SONNET ON HEARING RACHMANINOV'S

 ''SYMPHONIC DANCES'',  OPUS 45.

Once sweet,  now bittersweet,  acid etching

The harmonies,  cutting stringent contours

In lines all clean-defined where soft blurring

Used to be.  The Romantic thus retires

Before the Modern,  lushness giving ground

To functionality,  rich filigree

To spare economy of strictured sound;

But yet the ghost of former style roams free

To haunt these Dances like a counterpoint--

The Slavic soul imbues the mood of jazz

With elegiac tone:  a gushing fount

Reduced to slender rivulets,  a maze

Of ripened Russian melodies with form

In debt to American idiom.

Stanley




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