ドライデンの頌歌「アレクサンダー大王の饗宴，または音楽の力」 における詩と音楽の分裂

In his famous essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T. S. Eliot asserted that ‘a dissociation of sensibility’ had occurred during the seventeenth century, and that it ‘was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden’. This paper argues that the second of Dryden’s two odes written for St. Cecilia’s Day provides a concrete piece of evidence for Eliot’s otherwise abstract assertion. In theory, if music be the food of love, that is, if it stimulates emotions, and if poetry conveys meanings, a happy marriage of music and poetry would generate what Eliot called ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought’. In practice, however, the ‘musical language’ of the poets may merely imply imitation of musical effects, thus disclosing the remoteness of true musicality.
The divorce of poetry and music could happen either when the words of a song acquired a dominant priority over music, as in the works of the Puritan poets like Milton who believed that the words should control emotions, or when instrumental music matured and became independent enough to be played in concerts and other public performances by professional virtuosi. After the Restoration, Dryden’s odes enjoyed the latter environment, and consequently, I argue, his ‘Alexander’s Feast’, set to music by great composers like Handel, shows an obvious reduction of the connectedness of music to particular words. Demonstrating that ‘Alexander’s Feast’ is a mock-heroic poem, this paper points out that so long as the listeners are pleasantly and swiftly carried away by the musical surface without sinking into the deeper level of ironic meanings, not only Timotheus and Cecilia, who ‘both divide the crown’ (168), but also Alexander could be genuine (as opposed to mock) heroes of this dramatic ode.