For centuries authors, composers, and critics have been exploring the parallels between the "sister arts" of music and literature. As Calvin S. Brown dryly observes, the study of musico-literary correspondences holds "a fatal attraction for the dilettante, the faddist and the crackpot." To suggest, then, that Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Donald Justice has been influenced by music is to incur a certain risk. Being called a faddist or a dilettante would fracture no bones, only pride, and an academic becomes accustomed to being thought a crackpot, by students if not by colleagues and social acquaintances. Still, one would prefer other epithets. Moreover, influence cannot be proved, not even (or especially not?) by a writer's own statements about his or her art. In the case of Justice, it is unlikely that absolute "proof" of musical influence would help us to interpret his poems. But an awareness of his use of "musical possibilities" does afford insights into the composing process; it does enhance the reader's experience of Justice's poetry. As a writer and writing teacher, Justice is much concerned with the way in which a work takes shape. His commitment to the appropriate form—the characteristic feature of his poetry—and his use of certain structures, techniques, and metaphors may be traced to his early and continuing interest in music.

Justice has stated that in his youth he "played the piano and a few other instruments." studied musical composition, and aspired to be a composer. Recently asked by an interviewer whether music has influenced his poetry, he replied that it probably has, but he could not specify how. After speaking of poetic and musical rhythms as "roughly analogous," he continued, "There would be a common sensibility in composing music and writing poems; the same sort of … creative desire would obviously lie behind virtually any of the arts. But music and poetry are the two that I would know most about from personal experience. In both there is the same kind of joy in working something out…." In another interview, while making the point that poems are not developed only from subjects, Justice again compared composing music and writing poetry. Poetry has various sources, he said, "just as a composition in music may come from merely fooling around. Or from thinking: This time I'll try D minor; or, I like what Handel wrote just there, I think I'll try some variations on it."

His interest in music is immediately obvious in certain titles—"White Notes," "Sonatina in Green," "Variations for Two Pianos." In the latter poem he treats pianist Thomas Higgins as a hero for bringing art to the wilderness of Arkansas. Playing Mozart for "his pupils, the birds," Higgins taught them trills and attacks they could not otherwise have learned. But he has moved away, "taking both his pianos," and "There is no music now in all Arkansas." Though his poem is whimsical and well as elegiac, it records a real loss and testifies to Justice's regard for the beauty and order of art.

He is a virtuoso of the sound effects commonly called "musical": rhyme, assonance, consonance, and other kinds of repetition. To be sure, many poets—Algernon Charles Swinburne and Edward Lear, for example—have charmed the ear, but poems should not be called "musical" simply because they are euphonious. One of Justice's fortes is the structural and thematic use of sound patterns. "Beyond the Hunting Woods," composed of two fifteen-line stanzas, is unrhymed, but oral performance brings out recurring consonants and vowels in the end-words:

     I speak of that great house
     Beyond the hunting woods,
     Turreted and towered
     In nineteenth-century style,
     Where fireflies by the hundreds
     Leap in the long grass,
     Odor of jessamine
     And roses, canker-bit,
     Recalling famous times
     When dame and maiden sipped
     Sassafras or wild
     Elderberry wine,
     While far in the hunting woods
     Men after their red hounds
     Pursued the mythic beast.
 
     I ask it of a stranger,
     In all that great house finding
     Not any living thing,
     Or of the wind and the weather,
     What charm was in that wine
     That they should vanish so,
     Ladies in their stiff
     Bone and clean of limb,
     And over the hunting woods
     What mist had maddened them
     That gentlemen should lose
     Not only the beast in view
     But Belle and Ginger too,
     Nor home from the hunting woods
     Ever, ever come?

This repetition, pleasing in itself, tightens each stanza and links it with the other, for certain vowels (short i, long i) are used throughout. "Presences" illustrates his use of repetition to unify a work as well as enact its meaning:

     Everyone, everyone went away today.
     They left without a word, and I think
     I did not hear a single goodbye today.
 
     And all that I saw was someone's hand, I think,
     Thrown up out there like the hand of someone drowning,
     But far away, too far to be sure what it was or meant.
 
     No, but I saw how everything had changed
     Later, just as the light had; and at night
     I saw that from dream to dream everything changed.
 
     And those who might have come to me in the night,
     The ones who did come back but without a word,
     All those I remembered passed through my hands like clouds—
 
     Clouds out of the south, familiar clouds—
     But I could not hold onto them, they were drifting away,
     Everything going away in the night again and again.

The recurrence of words and images corresponds with the paradoxical constancy of loss and change; it conveys the presence of absence. In his essay, "Meters and Memory" Justice speaks of poetic meters as having no organic relationship to the sense of the poem but functioning to make it orderly. Like a composer of music, he has made such structural use of repetition and variation; as a poet, he can use these techniques to create and convey meaning.

During the 1960s many American poets rather noisily abandoned rhyme and other literary conventions, arguing that poetry must be "natural," "sincere," not "artificial." Justice's first book, The Summer Anniversaries (1960), which appeared at the beginning of this poetic revolution, includes a number of sonnets and sestinas. He did not repudiate literary tradition even when it was fashionable to do so, but in the last twenty years he has developed a repertoire of open forms, some departing from established ones, many assuming the shape of their subjects. Some are reminiscent of musical structures. "Dreams of Water" (Night Light), for instance, has three ten-line 'movements' linked by theme but different in mood; they might be marked Riposato, Misterioso, and Scherzando. The titles and subtitles of certain poems ask us to think of them as musical compositions: "Variations on a Theme from James," "Improvisations on themes from Guillevic," "Variations on a Text by Vallejo," and his two "Sonatinas." With such titles he acknowledges influences, indicates how we may perceive a poem and the relations between its parts, and presents his work as his contribution to the common enterprise of Art. Epigraphs, allusions, and endnotes identifying his sources associate his work with that of composers and performers in various art-forms.

Justice's poetic statements about his art are often expressed in terms of another medium—sometimes painting, more often music. Richard Howard has called "Thus," first published more than twenty years ago, Justice's "artistic credo." The narrator says that his key "must be minor. / B minor, then, as having passed for noble / On one or two occasions." His one theme, "with variations," will be "spoken outright by the oboe / Without apology of any string" and "without overmuch adornment." Not for him "the major resolution of the minor, / Johann's great signature"; he has no pretensions to the grand style (The Summer Anniversaries). The ironic stance and subdued voice are characteristic; some critics have spoken of Justice as a "low-keyed" poet. His one theme, by no means minor, is change—on this he has worked many variations.

"Sonatina in Green," subtitled "for my students," assesses the state of contemporary poetry. Iconoclastic, undisciplined novices who burst into the muse's "boudoir" are contrasted with "We few with the old instruments, / Obstinate, sounding the one string." For the young, art is "ecstatic" utterance, Bacchic revelry; for their elders it means "playing upon worn keys," enamored of a rich literary past and their own accomplishments but not unaware that modern audiences may have no ear for the music of another time. Both kinds of poet, he implies, think too much of themselves as performers. Seeking publicity and publication, they do not really respect their art: "There has been traffic enough / In the boudoir of the muse" (Departures). A highly respected teacher of writing, Justice suggests here what he makes explicit elsewhere, that a number of contemporary poets are indifferent craftsmen with too little concern for making the memorable poem. (He has called poetry readings "a kind of vaudeville," "show-biz rather than art.") By speaking of poets as musicians, he asks us to recognize them as performers and reminds us of the ancient unity of poetry and music-not-held 'sacred' by many of today's poets.

The most evocative of his poems about art, "Sonatina in Yellow," explores the relationship between memory and the creative imagination. Justice has stated that the writer's subject "seems always to be involved, in one way or another, with memory" and remarked that some of his own most profound memories are accompanied by music. "Sonatina in Yellow" dramatizes the creative process of a pianist, Justice's figure for the poet. Stimulated by a yellowed photography album, he relives a moment from his childhood. He sits at his instrument thinking of and trying to forget the past. But the forgetting is "an exercise requiring further practice." Fingering the keys as he tries to suppress a memory, he seems to hear it as "a difficult exercise, played through by someone else." The recollection assumes a definite shape: the hot, quiet room; the summer sunlight; he is a child; his father, risen from the dead, wakes from a nap, speaks…. In the last stanza, which Justice has called the poem's "coda," the artist comes back to himself at the keyboard. He realizes that in reliving, as it were rehearsing, the long-past drama and its attendant emotions, he has also been shaping it: for the creative mind, to remember is not merely to recall. Wishing to hear the 'music' he has been composing, he says, "Repeat it now, no one was listening. / Repeat it, the air, the variations." The man remembers; the artist makes. "Sonatina in Yellow" closes with these lines: "So your hand moves, moving across the keys, / And slowly the keys grow darker to the touch" (Departures). His father is dead, his youth is gone, the evening of his own life approaches; but in descending into memory he has discovered, controlled, and preserved a part of his past. The poet, then, has not merely experienced and expressed emotion: he has made something. The final image of dark keys is particularly rich for readers familiar with other poems by Justice.

The former pianist uses keys and scales to represent moods and phases of development. "Absences" contemplates descending scales played on "the white keys of a childhood piano," snowflakes, drooping flowers, and other luminous and delicate things that can be kept only in memory—or art (Departures). If white keys are associated with innocence and loss, black keys suggest the complexity of mature experience. In "Anniversaries," a poem tracing the speaker's loss of certainty about his own destiny, the narrator recalls how unlike other seventeen-year-olds he was: while they played kickball, he pondered the neurosis of the governess in The Turn of the Screw and spent a year "lost / Somewhere among the black / Keys of Chopin … / Fingering his ripe heart" (The Summer Anniversaries).

Piano keys suggest another kind of self-expression in "The Suicides." The narrator muses on the life-long masquerade of acquaintances who surprised everyone by destroying themselves. They made certain that their friends would not really know them—yet they must have always been secretly furious at not being known and accepted for what they were. Speaking for their survivors, the narrator addresses the suicides, now in their coffins, as "musicians of the black keys," as if they were pianists—then, more chillingly, as if, being no longer human, they are boxed-up pianos angrily playing themselves for only themselves in death as they did in life: "At last you compose yourselves. / We hear the music raging / Under the lids we have closed" (Night Light). Eyes, cases, and selves are locked shut forever. Who can know the meaning of lives whose music is so muffled?

Justice uses the keys image again in "Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens," a tribute to a master and farewell to operatic poetry. Human activities and natural processes proceed in a world without Stevens; poets no longer imitate his "French words and postures." Yet "The poet practicing his scales / Thinks of you as his thumbs slip clumsily under and under, / Avoiding the darker notes" (Departures), Again the association of music, poetry, and memory. Here the "darker notes" suggest a level of creativity that only the artist with skill, experience, and courage can attempt. Apprentice pianists—and poets—must practice.

For Justice, poetry, music, and the other fine arts are means for making sense of experience. The artist does this for himself and his audience by composing. A poetic form "fixes" an occurrence, insight, or emotion so that it may be apprehended. Justice is convinced mat it is not the poet's business to expose himself in verse or other media. His association of the composing process with memory and music has apparently influenced his own techniques of composition and certainly given him a way of writing about his past and his art while maintaining aesthetic distance. A mature artist enjoying the benefits of his early finger exercises, Justice plays the white keys and the black.