Okay, so now we have had our religious poem, and moved on to our musical poem right? Wrong! Actually, I'm sure there is much a musically knowledgeable person could say about this poem, but I am not such a person, so I'll declare myself a one-trick pony and bring out some religious themes.

Before we read the Sonnets, let me just cite a short (alright, maybe a little bit longer than "short") passage from one of my favorite essays:

"When Christians speak of the eternally performing God, a God who not only creates but redeems, they are not referring to some univocal Being but to Rather, Son, and Spirit. Indeed, because the Christian God is Trinity and not Being, this makes all the difference to how the character of human actions are understood as participatory in, and thus deriving of, God's action. This is especially important if Jesus Christ is viewed as God's true and most defining act. Because Christ is regarded by his followers as God's most memorable and excellent performance (complete, holy, and finally efficacious because inclusive of all differences), the implication is that Christians lives, too, can become "holy performances." However, if human acts neither persist alongside or stand over against God's pure act nor are swallowed up or absorbed into God's complete performance, how can we register the difference they make? More specifically, how is the manifold diversity of human actions "accommodated" or preserved in God's pure, undivided act? No satisfactory response to these questions can be provided without reflecting further on Christian understandings of Trinity and Creation. For unless these matters are addressed, the ramifications for human performance under God will be distorted if not missed altogether...

How exactly does the preservation of difference manifest itself in practical, concrete terms within the life of the church, part of whose present reality includes the spatio-temporal world of God's good creation? The only answer that is forthcoming, it appears, is an agnostic one. Although the church cannot claim to know in advance the full details of the story, it nonetheless has some inkling of its general shape and eventual outcome. Perhaps a knowing which has the form of an "unknowing" is all that Christians can rightly expect if their lives are truly lived in hope. And though Christians live in expectation of the eschaton, the "fullness of time" when all things will be made one in God, that hope does not pretend to lift the church out of time. Explicating the character of Christian hope, therefore, means that considerably more can and must be said in regarding the "timing" - and indeed the time it takes- to abide in, to keep the faith. Performance analogies are especially apt in this respect.

Following Saint Augustine's lead, Milbank discovers in music an appropriate analogy for the life of faith, arging that while the church is "open to difference- to a series of infinitely new additions, insights, progressions towards God, it also strives to make of all these differential additions a harmony, 'in the body of christ.'" Indeed, insofar as music is "a consistently beautiful, continuously differential and open series," it serves as an appropriate model of the peaceable accommodations of interpretive difference within the church. Just as every musical note exists in a position fully defined by the unfoldings of the entire sequence, so too every interpretive difference emerges in relation to the overall historical development of the church's life and self-understanding. Music's endlessly peaceable progression mirrors the church's infinitely expansive interpretive practices. As the undivided musical sequence undergoes continuous alteration and revision in its accomodation of each additional note, so too the church displays an unending capacity to expand in a noncoervice, nonviolent way. In one sense, of course, the whole musical sequence is nothing other than the differentia of its parts. Although the church may confidently claim this works as its own, it must nonetheless not lose sight of the fact that "it is God himself who is differentiation, ensuring that this process is 'music,' not the ceaseless rupture and self-destruction of a differentiation poised 'univocally' between an 'indifferent' transcendence and an anarchic finitude.""

Alright, now on to the sonnet:

Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'Thou single wilt prove none.'

In this poem, an external order seems to be acting on the man, attempting to bring him in line with some sort of cosmic harmony. The proper order SINGS to him. This is all sweet and good and nice and sugary and all, but it also seems like a load of shit. This isn't the order most people hear anyway. What calls do people hear most? TV's, demanding to be watched. Booze, demanding to be drunk. Pot, demanding to be smoked. Email, demanding to be checked. Does the proper order ever call to you?

"Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;"

What an amazing line. Strikes each in each. Next time I see a good group of friends, I'm going to think "Man, they really strike each in each." Each individual is partially defined by the part of others he brings out. A good husband/wife/child is like a good point guard, he/she makes everyone on the court play their own parts better.

When have you felt like you've been part of a harmony? When have harmonies sounded the saddest to you? Don't answer, just think about it. This poem kind of reminds me of the loneliness I sometimes feel when traveling.

And finally, in defense of solos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72e9Vc8iXg8&feature=related