Updike's Evening Concert
Light and Sound Creatively Commingle
Emotions Ideated
The speaker of the poem is in attendance of a concert that is to take place in the famed Sainte-Chapelle chapel in Paris, France. Typically, a reader might expect a response to a concert to begin with an overview of the instruments, but the speaker begins by introducing “The celebrated windows flamed with light” (1). The light immediately shape-shifts into liquid as it begins “pouring north across the Seine” (2). The light shifting states foreshadows future transformations throughout the poem.
Setting the Rhythm
Soon the speaker is “rustled” into place (3). The poem is mostly written in the meter of iambic pentameter (except for lines 6, 7, and 10), which serves as a rhythmic counterbalance to the imagery creating the aesthetic appeal. The speaker further captures the rhythm of the music with the use of alliteration: “violins / vaunting Vivaldi’s strident strength” (3-4). The speaker employs rhythm and meter in the poem in order to mimic the music being played. Following the allusion to Vivaldi the reader is presented with “Brahm’s” (4) and the music from both composers begins “to suck with their passionate sweetness, / bit by bit, the vigor from the red, / the blazing blue” (5-6). Again the speaker is referring to the juxtaposition of the music and the scenery combined with the idea of commingling senses.
Using Senses
The music is at once engaging to the ear and the eye, neurologically referred to as synesthesia. Moreover, “the listening eye” (7) is engaged by the music because as the concert proceeds “The celebrated windows” (1) with lead, structurally interwoven between the panes of glass for support, begin to unwind and transform into “thick black lines” (8). The lead becomes transformed into individual shapes. The process of synesthesia is catapulted by the music.
A Light Perspective
Towards the end of the poem on line 11 the speaker again analogizes light and liquid when “the glow became a milk” as well as a further transmutation as it is additionally compared to a “whisper” (12). The glimmer of light is further changed when “our beating hearts, our violins” (13) are enveloped “in thin but solid sheets of lead” (14). The speaker is stating here, with the repetitive use of the first-person pronoun “our”, that the speaker is a musician. This explains why the beginning of the poem is not an image of the stage, but an image of the Gothic chapel from the viewpoint of the stage. It is a tremendously effective use of an enigmatic perspective.
Productive Derangement
The musicians including the speaker are so lost and involved in their art that their senses become abstracted. Arguably this may have been what young Arthur Rimbaud was referring to when he said, “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love, suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences”. If we supplant the word “poet” with “artist” it becomes clear that occasionally humanity requires chaos to fully digest the beauty of creativity all around us. The musicians’ “hearts…[and] violins / were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead” (13-14) because they had become a part of the beauty they were helping to create.
John Updike
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