Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poetry Classroom: Bach Learns to Love the Masses

By David Clark Wright 5 Comments

Welcome to this month’s poetry classroom, with poet and professor David Wright. We invite you to respond to the poems we’ll share here—their forms, images, sounds, meanings, surprises—ask questions of David and each other, and write your own poems along the way.



Bach Learns to Love the Masses (in b-minor)

You’ve hitched a ride to the form, to the form
you know will take you, take you where you know
the next hard hitch in the dance, and the score,
evened and smoothed, turns out, not a rondeau
or gavotte, gavottes being another
slow way to move. No, this, love, is the fugue,
like high mass where the man in his miter
holds the body aloft, then again. Fugue
where all manner of noise comes to matter–
the low voices even get their measure
of love. We are falling here, a clatter
of loves–men into women—b-minor
tonic drawing us deep, bearing us down,
weary voices and full, home to the ground.

Photo by GollyGforce, via Flickr. Poem by David Wright, author of A Liturgy for Stones.

_____

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you know anything about the fugue music form? Is it necessary to know this, to appreciate the poem?

2. We have general ways we think about love and its expressions. Is there love in this poem?

3. There are quite a few rhymes in this poem (and something called half rhymes or slant rhymes, where the words almost rhyme or sound like an echo of each other). Does this lend anything to your experience of the poem?

Browse poets and poems
Browse music
Browse more short poems
Browse the Shakespeare sonnets library (all 154!)
Browse the Top 10 Best Shakespeare Sonnets

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
David Clark Wright
Latest posts by David Clark Wright (see all)
  • Poetry Classroom: Four Sarabandes—Yo-Yo Ma - September 30, 2013
  • Poetry Classroom: Kansas - September 23, 2013
  • Poetry Classroom: Iowa Tocatta - September 16, 2013

Filed Under: Blog, Music Poems, Poetry Classroom, poetry teaching resources, Sonnets

Try Every Day Poems...

Comments

  1. Tania Runyan says

    September 2, 2013 at 9:48 am

    I love how the rhymes and sonnet form help to mirror the musical form of the fugue, which involves repetition, the interweaving of themes. And the repetition of living, as “weary” as it makes our voices, is also beautiful and irresistible–“all manner of noise comes to matter.” I see this as a love poem of sorts to the human condition.

    Reply
    • dw says

      September 2, 2013 at 6:24 pm

      Thanks, Tania, for noticing the sonnet and the attempt to play with form in the way music does. I had never really thought of this as a love poem, but I’m pleased you see it as trying to love humanity in a larger way.

      Reply
  2. Maureen Doallas says

    September 2, 2013 at 11:40 am

    The title makes me smile, Bach’s “Mass in B Minor” being one of the most glorious of his works. I also enjoy the double meanings achieved with the religious allusions (“high mass”) and musical references and terms, such as “the tonic”, “the low voices even”.

    Reply
    • dw says

      September 2, 2013 at 6:26 pm

      Good to find another lover of double meanings, Maureen. I find it almost unavoidable. Is that something you work with in a more conscious or less conscious way in your poems?

      Reply
  3. Charity Singleton Craig says

    September 9, 2013 at 3:14 pm

    I think forms for poems and music and masses are like playgrounds with fences. The children go all the way to the edge to enjoy themselves. Leave off the fences, and the children are afraid to go anywhere near the boundaries. (http://www.examiner.com/article/why-children-need-boundaries)

    I have heard of a fugues, masses, and Bach, and that is really all I needed to know to get the rhythm and richness of this poem. I felt myself lifting and falling with the rhyme, and felt the pulse of unrelenting movement that Bach always instills in me.

    I, too, loved the play on words with “the masses,” and hitch, and the rhyme of miter and matter and clatter.

    This makes me want to look around at all the other forms in my life, the artificial boundaries that give me courage to really live.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy