Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle by John Updike was a very beautiful poem. The words flowed flawlessly off the tongue and created vivid imagery in the brain: "glow became a milk," "cased in thin but solid sheets of lead."
I thought Updike chose words that evoked an emotional kind of feeling - music moves people, it calms the anxious, pumps up the nervous, and even soothes the broken. I think he was trying to (in some way) move the audience like music moves him. I researched about his childhood and he had a condition called psoriasis, a disease with scaly patches covering the body.
In the poem he referred to the violin and playing music as though he was a part of it: "we rustled into place," "our beating hearts," and "our violins." Updike took solace in music because of his insecurities about his disease; now he is sharing the beauty of it with us.
My favorite quote in the poem was "listening eye." I connected with this because I am a very visual person, but when I am listening to music, I listen with my eyes. I paint pictures of the music in my head to emphasize the beauty of the music for me.
After reading the poem, I researched Seine (a long river near Paris), how Vivaldi or Brahms sounded. Vivaldi is more powerful, in your face, and Brahms is a shorter, almost staccato kind of rhythm.
I really liked the poem and connected with it, even though I'm more of a visual person rather than a listener.
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