A few notes on the titles of the EPs…
The title for my first EP, Up from the Underworld is taken from Tennyson’s famous Tears, idle tears…
Tears, idle tears
I know not what they mean
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise in the heart & gather to the eyes
In looking at the happy morning fields
And thinking of the days that are no more
Fresh as a new beam glittering on a sail
That brings our friends up from the underworld…
Tennyson (the Victorian poet laureatte) lost his close friend, Arthur Hallam early in life. It’s probably not too much of a leap of imagination to suggest that in Tennyson’s mind the underworld refers to death of a literal kind. I put the words to slightly different use, & have in mind my own return to life after a number of years of illness. In the Up from the Underworld EP I try to capture this sense of new birth in the opening song, The Whispering Seas. Reminders of the past, however, emerge in the subsequent two songs…
Orpheus Leading Urydice From The Underworld- Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. 1861
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The title of the second E.P, Anamnesis, means recollection or remembrance. The word is sometimes found in a medical context (where it refers to the process which a doctor adopts to elicit information from the patient’s memory in order to take a medical history). I have in mind, however, a much older use of the word which comes from philosophy. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates proposes that all ‘spiritual’ experience (and he uses the common example of falling in love) is not so much a new discovery or acquisition, but a ‘remembering’ of a state of knowledge that we have always had but have somehow lost sight of in this world:
…he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. For, as has already been said, every soul of man has, in the way of nature, beheld True Being; this was the condition of her [the soul] passing into the form of Man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other world…
Manuscript of Phaedrus from the 9th century AD, Bodleian Library
…when he sees the beauty of the earth, he is transported with the recollection (anamnesis) of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.
…the soul is oppressed at the strangeness of her condition, and is in great straits and excitement, and in her madness can neither sleep by night nor abide in her place by day. And wherever she thinks she will behold the beautiful one, thither in her desire she runs…
Plato- a detail from The School of Athens, Raphael (1483-1520)
The title for the third E.P, This World’s Delight, is taken from Shelley’s Mutability (see above). Throughout much of his poetry, Shelley refers to his perception of the spirit or Deity (he never uses the word God) that permeates the world around us, & which inhabits the mind of man. In his earlier and famous Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816), the poet says of this presence:
The awful shadow of some unseen power
Floats though unseen amongst us- visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower…
This force or spirit is ’like mist o’er the mountains driven/ Or music by the night wind sent’ and, for Shelley, it ‘gives grace to life’s unquiet dream.’ This presence, however, is somehow inconstant (or Shelley’s perception is inconstant) and this gives rise to feelings of sorrow and desertion. And so we come to Mutability… with its half-hopeful, half-despairing question, ‘What is this world’s delight?’
A page from Percy Byshe Shelley’s notebook.
