note

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove. 

It’s such a little thing to weep –
So short a thing to sigh –
And yet – by Trades – the size of these
We men and women die!

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Ted Hughes describes Emily Dickinson’s work as imbued with a sense of the ‘Holy Trinity’: first, the joy and awe inspired by the natural world around her, ‘the Universe in its Divine aspect’; second, her morose and frightening vision of the pain-stricken soul within that universe; and third, ‘Death as the solution’ to the conflict created by their simultaneity. Given her preoccupation with joy, pain, and death, it feels natural to relate her poetry to the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo, which are themselves such a striking exploration of those subjects. These two short madrigals bring the very separate worlds of these two artists into the same orbit, forming a simple musical/conceptual hinterland for my own explorations.