Ezra Pound (1885-1972) came to London in the summer of 1908. He cobbled together a living as a reviewer and editor for magazines such as The New Age and Poetry. He served as the midwife for modernism by arranging the publication of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Sometimes charming, sometimes arrogant, Pound antagonized many of his colleagues in both England the America. His Homage to Sextus Propertius, a set of poems based on the work of the Latin poet, published in Poetry 1918, was panned. Pound left for Europe in the spring of 1921. His publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) served as his farewell to London. The illustration shows a photographic portrait by E. O. Hoppé taken in 1918 and published in 1920.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

The book was published in a limited edition of 200 copies by the Ovid Press, founded by the Jewish poet and printer John Rodker in 1919. Though only active for about three years, the press published T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce. The book was elegantly printed with each poem preceded by abstract drop caps designed by Edward Wadsworth. The following illustration shows the beginnings of the first two poems:

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was reprinted in the 1923 edition of Personae and then again in 1958 together with Homage to Sextus Propertius in Diptych Rome-London. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is divided in two, the first part containing 12 poems and the second 5, with an Envoi separating the two. The full text is available at Wikisource. This post, which will comment on some of the poems, is much indebted to the work of Espey (1955), Berryman (1983), and Ruthven (2020, pp 125-147). Pound was intelligent, fluent in several languages and widely read. He assumed his readers knew as much as he did, and failed to understand why they did not appreciate the significance of his work, which, though sometimes achingly beautiful, was often intractably obscure.

 

Ode pour l’élection de son sepulchre

The first poem in the book is Pound’s proposal for his own epitaph. Its title comes from a long poem by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), wherein he asks not to be memorialized by a marble tomb but to be buried in the nature that he loved. A short excerpt together with a translation by Curtis Page (1903) that uses rhyme but loses much of the sense:

Pound’s poetry was nothing like Ronsard’s (and even less like that of Page). He tried to write poetry that conveyed the truth of his time. He failed. He therefore requests an epitaph that recognizes his defeat. From the last stanza we learn that this poem is dated to the poet’s 30^th year. In a subsequent revision he changed this to the 31^st. This would then be 1916, the date when Pound published Lustra.

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ᾽ ὅσ᾽ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Unaffected by “the march of events”,
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

The following is Pound’s recitation of the poem from a recording made at Harvard University in 1939:

The notion in the first stanza that Pound had tried “to resuscitate the dead art of poetry” alludes to Dante’s Ma qui la morta poesì resurga, (Purgatorio I, 7, 1321). In the last stanza, Pound quotes from the Testament (1461) of François Villon, a comic poem that serves, like Ronsard’s Ode, as the poet’s will. Pound felt victimized by society, in much the same way as the medieval poet. In 1923, Pound wrote a short opera based on Villon’s poem.

The second stanza refers to Capaneus, one of the “Seven Against Thebes.” A giant with immense strength, he claimed that even Zeus could not defeat him. Nevertheless, he was killed by a divine thunderbolt as he stormed the walls of Thebes. Pound shared his defiance.

The Greek quotation that begins the third stanza (transliterated as ídmen gár toi pánth᾽ ós᾽ ení Troíē refers to Homer’s rendition of the song of the sirens in the Odyssey XII: 189: “For we know all the suffering that was endured on the plains of Troy.” The next stanza refers to characters in the Odyssey: Penelope and Circe. Pound had begun to consider himself as a modern Odysseus. In 1917 published the first three parts of what were to become his life work: The Cantos. His idea was to create a sequence of modern poems that covered everything we understood about life, much like the Dante’s Divine Comedy. He later abandoned these “ur Cantos,” and began the project again with an episode from the Odyssey that had originally formed part of the original third canto. He then published A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925.

This first poem of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is intriguing for its bilingual rhymes: Τροίῃ and leeway, Flaubert and hair, trentiesme and diadem.

Exactly who is speaking in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is not easy to determine (Bush, 1990; Wong, 2000). Pound created Mauberley as a persona separate from himself. In the first poem of the book this writer provides a eulogy for the poet E.P., who we can only assume was the youthful and idealistic Ezra Pound, who “died” unappreciated in 1916. In the first part of the book Mauberley then goes on to consider the state of literary London after that death. Lacking the emotional energy of the young E.P., Mauberley speaks in a detached manner. Occasionally the mask slips.

The second poem in the sequence tries to explain Pound’s failure as a result of the public’s taste rather than the artist’s lack of talent:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

The following is Pound’s recitation of this poem recorded in Washington in 1958:

By “the classics in paraphrase” Pound is referring to his versions of the poems of Propertius in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919). Pound had attempted to convey the meaning of the poems rather than providing an exact translation. He had done the same with his translations from Chinese in Cathay (1915) but there were no pedantic Chinese scholars to criticize those poems.

In the third stanza, Pound distinguishes between statues made by means of plaster moulds from those sculpted from stone or alabaster. He likens prose to the cinema. For someone whose motto became Make it New (1934), he was decidedly antagonistic to new art forms. Ruthven (2020, p 130) quotes him as claiming “The Cinema is not art” in 1918.

 

There died a myriad

The most devastating event of Pound’s sojourn in London was World War I. Pound was acutely aware of the lives wasted by this terrible war. Pound’s friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who had sculpted a striking Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound in 1914, was killed in action in June 1915. Pound published a book on the sculptor’s works and thoughts in 1916: Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. The following illustration shows a 1909 self-portrait of Gaudier-Brzeska and his sculpted portrait of Pound:

The fourth and fifth poems in the initial section of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley provide an elegy for the young men who died in World War I. These remarkably moving poems are the most memorable of the whole book. So much so that one can forget how well written they are.

IV

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor …

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V.

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

The following is Pound’s recitation of these poems, recorded in Washington in 1958:

The initial part of poem IV bases both its rhythm and its sense on the Lament for Adonis (around 100 BCE) by Bion of Smyrna (Espey, 1955, p 44). Near the end of the lament, the Loves pay tribute to the dead Adonis:

This flung upon him arrows,
that a bow, this a feather, that a quiver.
One hath done off Adonis’ shoe,
others fetch water in a golden basin,
another washes the thighs of him,
and again another stands behind and fans him with his wings.

Pound quotes from Horace Ode III: 2: 13: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Sweet and fitting is it to die for fatherland). There was nothing sweet or fitting about death in the trenches of World War I. He also used the Latin phrase pro domo (for the home) as one of the reasons that the soldiers went to war. Latin made everything seem necessary.

Pound points to two main forces that led to the catastrophe of World War I: usury and lies. This is the first mention of “usury” in Pound’s poetry. He had become convinced by the economic writings of Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952) that endeavors financed by interest-bearing loans cannot lead to anything new or good because banks will not risk take risks with their investments (see Kenner, 1971, pp 301-317). Far better for endeavors to be financed by the government by means of “social credit.” Pound later became fixated on the idea of usury as leading to the downfall of civilization, for example in his Canto XLV (1937)

Almost like an ancient prophet, Pound foresees the collapse of the British Empire using the powerful consonance of “bitch” and “botch.” However, the empire persisted between the wars, finally falling into pieces after World War II.

And what did these young men die for? Ruthven (2020, p 133) suggests that the last two lines of the fifth poem indicate

The bric-à-brac of an ancient and once vital tradition: but the civilization these men have died for is little more than a museum of shabby objets d’art.

The following is a different interpretation from Tearle (2019, p 65):

If ‘statues’ and ‘books’ are meant to be read as metonymic stand-ins for ‘art’ or ‘culture’ more generally, then our response to these lines is likely to be mixed. Does Pound think art is worth dying for, or not? Th e men who gave their lives in the First World War were not, aft er all, dying merely to defend the cheapened modern art which Pound’s poem laments, but all art of all ages. And ‘broken statues’ and ‘battered books’ hardly sound like modern art, but classical art that has been allowed to fall into ruin. In other words, Pound’s lines cast the soldiers as men defending something which the populace could not even be bothered to maintain, but which the artistic champion in him felt was worth dying for. Th e men who had sent Pound’s generation off to war had also been those who had allowed several thousand years of Western culture to fall into decline.

Envoi

After the memorial to those who died in the war, Pound presents several satirical portraits of people he had met during his time in London. Despite occasionally beautiful lines, they are for the most part not worth reading. But then, Pound inserts a poem entitled Envoi to mark the end of the first part of his book. An “envoi” (from envoyer, send) is a writer’s farewell message to the reader. It began in French medieval poetry and was famously used at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c 1385), The following is Chaucer’s Middle English and a modern translation. He hopes that God will allow him to write a comedy now that his tragedy is finished:

Pound bids his book farewell, believing it has nothing to say, but that it has born witness to the beautiful. The following is the text and a recitation by Pound from his 1939 recording at Harvard University:

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

Pound is describing his experience hearing the young soprano Raymonde Collignon singing Go Lovely Rose (Berryman, 1983, pp 141-143; Hesse, 1981). This is a musical setting by Henry Lawes (1596-1662) of a poem by Edmund Waller (1606-1687). The following is the poem

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

And this is a modern performance by Ellen Hargis accompanied by Paul O’Dette on lute

In the Envoi, the persona of Mauberley appears to conclude his comments on literary London by quoting a poem from the now-dead poet E.P.

This is one place where there is no doubt who is speaking. It is Pound himself, suddenly stepping from behind the wavering figure of Mauberley and all the veils of irony, to speak out personally, even confessionally, into a situation which he had seemed to contrive just so as not to speak in his own person at all. This wonderfully dramatic moment is signalized by the sudden appearance of a wholly unexpected metre and style, flowing, plangent, and cantabile, so wholly traditional in every respect that the voice of the poet seems to be the anonymous voice of the tradition of English song. (Davie, 1967, p 325)

Pound hopes that his book description of the singer’s grace might somehow excuse its writer’s faults and make the singing long remembered. Then he imagines he might fix the rose in amber so that it might never fade or die. And finally, he notes that though singer and poet will pass away, the beauty of the song will not.

 

Mauberley

Part II of the book is entitled Mauberley (1920). If the reader has had problems knowing what persona is present the poems of the Part I, he will almost certainly be completely lost in Part II. The poems in this section are perhaps best interpreted as the work of a poet who, after suffering critical rejection, has changed his style so that it no longer suffers from his youthful enthusiasms. However, this has caused the poems to become so cryptic as to almost unintelligible: outlines without color or shape. The following is the first poem:

Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jaquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:

“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert”,
And his tool
The engraver’s

Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;

Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge Achaia.

The following is a recitation by Pound from his 1939 recording at Harvard University:

Scholars agree that the fist two lines refer to the etching by Jules Jacquemart (1837–1880) that serves as a frontispiece to the book Émaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos) by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). Gautier wrote in a precise and unsentimental manner, The title of Gautier’s book indicates the author’s preference for the skill of a craftsman creating objets d’art to the excesses of the Romantics and their grand themes. The brief lines in the first poem in this Mauberley section are similar to those in Gautier’s poem L’Art (Espey, 1955, pp 45-46), the last four quatrains (with my loose translations) of which are:

However, no one is certain what Pound meant by the “strait head of Messalina.” Pound appears to have had in mind some portrait of Messalina (17-48 CE), the third wife of the emperor Claudius. Much younger than her husband she was rumored to have satisfied her desires by working clandestinely in a Roman brothel. Berryman (1977) suggested that Pound might have been referring to etchings of a bust of Messalina in the Louvre or of a head in Munich as presented in Bernoulli’s Römische Ikonographie (pp 188, 193). Moody (2007, p 383) proposed Aubrey Beardsley’s stark black-and-white 1895 etching of Messalina Returning Home (from the brothel) (Wilson, 2020). The various candidate etchings are shown below. Neither interpretation makes much sense, other than that the Messalina etchings are outlines without shading. Perhaps Pound is indicating that the poet Mauberley, chastised for his youthful excesses, has now drained his work of any form. This fits with the final stanza wherein he likens his new art to Piero della Francesca without the color, or Pisanello without the talent that let him make medallions as fine as those from ancient Greece (Achaia).  

The following is a 1447 medallion of Pisanello showing s portrait of Cecilia Gonzaga, the daughter of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, on one side, and a representation of a virgin taming a unicorn on the obverse:

Luini in porcelain

The poems in Part II, cryptic and allusive, cannot be understood without access to scholarly annotations. The final poem recalls the description of Raymonde Collignon singing Go Lovely Rose in the Envoi that separates the two parts of the book. This final poem describes the singer rather than the song. Mauberley imagines the singer as a small porcelain medallion, perhaps like one of Gautier’s cameos, or one of Pisanello’s bronzes:

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.

The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.

Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;

The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.

The poem likens the singer to a painting by Bernardino Luini (1480-1532) who worked with Leonardo da Vinci. Pound is likely referring to his painting Head of a Girl in the Wallace Collection (Berryman, 1977, p 299). This was part of a set of frescos in Villa La Pelucca near Milan (about1523) which were transferred to canvas in 1822.

Pound also compares the singer to Venus Anadyomene (rising from the sea), a name for Aphrodite (which may derive from aphros, sea foam”), the  goddess of love. In particular, to a sculpted head of Venus in the Leconfield Collection (Petworth House), illustrated as Plate 83 in the art encyclopedia entitled Apollo (1904) compiled by Solomon Reinach (Berryman, 1977, p 301).

His final image is that of a fresco fragment from Minoan Crete, commonly called La Parisienne, also described in Reinach.

The following illustration shows these three heads, all of which have survived long beyond the age of their creation. All have intricately braided hair, as we must presume did Raymonde Collignon:

As described in a letter to the editor of Padieuma, the half-watt lamp was a special type of light bulb that gave a “warmer” lighting than the usual incandescent bulb. It would have highlighted the singer’s “topaz” eyes. Topaz is frequently yellow, but occasionally blue or even red.

Once one has understood the allusions, the poem has a cryptic beauty. However, it still pales before the description of the singing as presented in Envoi.

 

Exile

In early 1921, shortly after the publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound left for Europe. The journal The New Age bid him an ambiguous farewell:

Mr. Ezra Pound has recently gone abroad, perhaps for one year, perhaps for two, perhaps for good. Following the old and, in my opinion, the bad example first set by a man of letters, Landor, Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too. emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. I can perfectly well understand, even if I find it difficult to approve. Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus; among them being relatively popular successes as well as failures. With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for the advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual: I could parallel it near home and with more than one instance. Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.

After two years in Paris, during which time he edited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Pound moved to Rapallo in Italy where he stayed in self-imposed exile. While in Rapallo, he resumed work on The Cantos, a sprawling poetic work that by his death had extended to some 117 poems, the last of which remain uncompleted.

A man of towering intellect and enviable talent, he fashioned for himself an ego that considered only himself. He wrote only in accord with his own judgment, and lost the feedback of his fellows. Becoming fascinated by the economics of C. H. Douglas, he began to attribute all the ills of the world to the Jews.

During World War II, he made propaganda broadcasts for the Italian government, denouncing the Allied Governments and the Jews (Casillo, 1988). After the war he was indicted for treason, but judged mentally unfit to stand trial. He spent 12 years in St Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C. There was never any definite diagnosis for what was wrong with him (Torrey, 1984). After being released in 1958, he returned to Italy, where he lived until his death in 1972.

Despite the keenness of his mind and the tremendous breadth of his reading, he could not see clearly, could not communicate his ideas so that they could be easily understood, and could not abide by any criticism. He became exiled in himself. This process began with Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

 

References

Bernoulli, J. J. (1886). Römische Ikonographie. Teil 2, Die Bildnisse der Römischen Kaiser, I. Das Julisch-Claudische Kaiserhaus. Verlag von W Speman.

Berryman, J. B. (1977). The art of the image: allusions in Pound’s “Medallion.” Paideuma, 6(3), 295–308.

Berryman, J. B. (1983). Circe’s craft: Ezra Pounds’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. UMI Research Press.

Bush, R. (1990). “It draws one to consider time wasted”: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. American Literary History, 2(1), 56–78.

Casillo, R. (1988). The genealogy of demons: anti-Semitism, fascism, and the myths of Ezra Pound. Northwestern University Press.

Davie, D. (1967). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In Ford, B (Ed) The Pelican Guide to English Literature; Volume 7 The Modern Age. (pp 315-329).

Espey, J. J. (1955). Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: a study in composition. Faber and Faber.

Hesse, E. (1981). Raymonde Collignon, or (apropos Paideuma, 7-1&2, pp. 345-6): the duck that got away. Paideuma, 10(3), 583–584

Kenner, H. (1971). The Pound era. University of California Press.

Kotin, J. (2023). Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era: FAQ. nonsite website.

Moody, A. D. (2007). Ezra Pound: poet: a portrait of the man and his work. Volume I The young genius. Oxford University Press.

Pound, E. (1920). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Ovid Press.

Pound, E. (1926). Personæ: the collected poems of Ezra Pound. James Laughlin.

Pound, E. (1958). Diptych Rome-London. Officina Bodoni (reprinted in 1994, New Directions).

Reinach, S. (1904). Apollo: histoire génerale des arts plastiques professée en 1902-1903 à l’École du Louvre. Librairie Hachette et Cie.  English translation

Ronsard, P. de (translated by Page, C. H., 1903). Songs & sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard, gentleman of Vendomois. Houghton Mifflin.

Ruthven, K. K. (2020). A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personæ (1926). University of California Press.

Tearle, O. (2019). Battered books: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. (pp. 59–76). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Torrey, E. F. (1984). The roots of treason: Ezra Pound and the secret of St. Elizabeths. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Wong, K. A. (2000). Blurring of poet and persona in Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” Paideuma, 29(3), 193–205.

Wilson, S. (2020). Aubrey Beardsley’s Messalina: going, or coming? Audrey Beardsley Society.

 

Robert Desnos (both ‘s’ pronounced, 1900-1945) was a Surrealist French poet. During World War II, after initially serving in the French army, Desnos became an active member of La Résistance. The illustration shows a photograph taken in 1943. On 22 February 1944, Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. From there he was transferred to the Flōha labor campe, and finally, in April 1945, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Though Theresienstadt was liberated on 8 May, Desnos died there of typhus on 8 June. Contrée (“Against the Grain”), a book of 25 poems celebrating the land of France and its resistance to oppression, was published in 1944.

Rrose Sélavy

In 1921, the young poet Robert Desnos met André Breton (1896-1966) and became an enthusiastic participant in the automatic writing sessions of the Surrealist Movement. During this time, he also became smitten with Rrose Sélavy, the altera ego of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The name is a pun for Eros, c’est la vie (“love is life”), or arroser la vie (“give a toast to life”). In 1922, Desnos published under the title Rrose Sélavy multiple brief wordplays, puns and spoonerisms, supposedly dictated to him by Rrose while the poet slept (Conley, 2002, pp 15-44). Breton described them as “words making love” (les mots font l’amour) (Desnos, 1999, p 159).

The following are three of the wordplays: 

Rrose Sélavy voudrait bien savoir si l’amour, cette colle à couches, rend plus durs les molles couches [Rrose Sélavy would like to know if love is the fly-paper that hardens the soft foundation.]

La solution d’un sage est la pollution d’un page. [The solution of a sage is the pollution of a page. (page in the sense of both book-page and page-boy)]

Est-ce que la caresse des putains excuse la paresse des culs teints? [Does the whore’s caress excuse the laziness of dyed buttocks?]

The following illustration shows a photograph of Desnos by Man Ray (1925) and a painting by Georges Malkine (1928).

 

Desnos and Breton denounced each other in 1929. Desnos continued to write poetry though his days of automatic sleep-writing were over. During the 1930s many of his works were dedicated to the love of his life Youki (Lucie Badoud), who had been the muse and model for the Japanese artist Tsuguharu Fujita. Her nickname was the Japanese word for “snow.”

World War II

During the initial period of the war when very little happened – la drôle de guerre (phoney war) – Desnos enlisted in the army. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, he was captured, released, and then demobilised. He became a journalist at the newspaper Aujourd’hui, but continued to write poetry. Those poems that were more overtly anti-fascist were published clandestinely using pseudonyms. He participated in La Résistance by providing them with information secretly available to the newspaper, and arranging counterfeit papers for Jews and others sought by the occupying Germans. In February 1944, he was apparently betrayed by someone he had offended, and deported. The following illustration shows a photograph by Dora Maar taken in 1943, and an engraving portrait by Gaston Roux that was used for the volume État de veille (State of Alert) published by Robert Godet in 1943.

 

Contrée

Robert Godet published Contrée after Desnos was deported. The meaning of the title is complex. Both the French “contrée” and the English “country” derive from the Latin (terra) contrata which means “(the land) spread out before one.” In both languages the words came to mean the land around a town or city: rural rather than urban. In English, “country” was also used to denote the political entity that governs a defined region, a meaning that in French was taken by “pays.” The word “contrée” can also be the feminine past participle of the verb “contrer” meaning “act against” or “counter.” Adès (2017) translates this as “against the grain.” For Desnos “(la terre) contrée” suggests both the enduring land, and its rebellion against the current government.

The following illustration shows the etching of Dora Maar by Picasso that was included in the book, the title page, and then the first poem (La cascade). The etching shows a woman seated with her legs crossed on a chair made of books (Swan, 2017). The woman appears to be seen from both front and back; some have suggested that this double perspective might represent an embracing couple. Youki thought that the etching represented “a knight leaning on a stack of books” (Swan 2017, p 5). Picasso arranged for parts of the etching to be printed with each of the poems in the book. This may represent the desecration of the body of France by the Germans.

According to Conley (2003, p 124), Contrée contains one poem for every hour of the day and concludes with an epitaph. Although some of the poems are in free verse, most are formal in structure: nine poems are sonnets. Translations are difficult since one must find some compromise between form and meaning. Kulik (Desnos, 1984, 2004) uses free verse and finds exact meanings; Adès (2017) uses rhymes when Desnos does, albeit not always in the same order. The following sections present five of the poems from the book in the original French (Desnos, 1999; also Rimes website), and in the English translation of Timothy Adès (2017). Each poem is recited by Yvon Jean.  

 

La cascade

Quelle flèche a percé le ciel et le rocher?
Elle vibre. Elle étale, ainsi qu’un paon, sa queue
Ou, comme la comète à minuit vient nicher,
Le brouillard de sa tige et ses pennes sans noeuds.

Que surgisse le sang de la chair entr’ouverte,
Lèvres taisant déjà le murmure et le cri,
Un doigt posé suspend le temps et déconcerte
Le témoin dans les yeux duquel le fait s’inscrit.

Silence ? nous savons pourtant les mots de passe,
Sentinelles perdues loin des feux de bivouac
Nous sentirons monter dans les ténèbres basses
L’odeur du chèvrefeuille et celle du ressac.

Qu’enfin l’aube jaillisse à travers tes abîmes,
Distance, et rayon dessine sur les eaux,
Présage du retour de l’archer et des hymnes,
Un arc-en-ciel et son carquois plein de roseaux.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Waterfall

What arrow split the sky and pierced the rock?
Vibrant, it spreads its peacock tail and flaunts
Its blurry shaft and sleek unblemished flights,
The way the midnight comet finds its mark.

The flesh is opened. For the blood to rise,
While lips suppress the murmurs and the cries,
A finger bids time stop, pre-occupies
The witness who records it with his eyes.

Silence? And yet we know the passwords well.
We strayed from our camp-fires, we sentinels:
Drifting from shady corners we can smell
Salt surf aromas, honeysuckle smells.

Dawn bursts on far-off depths; a sunbeam limns
Upon the waves, at last, a sketch that leads
Back the returning archer and his hymns:
A rainbow, with its quiver full of reeds.

This poem, the first in the collection, seems on the surface to be like the love poems of the French Renaissance, wherein the lover sought to capture his beloved with the arrows of desire. However, the poem describes “the political pursuit of armed Resistance fighters hidden in the landscape of France” (Conley, 2003, p 131). Near a waterfall someone has been wounded, blood flows, passwords are given, and eventually the maquisards returns to their hideout and dawn arrives. The imagery for the waterfall is striking: the waterfall is likened to the tale of a peacock or a comet. Because of Desnos’ love of wordplay, one must wonder whether the word paon should recall païen meaning “pagan” – one who does not follow the established faith.

 

Le paysage

J’avais rêvé d’aimer. J’aime encor mais l’amour
Ce n’est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses
Chargeant de leurs parfums la forêt où repose
Une flamme à l’issue de sentiers sans détour.

J’avais rêvé d’aimer. J’aime encor mais l’amour
Ce n’est plus cet orage où l’éclair superpose
Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,
Illumine en fuyant l’adieu au carrefour.

C’est le silex en feu sous mon pas dans la nuit,
Le mot qu’aucun lexique au monde n’a traduit
L’écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

À vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,
Des boulevards sans noms et des cordes sans noeuds.
Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Countryside

I dreamed of loving. Still I love, but now
Love is no more that rose and lilac spray
Whose perfume filled the woods where each pathway
Led on directly to the blazing glow

I dreamed of loving. Still I love, but now
Love’s not that storm whose lightning kindled high
Towers, unhorsed, unhinged, and fleetingly
Would set the parting of the ways aglow.

Love is the flint my footstep sparks at night,
The word no lexicon can render right,
Foam of the sea, the cloud across the sky.

Old age makes all things fixed and luminous:
Knots are unravelled, streets anonymous;
Set in our ways, the countryside and I.

The countryside of Contrée stands in ironic contrast to that espoused by Vichy propaganda. Conley (200 3, p 1260 remarks

Under Pétain liberty, equality, and fraternity became outmoded concepts replaced with the moralizing, hierarchical values of work, family, and the notion of a mythical homeland led by the patriarchal Marshal.

Desnos remembers the springtime of his life when love blossomed, and the stormy time that followed when the war began. Now the country has hardened into resistance. Love still exists but it is now the flint that attempts to ignite rebellion.

 

La peste

Dans la rue un pas retentit. La cloche n’a qu’un seul
battant. Où va-t-il le promeneur qui se rapproche
lentement et s’arrête par instant? Le voici devant
la maison. J’entends son souffle derrière la porte.

Je vois le ciel à travers la vitre. Je vois le ciel où les
astres roulent sur l’arête des toits. C’est la grande
Ourse ou Bételgeuse, c’est Vénus au ventre blanc, c’est
Diane qui dégrafe sa tunique près d’une fontaine de lumière.

Jamais lunes ni soleils ne roulèrent si loin de la
terre, jamais l’air de nuit ne fut si opaque et si
lourd. Je pèse sur ma porte qui résiste…

Elle s’ouvre enfin, son battant claque contre le
mur. Et tandis que le pas s’éloigne je déchiffre
sur une affiche jaune les lettres noires du mot « Peste ».

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean:

The Plague

In the road a footstep echoes. The bell has only one
clapper. Where’s he going, the walker, coming
slowly nearer and briefly stopping? Now he’s outside
the house. I hear him breathing behind the door.

I see the sky through the glass. I see the sky where the
stars run on the rooftops. It’s the great
Bear or Betelgeuse, it’s Venus the white-bellied,
it’s Diana unfastening her tunic near a fountain of light.

Never did moons or suns run so far from the
earth, never was the night air so dense and so
heavy. I lean on my door which resists…

It opens at last, it swings and knocks against the
wall. And while the footstep moves away I decipher
on a yellow poster the word in black letters, “Plague”

The poem is written in free verse with the line-endings arbitrarily placed between article and noun, adverb and adjective. The world is out of joint. Never were the heavens so far from the earth. An unseen walker labels the house wherein we live in terror as infested by the plague. The label is ambiguous. Does it represent the oppression of the occupiers or the paralyzing fear of the oppressed? On another level the yellow poster recalls the yellow star that French Jews were required to wear.

 

La voix

Une voix, une voix qui vient de si loin
Qu’elle ne fait plus tinter les oreilles,
Une voix, comme un tambour, voilée
Parvient pourtant, distinctement, jusqu’à nous.
Bien qu’elle semble sortir d’un tombeau
Elle ne parle que d’été et de printemps,
Elle emplit le corps de joie,
Elle allume aux lèvres le sourire.

Je l’écoute. Ce n’est qu’une voix humaine
Qui traverse les fracas de la vie et des batailles,
L’écroulement du tonnerre et le murmure des bavardages.

Et vous ? Ne l’entendez-vous pas?
Elle dit « La peine sera de courte durée »
Elle dit « La belle saison est proche ».

Ne l’entendez-vous pas?

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

 

The Voice

A voice, a voice coming from so far away
That it no longer rings in the ears,
A voice, like a drumbeat, muffled
Reaches us even so, distinctly.
Though it seems to issue from a tomb
It speaks only of summer and spring,
It fills the body with joy,
It kindles a smile on the lips.

I’m listening. It’s only a human voice
Coming across the din of life and of battles,
The crash of thunder and the babble of talk.

What about you? Don’t you hear it?
It says “The pain will be short-lived”
It says “The beautiful season is near”.

Don’t you hear it?

This poem is a poem of hope. In the noise of battle and the babble of talk, a voice promises that beauty will return. The voice is not loud, it is like the “still small voice” of God who promised Elijah that Israel would be delivered from its oppressors (1 Kings 19: 12).

 

L’épitaphe

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et depuis mille années
Je suis mort. Je vivais, non déchu mais traqué.
Toute noblesse humaine étant emprisonnée
J’étais libre parmi les esclaves masqués.

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et pourtant j’étais libre.
Je regardais le fleuve et la terre et le ciel
Tourner autour de moi, garder leur équilibre
Et les saisons fournir leurs oiseaux et leur miel.

Vous qui vivez qu’avez-vous fait de ces fortunes ?
Regrettez-vous les temps où je me débattais ?
Avez-vous cultivé pour des moissons communes ?
Avez-vous enrichi la ville où j’habitais ?

Vivants, ne craignez rien de moi, car je suis mort.
Rien ne survit de mon esprit ni de mon corps.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean:

 

The Epitaph

I’ve lived today, and since antiquity
Been dead. I lived intact, but I was prey.
Man’s nobler side was jailed and put away;
Among the slaves in face-masks, I was free.

I’ve lived today, and nonetheless been free.
I watched the river and the earth and sky
Turn round me, and they kept their harmony;
Honey and birds, a seasonal supply.

How did you use these gifts, you there alive?
Did you misuse the days I spent in toil?
Did you make common cause and till the soil
To harvest? Did you make my city thrive?

Don’t fear me, you who live: I’m dead and gone:
Not soul nor body, nothing lingers on.

The sense of the poem stems from the ideas of mortality of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), epitomized in the Latin epitaph used by many of his followers:

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care).

Desnos agrees that today he lives, that before that was dead, and that after he dies nothing will remain. He cares not for before or after but concentrates on today. Despite the awfulness of the time into which he was born, he strives to remain free and to live in harmony with the world. He asks his readers if they using their talents for the common good or resigning themselves to servitude. The meaning of the poem is encapsulated in the line

J’ai vécu dans ces temps et pourtant j’étais libre

 

Imprisonment and Death

After his arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo in February, 1943, Desnos was sent to the transit camp in Compiègne. Youki visited him there and provided him with a care package. However, in April, Desnos and 1700 other prisoners were sent on to Auschwitz. From there, he was transferred to Buchenwald and then in May to the Flossenbūrg  concentration camp in Bavaria. Soon after his arrival Desnos was transferred to the Flōha sub-camp for where he worked for 11 months (Humphreys, 2002). During his stay there he wrote a few last poems usually at the request of his co-prisoners. On 14 April 1945, as the Allied Forces advanced into Germany, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered all concentration camps to be closed. After a forced march, Desnos arrived in Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Czechoslvakia on May 7. Germany surrendered on May 8, and all the guards left the camp at Theresienstadt. A period of chaos and starvation ensued. On June 4 a French-speaking Czech medical student Josef Stuna, assigned to help at the camp recognized Desnos. They talked about poetry, but Desnos was terribly sick with typhus, and died on June 8. The following photograph shows Desnos in a group of prisoners at Theresienstadt. He is in the center, leaning on the shoulder of a companion dressed in a black coat.

 

Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

In 1962 a memorial to the 200,000 people who died in concentration camps after being deported from France during World War II was constructed behind the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris on the eastern tip of Île de la Cité. The memorial, designed by Georges-Henri Pingusson, has an entrance is marked by two concrete blocks. Inside is the tomb of an unknown deportee. Along both walls of a narrow chamber leading underground are 200,000 crystals meant to symbolize each of the deportees who died in the concentration camps. The actual numbers were less than 200,000.  Among those deported were 75,000 Jews; of these only about 2,500 survived. Of the 88,000 deported on political rather than racial grounds, about 53,000 survived (Wieviorka, 2016, p 417). On the walls inside the memorial are brief quotations from several French writers: Paul Élard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Robert Desnos. The following illustration shows the memorial and the two quotations from Desnos:

The first quotation is from the ending of a poem published in 1944:

Car ces cœurs qui haïssaient la guerre battaient pour la liberté au rythme même des saisons et des marées, du jour et de la nuit.

For these hearts that hated war were beating for liberty to the very rhythm of the seasons, the tides, day and night.  (Adès translation).

The second quotation came from what was incorrectly assumed to be his last poem (Conley, 2003, pp 203-207; Desnos/Adès, 2017, p 93). This was quoted in Czech in a brief article in a Czech newspaper on 1 July 1945 that announced the death of the French poet at Theresienstadt. Translated back into French the poem read

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi.

Il me reste d’être l’ombre entre les ombres,
L’ombre qui viendra et reviendra
Dans ta vie ensoleillée.

The poem was thought to be addressed to France. However, the lines actually came from a 1926 prose poem that Desnos wrote for his love at the time: the singer Yvonne George

J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé, couché avec ton fantôme qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être, et pourtant, qu’à être fantôme parmi les fantômes et plus ombre cent fois que l’ombre qui se promène et se promènera allégrement sur le cadran solaire de ta vie. 

I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked, talked, slept with your phantom so much that all that’s left to me perhaps, is to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadowy than that shadow walking in joy, now and in time to come, across the sun-dial of your life. (Adès translation).

 

Springtime

Desnos’ real ‘last poem,’ written on 6 April 1944 in the Flossenbūrg camp (Desnos/Dumas, 1999, p 1259; Desnos/Adès, 2017, pp 512-513) was:

Printemps

Tu, Rrose Sélavy, hors de ces bornes erres
Dans un printemps en proie aux sueurs de l’amour,
Aux parfums de la rose éclose aux murs des tours,
à la fermentation des eaux et de la terre.

Sanglant, la rose au flanc, le danseur, corps de pierre
Paraît sur le théâtre au milieu des labours.
Un peuple de muets d’aveugles et de sourds
applaudira sa danse et sa mort printanière.

C’est dit. Mais la parole inscrite dans la suie
S’efface au gré des vents sous les doigts de la pluie
Pourtant nous l’entendons et lui obéissons.

Au lavoir où l’eau coule un nuage simule
À la fois le savon, la tempête et recule
l’instant où le soleil fleurira les buissons.

The following is a reading by Yvon Jean

Springtime

Rrose Sélavy, beyond these bounds you stray.
Meanwhile the waters and the earth ferment;
The rose on fortress-walls pours out its scent;
Love has its sweats and springtime is their prey.
 
The rose has torn the stone-limbed dancer’s side.
While others plough and sow, he treads the boards.
The public, blind and deaf and dumb, applauds
This rite of spring, when he has danced and died.
 
The word that’s writ in soot is wiped away
At the wind’s whim by fingers of the rain.
Nevertheless we hear it and obey.
 
Down at the wash-place where these waters run,
A cloud portrays both soap and hurricane,
Retreating when the thickets bloom in sun.
(Adès translation).

The poem hearkens back to the days of his youth when Desnos was in love with words and with Rrose Sélavy, and looks forward to the days when spring would dispel the darkness that was Europe during the Nazi era. Desnos was forever the optimist. He used to read the palms of his co-prisoners and he would always find happiness in their futures (Desnos/Caws, 2007, p 1280). An apocryphal story is that he read the palms of a group of prisoners slated for the gas chambers and that his description of their future lives so confused the guards that the prisoners were not executed.

 

References:

Poems and translations

Desnos, R. (translated by Forché, C., & Kulik, W. T., 1991). The selected poems of Robert Desnos. Ecco Press.

Desnos, R. (translated by Kulik, W, 1994). Contré = Country: twenty-five poems. Windhover Press (University of Iowa).

Desnos, R. (edited by Dumas, M.-C., 1999). Œuvres. Gallimard.

Desnos, R. (translated by Kulik, W, 2004). The voice of Robert Desnos: selected poems. Sheep Meadow Press.

Desnos, R. (edited by Caws, M. A., 2007) Essential poems and writings of Robert Desnos. Black Widow Press

Desnos, R. (translated by Adès, T., 2017). Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant: collected poems. Arc Publications.

 Others

Conley, K. (2003). Robert Desnos, surrealism, and the marvelous in everyday life. University of Nebraska Press.

Humphreys, K. (2002). Robert Desnos. In Leroux, J.-F. (Ed.) Modern French poets. (Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 258). Gale

Kulik, W. (1990). On Desnos. The American Poetry Review, 19(3), 29-31.

Swan, R. (2019). Contrée: Picasso’s visual fragmented tailpieces emphasise the poetry of Robert Desnos. Knowledge Commons.

Wieviorka, O. (translated by J. M. Todd, 2016). The French Resistance. Harvard University Press.

Su Shi (蘇軾; simplified 苏轼; Sū Shì, literary name 東坡 dōngpō “east slope,” 1037-1101) was a poet, calligrapher, painter and statesman during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). After criticizing some of the new government policies in his poetry, he was indicted in 1079 for treason. After the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial (烏臺詩案), he was found guilty and condemned to death. The emperor commuted his sentence, and Su was exiled to Huangzhou in Hubei Province. There he converted an old army camp on the eastern slope of a mountain near the city into a farm. During his exile from 1080 to 1084, he adopted the name of his farm as his professional pseudonym, practised Buddhism and wrote poetry. 

Poetry and Politics

Su Shi was born in Meishan near Chengdu in the western regions of the Chinese Empire. He and his younger brother Su Zhe travelled to the imperial capital Kaifeng to take the civil service examinations in 1057. They both passed with distinction and came to the attention of the powerful statesman Ouyang Xiu (1007-1070), who promoted their careers. Su Shi spent time as an administrator in various regions of the empire. While in Hangzhou in the southern Yangtze delta, he was responsible for dredging the West Lake and constructing a promenade that is now known as the Su Causeway. Hangzhou would later become the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279), when the northern regions seceded to form the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234).

From 1069 to 1076, the chancellor (and poet) Wang Anshi (1021-1086) brought in a series of reforms called the New Policies (新法 xīnfǎ). These were intended to improve the life of small farmers who were being bought out by large landowners, to increase taxation so that the government could maintain a professional army for defence rather than forcibly drafting young men, and to stabilize the prices of goods like salt so that rich merchants could not monopolize the markets (Egan, 1994, pp 27-53). In a sense these government interventions were “proto-Keynesian” in nature (Zhao & Drechsler, 2018). 

Although the intentions were good, the reforms were largely unsuccessful. For example, in the “Green Shoots” policy the government gave low-cost loans to small farmers to buy seeds in the spring. However, the bureaucrats administering the policy were terribly slow. The farmers had to travel to government centers for their loans and stay there for prolonged negotiations when they should have been at home planting. Wang Anshi refused to acknowledge the problems, and earned the sobriquet “his stubbornship” (Pease, 2021).

The following illustration shows the Song Dynasty at the time of these reforms.

 

The Crow Terrace Poetry Trial

Su Shi criticized the new reforms in both poetry and prose. By 1079 Wang Anshi had largely retired from public life, but his supporters were incensed by the criticisms. They arranged for the Imperial Office of the Censorate, nicknamed the Crow Terrace because of the crows who nested nearby, to indict Su Shi for treason. Article 122 of the Sung Criminal Code prohibited any “expression of critical comments directed against the emperor” (Hartman, 1990, p 18). Or in more poetic terms

指斥乘輿 Denouncing the Imperial Chariot

The records of the trial are intriguing since much of the prosecution depended upon the interpretation of poetry that was by its very nature both allusive and metaphorical (Hartman, 1990; Wang, 2011). Su Shi provided a deposition in which he explained his own poetry. The following is the fourth of his Mountain Village poems:

杖 藜 裹 饭 去 匆 匆
过 眼 青 钱 转 手 空。
赢 得 儿 童 语 音 好
一 年 强 半 在 城 中

With walking sticks and wraps of cooked rice, they depart in a rush
Turn around, with borrowed money spent, their hands soon empty.
Children learn the language and ways of the big city
For half a year they stay inside the city walls.
(text and translation from LAC website)

And the following is Su Shi’s interpretation

My meaning here is that as soon as the common people receive the green-sprout money, they at once squander it in the cities. It also means that the country people twice yearly must pay summer and autumn taxes and several other levies, to which is now added the green-sprout and corvée assistance monies, with the result that the children from the families who work on the great estates are often in the cities, where they become disorderly and learn nothing but a city accent. (Hartman, 1990, p 23).

The trial dragged on for four months. At the end Su was found guilty and condemned to death. However, Emperor Shenzong was counseled by the dowager Empress Cao and by Wang Anshi to commute the sentence. Su Shi was deprived of his salary and exiled to Huangzhou (黄州, presently part of Huanggang), a small town in Hubei on the Yangtze River. (Hubei is the region north of the Dongting Lake, whereas Hunan is the area to its south.)

Su Shi arranged to obtain some land on the East Slope (Dongpo) of a hill near Huangzhou. There he became a farmer to provide food for his family. He changed from a formal statesman to a hard-working layman:   

To state the matter simply, in Huangzhou, Su Shi became Su Dongpo, “Su of East Slope.” This poetic personality, with its firm, philosophic, yet jovial poise of spirit, was created by Su Shi’s major writings in Huangzhou. Reaffirmed in the poetry of his later exile to Huizhou and Hainandao, the image of Su Shi finding joy even in the worst of adversity has become part of the Chinese cultural heritage. (Fuller, 2023, p 251),

Su Tungpo now was to become a farmer by necessity and a recluse by temperament and natural inclination. What society, culture, learning, reading of history, and external duties and responsibilities do to a man is to hide his real self. Strip him of all these trappings of time and convention, and you have the real man. A Su Tungpo back among the people is like a seal in water; somehow a seal dragging its fins and tail on land is only half a seal. Su is never more likeable than when he is an independent farmer trying to make his own living. The Chinese mind usually glamorises a poet wearing a “coolie hat”, putting his hands to the plough and standing against an idyllic hillside, provided he can also compose good verse and beat time to it by striking the buffalo’s horn, and provided further that he occasionally, or even frequently, gets drunk and climbs the city wall to prowl in the moonlight. (Lin, 1948, p 183)

 

East Slope

In 1081, Su wrote a set of eight poems about his life as a farmer. The following is the first of these with a translation by Jeffrey Yang (2008):

And the following is a translation by Lin and Young (2020)

 

The Cold Food Festival

The Hanshi Observance (寒食節) is a traditional festival celebrated in early April (Holzman, 1986). Legend has it that in the 7^th Century BCE a nobleman Jie Zhitui refused to come out of the forest to pay allegiance to his lord. The angry lord burned down the forest to force Jie out, but wound up burning him to death. In remorse, the lord instituted an annual period without fires as a memorial to Jie.

In 1082, Su Shi wrote two poems about the festival, describing how desolate he felt. He wrote these out in his distinctive semi-cursive (running) script in a sample of calligraphy that has been preserved, and is now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. The following illustration shows the scroll that contains the calligraphy. The top section shows the full scroll (about 200 cm long). Below that is an enlargement of the title section that was added much later with calligraphy by Emperor Gaozong of Qing (1711-1799). This reads 雪堂餘韻: Reminiscences of the Academy (likely one of the halls in the Forbidden City where the emperors studied). Then there is an enlargement of the poems with two colophons. The first colophon in small script is by the Emperor Gaozong of Qing. The second colophon in characters larger than Su’s is by Su’s student Huang Tingjian (黃庭堅, 1045-1105). The lowest section shows an enlargement of Su’s poem. Particularly striking characters are in lines 2 (年, nián, year), 5 (中, zhōng, middle), 11 (葦, wěi, reed), and 13 (紙 zhǐ, paper, banknote) from the right. Each of these has an exaggerated descending line suggestive of rain or tears. This piece of calligraphy is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest examples of running script.

The following is the text of the first poem written from left to right

自我來黃州 已過三寒食
年年欲惜春 春去不容惜
今年又苦雨 兩月秋蕭瑟
臥聞海棠花 泥汙燕支雪
闇中偷負去 夜半真有力
何殊病少年 病起頭已白。

A free verse translation by Lin and Young (2020):

 

Red Cliff Rhapsodies

In the winter of 208-209 CE, the Battle of the Red Cliffs (赤壁) occurred on the Yangtze River to the west of Huangzhou. This naval battle, wherein the forces from the south of China led by Liu Bei and Zhou Yu defeated the numerically superior forces of Cao Cao, was one of the major events leading to the downfall of the Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) and the beginning of the period of the Three Kingdoms (220-280 CE). 

During his time in Huangzhou, Su Shi and his friends made several trips by boat to the site of the ancient battle. Modern scholarship places the location of the battle near Chibi, which was west of the location visited by Su Shi, now called the “literary” as opposed to the “historical” Red Cliffs. In 1082, Su described these trips in two prose poems (“odes” or “rhapsodies”). In the first , Su Shi and his friends drank wine, and remembered the song that Cao Cao composed on the eve of the battle:

The moon is bright, the stars are few,
and magpies come flying south,
three times round they circle the tree,
where is the branch on which to roost?
(translated by Stephen Owen, 1996, p 281)

The following illustration shows the Red Cliffs on the Yangtze River and a map of the battle in which Cao Cao was defeated. The red calligraphy on the cliffs is 赤壁(red cliffs) written from left to right.

One of Su’s companions played a melancholy tune on his flute and remembers

Once Cao Cao had smashed Jingzhou, he came down to Jiangling, going east with the current. The prows and sterns of his galleys stretched a thousand li, his flags and banners blotted the very sky; he poured wine and stood over the river, hefted his spear and composed a poem—he was indeed the boldest spirit that whole age! And yet where is he now? (translation of Tian, 2018, p 305)

This led him to a meditation on the transience of life:

We go riding a boat as small as a leaf and raise gourd flasks of wine to toast one another. We are but mayflies lodging between heaven and earth, single grains adrift, far out on the dark blue sea. We grieve that our lives last only a moment, and we covet the endlessness of the great river. We would throw an arm around those immortal beings in their flight and go off to roam with them; we would embrace the bright moonlight and have it done with forever. And since I knew that we could not suddenly have these things out of the blue, I gave the lingering echoes of that desire a place in my sad melody. (Tian, p 306)

Su replies to his companion

And do you, my friend, indeed understand the water and the moonlight? As Confucius said as he stood by the river, “It passes on just like this,” and yet it has never gone away. There is in all things a fullness and a waning to nothing, just as with that other thing, the moon; and yet it has never increased and never vanished altogether. If you think of it from the point of view of changing, then heaven and earth have never been able to stay as they are, even for the blink of an eye. But if you think of it from the point of view of not changing, then neither the self nor other things ever come to an end. So then what is there to covet? (Tian pp 306-307

The quotation from Confucius is from Analects IX 16 “The water flows on and on like this, never stopping day or night”

Su continues

且夫天地之間, 物各有主, 苟非吾之所有, 雖一毫而莫取. 惟江上之 清風, 與山間之明月, 耳得之而為聲, 目遇之而成色, 取之無禁, 用之不竭, 是造物者之無盡藏也, 而吾與子之所共適.

Between heaven and earth each thing has its own master. If something is not mine, then I cannot take it as mine, even if it is only a hair. There is only the cool breeze along with the bright moon among the mountains. The ears catch one of these, and it is sound; the eyes encounter the other, and it forms colors. Nothing prevents us from taking these as our own. We can do whatever we want with them, and they can never be used up. This is the inexhaustible treasure trove of the Fashioner-of-Things, and it serves the needs of both you and I alike. (Tian p 307)

This conclusion to the poem provides a moving reconciliation between transience and eternity. In the words of Zhang Longxi (2023, pp 221-222)

Through the dialogue of Master Su and the flute player and from the perspective that comprehends both mutability and constancy of all things, nature is invoked as a great healing power to cure human wounds and suffering, and relieve men from self-pity and depression.

Over two centuries later in 1301, the great Chinese calligrapher Zhao Mengfu wrote out Su Shi’s Two Odes on the Red Cliff and provided a portrait of Su Shi. This original scroll was later cut up to form album leaves each 27 by 11 cm. These are now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The following illustration shows at the top a digital recomposition of the original scroll of the first ode, and then an enlargement of the portrait and two album leaves near the end of the ode. The quotation beginning “Between heaven and earth… (且夫天 qiě fū tiān, and man heaven) begins in the right-most line of the enlarged album leaves three characters from the bottom.

Su’s poem shows his ability to write fluently and clearly about issues of importance. Yang (2015, p 3) discusses this in terms of “spontaneity.”

A primary Chinese term for this notion is ziran 自然 (literally ‘self-so-ness’). Ziran in the premodern context could function as an adjective: ‘being natural’; or adverb: ‘naturally’; but not as a noun in the modern sense of ‘nature’, that is, our material environment. The semantic gist of ‘spontaneity’ is also found in terms such as tianran 天然 (‘heavenly made so-ness’), tianjun 天鈞 (‘Heaven, the Potter’), tiancai 天才 (‘heavenly endowed talent’), shensi 神思 (‘divinely inspired thinking’), wuxin 無心 (‘mindless’), wuyi 無意 (‘without intention’), wuwei 無為 (‘without agitation’), and so forth. Conspicuously, these are all compound words that suggest that a certain object is originated from itself (zi), created by a transcendental agent (tian or shen) or, in any case, simply formed without human interference (wu).

Su’s poetry expresses the truth directly without any apparent effort on the part of the poet. The underlying pattern of the Dao makes itself manifest through the words (Bol, 1992). Fuller (2023, pp 2-4 and pp 78-118) considers the poetry in terms of 理 lǐ or “inherent pattern.” Through Su’s words one can see the underlying order of things. He quotes Su Shi’s own description of his work:

My writing is like a spring of ten thousand gallons; it does not choose its path as it goes out. On level land it flows smoothly and quickly, and a thousand miles a day is not difficult. When it comes to turns and breaks over mountains and stones, it follows the object to describe the form, and it cannot be known. That which can be known is that it always travels where it ought to travel, and it always stops where it ought to stop. It is like this, and as for all else, I too cannot know. (Fuller, 2023, pp 3-4)

 

A Visit to Mount Lu

Politics changed and Su Shi’s formal exile in Huangzhou came to an end in 1084. By 1086 he had returned to the capital in Kaifeng. In 1084 he visited Mount Lu (廬山, Lúshān), a mountainous area containing multiple towering peaks just south of the Yangtze and west of Lake Poyang. It is a land of mountains, mist and mysticism. The origin of the region’s name is usually related to the legendary Kuangsu who lived in a small hut (lú) in the mountains before becoming a Daoist immortal (Hargett, 2004, p 10). After the 4^th Century CE, Mount Lou became a prominent center for Buddhism, and numerous temples were built there (Grant, 1994). One of these temples in the northwest part of the mountain is the “West Forest Temple.” One of Su Shi’s most famous poems records his visit there: Inscription on the Wall of the West Forest Temple. The Buddhist sense of the poem is that one cannot understand the overarching truth of life when one is lost in its details The following is a word-by word translation 

This is a translation by Burton Watson (1994, p. 108):

From the side, a whole range; from the end, a single peak;
far, near, high, low, no two parts alike.
Why can’t I tell the true shape of Lu-shan?
Because I myself am in the mountain.

And a rhyming version by Xu Yuanchong (2005, p 397).

It’s a range viewed in face and peaks viewed from the side
Assuming different shapes viewed from far and wide
Of Mountain Lu we cannot make out the true face
For we are lost in the heart of the very place.

The following illustration shows on the left the poem as written out by a modern calligrapher Quan Xijun. On the right is a modern painting of Mount Lu in the autumn together with calligraphy of Su Shi’s poem:

Below is a version of the poem in chaos calligraphy (2016) by Wang Dongling (1946- ) together with two photographs of the area. The calligraphy gives a true sense of the land of mists and the mountains:

Mount Lu is the subject of many paintings. The following illustration shows on the left a painting made in 1467 by Shen Zhou (1427-1509) and on the right a modern painting by Qi Kun (1901-1944) created in 1943. These were exhibited at the National Palace Museum in Taipei in 2020.   

 

Bamboo, Rock and Tree

Su Shi was a talented painter as well as calligrapher. In 2018 a scroll containing his painting of Bamboo, Rock and Tree, long held in a private collection, was auctioned for almost 60 million dollars (Sturman, 2022). The following illustration shows the complete scroll (26 cm by 185 cm) at the top. In the middle are the first two colophons, the rightmost by Liu Liangzuo (11^th Century) and the next by the poet and calligrapher Mi Fu (1052–1107). And at the bottom is the painting with the more recent seals removed. The painting was likely created in the 1080s and the first two colophons added in the 1090s.

Liu Liangzuo describes how he was able to view the painting that was owned by Feng Qiyun. He then provides a poem (4^th line from right)

舊夢雲生石,浮榮木脱衣。
支離天壽永,磊落世緣微 

A rock born from clouds in an old dream;
A tree sheds its robes of empty glory.
Gnarled and knotted, heaven’s gift of years is timeless;
Rugged and upright, the fate of this world is fickle.
(translation Sturman, 2022)

Mi Fu provides a much more beautiful piece of calligraphy, though his words are less poetic. His colophon begins:

四十誰云是,三年不製衣。
贫知世路險,老覺道心微

Forty, who says it’s so?
Three years of no new clothing!
Poor, I know the worldly path is precarious;
Old, I awaken to the Dao-mind’s subtlety.
(translation Sturman, 2022)

 

Dongpo Pork

Legend has it that Su Shi created the original recipe for East Slope Pork (东坡肉, dōngpōròu): pork belly braised with ginger and scallions in soy sauce and rice wine. The recipe is contained in a poem that has been attributed to Su Shi:

 

Epilogue

Although Su Shi returned to political favor in 1086, this was not to last. He was banished again in 1090 to the south of China, ultimately to Hainan Island. He was pardoned in 1100, but died soon thereafter in 1101.

 

References

Bol, P. K. (1992). Su Shih’s Tao: unity with individuality. In This culture of ours: intellectual transitions in T’ang and Sung China. (pp 254-299). Stanford University Press

Egan, R. (1994). Word, image, and deed in the life of Su Shi. Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.

Fuller, M. A. (2023). The road to East Slope: the development of Su Shi’s poetic voice. Stanford University Press.

Grant, B. (1994). Mount Lu revisited: Buddhism in the life and writings of Su Shih. University of Hawaii Press.

Hargett, J. (2004). Su Shi and Mount Lu. Journeys, 5(1), 4–22.

Hartman, C. (1990). Poetry and politics in 1079: The Crow Terrace Poetry Case of Su Shih. Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews, 12, 15–44.

Holzman, D. (1986). The cold food festival in early medieval China. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 46(1), 51–79

Lin, J. I., & Young, D. (2020). Listening all night to the rain: selected poems of Su Dongpo (Su Shi). Pinyon Publishing

Lin, Y. (1948). The gay genius: the life and times of Su Tungpo. Heinemann.

Owen, S. (1996). An Anthology of Chinese literature: beginnings to 1911. W.W. Norton.

Pease, J. (2021). His stubbornship: Prime Minister Wang Anshi (1021–1086), reformer and poet. Brill.

Sturman, P. C. (2022). Inscriptional practices of the Song Literati: revisiting Su Shi’s Old Tree, Rock, and Bamboo. Archives of Asian Art, 72(1), 75–95.

Tian, X. (2019). The halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms. Harvard University Asia Center.

Watson, B. (1994). Selected poems of Su Tung-pʻo. Copper Canyon Press.

Wang, Yugen. (2011). The limits of poetry as means of social criticism: the 1079 literary inquisition against Su Shi revisited. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. Volume 41, 29–65.

Xu Yuanchong (2005). 300 gems of classical Chinese poetry. Peking University Press

Yang, J. (2008). East Slope. Ugly Duckling Press.

Yang, Z. (2015). Dialectics of spontaneity: the aesthetics and ethics of Su Shi (1037-1101) in poetry. Brill.

Zhang Longxi. (2023). From Ouyang Xiu to Su Shi: the splendor of Northern Song Literature. In A History of Chinese Literature. (pp. 206–228). Routledge.

Zhao, X., & Drechsler, W. (2018). Wang Anshi’s economic reforms: proto-Keynesian economic policy in Song Dynasty China. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 42(5), 1239–1254.

Chinese calligraphy began over 3000 years ago. Over the years several distinct styles of writing evolved: oracle, bronze, seal, clerical, regular, semi-cursive (running) and cursive (grass). The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) overturned the respect shown to these traditional modes. However, calligraphy flourished in the format of the big-character posters (大字报, dàzì bào). In the years following the revolution, Chinese calligraphy became more abstract. One of the most important modern calligraphers is Wang Dongling (王冬龄). Among his many achievements is a new writing style that he calls “chaos script” 亂書 luànshū.

A Calligrapher’s Life

Wang Dongling was born in 1946 in Rudong about 175 km north of Shanghai. He studied fine arts in Nanjing, graduating in 1966 in time for the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. He was able to survive through this upheaval by creating big-character posters, an experience which gave him a fearful sense of freedom. He was intrigued by the traditional calligraphy that was being trashed by the revolutionaries, and in 1968 began to study with Lin Zanshi (1898-1989) in Wujiang just east of Shanghai (Barrass, 2002, p 164). This grand old calligrapher, a master of the cursive script, was known for his “iron line.” Lin survived the purges by providing calligraphy for the propaganda of the party and the poetry of Mao Zedong. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Wang enrolled in the Zhejiang Academy of Art (now the National Academy of Art) in Hangzhou, where he studied with Lu Weizhao (1899-1980) and Sha Menghai (1900-1992). After graduating from the academy, he spent some time as a visiting fellow at the University of Minnesota and at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the United Sates. He is presently a Professor of Calligraphy at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou.

 

Influences

The following illustration shows calligraphy by two of his teachers: Lin Zanshi on the right and Sha Menghai on the left. Lin Zanshi wrote out the poem Going up the Hill by the Tang poet Du Mu (803–852) in 1975 using his iron line. The poem reads (Barrass, 2002, p 142)

A slanting stony path rises far up the chilly hill
To where men live amidst the fleecy clouds
I stop my carriage to admire the maple grove at dusk,
Where frozen leaves are redder than the flowers of early spring.

In the 1980s, Sha Menghai wrote a poem about the view from his office in the Academy of Art (Barrass, 2002, p 138)

Red apricot blossom and pink butterflies can be seen over the wall
While outside the window there are green willows and yellow orioles
To best enjoy the spring breezes, join those who walk along
Su Dongpo’s causeway across the West Lake.

East-West Interactions

Wang was also influenced by Western abstract art. He developed a highly fluid calligraphy and combined that with the freedom of Western abstraction. The following is a work called 史記 (shǐ jì, History and Memory, 68 cm square) from 1990 (Hertel, 2016):

The black calligraphy provides a basic structure for the abstract ecstasy of the colors. Though very freely written, the calligraphy still has definite meaning.

Wang also promoted direct contact between Chinese calligraphy and Western culture (Hertel, 2016). The following illustration shows Chinese calligraphy on a Western background (1999). Wang has written the character for passion/feeling (感 gǎn) on a two-page spread from a German arts magazine and then repeated the calligraphy on an identical spread.

He then placed the two sheets side by side, but with the left-hand one turned upside down. His intention was to illustrate how ‘feeling’ becomes ‘passion’ when, for example, on is ‘head-over-heels’ in love. (Barrass, 2002, p 168).   

The following illustration shows another example of the interaction between East and West. In 2012, Wang wrote out the Heart Sutra on a magazine illustration (25 by 20 cm) of one of Edward Weston’s 1936 nude photographs of Charis Weston in the Oceano dunes (Iezzi, 2016). The juxtaposition is intriguing. The nude body was not a subject for Chinese artists. The main message of the Heart Sutra is that everything is “emptiness” (śūnyatā). Nothing that we perceive is real.

Large-Character Calligraphy

Wang was very adept at making large-character calligraphic works (大字书, dàzì shū). Unlike previous artists, he allowed the characters to overlap and to extend beyond the borders of the paper, and he let the ink to spread freely. The following illustration shows two large-character works (about 178 cm high) about flowers dancing from his 2013 exhibition.

The following illustration shows on the left a large work (272 by 142 cm) entitled The Void, about the nature of the Dao created by Wang in 2000 (Barrass, 2002, p 170). The background contains calligraphy of the first two chapters of the Daodejing, written in a style similar to the “iron line” of his teacher Lin Zanshi. In the center is the character that represents absence or nothingness (無, simplified 无, wú) written in a script based on the oracle script. The right section of the illustration shows the evolution of the character from ancient times.

The following is the Chinese text of the beginning of the first chapter of the Daodejing (Wikibooks) with a recent English translation by Fischer (2023). The character 無 begins the second line:

道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。
無名天地之始；有名萬物之母。

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.

 

Photographic Experiments

Using photosensitive paper and calligraphy written upon transparencies, Wang (2013) was able to create impressive white on black creations. The following is a gelatin silver print (51 x 61 cm) of Love Cloud (爱雲)

The following is calligraphy on a photographic print (51 by 69 cm) composed of four separate views of a lotus pond (Wang Dongling, 2023): Li Shangyin – Newly Washed After the Rains, the Bamboo Dock is Transformed (李商隱 – 竹塢無塵水檻清, Zhú wù wú chén shuǐ kǎn qīng)

Chaos Script

Over recent years Wang has developed a fluid cursive script called chaos script (亂書 luànshū) that breaks all the rules of traditional calligraphy (Festi & Hou, 2023). In cursive script the characters may run into each other vertically. In chaos script the characters overlap both vertically and horizontally, and can extend beyond the edges of the paper. The calligraphy is created with a long-handled brush writing on paper laid out on the ground. The resultant work shows a slow alternation of dark and light as the ink intermittently dries in the brush and must be replenished. The following illustrations show the Heart Sutra as written in regular script by Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322 CE) and in chaos script in 2016 by Wang Dongling (Ferrell et al, 2026, p 126).

The following are comments by Wang on chaos script (Wang Dongling, 2016):

Chaos Script came about gradually, over a long process of creative practice. In Chaos Script, the strokes of cursive script overlap and interweave, creating what appears to be unreadable abstract images. But the execution of Chaos Script in fact still adheres to the rules of traditional calligraphy. It is not haphazard—it appears chaotic but is actually not so. I settled on the name of Chaos Script after some deliberation. Luan evokes disorder and mess, but it also implies zhi (“control,” “govern”)—after chaos comes control. In poetry, there is a famous line [by Bai Juyi (772-846)]: “Riotous blossoms [luanhua] gradually enchant the travelers’ vision.” Chaos has a feeling of nature.

Cahos calligraphy is as much related to painting as to writing. In an essay in the catalogue of Wang’s 2016 exhibition, Britta Erickson remarks

The closest comparison to Wang’s long cascades of intertwined lines that comes to mind are the vines painted by Wu Changshi 吴昌碩 (1844-1927), Professor Wang’s teacher’s teacher. One of the greatest calligraphers of the twentieth century, Wu Changshi employed calligraphic scripts in rendering natural forms. His loose, twisting renderings of vines brought together the artist’s understanding of nature, and of calligraphy, and he would allow the vines to be cropped by the paper’s edge, so that the viewer would then consider the wide spaces into which those vines stretched, beyond the frame of the painting. Wang Dongling’s Chaos Script similarly engages the mind to extrapolate beyond the paper’s edge to consider the breadth of the world into which his writing expands. The expanse can feel infinite.

The following illustration shows the transition from Wu Changshi on the left through Wang’s teacher Lu Weizhao (1899-1980) to Wang’s chaos script on the right.

Wu’s painting represents Wisteria. The inscription reads

The branches are messy and overflowing, [but] please do not chop off the vines!

The painting by Lu Weizhao depicts Bamboo and Rock (1962).

Wang’s example of chaos script is his 2019 calligraphy of the famous poem Quiet Night Thoughts by the Tang poet Li Bai (701-762):

床前明月光     Chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
疑是地上霜     Yí shì dìshang shuāng
舉頭望明月     Jǔtóu wàng míngyuè
低頭思故鄉     Dītóu sī gùxiāng

A pool of moonlight on my bed this late hour
like a banket of frost on the world.
I lift my eyes to a bright mountain moon.
Resigned, remembering my home, I bow.
(translation Sam Hamill, 2013, p 94).

 

Calligraphy as Performance

Chaos script lends itself easily to performance. It is an art based on action. The following are comments by Gao Shiming (2023):

Writing becomes simple ink, markings, and traces, and the physicality and emotional tenor of the writing becomes the centre of everything. Wang’s chaos script crystallises action. When that action stops, the state and meaning of that movement linger. This state of action is a dance that arises when the mood strikes. The impulse to write chaos stems from writing in an uninhibited state of disorientation and overwhelm. In the state of writing generated by the dialectic between chaos and order, a calligrapher loses himself yet finds contentment.

The following shows a video of Wang Dongling writing out the first two chapters of the Daodejing in chaos script at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2018.

And the following illustrations shows the calligraphy in its final form:

 

References

Barrass, G. S. (2002). The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China. British Museum Press.

Ferrell, S., Kong, W., Hiro, R. I., Little, S., Moon, V., &Ng, L. W. (2026). Line, form, qi: calligraphic art from the Fondation INK collection. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Festi, G. & Weihuan Hou. (2024). Contemporary reinventions of Chinese calligraphy. A semiotic exploration. Ocula (Online), 25(3). https://doi.org/10.57576/ocula2024-6

Fischer, P. (2023). The annotated Laozi: a new translation of the Daodejing. State University of New York at Albany.

Gao Shiming (2023). Chaos script – the dialectic between order and chaos. China Academy of Art

Hamill, S. (2013) Crossing the Yellow River. Three hundred poems from the Chinese. Tiger bark Press.

Hertel, Shao-Lan. (2016). Lines in translation: cross-cultural encounters in modernist calligraphy, early 1980s-early 1990s. Yishu, 15(4), 6–28.

Iezzi, A. (2016). “Chinese modern calligraphy” as a reflection of Chinese contemporary culture: a comparison between modernism (Wang Dongling) and avant-garde (Xu Bing). Italian Association for Chinese Studies. Selected Papers 1, 75-116

Wang Dongling (2013). The origins of abstraction. Exhibition in Beijing.  

Wang Dongling (2016). Writing Chaos. 亂書. Exhibition Catalogue published by Ink Studio, Beijing.  

Wang Dongling (2024). The joy of being. 信可樂也 Exhibition Catalogue published by iPRECIATION, Singapore.

 

During the 19^th 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 20^th 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 20^th Century), the songs were accompanied by piano. The following sections consider nine English art songs composed during first two decades of the 20^th 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 16^th to early 17^th Centuries. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) published his sonnets in 1609. The following is a recitation of his 18^th 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 17^th-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:

Arthur L Wood provides a much clearer recitation:

 

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 20^th 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.

Masefield, J. (illustrated by Pears, C., 1916). Salt-water poems and ballads. Macmillan Co.

Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Knoop, C. A., & Scharinger, M. (2018). Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language. PloS One, 13(11), e0205980.

Whitner, M. E. (1957). The modern art song in English. The American Music Teacher, 6(4), 2–23.

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, 18^th 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 18^th 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 (18^th 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 The Inspiration 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.

de Voragine, J. (1275, translated by W. Caxton, 1483) The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints.

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 17^th 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 (17^th 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.

 

References

Bynner, W. & Kiang Kang-Hu, (1929). The jade mountain: a Chinese anthology, being three hundred poems of the T’ang dynasty, 618-906. Alfred A. Knopf.

Carr, H. (2018). The Ur-Cantos. In R. Parker (Ed.) Readings in the Cantos. (pp 9-32). Clemson University Press.

Fuller, M. (2018). An Introduction to Chinese Poetry: From the Canon of Poetry to the Lyrics of the Song Dynasty. Harvard University Asia Center.

Geng, L. (2021). The four great Tang poets. In A Comprehensive Study of Tang Poetry II (pp. 1–42). Routledge.

Giles, H. A. (1884, revised 1923). Gems of Chinese Literature. Bernard Quaritch

Harris, P. (2009). Three hundred Tang poems. Alfred A. Knopf (Everyman’s Library)

Liu Yang, & Hua Zhangyi, (2024). 琵琶行 (Pipa Song). CITIC Press.

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.

Pound, E. (1915). Cathay. Elkin Mathews.

Pound, E. (1917a). Three Cantos II. Poetry, 10 (4), 180-188

Pound, E. (1917b). Lustra of Ezra Pound: with earlier poems. Alfred A. Knopf.

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.

 

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 2^nd 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 15^th 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 1^st Century BCE, and the second map when the Silk Roads were at their height during the late 8^th 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 14^th 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 2^nd 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 4^th 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 9^th 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 20^th 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 4^th 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 2^nd 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 (6^th-5^th 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 6^th 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 8^th Century CE.

 

Buddhism

Gautama Buddha lived in the northeastern region of India in the 6^th or 5^th 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 1^st, 2^nd and 5^th 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 7^th and 8^th 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:

1. Stone, Avalokistesvara, Gandhara, 3^rd Century CE
2. Bronze, Avalokistesvara, Gandhara, 4^th Century CE
3. Stone, Avalokistesvara, Northern China, 6^th Century CE
4. Wood, Avalokistesvara with multiple heads, Northern China 11^th Century CE
5. Wood, Avalokistesvara “seated at royal ease,” China, 11^th Century CE
6. Bronze, Avalokistesvara, Nepal, 14^th Century CE
7. Gilded Wood, Kannon, Japan 11^th Century CE
8. Porcelain, Guanyin, China 17^th Century CE
9. Jade, Guanyin, China, 19^th Century CE
10. Titanium callosal statue (78 m) Nanshan Guanyin, Hainan Island, 21^st 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 5^th Century BCE. However, it was not formally written down in Sanskrit until the 2^nd or 3^rd 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 5^th 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 5^th 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 15^th 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 17^th 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 1^st 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 13^th Century manuscript. This may represent the House of Wisdom, also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, which was founded in the 8^th Century CE. On the right is a photograph of a honeycomb archway (muquarnas) from the Abbasid Palace in Baghdad built in the 12^th Century CE.

(ii) The Great Mosque in Xi’an

Islamic merchants came to China along the Silk Roads. By the 8^th 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, fèng tíng), 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

Beckwith, C. I. (2009). Empires of the Silk Road: a history of central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present. Princeton University Press,

Berg, I. M. (2000). Among the Jewish descendants of Kaifeng. Judaism, 49(1), 103.

Boyce, M., Grenet, F, & Beck, R. (1991). A history of Zoroastrianism. Volume 3. Zoroastrianism under Macedonian and Roman rule. E. J. Brill.

Brock, S. P. (1996). The ‘Nestorian’ Church: A Lamentable Misnomer. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 78(3), 23–35.

Chalupa, A. (2016). The origins of the Roman cult of Mithras in the light of new evidence and interpretations: the current state of affairs. Religio, 24(1), 65-96.

Dalrymple, W. (2025). The golden road: how ancient India transformed the world. Bloomsbury.

Flecker, J. E. (1922). Hassan: the story of Hassan of Bagdad and how he came to make the golden journey to Samarkand: a play in five acts. William Heinemann.

Foltz, R. C. (2010). Religions of the Silk Road: premodern patterns of globalization. (2^nd 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.

Gulácsi, Z. (2015). Mani’s pictures: the didactic images of the Manichaeans from Sasanian Mesopotamia to Uygur Central Asia and Tang-Ming China. Brill.

Hansen, V. (2017). The Silk Road: a new history with documents. Oxford University Press.

Keevak, M. (2008). The story of a stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and its reception in the West, 1625-1916. Hong Kong University Press.

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.

McGrath, A, (2021). China’s buried Christian history. Sapentia.

Millward, J. A. (2013). The silk road: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Morgan, J., & Walters, C. (2012). Journeys on the Silk Road: a desert explorer, Buddha’s secret library, and the unearthing of the world’s oldest printed book. Lyons Press.

Moule, A. C. (1930). Christians in China: Before the Year 1550. Macmillan

Pin Lyu (2024). The Sogdians: the ‘Cultural Bees’ of Eurasia. In Henderson, J., L. Morgan, S., & Salonia, M. (Eds). Reimagining the Silk Roads: Interactions and Perceptions Across Eurasia. (pp 145-160). Taylor & Francis

Rong, X. (translated by Hansen, V., 1999). The nature of the Dunhuang library cave and the reasons for its sealing. Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, 11(1), 247–275.

Red Pine. (2001). The Diamond Sutra: the perfection of wisdom. Counterpoint.

Schatzmiller, M. (2018). The adoption of paper in the Middle East, 700-1300 AD. Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient, 61 1-32.

Sinor, D. (1990, online 2008). The Karakhanids and early Islam. In Sinor, D. (Ed.). The Cambridge history of early Inner Asia. (pp 343-370). Cambridge University Press.

Stein, R. A. (1986). Avalokiteśvara/Kouan-yin, un exemple de transformation d’un dieu en déesse. Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, 2(1), 17–80.

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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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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.

This is a recitation of the poem by Wort Krämer

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 19^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 (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 20^th 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.

Jones, D. E. (1960). The plays of T.S. Eliot. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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.

Shelley, P. B. (1820). Prometheus unbound: a lyrical drama in four acts. C. & J. Ollier.

Smith, C. H. (1967). T. S. Eliot’s dramatic theory and practice: from Sweeney Agonistes to the Elder Statesman. Princeton University Press.