Welcome to this month’s poetry classroom, with poet and professor David Wright. We invite you to respond to the poems we’ll share here—their forms, images, sounds, meanings, surprises—ask questions of David and each other, and write your own poems along the way.
Bach Learns to Love the Masses (in b-minor)
You’ve hitched a ride to the form, to the form
you know will take you, take you where you know
the next hard hitch in the dance, and the score,
evened and smoothed, turns out, not a rondeau
or gavotte, gavottes being another
slow way to move. No, this, love, is the fugue,
like high mass where the man in his miter
holds the body aloft, then again. Fugue
where all manner of noise comes to matter–
the low voices even get their measure
of love. We are falling here, a clatter
of loves–men into women—b-minor
tonic drawing us deep, bearing us down,
weary voices and full, home to the ground.
1. Do you know anything about the fugue music form? Is it necessary to know this, to appreciate the poem?
2. We have general ways we think about love and its expressions. Is there love in this poem?
3. There are quite a few rhymes in this poem (and something called half rhymes or slant rhymes, where the words almost rhyme or sound like an echo of each other). Does this lend anything to your experience of the poem?