winds naturally away. The inner teachings dissolved his many cares, The western garden transformed his old abode; In the deep chamber, spring bamboo grows old, In the thin rain, the night bell seldom tolls. His dusty tracks remain in the golden earth, His writings are kept beside the Stone Canal; Still I do not know which of his companions, Has inherited the books of this Cai Yong!
“Ruism” is the philosophy of Confucius (5th and 6th Centuries BCE); “Moism” refers to the teachings of Mozi (3rd Century BCE) who promoted asceticism and self-restraint; and the “Holy Religion” refers to Buddhism. Meng Wall Cove is located near Wang Wei’s country estate and was described in the set of poems entitled Wangchuan Ji (Wheel River Poems). The Stone Canal is the name of one of the imperial libraries. Cai Yong was a famous scholar and politician from the 2nd Century CE.
Bada Shanren’s calligraphy expresses the meaning and emotion of the text. The character 深, “deep” (fifth from top in the third column from left) extends its tail into the depths of sadness.
Deng Shiru (鄧石如, simplified: 邓石如 1743-1805)
Deng Shiru became adept in calligraphy in the style of seal script and clerical script. The following illustration below shows a pair of homiletic sayings in clerical script on hanging scrolls each 1.7 meters high:
The calligraphy is powerful and serious (Ho Chuan-hsing in Chang and Knight, 2012. The strokes are broad and the characters wider than they are high. The beginning and end of each stroke are cleanly demarcated: the brush is turned to “conceal the tip.” The sayings read:
心作良田百世耕之不盡
The heart is a good field – plow it for a hundred generations and it’s never depleted.
善為至寶一生用則有餘
Goodness is a perfect treasure – use it for a lifetime and some will still be left over
Epilogue
Chinese calligraphy has continued through the years as an artform that appeals to both the eye and the mind. The writing of Chinese characters with a brush became popular throughout East Asia as a way of combining art and meditation (Tanahashi, 2016). Modern artists still produce calligraphy. They use new forms but still maintain links to past masters.
Wang Jiqian (王己千, Westernized name C. C. Wang, 1907-2003) was both a major collector of Chinese art and calligraphy and an artist. The illustration shows his calligraphy of a Poem by Du Fu:
The calligraphy presents a line from a poem by Du Fu (712-770 CE):
不薄今人愛古人
Without belittling the moderns, I love the ancients
The full poem can be found in Owen (2016, Vol III p 114-115).
References
Chang, J., Bai, Q., & Allee, S. D. (2003). In pursuit of heavenly harmony: paintings and calligraphy by Bada Shanren from the estate of Wang Fangyu and Sum Wai. Freer Gallery of Art (Smithsonian Institution).
Chang, J., & Knight, M (Eds.) (2012). Out of character: decoding Chinese calligraphy Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
Chiang, Y. (1973). Chinese calligraphy: an introduction to its aesthetic and technique (3rd ed.). Harvard University Press.
Fong, W. (1984). Images of the mind: selections from the Edward L. Elliott family and John B. Elliott collections of Chinese calligraphy and painting at the Art Museum, Princeton University. Princeton University Press.
Wang Wei (王维; traditional 王維; pinyin, Wáng Wéi; 699–761) was a Chinese musician, painter, and poet during the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907). He was a devout Buddhist and used the courtesy name Wang Weimojie in homage to the early Buddhist teacher and boddhisattva Vimalakirti (Chinese name 維摩詰 Wéimójí). Vimalakirti taught the practice of sunyata (Sanskrit, emptiness; Chinese 空性 Kōng xìng), a meditative state wherein the mind is emptied of the self and becomes one with the universe. After a tumultuous life, Wang Wei retired to his villa on the Wang River about 40 km southeast of the imperial capital Chang’an (present day Xi’an). There he composed the Wǎngchuān jí (辋川集 The Wheel River Collection): a set of twenty quatrains describing various locations near his villa. Each quatrain was accompanied by a reply from his protégé Pei Di (裴迪 pinyin, Péi Dí, 714-?).
A Poet of the High Tang
Wang Wei was born to an aristocratic family in Shanxi province in northeast China. He was a precocious child and quickly showed his talents for music and painting. By 721 he had passed his imperial exams and was appointed as Court Musician in Chang’an. Over the following years he continued with his music and painting, while serving in various official positions in the imperial court. In 755, the general An Lushan instigated a revolt against the emperor. Within a year the rebels advanced on Chang’an. The emperor and his court fled over the mountains to Sichuan in the West, but Wang Wei was captured and taken to the rebel capital of Luoyang some 350 km to the East. The imperial forces regrouped and defeated the rebels in 757, releasing Wang Wei. However, since Wang Wei had been forced to serve in the rebel government, he was indicted for treason. After finally being exonerated, Wang Wei retired to his villa on the Wang River, where he wrote the poems in the Wangchuan Ji (Wheel River Collection). Wang Wei died in 761. Followers of An Lushan continued fighting against the empire until 763.
Although plagued by intense civil disorder, these times were remarkable for the glorious poetry that was written. Li Bai (701-762), Du Fu (712-770) and Wang Wei were the three greatest poets of a period that became known as the “High Tang” (Owen, 1981). Each of these poets had their own view of life:
Wang Wei became known as the Poet-Buddha, Li Bai as the Poet-Immortal, and Du Fu as the Poet-Sage, respectively symbolizing Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian approaches in their poems. Accordingly, Wang Wei was characterized as the contemplative, Li Bai as the visionary, and Du Fu as the social conscience of the age. (Cartelli, 2019).
However, Cartelli notes that these differences are far from categorical. The religious threads of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism are fully intertwined both in Chinese society (Ching, 1993; Hinton, 2020) and in the poetry of these three writers.
Wang Wei’s nature poetry simply describes his experience of the world with little if any interpretation or metaphorical explanation:
Wang’s quatrains often ended in enigmatic understatement – a statement, a question, or an image that was so simple or seemed so incomplete that the reader was compelled to look beneath it for the importance. (Owen, 1981, p 38)
Owen (1981, p 45) describes Wang Wei’s state of mind as “unselfconsciousness” and relates it to the Buddhist idea of sunyata (emptiness). Only if the mind is emptied can one become aware of truth. And truth perhaps differs between East and West:
in contrast to the West, in the Chinese tradition truth usually lay not behind a mask of orphic complexity but rather behind a mask of guileless simplicity. To draw on this philosophical tradition was to alter entirely the way in which poetry was read: what was said was no longer necessarily all that was meant, and the surface mood might not be the real mood. Particularly in the Wang Stream Collection, we find poems that are visually complete but intellectually incomplete, which tease the reader to decipher some hidden truth. (Owen, 1981, p 39)
Yip (1972, p xi) remarks
In a mode of consciousness in which there is no disturbance of intellectual impositions, no hurry-scurry to establish causal relations, each object or moment is given the fullest chance to emerge in spotlighting distinctiveness very much the way everything appears keenly fresh in the orbit of a child’s vision.
Paintings
Although Wang Wei was a renowned painter, none of his paintings have survived to the present day. Nevertheless, later artists made many copies and interpretations of his work. One of his most famous paintings was a scroll depicting the various locations mentioned in the Wangchuan Ji. This essay will include images from three such copies: one by Guo Zhongshu (929-279) now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, a copy of the Zhongshu scroll in The Freer Gallery in Washington, and a much later scroll by Wang Yuanqi, dated 1711, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. An intriguing website provides images of a scroll together with translations of the Wangchun Ji poems.
Wheel River Poems
The Wǎngchuān jí (辋川集) is a collection of poems containing 20 quatrains (絕可juéjù, literal meaning “cut-off lines”)by Wang Wei and 20 replies by his young protégé Pei Di. Each line is composed of 5 characters in a format is known as 五絕 (Wǔjué). The poems describe various locations near Wang Wei’s villa on the Wang River. The name of the river (辋 Wǎng, a different character from that in the poet’s name) specifically refers to the rim (felloes or felly) of a wagon wheel, and Hinton (2006) translates the title “Wheel-Rim River.” The river was so named
because of its small eddies and whirlpools which resembled wheels, or because of the spot at the mouth of the river where the current flowed around an island like a wheel (Wagner, 1981, p 88).
Many authors have translated Wang Wei’s contributions to the collection (e.g., Yu, 1980; Barnstone et al., 1991; Hinton, 2020), but only a few include the replies of Pei Di (Yip, 1972, Powell, 2019; Rouzer & Nugent, 2020). The general evaluation has been that Pei Di’s poems were inferior to those Wang Wei. However, Pei Di was a talented young scholar, and a close reading of the poems shows that the pairing of the poems enhances their overall effect (Warner, 2005). This essay will consider five of the poems in the collection. For consistency and because of the sensitivity and precision of the translations, the English versions will all be from Hiding the Universe by Wai-lim Yip (1972). The poems will be presented with Wang Wei on the left and Pei Di on the right. The translations will then be followed by the Chinese text, with Wang Wei above and Pei Di below.
Deer Park
Empty mountain: no man is seen, Day in, day out, cold mountain in view. But voices of men are heard. A wayfarer comes and goes alone; Sun’s reflection reaches into the woods Knows no things of the pine-forests And shines upon the green moss. But tracks of buck and doe.
The following is a reading of this poem from a website associated with Zong-qi Cai’s book on How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context (2018).
The difficulty of translating this poem into English was the subject of Eliot Weinberger’s book Seventeen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987). Chinese characters often have many meanings, and can be translated as nouns, verbs or adjectives, depending on the context. One difficulty with Wang Wei is his lack of a personal viewpoint. The ending of the first line is therefore better translated “no one is seen” rather than “I see no one.”
The presence of a deer park on Wang Wei’s estate was probably related to Buddhist teachings. Gautama gave his first sermon, wherein he delineated the four noble truths and the eightfold way, at a deer park in Sarnath in Northern India. The Chinese character 柴 chái now means “firewood,” although it likely once also meant a “fence,” such as that enclosing a park.
The opening word of the poem 空,kōng means empty or emptiness. Wang Wei is clearly alluding to the Buddhist concept of sunyata (Yang, 2001; Stepien, 2014).
The characters 返景 translated as “returning or reflected sunlight” might simply mean the light from the setting sun.
The complementary poem by Pei Di makes Wang Wei’s feeling of emptiness extend over time as well as space. He also comments on the difference between the human wayfarer who knows nothing of the way of the forest, and the deer who are naturally attuned to its secrets.
The following illustration of the Deer Park is from the Zhongshu scroll in Tapei:
Lakeside Pavilion
The Chinese hibiscus (Hibiscus x rosa sinensis) is the most common variant of this showy flower. In China it often symbolizes success. The poem by Pei Di seems to occur after the party with the invited guests. The lake is now windswept, and the lonely cries of monkeys echo through the night.
The following illustration shows the lakeside pavilion in the Wang Yuanqi scroll:
Lake Yi
Flute music rides beyond water’s reach. Vast emptiness: lake has no limits. Sun at dusk: to see my lord off. Blue glimmer: sky’s hue merges. On the lake, merely turning my head: Moor the boat with a long whistle: Mountain’s green—curling, white clouds. From four sides clear winds come.
The Chinese character 青 qīng can describe colors ranging from light green to deep blue. Many languages do not discriminate between green and blue, and the term “grue” has been used for this range of colors (Bogushevsaya, 2015). One then takes the color from the context: in this pair of poems, one assumes that Wang Wei’s mountain is green and that Pei Di’s sky in blue. Modern Chinese has evolved the terms 藍lán for blue and 綠lǜ for green, but the older word is still used. In following illustration of Lake Yi from Wang Yuanqi’s scroll, the colors blue and green shade into each other. Pei Di mentions in his poem how the colors of the sky and the lake merge.
Wang Wei’s poem is set in peaceful weather. By the time of Pei Di’s quatrain, a blustery wind has risen. The sound of the flute has changed to the more strident whistle.
Bamboo Grove
I sit alone among dark bamboos, Have been to the Bamboo Grove, Strum the lute and unloose my voice. Daily to get close to the Way. Grove so deep, no one knows. In and out, only mountain birds. The moon comes to shine upon me. Deep solitude: no men of the world.
The Chinese guqin is a plucked seven-stringed instrument favored by Chinese scholars. The illustration below shows an example (c 1700) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The upper board of wutong wood represents heaven, and the bottom board of zi wood earth. The 13 studs (hui) indicate positions for fingering. The strings are made of twisted silk.
The following is a reading of the Wang Wei poem from Librivox:
Yu (1980, p 191) points out that the xiào referred to in the second line was
a combination of Taoist breathing techniques and whistling which was said to express feelings and was associated with harmonizing with nature and achieving immortality; the word has also been translated as “humming,” “singing,” and “crooning,” The tradition of the Xiao began during the Jin dynasty and has always been linked with Taoism. Its most famous practitioner was Sun Deng, a friend of the poet Ruan Jiu whose Xiao was said to sound like a phoenix.
The ideas of solitude and emptiness in the Wang Wei quatrain are extended in Pei Di’s reply. He talks specifically about the Dao (道) commonly translated as “The Way” – the underlying principle of the universe considered in Taoism. The character 無 wu, a negative term (“not” or “no”), is used in Taoism and Chan Buddhism to denote “nonbeing” or “absence” (Hinton, 2020, pp 49-55). Thus, the ending of Pei Di’s poem might be describing the state of mind wherein the world and its people have become nothing.
The following illustration shows the lodge in the bamboo grove as represented in the Freer gallery scroll:
Poetry, calligraphy and painting – the “three perfections” – are often combined in Chinese art (Sullivan 1974). The following illustration shows Wang Wei’s poem about the Bamboo Grove as written by different calligraphers. On the right is regular script from Yip’s Hiding the Universe: this presents the quatrains of both Wang Wei and Pei Di. The other examples show only Wang Wei’s contribution. From right to left: calligraphy from the Wangchuan Ji scroll of Guo Zhongshu; from the scroll of Wang Yuanqi; modern cursive calligraphy by the Japanese artist Nakamura Furetsu from around 1915.
Pepper Orchard
Wang Wei’s quatrain alludes to some ancient Chinese songs used to invoke the appearance of the Gods. Several of these songs were incliuded in the Juejie (“Nine Songs”) which were anthologized in the collection called Chuci (“Songs of the South,” or “Songs of Chu”). The following is from the first of these songs (as translated by Hawkes and Liu, 1959, p 36):
Song to the Great Lord of the Eastern World
On a lucky day with an auspicious name. Reverently we come to delight the Lord on High We grasp the long sword’s haft of jade. And our girdle pendants clash and chime Jade weights fasten the god’s jewelled mat. Now take the rich and fragrant flower offerings The meats cooked in melilotus, served on orchid mats, And libations of cinnamon wine and pepper sauces! Flourish the drumsticks and beat all the drums!
Many different plants are used as gifts and food for the Gods. Cinnamomum cassia is Chinese cinnamon, the bark of which is used as a spice. Pollia japonica is a Chinese flowering plant that gives a strikingly beautiful (but inedible) iridescent purple fruit. Sichuan peppers are used to add spice to Chinese dishes. Melilotus or sweet clover is a herb with an aroma like vanilla. The following illustration shows Pollia fruit on the left and Sichuan peppers on the right.
Pei Di’s poem describes the pepper trees in the orchard without making any allusions to the invocation of the Gods. The thorns on the pepper tree are very prominent.
The following illustration shows a zun and a ding, ceremonial bronze vessels from the Shang dynasty (second millennium BCE). The zun is from the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the ding from the Shanghai Museum:
The following illustration shows (on the left) the Pepper Tree Orchard from the scroll in the Freer Gallery. The neighbouring orchard (on the right) contains Lacquer Trees (Toxicodendron vernicifluum), the sap of which is used in the production of lacquer. These trees are the subject of another pair of quatrains in the Wangchuan Ji.
Illusion and Reality
Ferguson (1927, pp 73-74) suggested that the Wangchuan estate described in the poems and depicted on the scroll was more imaginary than real:
The poem and the picture both represent Wang Ch’uan as a place of splendor and magnificence, but this was the product solely of poetical license … Wang Wei could only have had a very humble cottage in this secluded spot. If it had been otherwise he would have attracted the attention of the rapacious myrmidons of the court, and the place would have been confiscated … Wang Wei’s imagination … clothed a barren hillside with beautiful rare trees, with spacious courtyards, with a broad stream upon which boats plied and on whose bank stood a pretty fishing pavilion, with a deer park, with storks and birds—all of the delights of eye and ear were brought together in this one lovely spot by the fancy of a brilliant genius. Life had been hard and severe for him, but his spirit was untamed. It reveled in all of the sensuous delights which it could spiritualize, even though it had spurned them when they were thrust upon it.
However, Ferguson probably exaggerated the simplicity of Wang Wei’s country home. Wagner (1981) claimed that it was far more than a “humble cottage”
The villa had previously belonged to the Early T’ang poet Sung Chih-wen (ca. 663-712), but was apparently unoccupied for about thirty years between owners. When Wang Wei acquired the estate he had it repaired, and he may have personally supervised the design and reconstruction of its various houses, pavilions, gardens, and parks. Paintings and poems depict the estate as a large piece of property with elaborate residential buildings and landscape architecture: it was by no means a simple rustic hut hidden in the woods.
Nevertheless, the scenes that Wang Wei and Pei Di described in the poems owe as much to poetic imagination as to reality. In this regard, we must wonder how the poems relate to Buddhism. The Buddhist idea of the perceived world is that it is illusion (maya). What then is the imagined world? Does the imagination exaggerate our illusions, or does it provide insight into what might be the true reality beneath them? Wagner (1981, p 140) remarks:
Wang Wei aspires to transcendence of the particular, and of the visual physical world, at the same time that he is attached to the sensual delights which he so sensitively perceives in that world. Through visual imagery he achieves metaphoric representation of that realm which cannot be seen, a realm which transcends the material world, the perceiving senses, the definitions of language, and the discerning consciousness. Wang Wei’s vision, then, moves through the world of concrete natural objects to attain a glimpse of “distant emptiness.”
Epilogue
We can conclude this brief discussion of Wang Wei’s poetry with another poem wherein he describes a trip to the Zhongnan (“far south”) Mountain near his Wangchuan Villa (translation by Rouzer, 2020, Volume I, p. 79):
The Cleveland Museum of Art possesses a beautiful fan created in about 1256. On one side is calligraphy by Emperor Lizong (1205-1264) presenting the 5th and 6th lines of Wang Wei’s poem. On the other side is a painting by Ma Lin (~1180-1260) showing A Scholar Reclining and Watching Rising Clouds. The illustration at the beginning of this essay is a high-contrast rendition of the Ma Lin painting.
Stephen Owen relates the description of the rising clouds to another Wang Wei poem (Floating on the Han River) which contains the lines
what this describes is a mountain in a mist in that peculiar way in which you can just barely see a color space in the mist, and you think there’s a mountain there, but in the Buddhist sense of the illusions of the world, you have this huge thing, this mountain and all of a sudden, its presence, its very existence, sort of half fades in and out. It’s between being there and not being there.
The lines describe the ideas of yǒu (有, being/possession/existence) and wú (無, simplified 无, nonbeing, nothingness). A central idea in Chan Buddhism is sunyata: the meditative practice of emptying oneself of being to become one with the universe.
References
Barnstone, T., Barnstone, W., & Xu, H. (1991). Laughing lost in the mountains: poems of Wang Wei. University Press of New England.
Bogushevskaya, V. (2015). Grue in Chinese: on the original meaning and evolution of qing In Bogushevskaya, V., & Colla, E., (Eds.). Thinking colours: perception, translation and representation. (pp 26-44): Cambridge Scholars,
Cai, Zong-qi (Ed.) (2018). How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang. Columbia University Press.
Cartelli, M. A. (2019). Making it new in Tang Dynasty poetry: Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu. In K. Seigneurie (Ed.) A Companion to World Literature (pp. 1–12). John Wiley & Sons.
Ching, J. (1993). Chinese religions. Macmillan Press.
Ferguson, J. C. (1927). Chinese Painting. University of Chicago.
Hawkes, D., & Liu, X. (1959). Ch’u tz’ǔ: the songs of the South, an ancient Chinese anthology. Clarendon Press.
Hinton, D. (2020). China root: Taoism, Ch’an, and original Zen. Shambhala.
Hinton, D. (2006). The selected poems of Wang Wei. New Directions Publishing Corp.
Owen, S. (1981). The great age of Chinese poetry: the High T’ang. Yale University Press.
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) arrived in the United States of America on January 26, 1939. The ostensible reason for their visit was to write a book on the United States, to be published by the Hogarth Press with the title Address Not Known. The two writers had just completed a book on China, Journey to a War, which was to come out in March. However, other reasons played a larger role in their decision to emigrate. Both writers were tired of the hypocrisy, complacency and insularity of British literary life. Auden claimed, “An artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all.” (Davenport-Hines, 1995, p 180). In New York City they took lodging in the George Washington Hotel at Lexington and 23rd St., had their photographs taken by Carl van Vechten, visited with Thomas Mann and his family in Princeton, wrote reviews for American magazines, and gave readings of their work. At one of these readings in April, Auden met the 18-year-old Chester Kallman (1921-1975), and fell deeply in love. The two were to remain together for the rest of Auden’s life. In June, Auden and Kallman departed on a two-month trip by Greyhound Bus across the United States, that served as their honeymoon. They visited New Orleans, stayed for a while with Frieda Lawrence in Taos, and ended up in Laguna Beach in California. On August 28, 1939, they arrived back in Manhattan.
The Beginning of World War II
In the early morning hours of September 1, 1939, Hitler’s German troops invaded Poland. One week earlier, Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had agreed on a mutual non-aggression treaty – the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. These negotiations had also included a secret agreement to divide up Poland between the two powers, and to allow the USSR to invade Finland and the Baltic countries.
The Munich Agreement of September, 1938, had allowed the German annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In March, 1939, a fascist Slovak State was proclaimed and Germany took over the remaining areas of what had once been Czechoslovakia. Alarmed by Hitler’s complete disregard of the Munich agreements, the United Kingdom agreed to an Anglo-Polish Alliance which would assure mutual assistance in the event of German aggression. On September 3, 1939, Britain therefore gave Germany an ultimatum requiring them to withdraw their troops from Poland. The deadline passed, and later that day Neville Chamberlain declared the United Kingdom at war with Germany. Undeterred, Germany continued its invasion. The photograph shows Hitler reviewing German troops as they crossed the border into Poland.
Auden’s Poem
The beginning of the war was for Auden the culmination of a decade of increasing despair. He expressed his thoughts in a remarkable and controversial poem entitled September 1, 1939. This was first published in The New Republic in October, 1939, and then in the book Another Time in 1940.
The poem consists of 9 stanzas, each 11 lines long. There are three stresses per line, with no dominant rhythm. The rhyme scheme is variable both in terms of the lines that rhyme and the type of rhyme: slant rhymes, assonance, and alliteration are as common as perfect rhymes, and internal rhymes as frequent as end-rhymes. Each stanza is composed of one sentence. The poem is similar in many ways to Yeats’ poem about the Easter uprising in Dublin, Easter, 1916, with its ringing call to rebellion:
All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
Both poems deal with a poet’s personal response to a world-changing event. Both poems are driven by a pulsating trimeter rhythm, and adorned with multiple and various rhymes.
After September 1, 1939 was published, Auden had second thoughts, particularly about the line that ends the penultimate stanza. In his preface to Bloomfield’s 1964 bibliography of his works he stated
A critic is entitled, of course, to prefer an earlier version to a later, but some seem to think that an author has no right to revise his work. Such an attitude seems to me mad. Most poets, I think, will agree with Valéry’s dictum: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned”. To which I would add: “Yes, but it must not be abandoned too soon”. In some cases, too, one finds that tinkering is no good and the whole poem must go. Rereading a poem of mine, 1st September, l939, after it had been published, I came to the line
We must love one another or die
and said to myself: “That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway”. So, in the nest edition, I altered it to
We must love one mother and die.
This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realised, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped.
Although the poem was omitted from Auden’s Collected Poems (1976), it continues to be read and studied (Brodsky, 1986; Hecht, 1993, pp 152-170; Fuller, 1998, pp 290-293; Mendelson, 1999, pp 73-77; Sansom, 2019). It may not be perfect but it says much that is important and, for the most part, says it very well. This essay reviews various aspects of the poem, and provides a recitation of each stanza by Tom O’Bedlam.
Fifty-Second Street
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
The opening of the poem may have its roots in the beginning of a 1930 poem by Ogden Nash, Spring Comes to Murray Hill, which Auden had recently read. Murray Hill is a neighborhood in midtown Manhattan.
I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue And say to myself you have a responsible job havenue? Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel? If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggeral, If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist, And you can get your original sin removed by St. John the Bopodist,
However, Nash’s blithe insouciance had transformed in Auden’s poem to a keen anxiety. For which there are no cures. And spring had long passed. Now came the fall.
In the 1930s, Fifty-Second Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan became a center for jazz. During prohibition, the five-story brownstone buildings had provided spaces in their narrow ground floors for speakeasies. With the repeal of prohibition, these developed into bars and jazz clubs. The spaces were long, narrow, dark and windowless. They typically placed a mirrored bar on one wall and tables or booths on the other. At the far end was a tiny stage upon which small groups of musicians could play. This fostered a new jazz sound, more intimate than that of the big bands. Some famous musicians performing on the street were Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davies. The following is a night photograph of the clubs on 52nd Street:
On September 1, 1939, Auden went alone to the Dizzy Club on 52nd Street. Chester Kallman and his friend Harold Norse had discovered this gay bar a few nights before and recommended it. Auden went there alone, searching for solace in the company of strangers. Norse (1989) recalled
The dive was the sex addict’s quick fix, packed to the rafters with college buys and working-class youths under twenty-five. From street level you stepped into a writhing mass of tight boys in tighter pants … With floppy shoelaces, creased suit and tie, ash-stained, he must have looked out of place, though with his rosy California tan and sun-bleached hair he could, in the right light, pass for twenty-five. He didn’t go to pick up a boy; however, aware of the age difference and shy. he would have selected one of the two unused corner tables at the rear of the bar, which was usually deserted except for those too drunk to stand, from which he could observe boys kissing and groping under the bright lights, packed like sardines pickled in alcohol. (pp 78-79)
The “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s had been ushered in by the Wall Street Crash in October, 1929. Unemployment and despair soon spread across the world. Liberal hopes for a better world fell by the wayside. Autocratic companies used foreign wars to mobilize their people. In 1932, Japan invaded Manchuria. In 1933, Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. In 1936, the Nationalist military forces rebelled against the Republican government of Spain precipitating the bloody Spanish Civil War, which ended with the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1939. While the fascist governments of Italy and Germany provided assistance to the Nationalist and the communist government of the USSR supported the Republicans, the liberal democracies of Western Europe decided not to intervene. In 1937, Japan invaded China. In March, 1938, Germany annexed Austria. In September, 1938, the Munich Agreement allowed Germany to take control of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in return for future restraint. According to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, this brought “Peace for our time.” However, Hitler paid no attention to the agreement, and went ahead with the occupation of the western half of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
In some notes made during in his early months in New York City but only published much later, Auden remarked on the failure of all the “clever hopes” for peace and justice
If one reviews the political activity of the world’s intellectuals during the past eight years, if one counts up all the letters to the papers which they have signed, all the platforms on which they have spoken, all the congresses which they have attended, one is compelled to admit that their combined effect, apart from the money they have helped to raise for humanitarian purposes (and one must not belittle the value of that) has been nil. As far as the course of political events is concerned they might just as well have done nothing. (Auden, 1993, p 20)
Radio “waves” from all parts of the world, both where it was “darkened” night and where it was “bright” day, brought news of broken treaties and warnings of impending war. Listeners found it hard to hear and even harder to talk about it. One sensed an “unmentionable odour of death.”
Those to Whom Evil Is Done
Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
What was it that had “driven a culture mad”? Auden sometimes longed for the simplicity of life in the Middle Ages. He believed that Luther had changed all this by insisting on an individual rather than communal approach to God, and by dissociating salvation from good works. Perhaps the madness of the modern age was its selfishness: its complete lack of fellow feeling. In his later preface to the first volume of Poets of the English Language (1950), Auden wrote
Luther denied any intelligible relation between Faith and Works, Machiavelli any intelligible relation between private and public morality, and Descartes any intelligible relation between Mauer and Mind. Allegory became impossible as a literary form, and the human Amor seemed no longer a parable of the Divine Love but its blasphemous parody.
There has been no time since its own when the literature of the Middle Ages could appeal to readers as greatly as it can today, when the dualism inaugurated by Luther, Machiavelli, and Descartes has brought as to the end of our tether and we know that either we must discover a unity which can repair the fissures that separate the individual from society, feeling from intellect, and conscience from both, or we shall surely die by spiritual despair and physical annihilation.
Auden had spent 10 months in Berlin in 1928-29 and had visited Germany multiple times during the 1930s. He loved the sexual and intellectual freedom of Weimar Germany. But this came crashing down with the rise of Hitler, who became Chancellor in 1933 and anointed himself Führer a year later. No one can really tell how Hitler came to be the embodiment of evil. Jungian psychoanalysis proposed that we internalize our early social experiences as “imagos” (later known as archetypes) which later drive our behavior. Hitler’s father was domineering and violent, and Hitler’s schooling in Linz was punitive and severe. Both may have contributed to the subconscious “psychopathic god” that drove the Führer.
The final couplet of the stanza presents the obverse of the moral law. We should love our neighbors as ourselves. For if we do them evil, they will repay us. Human history has passed through multiple cycles of evils done and revenges taken. The punitive reparations demanded of Germany after the end of World War I were a contributing factor to the onset of World War II.
What Dictators Do
Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
Thucydides (460-400 BCE) was an Athenian general. After losing a battle with the Spartans in 424 BCE, he was exiled from Athens. He then travelled through various regions of Greece, and wrote an account of the ongoing Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). This History of the Peloponnesian War, which covered events up to 411 BCE, includes a famous speech given by the Athenian leader in memory of those that died in defence of the state: Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which among other things considers the process of democracy:
We have a form of government, not fetched by imitation from the laws of our neighbouring states; (nay, we are rather a pattern to others, than they to us); which, because in the administration it hath respect not to a few, but to the multitude, is called a democracy. Wherein, though there be an equality amongst all men in point of law for their private controversies; yet in conferring of dignities one man is preferred before another to public charge, and that according to the reputation, not of his house, but of his virtue; and is not put back through poverty for the obscurity of his person, as long as he can do good service to the commonwealth. (translated by Thomas Hobbes in 1628)
The speech was not as clear as it might have been. Auden considered most of it “elderly rubbish” spoken at the “apathetic grave” of the soldiers that had died. However, it does point out that democracy requires that certain men become leaders, and that these leaders then enact laws and arrange to have them enforced. The main problem with democracy is that some leaders come to power because of popularity rather than wisdom, because of propaganda rather than policy. People vote for their leaders as much on the basis of emotion as on reason. Pericles was a charismatic leader. He had encouraged Athenian imperialism, which denied freedom to all but the ruling state, and which ultimately led to war with Sparta. Democracy comes a cropper if the wrong leader is selected. We need to be “managed” but sometime we choose the wrong manager. Once Hitler was elected, he declared himself dictator.
Blind Skyscrapers
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong.
The skyline of New York in the 1930s was filled with new skyscrapers. These magnificent buildings demonstrated the tremendous power of capitalism. No one had made buildings as tall as these since the Tower of Babel. Yet the Great Depression showed that raw capitalism was doomed to fail. For a few years after the Wall Street Crash, the skyscrapers that had been conceived and financed before the crash were completed. After 1935 no new skyscrapers were built in New York City until 1961.
However, the “Collective Man” had shown that he could build great things even exploited. What might he do if free? Perhaps the “euphoric dreams” mentioned to in Auden’s poem allude to the New Deal that was enacted from 1933 to 1938 by the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The “new” idea was that everyone should work together for the common good.
The following photograph below shows the night view south from the main building of the Rockefeller Center which was completed in 1933. Visible on the right is the Empire State Building (1931), the tallest building in the world until the World Trade Center was built in 1970. On the left is the Art Deco Chrysler Building (1930). In the right foreground, with the striking vertical stripes, is 500 Fifth Avenue (1930).
Looking at the mirrors of the bar, Auden could see the faces of the two main political forces at work in the world: western Europe with its colonial empires, and Russia with its dreams of international communism. Both were starting to fall apart. Gandhi was attempting to bring independence to India through satyagraha (nonviolent resistance). And in Russia, the show trials and executions of Stalin’s Great Purge had already begun.
Lost in a Haunted Wood
Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
The bars on 52nd Street were set up to make the patrons feel at home. Like a “fort,” the bar was closed off from the outside world. The lights stayed on through the night and the music played into the early hours of the morning. The following is Coleman Hawkins’ Body and Soul, recorded in 1939 with RCA (Radio Corporation of America).
The following illustration shows the interior of the Onyx bar, whose neon sign shows on the left side of the earlier photograph of 52nd Street. Without the people, it is a quiet and lonely space, with mirrors reflecting dolefully back on each other.
The stanza concludes with the mute despair of children lost in a frightening world. The fairy tales with their “haunted” woods are right.
What Mad Nijinsky Wrote
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
Auden had found some respite from the recent propaganda and demagoguery by reading through the Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950), written during the winter of 1918-1919 but only published in 1936. The diary was composed when Nijinsky was living in Switzerland with his wife Romola; and slowly but surely becoming mad.
Nijinsky had become a dancer with Les Ballets Russes, and the lover of its impresario Sergei Diaghilev. His most famous performance was in 1912 as the faun in a ballet that he himself choregraphed for Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1894), itself based on the 1876 poem by Stéphane Mallarmé about the sensuous dreams of a young faun. The following are contemporary photographs by Adolph de Meyer, showing the Nijinsky reclining with his flute as the music begins and then dancing in a stylized manner evocative of ancient Greek paintings.
When Nijinsky married the Hungarian aristocrat Romola de Pulszky in 1913, Diaghilev summarily dismissed him from the Ballet Russes, and took as a lover another beautiful young man, the choreographer, Léonide Massine. As Nijinsky lapsed into schizophrenia, Romola continued to care for him.
The diaries jump haphazardly from one topic to the next. Auden quotes a comment about Nijinsky that follows from a discussion of Georges Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France.
I know that Clemenceau is honest; he is the policy of France. He is a hard-working man, but he was mistaken when he sent France to her death. He is a man who seeks goodness, a child with a tremendous brain. Some politicians are hypocrites like Diaghilev, who does not want universal love, but to be loved alone. I want universal love. (Nijinsky, 1936, p 27).
Madness brings the truth to light. Human beings want to be loved, but find it difficult to love one another. Most of us are like Diaghilev: selfishness is “bred in the bone.”
Brodsky (1986, p 345-6) points out the intricacy of the rhymes in this stanza. Most importantly “Diaghilev” pararhymes with “love.” But this end-rhyme is preceded by the internal consonant rhymes on the “v” of “Craves what it cannot have.”
Who Can Speak for the Dumb?
From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; “I will be true to the wife, I’ll concentrate more on my work,” And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb?
In this stanza Auden recounts how commuters come to the city promising themselves to do better. But the city lacks leaders who can release them from their mundane lives. The ending has its source in the advice given by his mother to King Lemuel in Proverbs:
It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more. Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. (Proverbs 31: 4-9)
We are in need of kings who can comfort those who suffer, who can talk to the deaf and speak up for the dumb.
We Must Love One Another or Die
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
This stanza provides tentative answers to the questions posed in the preceding stanza. Auden had been concerned about the role of the poet in modern society. Soon after Yeats had died in January 1939, and Auden had written In Memory of W. B. Yeats, publishing it in The New Republic in March. The poem famously claimed that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Nevertheless, it also claimed that poetry provided “a mouth.” This recitation is by Auden.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
In September 1, 1939, Auden voices what is needed to undo the lies to which we have become accustomed. Fuller (1998, p 292) suggests that the “folded lie” is “a kind of kenning for the newspaper tucked under the arm of the commuter of stanza 7.” Auden admired Old English poetry which often combined two words to give the extended meaning of one: poetical periphrasis or “kenning” (from ken, know). A second lie is the romantic idea that everything we do is for the best. And a third lie is what we are told by those in authority. The syntax of the second half of the stanza is difficult. The following is the interpretation of Anthony Hecht (1993, pp 166-7):
What follows after the colon is the truth that the poet, armed only with his “voice,” has taken upon himself to reveal. It is a double secret, enraging both to the individual and to the corporate group of “Collective Man” which constitutes “Authority.” “There is no such thing as the State” is not merely an attack upon the likes of Hitler and Stalin, and the superstates over which they tyrannize; it declares that government itself is no more than a useful fiction, one which ought to allow us as much independence and freedom from itself as possible. but there is a balancing corollary which is, at the same time, the inverse of this proposition: it is that “no one exists alone.” And this means that we are, of necessity, bound to one another, not wholly independent, and thus part of the fictive State. Both those with authority and those without it are caught in this dilemma, both citizens and police.
And so we come to the crux of the poem and line that Auden later regretted.
We must love one another or die.
Auden claimed that it made no sense. We die whether we love or not. But this is a simplistic interpretation. Surely the poet is saying that we must love one another or fail to be truly human: without love we are dead to our real selves. Or even more directly: we must either love one another or wind up killing each other.
Auden had made similar comments before. Fuller (1998, p 292) quotes from Auden’s revisions for a 1939 production of Auden and Isherwood’s 1936 play The Ascent of F6:
Man is an animal that has to love or perish.
I think that years afterward, Auden considered his younger self hopelessly naïve for telling people on the brink of a war that would lead to 80 million deaths to “love one another.” Invoking the moral law would do little to stop the advancing Panzer divisions.
In his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson used a commercial wherein the image of a young girl picking petals from a daisy leads into the image of an exploding atomic bomb, as Johnson speaks a garbled version of Auden’s line:
*We must either love each other, or we must die.
Johnson won by a landslide. Perhaps poetry does make some things happen.
Defenceless under the Night
Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
Auden was not clear what he should do now that war was beginning. How can one person change the world other than by standing up for what is right, telling others of one’s fears, and hoping that justice will prevail? The image of small lights flashing out their messages of good will likely comes from E. M Forster’s essay What I Believe, published in The Nation in 1938 and then as a pamphlet in 1939. Forster gave his famous “two cheers for democracy:” “one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.” However, he also believed in an aristocracy of “the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” And in the darkest times
the brighter shine the little lights, reassuring one another, signalling: “Well, at all events, I’m still here. I don’t like it very much, but how are you?” Unquenchable lights of my aristocracy! Signals of the invincible army! “Come along—anyway, let’s have a good time while we can.” I think they signal that too.
I think that Auden was skeptical about how effective these lights would be. While composing the poem, he changed “little lights” to “ironic lights.” Nevertheless, the poem ends with a prayer that he may show an “affirming flame.”
The idea of tiny lights flashing in the darkness was used by George H. W. Bush in a 1988 campaign speech to promote charitable giving as a better way of taking care of those in need than government handouts.
I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. We will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading, sometimes being led, rewarding.
Upping the ante to a thousand does little in the way of convincing anyone that the rich will provide all the help that the poor will need.
The New Year Letter
A few months after September 1, 1939, Auden composed his New Year Letter, a long poem in tetrameter rhyming couplets to celebrate the beginning of 1940. His hopes for his “ironic points of light” were turning to “flares of desperation:”
Around me, pausing as I write, A tiny object in the night, Whichever way I look, I mark Importunate along the dark Horizon of immediacies The flares of desperation rise From signallers who justly plead Their cause is piteous indeed (Auden, 1976, p 224)
Auden had been intrigued by the possibilities of communism but had recognized its failure. He now began to turn back toward religion as a way to organize society. By the end of 1940, he was once again taking communion in the Anglican Church, which in the United States was called Episcopalian. There was no mystical moment of conversion, just a slowly increasing agreement with Christian beliefs (Carpenter, 1981, pp 283-8, 297-302).
The following quotation from the ending to Auden’s New Year Letter summarized much of the import of September 1, 1939, and hinted at his ongoing return to Christianity:
Our road Gets worse and we seem altogether Lost as our theories, like the weather, Veer round completely every day, And all that we can always say Is: true democracy begins With free confession of our sins. In this alone are all the same, All are so weak that none dare claim “I have the right to govern,” or “Behold in me the Moral Law,” And all real unity commences That all have wants to satisfy And each a power to supply. We need to love all since we are Each a unique particular That is no giant, god, or dwarf, But one odd human isomorph; We can love each because we know All, all of us, that this is so: Can live since we are lived, the powers That we create with are not ours. (Auden, 1976, p 241)
The idea that “all have wants to satisfy and each a power to supply” is a simple description of communism. Yet communism does not work. We need some other way to facilitate the moral law. This can perhaps be obtained in the idea of an immanent God, one who lives through us when we allow it:
For in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28)
September 11, 2011
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, there was a resurgence of interest in Auden’s September 1, 1939. Several newspapers reprinted the poem and it was recited on the radio. Written about a war that began in a September more than 70 years before, the poem helped people to explore the uncertainty, grief and fear that they were once again experiencing. It also provided some comfort in the idea that, even though the world had face terrible problems in the past, justice had always prevailed. Stephen Burt (2003) wrote
“September 1,1939” represents one mind, and many minds, united by a civic emergency, by illimitable apprehension, by a newly evident international enemy, and by the sudden, urgent, and disquietingly general search for an explanation—not just any explanation, but one that uses data we already have. It gropes for appropriate response to “evil,” while resorting neither to bellicose or to confidently pacifist rhetoric, enunciating instead a sustained uncertainty. The poem speaks at once to our feeling of catastrophic helplessness and, in its middle stanzas, to the understandable feeling that when anything bad happens to us (or to our society) it could be partly our fault. Moreover, it uses that feeling to claim that its resources, poetry’s resources, have at this time a special civic purpose: they can enunciate a collective confession and thus draw the just, the ironic light-bearers, together for good.
Growing Old
Auden continued to write poetry until his death. He was always unsure of his work. He revised many of his earlier poems (Quesenbery, 2008). He continued to disown September 1, 1939, and another long poem entitled Spain that he had written 2 years earlier. Neither poem is perfect. Yet both poems give voice to the feelings of the time in which they were written.
In the postscript to the poem The Cave of Making written in memory of his friend Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Auden considered how poets so often fail to write what they should have. The “you” refers to Auden – he is talking to himself.
You hope, yes, your books will excuse you, save you from hell; nevertheless, without looking sad, without in any way seeming to blame (He doesn’t need to, knowing well what a lover of art like yourself pays heed to), God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
The illustration shows a 2014 drawing of Auden’s face (based on photographs from the 1960s) by Caroline Binch. The deep furrows are a result of Touraine‐Solente‐Golé syndrome, a genetic disorder causing hypertrophy of the skin and bones (Aronson & Ramachandran, 2011). In Auden’s words, his face “looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain” (Carpenter, 1981, p 423). The face seems to manifest his anxiety about not getting the words completely right.
References
Aronson, J. K., & Ramachandran, M. (2011). The diagnosis of art: W. H. Auden’s face. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 104(1), 38–40.
Auden, W. H. (1940). Another time: poems. Faber.
Auden, W. H. (edited by Mendelson, E, 1976). Collected poems. Random House.
Auden, W. H. (edited by Mendelson, E, 1993). The prolific and the devourer. Ecco Press.
Auden, W. H., & Pearson, N. H. (1950). Poets of the English language. Viking.
Bloomfield, B. C. (1964). W.H. Auden, a bibliography: the early years through 1955. University of Virginia.
Brodsky, J. (1986). On “September 1, 1939” by W. H Auden. In Less than one: selected essays. (pp 304-356). Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Burt, S. (2003). “September 1, 1939” revisited: or, poetry, politics, and the idea of the public. American Literary History, 15(3), 533–559.
Carpenter, H. (1981). W. H. Auden: a biography. Allen & Unwin.
Davenport-Hines, R. P. T. (1995). Auden. Heinemann.
Fuller, J. (1998). W.H. Auden: a commentary. Faber and Faber.
Hecht, A. (1993). The hidden law: the poetry of W. H. Auden. Harvard University Press.
Mendelson, E. (1999). Later Auden. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Nijinsky, V. (edited by R. Nijinsky, 1936). The diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Simon & Schuster.
Norse, H. (1989). Memoirs of a bastard angel. William Morrow.
