On Smart's David and Ravel's Bolero: Double Energetic Vaultings into Ecstasy, Part LXI

 Has anyone ever noticed how structurally and energetically similar both Ravel's Bolero is to Christopher Smart's Song to David? Both are sustained and rhapsodic as they swell into fiery cauldrons of spiritual heat as they build into frenetic ecstasy, bit by bit; part by part, not vertically, but horizontally. This poem could be considered a Horatian Ode, or Pindaric-Sapphic, as well, since it's not David Smart is lauding, but Jesus.

I suppose since Jesus was always thought to have been within the bloodline of King David, that the thrust of the poem is really a genesis story of the ancestral beginnings of the Nazarene bloodline.  

Ravel, on the other hand, is doing something very similar to Smart, not that it's Pindaric, but it is essentially an argument for snare drum with repetitious motifs in 9/8, just like how Smart uses words like Adoration, and builds his orchestration around the drum; and as for Smart, he then begins a series of words that begin the subsequent stanzas, such as great, precious, sweet, beauteous, strong and ultimately GLORIOUS, as in religious ecstacy achieved like an orgasm in Gregorian chant in a Gloria, or Aleluia. The ending Determined, Dared, and Done, in capital letters, is as much of a cadence as in the Bolero's final cadential turn at the very end of the piece. 

Smart sticks to sestets throughout the entirety of the laud just as Ravel sticks to 9/8, and the orchestration builds both vertically and horizontally as the piece progresses, never deviating, developing, or venturing away, much like Smart's David. 

I don't really have much more to say on this, but in reading and reviewing English poetry recently, I did happen to catch a great many more details heretofore uncaught. I am also aware of Ginsberg's interview on this poem and his comparing it to sex, which is absolutely right. So does Bolero. They are both orgiastic and sexual energetic vehicles, catapulting the listener and reader into higher and higher spaces.

So, as I don't like to recreate wheels, I searched to see if anyone else had made this comparison and to my surprise and relief, no one had. Voila, here it is. Disagree all you want.  

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