Colin Huehns | Apr 2025 | London
‘I Wonder What a Farmer-Woman Can Want with a Harpsichord, Dulcimer, Pianner, or Whatever ’Tis They D’call It?’ said Gabriel Oak, speaking in Chapter 15 of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (first published in 1874), asks this question of ‘a farmer-women’, so this series of three essays asks the same question of a range of individuals – mainly women – in English literature: what did they want from their various instruments – virginals, dulcimers, harps and pianos – all generically related as arrays of strings either plucked or struck?
As their actual means of sound production appears superficially easy, keyboard, plucked or hammered stringed instruments have always been readily accessible, though as experience grows it is gradually understood to be more difficult than at first it seemed. Even so, the entry threshold for learning these instruments remains low. Few amateurs attempt the violin-playing feats of Sherlock Holmes as achieved in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. In A Study in Scarlet, Dr Watson describes Holmes’s skill on the violin as ‘very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments. That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and other favourites’ (Chapter 2). Later in the novel, Watson is less complimentary: ‘Holmes was engaged in his favourite occupation of scraping upon his violin’ (Chapter 5) and ‘I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low, melancholy wailings of his violin, and knew that he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel’ (also Chapter 5). Violin playing may perhaps be best left to professionals.
Returning to plucked and hammered strings in English literature and through Sonnet 128 by William Shakespeare, ‘Perplexed Music’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘In Xanadu’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, this series of articles examines who played what, when, why and how.
The Virginals and the Dulcimer
‘Thou, My Music’ and ‘Perplexed Music’: Two Sonnets
Sonnet 128
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway’st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
10 And situation with those dancing chips
O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blest than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
The keyboard instrument, the virginals, preceded the piano by two or more centuries as the parlour instrument par excellence, played especially, as the name suggests, mainly by young, unmarried ladies of wealthy families. One such individual is depicted on the frontispiece of Parthenia or The Maydenhead, the first printed collection of English music for virginals, first published in 1612 or thereabouts and which contains 21 pieces by William Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons. Stroking the keys with her chubby fingers, she looks down demurely to one side. We know she is unmarried because her hair is let down over her shoulders and enviable curls adorn them. Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, queen of England when the English virginal school was in its heyday, is often painted with her hair down. Unlike her half-sister Mary, who preceded her as queen, she never married and thus never allowed her control over the English throne to be diluted by marital duty to a husband. Just as Elizabeth was at ease with her evident attraction to a succession of ardent courtly favourites, our virginal player on the front of Parthenia is both conscious and unconscious of her undoubted beauty and the stir it causes.
This is what drew Shakespeare to her, probably young and certainly in love. His is, however, an innocent love and possibly no more than distant admiration. She, an accomplished player of the virginals, most likely the daughter of an aristocratic family and probably a pawn in the marriage market, to be auctioned to the highest bidder. He, a mere actor and playwright, with no conceivable role in that contest. So all he could do was to leave behind this sonnet as witness to his affection. Was she charmed? Now over four centuries later, we hope so.
For all the suppressed passion of the music of the English virginal school and Shakespeare’s sonnets, both are disciplined and sophisticated art forms. Sonnets are defined as 14 lines in length. Each line has exactly 10 syllables, and there is considerable parallelism in parts of speech between the lines. The rhyme scheme employed here divides the poem into three four-line sections, each with an a–b–a–b pattern as defined by the last syllable of each line, which are: (lines 1–4) play’st, sounds, sway’st, [con]founds; (lines 5–8) leap, hand, reap, stand; (lines 9–12) state, chips, gait, lips. The last two lines, which are the summary and climax of the poem, rhyme with one another: (lines 13–14) this, kiss.
Daringly, the poet addresses the young lady directly in the very first line: he calls her ‘thou’, which is more intimate than ‘you’. She is ‘his music’. This sets forth the two tangled threads of the poem: for her, it is the music itself that is enchanting, but for him, she is the enchantment, and he is jealous of her apparent devotion to the keyboard. How is it that often when she, his ‘music’, plays on the keyboard… This line and the next three set up an expectation of how he feels, without narrating that he is the agent who is manifesting these feelings. This is only revealed in line 5.
On what does she play? Upon ‘blessed wood’ (line 2), that is, a keyboard made of wood, as most early keyboards were, not lined with ivory, as became fashionable later. A typical example of this is the early 17th-century Italian virginals in the Royal Academy of Music Museum. Its light wooden keys seem almost crude compared with the ivory of other instruments in the gallery, but they seem to resonate with its strings so that touching them feels closer to plucking the strings themselves. The wood is ‘blessed’ (two syllables: bless-éd) because she is playing it, or so the poet feels, and is put into motion and sounds because of her ‘sweet fingers’. The wood itself is now dead and lifeless – though once it had been part of a living tree – but is brought alive once more by her touch. No instrument makes sound by itself; it is a human agent that causes this.
Her fingers are ‘sweet’ (line 3). ‘Sweet’ to an Elizabethan did not simply mean tasting of sugar; instead, it meant something indefinably lovely and feminine. If there is an equivalent in Chinese, it is perhaps 芳 (fang or ‘fragrant’), for example 芳心 (fangxin or ‘fragrant heart’) or 芳名 (fangming or ‘fragrant name’). In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia, who is unmarried and loves Hamlet, commits suicide at the end of Act IV because her love is unrequited. The queen (Hamlet’s mother), on learning of Ophelia’s fate in Act V, scene i, says the following (lines 242–46):
By Anonymous – wp en, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4949675
[Scattering flowers] Sweets to the sweet, farewell!
I hop’d thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife:
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,
And not have strew’d thy grave.
The ‘sweets’ are the flowers, the ‘sweet’ is Ophelia (also ‘sweet maid’) and the image is of flowers scattered (‘strew’d’) on her grave instead of decorating (‘deck’d’) her bride-bed.
The ‘wiry concord’ (line 4) is the virginals itself, as the strings are made of wire and they produce a concordant sound. Her fingers cause the ‘wiry concord’ to ‘sway’, and there is no punctuation mark at the end of line 3 so the whole phrase reads across the line-break: ‘when thou gently sway’st the wiry concord’. He finds the complex music she plays confusing, and it muddles (‘confounds’) his ears. He is, after all, perhaps less sophisticated than she, less musically well-versed, and more interested in her beauty.
So intoxicated is he that the virginals become an object of jealousy (line 5): ‘Do I envy those jacks’. The ‘jacks’ here represent not only the keys themselves but also the quills that pluck the strings as initiated by pressing the keys. The mechanism of transforming pressed key into plucked string on the virginals is extremely straightforward, and a player thus experiences extremely directly the tactile sensation of exciting a string to vibrate. Her playing is fluent and confident, and the jacks are ‘nimble’ in response and ‘leap’ back into ‘the tender inward of thy hand’ (line 6). This is an intimate place, not only ‘inward’, as her hands are facing down over the keyboard, but also ‘tender’, and the jacks leap enthusiastically to ‘kiss’ it.
He feels that his lips should replace the jacks and kiss her fingers instead and, blighted, they are ‘poor lips’ (line 7) and the ‘harvest’ that they should ‘reap’ is the opportunity to kiss her fingers. For the wood of the keys to leap up so nimbly is a sign of their ‘boldness’ (line 8), when he feels his own behaviour is checked, so his lips stand ‘blushing’ with embarrassment.
To have the opportunity to be ‘tickled’ (line 9) by her fingers, he admits that he would be willing for the ‘state and situation’ of his living lips to ‘change’ into those ‘dancing chips’ (line 10), that is, the wooden keys. It is over (‘o’er’) them that her fingers ‘walk with gentle gait’ (line 11). As someone he has admired from afar, he appreciates her maidenly manner of walking (‘gait’) as ‘gentle’. All this makes the ‘dead wood more blest [one syllable here] than living lips’ (line 12).
In the final two lines of the poem that are its climactic finale, the poet takes a new tack to charm his young lady, who has undoubtedly continued playing unruffled by this narrative. The jacks are now ‘saucy’ (line 13) and taking unwarranted liberties with her, but he is content to let this happen, given that they can do no more to her and ‘so happy are in this’. Let the jacks have her fingers (‘give them thy fingers’, line 14); for him, it is ‘thy lips to kiss’. His love transcends her music, which is only a tactile response to her fingers. It is she whom he loves.
Does she respond? Shakespeare believed in love and courtship, so probably. We as readers hope so too because we find their innocent emotion life-enhancing. But so too music, and male advances are not always as welcome as the besotted male thinks they are, and she may have preferred to carry on playing and longed for him to leave her alone. As a musician, for her, love may have been a route to creating music and not music a route for generating love.
With early keyboard instruments like the virginals or harpsichord, there are two possible variations: one is to improve the action for stimulating the strings to vibrate, and by replacing the quills that pluck the strings with hammers that strike them and that respond to finger pressure the piano was born; another alternative is to remove the action entirely and allow hammers held directly by the hands to strike the strings, and this is the dulcimer.
‘Perplexed Music’ is a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), written more than 200 years later, that takes the dulcimer as its central image early on (line 2), in contrast to Shakespeare, who never names the instrument he describes and allows his readers to work it out for themselves. She no longer writes of love and courtship. An all-too-rare woman poet of the 19th century, it is not for her a praise of feminine beauty, since the reaction it invokes in a male admirer is not one she shares, but instead a more complex narrative of the experience of the human soul.
Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand,
Whence harmonies, we cannot understand,
Of God’s will in his worlds, the strain unfolds
5 In sad-perplexed minors: deathly colds
Fall on us while we hear, and countermand
Our sanguine heart back from the fancyland
With nightingale in visionary wolds.
We murmur ‘Where is any certain tune
10 Or measured music in such notes as these?’
But angels, leaning from the golden seat,
Are not so minded; their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed cadences,
And, smiling down the stars, they whisper—SWEET.
This poetic form remains firmly within the sonnet form. There are 14 lines, and each line has 10 syllables, though not as strictly as in the Shakespeare: ‘experience’ (line 1) must be treated as possessing three syllables (like ‘patience’ in line 2 has two syllables) and ‘perplexed’ (line 5) has three (‘per-plex-éd’).
The last two lines are no longer a final climax, and the rhyme scheme breaks the poem into two sections of respectively eight and six lines. The first eight lines employ two rhymes: holds (line 1), [un]folds (line 4), colds (line 5), wolds (line 8); and hand (line 2), [under]stand (line 3), [counter]mand (line 6), [fancy]land (line 7). The last six lines have a clear rhyme at the end of lines 11 and 14: seat, SWEET. Lines 9 and 12 form a pair but the rhyme is not exact: tune, won. Similarly, lines 10 and 13: these, [ca]dences.
Crucial to understanding this poem is knowledge of the origin of the word ‘dulcimer’, which is a corruption of ‘dolce melos’, meaning ‘sweet melodies’. Hence, ‘dulcimer’ (line 2) and ‘SWEET’ (the final word at the end of line 14) neatly frame the poem inside a linguistic and conceptual unity.
Contrasting with the rhyme scheme of the poem, which breaks its 14 lines into eight and six, the subject matter breaks it into ten and four, with the first ten dealing with human experience and the last four with angelic interpretation. The ‘dulcimer’ here is not so much the actual instrument that the virginals are in Shakespeare’s sonnet but a metaphor for the music of human experience. A dulcimer is, after all, far too large to be held in the hand, and it is a ‘dulcimer of patience’ (line 2), so an item, or perhaps a musical sound, that merely represents an emotion and not the object itself. The ‘musician’ who holds it is ‘pale’ (line 1), so hardly Shakespeare’s confident maiden with her flowing flaxen hair, and this musician – a man – is simply a metaphor for ‘experience’.
From this ‘experience’ or ‘dulcimer’ come ‘harmonies, we cannot understand’ (line 3). The heroes or heroines of Barrett Browning’s poem are puzzled or ‘perplexed’ (line 5) and searching for the intangible. By contrast, the poetical voice in Shakespeare’s sonnet is clear in his motivation – the girl, of course – and she in turn has her role as the musician. Barrett Browning uses ‘we’ (lines 3 and 6), so we as readers become participants in the narrative. What is it we do not understand? Answer: ‘God’s will in his worlds’ (line 4). There is no God in Shakespeare’s sonnet. In the glories of Renaissance Europe, mankind – and human emotion – had assumed the central aesthetic role. In the darker, troubled world of the early Romantics, searching for God’s will has reassumed Gothic primacy as the keynote preoccupation.
To us, puzzled humanity, the melody (‘strain’) of ‘God will’ manifests itself (‘unfolds’) not as a delightful courtship but ‘in sad-perplexed minors’ (line 5), that is, minor keys, and when we listen to this music that comes from the dulcimer of our experience it falls ‘on us while we hear’ (line 6) like ‘deathly colds’ (line 5). These harmonies that we hear operate in contradiction and offer an opposite command (‘countermand’, line 6) that takes our ‘heart back from the fancyland’, that is, the beautiful world of our imagination that we would like to inhabit, and back to reality. Our ‘heart’ is thus ‘sanguine’ (line 7) as it accepts this reality rather than the ‘nightingale in visionary wolds’ (line 8). ‘Wolds’ are tracts of high open uncultivated land or moor. The word is obsolete but preserved in placenames like the Yorkshire Wolds or the Cotswolds, two hilly areas of England.
To this, we, that is, the readers of this poem or humanity in general, ‘murmur’ (line 9) a response. Note the use of ‘murmur’, not ‘sing’, ‘state’, ‘speak’, ‘articulate’ or ‘outline’. Hesitantly, quietly, uncertainly, all we can do is murmur. The answer is itself a question: ‘Where is any certain tune or measured music in such notes as these?’ (lines 9–10). Dulcimer playing by its nature can lack rhythm and is often not metred (‘measured’), because the player will often sacrifice regular pulse for increased accuracy, given how easy it can be to strike wrong notes; moreover, strings struck by hammers held in the hands do not transmit melodic contour with quite the definition of piano hammers, to say nothing of the voice or violin, whose sound is continuous. Barrett Browning is quite correct to bemoan the lack of a ‘certain tune’ in dulcimer music, and its parallel is with God’s will as perceived by the human soul.
The angels, however, see things differently (‘are not so minded’, line 11), situated in Heaven ‘leaning’ down from their ‘golden seat’ (line 10). Why so? Because their ‘fine’ (line 12) ear is more acute, and their interpretive understanding more comprehensive (‘won’). And what is it that they have understood? ‘The issue of complete cadences’ (line 13), in other words, phrase structure and its moulding through harmonic progression. These cadences are, however, ‘complete’ so this music is a journey that reaches a conclusion, which may be simply the end of the piece, but also hints at death, always a Romantic preoccupation, whereas the Renaissance was obsessed with life.
The angels offer great comfort, not simply through revelation of their superior interpretive powers but also via a more direct and kindly manner ‘smiling down the stars’ (line 14). To our ‘murmur’, all they do is ‘whisper’ in response. Too much noise, and the whisper is drowned, and the answer is that the (dulcimer) sound is ‘SWEET’. For all the perplexities of this human world and its minor keys and deathly colds, and even if there is no certain tune or measured music, it is nonetheless ‘SWEET’, a sweetness we can learn to understand, just as the swirling resonances of Shakespeare’s ‘wiry concord’ if left undamped, as they are on a dulcimer, remain ‘SWEET’ however mixed they seem. ′
Part II will be presented in the next issue of Vantage.