A Song for St. Cecelia's Day

John Dryden – A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day

Posted on November 24, 2011

4 Votes

This is an ode to the emotive power of music, and presumably a commemoration of some event on this festival day of music’s patron saint. It re-imagines the Genesis account as an act of melodic conception, perhaps drawing on Milton’s famous invocation to Paradise Lost. The later stanzas can be seen to carry this Biblical metaphor through Christian history until the ‘Grand Chorus’ where music heralds the apocalypse. Intricate rhyme scheme and mirroring lines, together with varied line lengths create a frame and strive for a lyrical effect.

The opening stanza sees music as an aspect or incarnation of divinity in self-begetting genesis. The lyric, flowing rhythm of the first line with two ‘harmonizing’ dactyls at the end sets the tone – this ode has the grandeur of a hymn and the playfulness of a folk song. The ‘universal frame’ likens nature to an instrument that requires assembling – its constituent parts the elements, ‘cold, and hot, and moist, and dry’. Yet it is music itself, ‘the tuneful voice’ that sets in motion this genesis. Consequently music, personified with its own ‘power’ is seen as an expression of a self-begetting God. Nature then comes to represent the musical scale, which Dryden likens to the Chain of Being. Just as man is created on the final day of creation, so Dryden’s Genesis account ends in this stanza with mankind as the note which completes the scale.

Stanza structures throughout the poem are suggestive of the forms and frames of musical instruments. In the opening stanza the longer pentameter and tetrameter lines cut across the shorter to mimic the struts or strings on an organ or lute. The repeated line ‘From harmony, from heavenly harmony’ might represent the same note in a scale struck again. The second stanza certainly aims to mimic the completeness of the ‘compass of the notes’, returning to its opening line to suggest the circle of fifths or...