"Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle" Poetry Blog.

Evening Concert, Saint-Chapelle

The celebrated windows flamed with light

directly pouring north across the Seine;

we rustled into place. Then violins

vaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,

seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,

bit by bit, the vigor from the red,

the blazing blue, so that the listening eye

saw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapes

of shield and cross and strut and brace, that held

the holy glowing gantasy together.

The music surged; the glow became a milk,

a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbed

until our beating hearts, our violins

were cased in thin but solid sheets of lead.

-John Updike

Before reading this poem by John Updike I looked up Saint-Chapelle and learned that it is an old, restored building in the heart of France that has an extensive stained-glass collection. I believe that the stained-glass has much to do with this poem. In the first line, Updike calls the windows "celebrated" and describes the light they shine onto the French river Seine. A few lines later, the colors red and blue are mentioned along with the phrase, "...shapes of shield and cross and strut and brace...." These sound like stained-glass windows in churches which makes sense because Saint-Chapelle was a chapel. It seems that Updike is saying that the "vaunting," or boasting, violins playing the compositions of Vivaldi and Brahms sucked the intensity from the colors in the windows so that all one could see in them were the lines and shapes- the skeleton. In the evening concert "music surged" until the windows' glow slowly disappeared and all that was left was the solidity of the music.