This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
I was at Mass on a Sunday in late November 2014, and my mind was distracted by many things. My wife was due to give birth to our second daughter. My mother was soon to arrive for a visit. Thanksgiving was coming and so was the grading that marked the end of another semester. My thoughts were so adrift that I could hardly pray. To add to the distraction, my wife and I had not yet settled on a name for our little girl. It had never been so difficult to reach agreement in the past.
As I sat in the pew, I chanced to glance up at the ceiling of our church and there, looking down upon me, was the figure of St. Cecilia, Roman martyr and patroness of music. It had been her feast just the day before.
The music of the spheres
As she floated above me in the painted heaven of the ceiling, I was taken back to a winter’s night 20 years earlier, when I had first become enthralled by the art of poetry. One of the causes of that love was John Dryden, who showed me, in his “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687” that human speech could approach music in its beauty. Several stanzas in Dryden’s poem coax words to imitate the sounds of musical instruments, as, for example, when “The soft complaining flute / In dying notes discovers / The woes of hopeless lovers.”
The opening of Dryden’s poem was my first vivid encounter with an idea as ancient as civilization itself: that the order of music has its origin in what the ancients called the music of the spheres. Long before music ever entranced us with its melodious structure of sound, God called all things into being by, as it were, singing the first sound of creation. Dryden’s poem begins with this “Heav’nly harmony” calling the universe into being, the music of God’s creative intelligence drawing the “atoms” of “Nature” out of a great “heap,” and putting all things into their assigned place. All the elements “leap” to their “stations” and assume their role in the cosmic order. This great “diapason,” Dryden tells us, culminates “full in man.”
The refrain of prayer
All of a sudden, the eyes of St. Cecilia called my disheveled, wandering thoughts to order. She brought back my joy in reading Dryden for the first time, and reminded me thereby that Our Lord is the composer of the great symphony of the world, and that he has given mankind the particular duty of answering his creative music with our prayer of praise. How wonderful to be reminded of this vision and this responsibility.
From “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687”
By John Dryden
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And music’s pow’r obey.
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.
