Anyone who has sat through a concert, fighting the urge to cough, will recognise the strange mix of reverence and absurdity that Dave Bonta catches in "Classical Muse". The poem takes the concert hall, a place that asks us to forget our bodies, and keeps reminding us that bodies are all it contains. Its central idea is that classical music, for all its claims to the sublime, is made of flesh, breath, metal and nerves, and that the audience's solemn discipline is a comic, touching effort to rise above that.
The title is a small pun. "Classical Muse" echoes "classical music" while naming the Greek inspiration behind it, and "muse" also means to ponder, which is what an audience does in the dark. The first image sets the tone: the classical "hides / within the vernacular / like a clutch of eggs." Eggs are fragile, warm and hidden, and they suggest something alive waiting to hatch. The comparison also suggests that high culture is not a separate realm but is tucked inside ordinary speech and ordinary life.
Bonta then fills the poem with puns and bodily imagery. "Wood-winded / or unreedable" bends "woodwind" and "unreadable" together, as if the instruments were texts too difficult to decipher. "All flesh is brass" twists the biblical "all flesh is grass," trading the idea of human frailty for something loud and metallic. The comparisons turn unsettling: the piccolo "shrieks / like a rabbit / caught by an owl," and clarinets and cellos "swell / like unexpected tumors." Beauty is described through pain and illness. The concert hall itself "throbs / like an engine / for the holy," a phrase that makes spirituality sound like machinery.
The middle of the poem shifts from description to rules. "And we must not / must not cough" repeats itself, and the stuttering repetition almost produces the suppressed cough it forbids. Then come three "if" clauses, listing what dancers, singers and wayward strings must do. Dancers "must aspire / to escape their bodies," singers' lungs "must be filled / with light," and an "errant string may be coaxed back / to the straight and narrow." The moral language of sin and redemption makes a slightly out-of-tune string sound like a lapsed churchgoer. The tone is teasing, but the poem never sneers. It seems to understand the longing behind these rules, even as it points out how impossible they are, since lungs full of "light" are still lungs.
Formally, the poem is a chain of unrhymed tercets, each a small, nearly self-contained thought. There is no punctuation at all, so the stanzas flow like a programme of movements, and the short lines, often only three or four words, give the pace a hushed, careful quality. The sound shifts with the subject: "shivery," "bowed strings" and "ceremonious mallets" hiss and rattle, while "swell" and "cellos" are rounder and softer. The "if" structure delays the ending, which makes it feel like a long-held silence about to break.
The last three stanzas drift into a dreamlike state. In the darkness, "the instruments star in a movie / about prize fish." Judging by the imagery, the polished instruments glint like scales, as an audience member's mind slips loose from the music. Then comes the best image in the poem: the baton "keeps prophesying / one second into / the future." That is exactly what a conductor does, since the gesture must come before the sound. It also makes the performance feel like a ritual governed by a priest-like seer.
The ending brings release. The audience finally enters "the common surf / of applause," and the word "common" quietly answers the "vernacular" of the opening. The classical has been hiding in the ordinary all along, and when the clapping begins, the bodies in the dark are finally allowed to make noise. The poem's significance lies in this balance. It manages to be irreverent and affectionate at once, showing that the hush of the concert hall is a shared human effort, and that the music is most moving because it comes from, and returns to, the body.