Bill Monroe and Romantic Agony

The home page of my web browser is set to The Writer's Almanac, and to be introduced to a new poem at the start of the day rarely fails to provide me with a thrill. (For a while a couple of years ago I was also the crank lady who sent them exasperated emails about the lack of research and sloppy editing in their writer profiles -- things like getting the plot of my favorite novel, The End of the Affair,  entirely wrong, and making assertions along the lines of "the novels of Thomas Mann have now fallen into neglect" -- but they've improved.)

Although today is the birthday of William Wordsworth, the Writer's Almanac poem of the day is the text of a song by bluegrass legend Bill Monroe:

Sittin' alone in the moonlight,
Thinkin' of the days gone by,
Wonderin' about my darlin'.
I can still hear her sayin' good-bye.

Oh, the moon glows pale as I sit here.
Each little star seems to whisper and say,
"Your sweetheart has found another,
And now she is far, far away."

It reminded me of a recent conversation with Melanie B in the combox here, about the notion that all poetry is about nostalgia for a never-to-return Golden Age. And I was struck by how much the Bill Monroe song resembled the premise of Schubert's great song cycle Winterreise, the first number of which, "Gute Nacht" (Good Night), is sung here by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, accompanied by an unidentified pianist:

Having been disappointed in love, the nameless protagonist of Schubert's song cycle goes off on foot across the winter countryside, growing more and more alienated from society as his journey continues.  In the last song, he throws in his lot with an outcast, mentally disabled organ grinder who he sees wandering barefoot over the ice.

Here is the text of "Gute Nacht," by Wilhelm Müller, translated by Arthur Rishi:

As a stranger I arrived,
As a stranger again I leave.
May was kind to me
With many bunches of flowers.
The girl spoke of love,
Her mother even of marriage, -
Now the world is bleak,
The path covered by snow.

I cannot choose the time
Of my departure;
I must find my own way
In this darkness.
With a shadow cast by the moonlight
As my traveling companion
I'll search for animal tracks
On the white fields.

Why should I linger, waiting
Until I am driven out?
Let stray dogs howl
Outside their master's house;
Love loves to wander
God has made her so
From one to the other.
Dear love, good night!

I will not disturb you in your dreaming,
It would be a pity to disturb your rest;
You shall not hear my footsteps
Softly, softly shut the door!
On my way out I'll write
"Good Night" on the gate,
So that you may see
That I have thought of you.

While doing research for my book project recently, I came across an essay entitled "Wounds and Beauty" by the painter and scholar Bruce Herman.  Herman suggests that the prevailing Western notion of beauty since 1750 has been an emblem of the Romantic longing for the lost Golden Age:  "Beauty," he writes, "is everywhere colonized by the Romantic longing for perpetual youth."  Herman posits

the possibility of a clear-eyed adult aesthetic that bears the marks of Christ's resurrected body -- marks that memorialize suffering but move beyond it to redemption, healing, and eternity.  The ascended Christ still bears earthly wounds, and his new body can be treated as a starting point for a new aesthetic -- a broken beauty if you will -- and a means of working through and beyond pain to a perfection that need not participate in [Romantic] idealization.

Herman suggests that Romantic yearning is not only untenable, but unsavory, even antithetical to the Christian longing for heaven.  Indeed, the thread of complete personal annihilation, certainly antagonistic to the Christian ethos, hangs heavily over the Romantic quest for a lost Golden Age.  We should, Herman exhorts, long for the future in heaven, not for the past.

The Bill Monroe song has all the elements of the Romantic argument:  grief, loss, rejection in love, yearning for the past, solitude, and the countryside by night; but its protagonist restrains himself from the more Wertherian extremes of disappointed lovers of the previous century.  I suppose that if we are to mourn in this life -- and we are -- it's better to do it sitting alone in the moonlight for a spell than wandering off across the frozen landscape into ever-increasing neurosis and alienation.  It's worth remembering that the words of the most famous song by Bill Monroe's contemporary, Hank Williams, are “I'm so lonesome I could cry,” and not “I'm so lonesome I could die."

There are numerous performances of the Bill Monroe song on Youtube, but none by Monroe himself, so I'll leave you with this particularly fine one:
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