From lute to heart

You don't see too many lutes these days. However, it is a very romantic instrument, and supremely appropriate for the holiday season. Here's a good example of the sound. Big Frank does not think that there is a better instrument with which to accompany the melodic content of a poetically sung tune. By the way, Big Frank doesn't own a lute - yet. A song, when thus accompanied, in the poet's imagination, takes flight and goes beyond from the strings of the lute to the strings of the beloved's desire. Here's Wallace Stevens' XVI from "The Little Blue Book". "Beyond the song's content" - in the imagination the song radiates warmly into the receptive vision of his beloved.

XVI

He sang, and in her heart, the sound

Took form beyond the song's content.

She saw divinely, and she felt

With visionary blandishment.

Desire went deeper than his lute.

She saw her image, sweet and pale,

Invite her to simplicity,

Far off, in some relinquished vale.

---- Wallace Stevens