In March 2000, Joseph Bottum complained in The Atlantic of what he called “the soundtracking of America.” “America,” Bottum wrote at the time, “is drowning in sanctioned music, an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space.” He was not ranting against the decadence of pop music or lamenting the enfeeblement of classical music. Rather, his subject was the place of music in general—from Bach’s fugues to Bono’s falsettos—in America’s moral landscape. While the popularity of other arts has faded, the popularity of music has, so to speak, charged up the charts. This can be attributed, Bottum suggested, to the rise of what Alasdair MacIntyre has called “emotivism”—the idea that moral judgments should be determined by positive or negative feelings rather than by reasoning. Music, which has the capacity to communicate immediate, non-linguistic feelings, has flourished under emotivism while the so-called rational arts—poetry and drama—have struggled. We may live in perversely Puritanical times, as Marilynne Robinson has argued, but it is music, not the church, that tells us what “obvious and officially appropriate emotions” we should feel.
And lyrics, Bottum argued, cannot make up for music’s fundamental incapacity to express complex thought. They can’t introduce or maintain “any ideas the music itself lacks.” Good poetry cannot be set to music, and good lyrics, which of course can, read like “serviceable parlor verse” at best.
The article, as Bottum notes in his introduction to The Second Spring, received its fair share of scorn. Mostly this caused him, as he tells it, “to dig in my heels and hold, beyond all reason and measure, the claims I’d made,” except that last claim regarding lyrics. After all, perhaps lyrics do add cognitive content to music, and perhaps they can be viewed as respectable verse, though of a particular kind. Instead of holding song lyrics to the same standard as “grand poetry,” what if we were to view them “as a particular species of poetry: a certain kind of verse, happily subject to its own poetic structures and laws”? “Judged by that standard,” Bottum continues, “lyrics form something that might be worth appreciating as verse when we hear it—and worth attempting as verse when we write it.”
So which Bottum is right, the first or the second? Judging by The Second Spring, mostly the second. Second Spring is a collection of 24 poems set to music, complete with musical scores and brief histories of the melodies. The title, taken from the final song in the collection, is a reference, most likely, to Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 1852 sermon on the Catholic resurgence in England. But one wonders if the phrase encapsulates Bottum’s hope for music and Western culture as well. Can music, can American culture, so long in decline, experience not an Indian summer but a second spring?
The poems are not, of course, “grand poetry.” Otherwise, they would not work as lyrics. And in addition to having the poems work as song lyrics, Bottum placed two additional constraints on himself. He chose melodies that had “a classic sound” but that were not overly familiar, and he determined to “dwell within each song’s genre without irony, sarcasm, or mockery—without self-consciousness, so far as possible.” While these two constraints are perhaps unnecessarily limiting, most of the lyrics are both singable—sometimes wonderfully so—and readerly.
The musicality of the verse and the choice of melodies are excellent. Not long after I had received the poems, I got my guitar out and began working through the scores as my daughters took turns pecking out the melodies on the piano. We played “The Reason for the Light” first, a touching song on broken familial ties, wandering, and despair:
This is the cause of the darkness, my dear—
that the world slips away into shadows and fear.
That a son must leave his father’s house and wander on his own—
this is the cause of night, my dear, the reason I’m alone.
The words have been set to Joseph Philbrick Webster’s 1860 parlor song “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets,” which was recorded as “Wildwood Flower” by the Carter family in 1928. The song, like most in the volume, tends toward a light melancholy (even if there are a few whimsically humorous songs), which is at times odd for a book with the title The Second Spring. Yet, there are glimmers of hope to be found throughout the volume. “The Reason for the Light,” for example, ends with homecoming:
Oh, the young, they can play and pretend that they’re whole—
that the world needs no savior and time needs no goal.
But we who’ve walked the darkness know that God is always true.
He found me in the shadows, and He brought me home to you.
And in “The Only Hurry is Our Own,” set to Michael Praetorius’ “Courante 183” (1612), we sing out boldly (or, if you’re a Baptist, quietly):
So come, Golias, though we seem
to teeter on the pagan brink,
fear not, we’ll totter back in time,
when faith is strong enough to drink.
Most of the songs are folksy, though Bottum does include a pop song, a lullaby, and a country western tune. There are two Christmas songs—”He Will Wake to the Fire,” set to “The Babe of Bethlehem,” and “Joy Will Keep Us,” with an original score by Michael Linton. Some of the English and Irish melodies force Bottum into expressions that, to this American’s ear at least, sound contrived. But this is perhaps the price one must pay for recovering forgotten tunes and dwelling carefully in each song’s genre.
If the poems are worth singing as songs, are they also “worth appreciating as verse,” as Bottum hopes? Not all of them, no, but the majority of them can indeed stand on their own, and the very best of them are worth as much reflection as one might care to give them. In “The Faeries’ Farwell,” for example, as the faeries leave the human world, they lament:
Once we stole here a changeling child:
faery kist, and all golden were his toys.
Fat with love, and yet soon he failed.
Why must fall be the fruit of summer’s joys.
The tropes of summer and fall, signifying life and death, or innocence and sinful experience in the Christian view, are wonderfully underscored in the image (and alliteration) of the “Fat,” overabundant love that is “failed.” The “fruit” of this love is not joy but the putrid wasting away of “fall.” This is a musical version of George Herbert’s image poem “Easter Wings.”
“The Second Spring,” the final song in the volume, is the strongest poem here, with lines such as,
This gray east rain has drained the sky:
dim trees, darkened hills, a land where birds no longer fly.
And soon the rain will deaden down to snow.
Now gone, our Western Wind—now gone, the glow.
And these:
Bright virgin blue to brush the dawn—
the sun rising fresh to show an ancient dark withdrawn:
The world is witness. It whispers holy things
of nature fallen and new grace that springs.
These are not art poems, but few poets could accomplish as much given the constraints of the songs. Indeed, one of the great accomplishments of the book is its coupling of accessibility and depth. Music is a communal art, something that we’ve lost in this age of MP3 players and CDs, and these immensely playable, intellectually rich songs offer the opportunity to re-experience the community of song.
Micah Mattix is assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University and the review editor of The City. His book Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of Saying I (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press) was published earlier this year.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
