My
eyes, blue pupils—iris, red as blood,
have
sought a true path through the garden ways,
and
fled the laurel’s shadow and its blaze—
while
lions roared, I played the cello bowed.
I
gold-marked my place inside a old book,
and
poets, songwriters, and lyricists,
were
examined by my ready physics:
for
dexterity, vision, ordered flutes.
What
love has descended to music’s mouth?
Mouthpiece
to breathe upon, with trill unsure,
would
bless orchestra’s liturgical red.
Then
touch Cecilia Rose’s bloom—myrrh roof:
the
shelter in our pain that waits for cure,
while
raising us unaware from our beds.
—W.E. Isaacson
In St. Cecilia, music becomes both vocation and passage: a discipline by which the speaker searches for a “true path” through a symbolic garden of danger, tradition, and revelation. The Petrarchan sonnet form gives this pilgrimage an inherited sacred architecture, while the slant rhymes loosen that architecture just enough to suggest music heard at a distance—echoed rather than perfectly resolved. The opening octave gathers intensely sensuous emblems: the blood-red iris, the laurel, the roaring lions, the bowed cello, the gold-marked book. Poetry, music, bodily skill, and vision are placed under examination, as though artistic creation itself were a kind of spiritual physics. The speaker does not merely listen to music; she tests its makers for “dexterity, vision,” seeking the point at which technique becomes something more mysterious than technique.
The sestet turns toward that mystery with the question, “What love has descended to music’s mouth?” Here St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, becomes less a historical figure than a principle of sacred listening: breath enters the mouthpiece, uncertain trills become blessing, and the orchestra assumes the ceremonial colour of liturgy and sacrifice. Rose and myrrh deepen the devotional symbolism, joining beauty to burial, fragrance to suffering, and cure to pain. The poem finally suggests that music does not necessarily remove suffering; it shelters the sufferer within it, quietly performing a resurrection of consciousness. Its closing image—being raised “unaware from our beds”—makes Cecilia’s music almost sacramental: an unseen force by which the wounded are lifted before they even understand that healing has begun.
—Analysis provided by WLI
