Rising – Convery, Voyages III
Robert Convery – Voyages, No. 3
Sunrise, Thursday May 28
When we’re not singing about the environment or immigration or other challenges we humans face, we sing about the same stuff people have been singing about since there has been song: Love and Death.
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones
Hart Crane conflates these two facts of life – Love, Death – in his magnificent cycle, Voyages, where death holds a dual transformative role: the death-to-self found in the obsessive rapture of a new love becomes the death-of-feeling in the unravelling of that relationship. In the third poem, the relationship he describes is caught in confusing uncertainty between the Desire of Night and the Clarity of Day.
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
We love singing Bob Convery’s music; it is so lyric, so sensible, so song-like. But, our love of this movement goes beyond the pleasure of singing his undulating, evocative harmonies; it is rooted in the feeling of being in the moment, while knowing what lies ahead in the final phrase: uncomplicated chords that resonate profoundly.
The last line of this poem has struck many a poet and reader for its astonishing simplicity, a stunning divergence in a poem that tells its story through feelings rather than images, in complex, often abstract word combination: “infinite consanguinity,” “lithe pediments,” and the coup de grâce, “silken skilled transmemberment of song.”
Hart gives up his own language. He gives in:
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands...
A disarming conclusion:a sentence we have all thought, if not said.
So impactful, James Agee named his only volume of poetry for it.
Permit
me
voyage
Sometimes we just pause to be grateful for how art works. How the organization of words, or notes, can remind us of our humanity.
Bob sets this sentence with subtle mastery, breaking it into two phrases of increasing gravity, concluding the movement with devastating finality on a low D in the basses – the lowest note we’ve heard in the entire cycle.
For a choir that normally tunes up to the highest voice, it is a powerful change, though undoubtedly imperceptible to the listener: we tune down (to Colin and the Dans).
It changes the room.
It changes us – as a piece of music ought to.
From here, the cycle will get darker.
But we’ll listen to that another morning, at Sunrise.
Love and Death.
And time.
Be well.
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Voyages
III.
music by Robert Convery
words by Hart Crane
recorded live in concert at The Month of Moderns 2018,
June 17, 2018 at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
video art by Dan Cole
* * *
Infinite consanguinity it bears—
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...