Intellectualized Emotion

  Intellectualized Emotion

 

The young Parry put into his jottings that his favourite among them all was “my grand fugue in G major with three (own) subjects.”

 

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” ~ Robert Browning

He kept on writing at the tough one though,

Quite like an ancient hero given task,

Task, task, and harder task.  Thus muscles grow.

You do what music and your teachers ask

And do it even harder, do it more.

You take the thing and make it fuller, large,

More intricate, complete.  You stretch a score.

You write a denser piece and make it charge

With extra power.  He wrote a fugue of grand

Complexity of not just one, or two,

But triple subjects all his own.  His hand

Grasped far beyond the teacher’s aims, too few.

..His century thought the major key of G

….Was for emotions of a staid degree.

This poem is part of a shorter sonnet sequence within this large sonnet sequence called The Encyclopedia Sonnetica.  The shorter sonnet sequence is called “A Lively Hope.”  I recommend you read this poem where it is set in its sonnet sequence.  To do that, search for “A Lively Hope” here in The Encyclopedia Sonnetica, or you may see an illustrated version the entire shorter sequence at
https://classicalpoets.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/A-Lively-Hope.pdf 
where it was first published.