MOTHER OF MUSES (OUR SONGS ARE ALIVE IN THE LAND OF THE LIVING)

I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”  

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory – tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place. 

 That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

Thoreau says, even today, with Homer and the "wanted man" delivering the above lecture:

The coward ever sings no song,
He listens to no chime,
He has no heart, he has no tongue,
To build the lofty rhyme.