ABSTRACT
The lute in the poem of that title performs with exquisite sensuousness this transport, this mutual melding of the singer and her instrument and analogously of the poet and the poem or the poem and the reader. The poem’s enchantingly erotic tension arises in the description of the lute’s voluptuous body, the exaggeration of the lute’s dark resonance chamber whence the invisible sound originates, and then the allusion to Tullia’s darkness, which invokes her lighted hair, which lifts a sound from the instrument to Tullia’s face and who, in turn, sings back to the instrument. By feat of its sound, melody, and rhetorical canoodling, the poem performs Tullia’s gentle seduction by her instrument which finally, to recall Rilke’s words from his letter, dissolves in her love, resulting in the melding of singer and sound, all of which accomplishes its delightful transport into people — like a madeleine, like a melting lump of sugar.
