One cold, gray February day, I thought what better play to read than “The Tempest,” what better place to be than on Prospero’s enchanted island? As William Hazlitt says in his1817 essay, the play “is full of grace and grandeur, the human and imaginary characters, the dramatic and the grotesque, are blended together with the greatest art. … He has here given ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.’ (Characters of Shakespeare’s plays).

“The Tempest,” the play that was chosen, so interestingly, by his friends and fellow actors, to be the first in the First Folio, even though it was the last work that he wrote on his own; the play in which Shakespeare has his Prospero, in a speech of glorious lyricism, bid his farewell to the world of the stage - the great Globe Theater itself:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” (Act IV: sc. 1 ll. 148-158).

Every generation brings its own readings to Shakespeare’s plays, that is his chameleon genius, his perpetual gift. But even taking into account modern sensibilities - post-colonial questions, Prospero as patriarch - the magic spell cast by the play remains, and at the core of this magic, a thread that weaves the fabric of the play into a harmonious whole, is the music and songs of Ariel, Prospero’s servant and spirit of the air, who promises to “do my spiriting gently.”

Even the bruised spirit of Caliban is soothed by these “Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” Such music, as he says, that:

“Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices

That, if I then had waked after a long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop on me, that, when I waked

I cried to dream again.” (Act III: sc.3. ll.143-152).

Again, it is Ariel’s most loved songs with their “sweet air” that bring balm to Prince Ferdinand, grief struck, believing his father to have been drowned in the tempest:

“Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands:

Courtsied when you have and kiss’d,

The wild waves whist,[into silence]

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burthen[refrain]bear.

Hark, hark!

Bow-wow.

The watch-dogs bark:

Bow-wow.

…. …. …. ….

Ferdinand: Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?

…. …. …. … ….

This music crept by me upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and my passion

With its sweet air: thence I have followed it,

Or it hath drawn me rather. But it is gone:

No, it begins again.

Ariel sings:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:” (Act I: sc. 2. ll 376-402).

And it is Ariel who persuades the vengeful Prospero to abandon his tormenting of the wrecked mariners, his usurping brother and all the crew:

Ariel: “Your charm so strongly works ‘em

That if you now beheld them, your affections

Would become tender.

Prospero: Dost thou think so, spirit?

Ariel: Mine would, sir, were I human.

Prospero: And mine shall.

…. …. …. …. ….

Go release them, Ariel:

My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore,

And they shall be themselves.”

Thus the moment arrives when, left alone, Prospero muses on his powers and all that he has done with his “so potent art”. The time has come to close the chapter with “heavenly music,” “a solemn air and the best comforter/ To an unsettled fancy.”

“But this rough magic

I here abjure, and when I have required

Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I’ll drown my book.” (Act V: sc. 1 ll. 15-57).

And then, as Ariel attires Prospero in the robes of the Duke of Milan, one of his final tasks as servant before he gains his long promised freedom, he sings:

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly

After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Prospero: Why that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee.”

Ariel, spirit of the air, and his “solemn music,” summon thoughts of the music of the spheres - first conceived of by the Ancient Greek mathematician, Pythagoras. Johannes Kepler, the 17th century astronomer, thought such music could be heard, not by the ear, but by the soul, as did his near contemporary, the physician and divine, Sir Thomas Browne:

“For there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musicke of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.” (Religio Medici: bk.2 section 9).

A thought captured by George Herbert in this line in his sonnet “Prayer 1” - “Music beyond the stars heard”.

Or, in T. S. Eliot’s words:

“the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, …..” (“The Dry Sauvages” ll. 206-212.)

Or again, the deep silence and musical enchantment of Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” - ever en-chanting, however familiar to our ears it might be:

“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

…. …. …. …. ….

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:”

As a coda, let us go to the late 20th Century and another “soft pipe” that delivers another kind of music. “The Rain Stick” is the first poem in Seamus Heaney’s 1996 collection The Spirit Level:

“Upend the rain stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known

To listen for. …..

…. …. …. ….

You stand there like a pipe

Being played by water, you shake it lightly

And dimuendo runs through all its scale

Like a gutter stopping trickling. …….

…. …. …. ….

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.”

Indeed, yes, let us “Listen now again” to these “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”

Belinda de Kay is director emeritus of Stonington Free Library.