I’m reading this while listening to a Leonard Bernstein conducted performance of Mahler’s First. Specifically, the movement drawing on a slow building of the children’s song Frère Jacques. Apropos of nothing, but I fell in love with Mahler back in 1995 when I heard this symphony.

Today’s Canto opens promisingly:

Whereof memory of man runneth not to the contrary
Dome Book, Ina, Offa and Aethelbert, folcright
for a thousand years 

A bit of old school, King James sounding language, references to old English kings and the first census (I am assuming ‘Dome Book’ to be a reference to the ‘Domesday Book’ which was not about the end times, but a recording of people, lands, and property).

Sadly, it’s mostly downhill from here.

While I appreciate the Canto‘s role in the  slow process of building to a grand poetic-historical document, barely the only bone he tosses us after the opening are some outbreaks of ancient history, which could be read as learned digressions by the eighteen century ‘narrators’ of this Canto and can also be read as a reminder of the great work of historicity taking place and as a tool to shake the reader from their expectations.

As another personal digression, Mahler called his First Symphony Der Titan. Each man seemed confident in their own genius and potential to direct the future of their respective forms. Hasn’t each been proved to be right, despite their faults, even their grave ones?