The Art of (the) Cello

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The persona likens the cello to a siren (“It is / his cross, to love / a mermaid whose hair / can sing”) that the musician loves, but taxingly so. We think of the sirens of the Greek: beautiful, enchanting, yet deadly. It goes back to the duality of art in man’s life, giving both meaning and misery.

“a wooden box / half hourglass, half hollowness restraining / resonant air,”: The irony in the line is that it is the first explicit acknowledgement of the cello as a thing (“a wooden box”), and in the same breath it is personified (“restraining / resonant air,”). Even in its simplicity as an object, it does something. At first glance the line seems to undermine all the grandeur of the earlier descriptions, but it is in fact another way of showing the greatness of the cello. We find that art, even as an object, still has the power to do something to those who experience it.

It is the cello player’s burden “to know / what is not woman, not thing / but voice, / and, with the audience / mute as landscapes, / to let it scream.” He must understand that the cello is more than an instrument, not simply a woman (in the sense that it is not tied to humanity), but a voice. The music it carries is, in a manner of speaking, the cello itself. Artists understand that the art they create is not limited to the object in front of them—the sculpture, scripts, music sheets, sequences of choreography; these are not where art stops and ends. Art has meaning and life beyond its own self, that the artist must let materialise and, in a sense, set free (“to let it scream”) before those who truly wish to experience it.

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