"Sure on this Shining Night": Origins and Meanings

Morten Lauridsen's 2005 choral composition "Sure on this Shining Night" sets to music several lines of a James Agee poem published in 1934. Performers, audiences, and listeners have warmly embraced this lovely marriage of lyric and music.

Among a host of recordings by professional, amateur, and youth choruses, I especially admire the recording by the Minnesota Chorale Artists, with Lauridsen at the piano: < https://bit.ly/2AxnpoQ >.

Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.

The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.

Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone 

Of shadows on the stars.

A number of commentators have called these ten lines "an untitled poem by James Agee." This is misleading. The lines are actually excerpts from a longer poem by Agee. A web posting by Debi Simons, 10/25/15, acquainted me with the fact that the lyric is "ripped from the middle of a longer Agee poem titled 'Description of Elysium'."

"Ripped" is a strong word; I prefer "excerpted" or "extracted." But I fully understand Simons' point: it seems unfair to lift and isolate ten congenial lines from a poem of forty-six lines, when the final sixteen lines of that poem are somber in the extreme.

Presumably the ten-line extraction was made by the composer Samuel Barber, who in 1940 set the words for solo voice and piano in what soon became a beloved art song titled "Sure on this Shining Night."* I've found no evidence that that Agee had any part in excerpting the text or naming the song. Agee and Barber first met in 1947, and they became good friends. Barber wrote "I met with him last week and admired him," and later recalled "I used to have lunch with him once every two weeks or so."**

The entire "Description of Elysium" was included in the volume of Agee poems titled Permit Me Voyage, published in 1934 by Yale University Press. Here is the complete poem, to which I have added section numbers in brackets to keep us oriented.

     "Description of Elysium"

 [Section 1]

Whole health resides with peace,
Gladness and never harm,
There not time turning,
Nor fear of flower of snow

Where marbling water slides
No charm may halt of chill,
Air aisling the open acres,
And all the gracious trees

Spout up their standing fountains
Of wind-beloved green
And the blue conclaved mountains
Are grave guards

Stone and springing field

Wide one tenderness,

The unalterable hour

Smiles deathlessness:

No thing is there thinks:

Mind the witherer

Withers on the outward air:

We can not come there.

[Section 2]

Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.

The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.

Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone 

Of shadows on the stars.

[Section 3] 

Now thorn bone bare

Silenced with iron the branch's gullet:

Rattling merely on the air

Of hornleaved holly:

The stony mark where sand was by

The water of a nailèd foot:

The berry harder than the beak:

The hole beneath the dead oak root:

All now brought quiet

Through the latest throe

Quieted and ready and quiet:

Still not snow:

Still thorn bone bare

Iron in the silenced gully

Rattling only of the air

Through hornleaved holly.

Section 1 of "Description of Elysium" characterizes the timeless realm of the blessed dead: "Whole health resides with peace, / Gladness and never harm...." Agee yearned for such innocence, but was profoundly disturbed by human failures, including his own.

Section 2 expresses the poet's response to a night of marveling inspiration: "Sure on this shining night / Of starmade shadows round...." Composer Lauridsen has described this moment of respite amidst human folly as "the wondrous awe that one has being within nature."***

Section 3 introduces menacing apocalyptic imagery: "Now thorn bone bare...of hornleaved holly." Agee wrestled with his harrowing premonition that "Pride, a mortal sin, can quite as coldly and inevitably damage and wreck the human race as the most total power of ‘Greed’ ever could."

The final two lines of Section 2 have generated a great deal of discussion:

Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone 

Of shadows on the stars.

What do the enigmatic phrases "weep for wonder," "wandering far alone," and "shadows on the stars" convey? Are the phrases ominous? Are they transcendent? Are they simply inscrutable? 

I have long been undecided about whether the concluding couplet of Section 2 expresses hope or despair or enigma, and have found Agee's phrase "shadows on the stars" completely puzzling. But I think I have some new light to shed.

Several singers and listeners have told me that the final couplet of "Sure on this Shining Night" seems to be a darkening transition into the bleak remainder of the larger poem. But in fact the larger poem has no such transitions.

Section 1 ends with the absolutely exclusionary words "We can not come there." Section 3 begins abruptly with bleak new imagery of "hornleaved holly." In between, Section 2 is quite distinct—not transitional but entire.

Allow me a personal observation. A few years ago a hornleaved holly sprang up volunteer in my little patch of garden. The official name is "Chinese Holly," Ilex cornuta. It is an escaped species, not native. Where it came from I do not know. One thing I do know—and this from bleeding experience—is that the horned leaves of Ilex cornuta make an impenetrable barrier:

 

My Horn Leaf Holly
Ilex cornuta

Still worse are the rigid, desiccated leaves of dead holly: 

Now thorn bone bare...

    Rattling merely on the air

Of hornleaved holly....

Given these barriers, I think we can say that we have three poems, joined only by mutual exclusion and a common title. "Sure on this Shining Night" finds itself between inaccessible innocence and goodness on the one hand, and quaking fear of self-destruction on the other. So, too, Agee finds himself, and the human race.

A few details from Laurence Bergreen's exemplary biography, James Agee: A Life, have further convinced me that Section 2 is coherent and expresses Agee's transcendent, spiritual experience.

Bergreen informs us that in 1930, the summer before Agee's junior year at Harvard, he was introduced to the household of Arthur Percy Saunders and Louise Brownell Saunders of Clinton, New York. The Saunders family quickly embraced young Agee, and the fondness was mutual.

Agee wrote to his mentor and life-long friend, Father James Flye: "They're the most beautiful and happy family to know and watch I've ever seen. It's hard to write of such people without becoming mawkish." At summer's end he wrote to Louise, "I've been homesick ever since I left you, and the last time I was homesick, I was nine years old." Agee and one of the Saunders daughters, Olivia or "Via", were mutually attracted and married in 1933.

Bergreen reports that Agee "roamed the large Saunders home at will, pausing to amuse himself with the professor's powerful telescope, through which Agee gazed at shivering images of the moon and the rings of Saturn." Bergreen describes the Saunders family as "blessed with enough money and intelligence to live exceedingly well." Also he reports that the father was a scientist, a retired professor of chemistry at Hamilton College. I think it fair to assume that the Saunders' telescope was a good one.

Again a personal note. In my senior year of high school I ground a six-inch mirror and mailed it off to be silvered—or in Agee's own terminology, "quicksilvered" ("The Truce", 1931). Upon its return I mounted the mirror in a tube with a secondary mirror and focusing lens. The magnification was good, but the telescope was limited in performance by the unsteadiness of my homemade tripod.

When all was completed I climbed at night to a dark hilltop. I focused first on the moon. The detail was stunning but not deeply engaging. Then I focused on Saturn. The tawny image of perfect, ringed symmetry suspended in prodigious darkness and absolute silence caught my breath and brought tears to my eyes.

It is probable that the Saunders telescope resolved detail beyond the capacity of mine. In particular, it might have disclosed the phenomenon of Saturn's shadow upon its rings, and the rings' shadows upon Saturn's surface. With amateur telescopes, seeing this phenomenon usually requires repeated viewings over long periods of time, as Saturn's position is constantly changing in relation to the locations of earth and sun. Also, earth's atmosphere must be at its clearest.

We know that the Saunders' father, called by his middle name Percy, did view the stars repeatedly. A biographer of the family writes:

He lectured, it is true, in chemistry, but through his warm personality he was able to come in close touch with many students. They shared his interest in music, art, literature, drama. On clear nights they could gather with him in the fields and explore the heavens through his telescope.****

In the practiced hands of Percy the 1930 telescope might well have resolved the Saturn shadows.

Telescopic View of Saturn from Earth

Here the sun is behind the viewer, below and slightly to the right. We glimpse part of Saturn's shadow on the rings as the small black interruption of the rings immediately above the sphere, slightly to the left. The shadow cast by the rings onto Saturn's surface is the very faint pinkish band, parallel to the rings, about a third of the way between the rings and the top of the planet's sphere.

I think that Agee might have included the phrase "shadows on the stars" in his verse as a kind of nod to his generous host through whose telescope he had shared views of Saturn's shadows. (I'm assuming that that Agee chose to use the poetic-licensed "stars" instead of the literal but clomping "planets.") The family biographer describes Percy as "a unique, incredible being. And yet he moved among us so simply with that quiet amused charm of his, unaware that he was in any way set apart from the rest of us." We are also told that Percy had an interest in literature. Agee's future father-in law seems a person likely to appreciate his clandestine reference in verse to shared experience.

There's a similar puzzle in the second stanza of Section 3. The phrase "a nailèd foot" has seemed to me impossibly obscure. Now I have learned from Bergreen that in the summer of 1930, Agee "was forced to hobble about on one foot, the painful result of inadvertently stepping on a nail." So I think phrase may be another in-family wink and nod—"nailèd foot" both describing Agee's summertime injury and also reinforcing Section 3's recurring theme of "thorn bone bare."

Two thirds of a century later, NASA launched its Cassini spacecraft to explore Saturn and its rings and moons. Here are two Cassini images:

Sunlight  coming from the right;

planet's shadow falling to the left.

Sun coming from the lower right;

Saturn's horizontal rings near the bottom;

surface shadows of the rings at upper left.

Percy and Agee were never to see such stunning images. But Agee and NASA share a sense of wonder. In a NASA report titled Ten Things: Why Cassini Mattered, the tenth item is this: "Cassini revealed the beauty of Saturn, its rings and moons, inspiring our sense of wonder." Wonder makes additional appearances in the report: "For more than a decade, NASA's Cassini spacecraft shared the wonders of Saturn." And "Cassini revealed in great detail the true wonders of Saturn."

Wonders of astronomy were often in Agee's thoughts. To Father Flye he suggests that body and mind are "like binary stars." His poem, "A Nursery Rhyme" (1937), compares "nebulae" to "the blown seeds of a dandelion," and seems to refer to the possibility that other galactic intelligence may be observing us:

Our galaxy, so runs the hope,

Is mirror for a telescope.

It is important to acknowledge that when the word shadow appears throughout Agee's writings, more often than not it serves as a metaphor for death. Here are two of many examples:

So, for a space, the Shadow will relent,

Befooling us with slow yet sure consent:

And, in due time, once more it will return,

Coolly to blot out what once more must burn.

                       ..."The Shadow" (1930)

How God must grieve, 

Watching in all this shadow land

The flinching vigil candles of this countless loss

In night’s nave each a life.

                       ...Letter to Father Frye, March 29, 1945

In Section 2, however, I believe that "shadows of the stars" evokes not death but Agee's living wonderment at his sheer existence in a vast cosmos graced with the delicacy of Saturn's shadows.

I am often unable to penetrate Agee's turgid poetry. So I feel fortunate that we have a prose account of an experience of wonder under the sky as sensed by a young boy. It comes from Agee's novelette, The Morning Watch, published when he was forty-two. Agee names his central character Richard, but the novel is obviously rooted in autobiographical recollections of Agee's experiences at St. Andrew's Episcopal School, 1919–1924, when Agee was in his early teenage years.

Young Richard and some of his classmates break rules by slipping outside after lights-out;

For the first time this year, he felt the ground against the bare soles of his feet.... Even though the ground in this schoolyard was skimmed with dusty gravel, its aliveness soared through him like a sob and lifted his eyes in wonder upon the night. There was no moon and what few stars were out, they were made faint by a kind of smiling universal milky silence, not fog, or even the lightest kind of mist, but as if the whole air and sky were one mild supernal breath.

 Agee portrays Richard in attendance at the St. Andrew's Good Friday service:

His heart opened. Almighty and everlasting God, he prayed, Maker of all things, Judge of all men (and he saw as in a wheeling rondure the shining of all things, the shadows of all men)....

I think we've no reason to doubt Agee's weeping for wonder beneath the rondure of stars, suspended in what he calls "space and darkness of sky beyond conjecture" ("Dedication", 1934).

We have one further detail of "Sure on this Shining Night" to consider: the phrase, "wandering far alone."

By all accounts, Agee was throughout his life an ebullient socializer, talking far into the night with enraptured comrades, male and female. Yet in matters of the "binary stars" of mind and soul he suffered increasing solitude. A simile Agee uses in The Morning Watch could well apply to himself: "lonesome as nebulae."

Agee was profoundly motivated by Christian morality. John Hersey speaks of his "enormous humanity and pity and sorrow." Adam Kirsch speaks of Agee's "desperate sincerity and fearful compassion." Robert Fitzgerald, Agee's close friend from Harvard days, writes, "For poverty and misery in general he had a sharp-eyed pity. Yet 'Church' and 'organized religion' in relation to awe and vision bothered his mind."

Agee attended Christian worship. At Harvard he frequented the Cowley Fathers Monastery (Anglo-Catholic) near Harvard Square, assisting as a server in the Mass. He sang in an octet at First Church (Congregational) Cambridge. Later, he and Via went to Anglo-Catholic Confession and partook of the Lord's Supper. They were married in a traditional Episcopal service.

Dwight Macdonald, Agee's friend since St. Andrew's days, spares no words:

Although he was deeply religious, he had his own kind of religion, one that included irreverence, blasphemy, obscenity, and even communism (of his own kind). By the late forties, a religio-conservative revival was under way, but Agee felt as out of place as ever...always out of step.

 MacDonald's words are borne out by Agee's self-description:

I have a religious background and am 'pro-religious'—though not on the whole delighted by this so-called revival—but doubt that I will return to religion.

In 1938, Agee, age 29, wrote to Father Flye, "I trust nothing else save a feeling of God, and love, and in part myself...." 

In 1945, age 36, he wrote to Flye:

It seems unlikely that I will ever become fully religious or a communicant again. But I hope I need not tell you, and feel sure you will not scorn, how grateful I am for such religious feelings as I do have. ...I have to doubt so much that at the same time I trust: thoughts and realizations mixed with personal and historic memories and projections so fill me with tears, and with faith and certainty, that it seems incredible to me not to be a Christian and a Catholic in the simplest and strictest senses of the words. But I am at once grateful for the emotions and doubtful of them.

 In 1950, age 40, five years before his death, Agee wrote to Father Flye:

I evidently move, as I imagine many people do, in a rough not very predictable cycle, between feeling relatively uninvolved religiously and very much involved: though I'm not sure that "religiously" is the right word for it: but anyhow a strong sense of being open, aware, concerned, in the ways which are rooted usually in religion, or in the more serious kinds of poetry or music, or just in a sense of existence—i.e. a relatively very full and emotionally rich sense of it, as compared with the opposite side of the cycle. I'm evidently swinging into it again now. At times or moments I feel virtually sure that nothing short of coming back into a formal religion (probably the one I was brought up in) will be nearly enough for me: at others, just as sure I never will. But at all times I feel sure that my own shapeless personal religious sense, whatever that may be, is deepening and increasing: even the swings away are less far away from it: keep some kind of religion with it. I wish I were with you and could talk about this, but even if I were I doubt there would actually be much to say about it...essentially a very private matter and should be....

In mind and soul, this most gregarious of poets felt himself solitary—"very private," "wandering far alone."

 CODA

Agee's lyric and Lauridsen's musical setting seem to me a perfect wedding. The flowing melodic lines and melting harmonic tensions—seconds and fourths, sevenths and ninths—convey tender warmth throughout.

Amidst the gentle harmonic tensions, the only sustained dissonance comes with the enigmatic words we have been considering:

I weep for wonder wand'ring far alone
of shadows on the stars.

Lauridsen asks the altos to sing a dissonant C ("far alone"?) and repeat that discordant note throughout three full measures. The dissonance is subtle but disquieting. Then the resolution of that dissonance on the concluding word, stars, is as heart-melting as any musical cadence I can call to memory.

In the recording linked at the beginning of this posting, listen for these three dissonant measures and their cadence at 2:43ff.

James Agee

__________

* Besides Barber and Lauridsen, a least two other composers, Mark Foster and Z. Randall Stroope, have published settings of "Sure on this Shining Night."

** I have included references for only a few of the quotations in this posting, trying to minimize what the literary critic Edmund Wilson has called "scholarly barbed wire." If anyone should want particular references, feel free to send me a request by e-mail (albertblackwell39@gmail.com) and I shall answer promptly.

*** Quoted by Margaret B. Owens, "Morten Lauridsen's Choral Cycle, Nocturnes; A Conductor's Analysis" (2019). < https://bit.ly/3j5fGzF >

**** Elsie M. Pomeroy, William Saunders and His Five Sons, The Ryerson Press – Toronto, 1956.

*****