Orpheus: The Song of Life
Contents:
But godhead gradually slipped away from him, leaving only a sense of election and the power, through his music, to change landscapes, seasons, hearts. His mother was Calliope — "fair-voice" — the muse of epic poetry. In some versions his father is the sun-god Apollo, in others it is Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams.
More mundanely, he is said to be the son of Oeagros, an uncouth king of ancient Thrace, ruler of the Odrysians and the Bistonians, who "lived in one-room huts or chambers underground, the walls lined with clay or wolf-skins".
And when, very shortly after their marriage, she dies from a snakebite, he goes down into Hades to rescue her. What most strikes me or doesn't strike me is the the way information, data, ideas, references, descriptions thrust forward without a splashing of the verbal oars or any jerky moments from the syntactical keel -- the mind and the pen sculled in utter harmony the waters Ann Wroe traveled with this book. Her immediate inspiration is the extraordinary sequence of sonnets that Rilke wrote, or transcribed at Orpheus's dictation, as he thought it, in a space of weeks at the beginning of Personal tools Log in. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Learned a lot and it wasn't unpleasant but it was hard to sit down and read it all in one sitting. If you want to know him, you can meet him here.
Wroe seems to favour Orpheus in this earthly, earthy, version. She sees him in something very like the traditional manifestation of the poet: It could capture wild creatures as deftly as his hunter-father, but without spears, or snares, or blood. She knows his waywardness, too, assuring us, with a mother's rueful astringency, that "his taboos seem as capricious as a teenager's" — and in the acknowledgements at the back of the book we note the author thanking her "eldest son Simon, for introducing me to Rilke's poetry in the beginning". Throughout, Orpheus is suffused with Calliopean care, attentiveness and pride.
The book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter representing a "string" of Orpheus's lyre.
Death" shows the author at her most powerful and poetical. A true case, then, of cherchez la femme.
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Wroe conceives of Orpheus not only as a creator of magical song, but as the maker of an entire theogony, conjuring gods out of the spirit of music: The Song of Life is a book of wonders, learned, playful and passionate. There are passages in it where one will feel lost in the author's elusive wake, and seem to be stumbling blindly through the golden dust of an Attic glade, yet the music is always captivating.
For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical diligence, Wroe's method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia.
Her Orpheus sings on at the very heart of our culture, roaming western civilisation "much as balladeers, hurdy-gurdy men, pipers and storytellers used to travel the back roads of America and Europe. He has no certain roots, but keeps returning, as if he has something urgent to transmit to us.
Orpheus: The Song of Life by Ann Wroe
Now, suddenly, this winter morning at his standing-desk he felt himself set on by the very spirit of poetry, and there began to pour out of him, not another of the elegies, as he had expected, but a sonnet, ready-made, so it seemed, the rhythms and rhymes already in place: Da stieg ein Baum. A tree rises there. Wroe would prefer to see him, instead, as Orpheus. In a statue of Orpheus, paid for by the Rotary Club, was unveiled on a Bulgarian mountain with balloons, a fly-past and the local high-school majorettes. Bulgarian archaeologists insist that he is buried nearby at Tatul, but Orpheus is extolled just as jealously by the northern Greeks as a Thracian, by the Jews of Alexandria as a disciple of Moses, and by the citizens of Winchester as Sir Orfeo.
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He is a vine that spreads along all branches of mythology and religion: His most passionate followers identify him with Jesus. Even that name is clouded in mystery. Some say it derives from orphe, darkness; some from eu-phonos, beautiful-voiced; some from orphanos, an orphan longing for light.
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His parents were possibly Apollo and Calliope — loveliest of the Muses, who gave him his ear for music. In another version his father was Oeagros, King of Thrace. Wroe weaves together the rest of his life from a line here, a mention there. The resulting narrative is much like a verbal equivalent of the Lady and Unicorn tapestries; sensual, whimsical, concrete and yet open to boundless interpretations. A bit of a wimp, with the taboos of a capricious teenager, the young Orpheus refused to eat beans or meat, or to wear anything made of wool.
He was inseparable, though, from his seven-stringed lyre. His playing, by every account, lulled and lured all who heard it.
In Orpheus Ann Wroe has written the biography of a mythic figure – the book is dedicated "to everyone who protested, 'But Orpheus isn't real'". Orpheus by Ann Wroe. For at least two and a half millennia, the figure of Orpheus has haunted humanity. Half.
Trees followed him, streams changed their course, birds forgot their nests as men forgot the world. Ovid said that he introduced homosexual practises to the Greeks, after singing out his desire for Calais, a boy with small red lips whom he met on the Argo.
Orpheus: The Song of Life by Ann Wroe: review
And when, very shortly after their marriage, she dies from a snakebite, he goes down into Hades to rescue her. One glance sealed his love, another sunders it. It was Virgil who imposed the condition that he must not look back. Up until Virgil, Orpheus simply leads her happily out of Hades.