The poet and the knife-grinder

Walt Whitman’s short poem ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’ describes an encounter on a Manhattan street with a knife-grinder who ‘works at his wheel sharpening a great knife’: the ‘sparkles from the wheel’ form the knife-grinder’s song. The poem, with its narrator observing a group who are watching the knife-grinder’s magical performance, circles back to Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’, with which I began. But the way the narrator places himself in the scene, the description of the old man at work, and the implied politics of the urban landscape are all radically different. In the knife-grinder’s long literary and visual history, there are very few images that ennoble his ‘art’, and some that carry the darkest intimations of violence. Whitman deliberately refrains from investing the knife-grinder with attributes ‘above his station’. What is transcendent is not the knife-grinder himself, but his utterance—matched by that of the poet.

Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris?

In an episode of La Prisonnière, the sixth volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator listens from his bedroom to the cris de Paris, which like the ‘Cries of London’ had long been enshrined in music and visual art. The pleasure the narrator takes in associating the cries he hears with Gregorian plainchant, or the music of Debussy and Mussorgsky, suggests his interest is purely aesthetic. But this aesthetic surface is a mask; in the street-vendors’ cries he hears a different song, the song of the Sirens, tempting his lover Albertine into the streets, ‘translating’ foodstuffs and trades into offers of sexual pleasure, and in particular promising to satisfy her desire for other women. Albertine’s lesbianism is the secret each withholds from the other—she refusing to admit what he refuses to tell her he already knows—and this secret is cried in the street.

The child in the street

In the optimistic opening of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851), street song appears as a sign of political regeneration. Hearing a little child singing ‘O bella libertà’ in a street in Florence in 1847, Barrett Browning projects a future for Italy in which the poetry of loss and lament will be replaced by a modern song of enlightenment and freedom. These hopes, raised by the revolutions of 1848, were crushed in the defeats that followed, and the second part of Casa Guidi Windows reflects with mordant irony on these events. The figure of the child in the street is replaced by that of her own child, born in 1849; yet Barrett Browning returns, in a number of later poems, to the child singing of liberty, especially in poems written in the last year of her life, when the prospects for a united Italy were again resurgent.

Lippi sings the blues

In Robert Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, the painter is caught playing truant in the red-light district of Renaissance Florence. Lippi, a child of the streets who has attracted the patronage of the Catholic Church and the ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, plays throughout his monologue with songs derived from a Tuscan folk-song known as the stornello. As he tells the story of his life to the officer of the watch who has arrested him, he quotes, or makes up, half a dozen of his own stornelli. He appropriates the form for his own purpose—but the stornelli say more about him than he intends. Browning’s appropriation of the stornello overrides Lippi’s; it becomes one of the indices of Lippi’s failure as an artist, one he attributes to his enforced dependency on the Church and the ruling class, but whose roots go deeper than he is willing to acknowledge.

Introduction

Street Songs, based on the Clarendon Lectures for 2016, is about the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries. Karlin begins with the London street-vendor’s cry of ‘Cherry-ripe!’, as it occurs in poems from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: the ‘Cries of London’ (and Paris) exemplify the fascination of this urban art to writers of every period. Focusing on nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers, the book traces the theme in works by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. As well as street cries, these writers incorporate ballads, folk-songs, religious and political songs, and songs of their own invention into crucial scenes, and the singers themselves range from a one-legged beggar in Dublin to a famous painter in fifteenth-century Florence. The book concludes with the beautiful and unlikely ‘song’ of a knife-grinder’s wheel. Throughout the book Karlin emphasizes the rich complexity of his subject. The street singer may be figured as an urban Orpheus, enchanting the crowd and possessed of magical powers of healing and redemption; but the barbaric din of the modern city is never far away, and the poet who identifies with Orpheus may also dread his fate. And the fugitive, transient nature of song offers writers a challenge to their more structured art. Overheard in fragments, teasing, ungraspable, the street song may be ‘captured’ by a literary work but is never, finally, tamed.

The voice of an ancient spring

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, an old beggar woman is heard singing outside Regent’s Park underground station. The song itself cannot be fixed: it is given to us, first, as a string of meaningless syllables, then ‘translated’ by the narrator of the book into an ancient, primordial song of sexual love, and then heard in the form of a modern German lied—a melancholy fin-de-siècle art-song which is inconceivable as a song sung by a beggar on a London street in 1925. The solid foundation of realism dissolves in Woolf’s playful handling, but she has good reasons for refusing to pin the song down to a single determinate form. The characters who see and hear the old woman—Peter Walsh, Rezia and Septimus Smith—do not really ‘see’ her for what she is, and do not understand that she is not begging, but offering; and they pass her by.

Orpheus in the city

Chapter 1 begins with a primal myth transposed to the city. William Wordsworth’s ‘Power of Music’ represents street music as an unqualified blessing: in proclaiming his fiddler ‘An Orpheus!’, the poet summons the miraculous and sacred power of music and song, but any allusion to Orpheus is shadowed by his tragic fate. Wordsworth’s poem recalls, by inversion, William Hogarth’s famous print, ‘The Enrag’d Musician’ (1741), in which a mob of urban noise-makers (including rival and degraded forms of street music and song) advance on the ‘classical’ violinist, himself a bathetic version of divine harmony. Hogarth’s urban ‘soundscape’ reappears in James Clarence Mangan’s poem ‘Khidder’ (1845), which likewise brings the fate of Orpheus, rather than his power, into focus. The violence with which street singers are faced is evident in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), whose title indicates that Orpheus will descend in vain into the hell of the city.

The one-legged sailor and other heroes

On the streets of Dublin a drunken navvy bawls out fragments of an Irish revolutionary ballad, and a crippled sailor growls out fragments of an English ballad about a crippled sailor, ‘The Death of Nelson’. These popular songs function, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as mocking reminders of British rule. Nelson, in particular, the ‘onehandled adulterer’, fits the novel’s plot of sexual conquest and betrayal. Yet the wandering sailor’s associations reach to the deepest sources of the book: to Ulysses, to Sinbad, to Homer. (He also has a surprising ‘real-life’ origin in a one-legged Irish sailor who caused a disturbance in the royal box at Ascot in 1832.) His figure, and the song he sings, correspond to other ‘types’ in the novel, intricately doubled and bonded. In the final section of the novel devoted to Bloom, and in Molly’s concluding monologue, these threads of association are woven together.