Night Concert At Taormina Analysis

The aesthetic desires which Jennings distinguish operating in the visual art, both of Cezanne and of the Chinese painter allow her to reconstruct a sense of their original artistic meanings and in doing so to expand her own aesthetic perspective, always drawing attention to the “human touch,” The final poem “Night Concert at Taormina,” in the series of six poems relate to human touch” to various forms of aesthetic expression, accurately defines the setting and the inspiring visual and auditory effects achieved as the concert begins: “The spectacle is changing into sound,/The columns, plucked by song, turn into light,/ Two key-boards rise in triumph from the ground/And fill the spaces of a warm good- night”(401)
In the concluding lines of the next stanza, the speaker draws the reader’s attention to the fleeting beneficent effects the music has on the rapt audience: “Listen, the movements make a kindly claim/And lift the troubled glances from each face,” She guides the audience in their response to the music, directing them to participate in the recreated vision of “the ruined Greeks, the flaunting Romans,” and finally claiming that the “music will open more than heart or mind”: it will “Release our violence and make us kind.” This lofty claim for the evocative power of the performance is less ingenious if the overt, pervasive presence of the speaker …show more content…
She asks for the imaginative power, the “magic,” to transform the dark gleam of the “grounded startlings” into an image of “all- day night.” The power she reminds is of the mind to see something as a representation, or metaphor for something else, a power which, according to Culler, is characteristically associated with poetic activity (Culler 177): “Give me the magic/To see grounded starlings, their polish/ As this threat to all-day