The Death Of Orpheus

They knew they could not out do him, those maenads screaming in a confusion of dissonance, while he strummed one last diatonic melody that cut through their rage and ascended above all violence to the hearing of his father, the supremely calm and self-possessed god of the lyre, Phoebus Apollo. And so they ripped his head from his shoulders, and tossed both head and lyre into the River Hebrus on its course to Lesbos. They were exhausted by their brutality, and sank into a troubled sleep. But the head kept singing sweetly as the lyre carried it like a barge of death into the realm felicity. How warmly he sang, how tenderly his voice caressed both sounds and words. Earth was so enamored of his music that she brought the whole of it into her being, and we earthlings benefit from this music in birds' songs, the motion of water, the sigh of winds and crack of thunder, and in the harmonies of our souls in the oneness of flesh and spirit. His voice is embodied everywhere we call Earth, perhaps even in our identity as Earthlings are traces of the god Orpheus. Whenever we hear music, it is Orpheus stretching his being across space and infusing its openness with his immense soul.