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Most of us take for granted not only the ability to hear but more specifically the sounds we actually perceive and the meaning we attach to them, the emotional responses they generate. For nineteen years I had the privilege of teaching English at a magnet school that also housed the Regional Day School for the Deaf and the largest unit for multiply-impaired children in the state. One of the student requirements of the gifted and talented unit of which I was a part was to learn sign language. Unfortunately, the hearing students and even the faculty rarely spoke of their own ability to hear; it was a blessing we simply accepted with little depth of an awareness of our own gift.
Yet how often we complain about the din that bombards our senses daily. This blog post is a tribute to the mellifluous, the honey flowing sweetness of words--from the Latin melli--honey + flu--to flow (1375-1425), that makes life worth living.
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In 1598 Sir Francis Meres wrote in his Palladis Tamia, "The witty soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare," and compared the excellence of his plays to the greatest of Roman philosophers. In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the bard himself actually uses the word.
In Act II, scene 3 the fool Festes sings,
What is love? Tis not hereafter
Present mirth hath present laughter
What's to come is still unsure
In delay there lies no plenty
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty
Youth's a stuff will not endure.
To which Sir Andrew replies, "A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight."
It's no secret that I love Shakespeare, and when I hear his words in the plays and sonnets spoken with perfection by trained actors, I am in heaven. Whether the voice of Shakespeare is heard in the myriad of famous lines from the beloved plays or the hundreds of words coined by Shakespeare himself, we know that music when we hear it--like no other, and the sound of his words in the cadence of his verse makes him the greatest writer who ever lived.
Here are a few of my favorites from:
Richard III, Act 1, scene 1: Now is the winter of our discontent...
Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene 5: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Romeo and Juliet, Act III, scene 2: Come, gentle night, come loving, black brow'd night, Give me my Romeo.
Merchant of Venice, Act IV, scene 1: The quality of mercy is not strain'd, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest.
Henry V, Act I Prologue: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention...
Henry V, Act IV, scene 3: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne'er so vile. This day shall gentle his condition.
Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 2: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
As You Like It, Act II, scene 7: All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.
Hamlet, Act III, scene 1: To be, or not to be, that is the question.
Macbeth, Act V, scene 5: Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
The Tempest, Act IV, scene 1: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Twelfth Night, Act II, scene 4: She sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
But let us leave the Bard for now and focus on the mellifluous sounds of music.
I grew up listening to my father play favorite ballads of the 30s and 40s on his guitar. His secret desire was to play in an orchestra or big band in the 1940s, and he actually did a few times, eventually giving up his dream to take care of a young family. The one song I remember most vividly is "Stardust."
"In my heart it will remain, my stardust melody, the memory of love's refrain."
Other than my father's rendition, no one sings it better than Nat King Cole--in my heart his Stardust melody will remain forever.
And these ballads made me fall in love with the famous tunes of Tin Pan Alley, a decade before Artie Shaw's "Stardust," and I fell hard for the ballads of George and Ira Gershwin. The songs of these musical geniuses carried people through a depression and a war. During the Depression their sentimental music and lyrics reminded people of what was most important in an epic when life and death were merely a thread apart. George wrote the music and his brother Ira penned the lyrics, and together they created a world people could believe in.
Another kind of mellifluous music can be heard in the outdoor wilderness of our garden, where eleven bird feeders coax the frequent presence of songbirds. I think my mother must have been a bird whisperer, a healer, and birds found themselves in need of aid in her garden and even on her doorstep. I was in elementary school when she first rescued two young mockingbirds. There were others, but she taught me to listen to the long repertoire of the mockingbirds and their music became my favorite. I was intrigued with the screech of blue jays, the single note cardinals, the whistle of the black bellied whistling ducks, the cooing of doves, and the cawing of grackles, but none compared to the mockingbird. When Harper Lee's book To Kill a Mockingbird came out, it was my mother who introduced me to it, emphasizing "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird," who does nothing but make beautiful music and eat the insects out of people's corn cribs.
2020 has been a difficult year, the pain of which few words can accurately describe. It is in these challenging times when we turn to our other senses to help us cope--food, movies, music, physical activities, pain-eradicating potions, online church services and prayer--lots of prayer. But we have also been stopped in our tracks and forced to slow down, and it is in the power of the universe when we finally pay attention to the details too often lost in the fast track of our lives. The silence and the sounds. May we never return to a time when we ignore them again.
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