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Where the repetitions of ordinary life threaten to overwhelm any sense of the sublime,

the poet Conrad Aiken seems to suggest that they can be transformed into a way of being connected to it. The mundane order is, after all,

just a part of the cosmic order. When we get ready to go to work, it is on a, quote,

swiftly tilting planet that bathes in a flame of space.

The sun is far off in a shell of silence, but its light decorates the walls of our homes.

But we might wonder, in light of modernity's crisis of faith, if the sublime is meant to replace the divine,

and if so, whether what Aiken calls humble

offerings to a cloud of silence are enough. Today we're discussing Aiken's Morning Song of

Sondland and whether humanity's religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic

or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale.

This is Wes Alwyn.

And this is Aaron Olonik.

And you're listening to Subtext.

So, Aaron, I didn't ask you before suggesting this episode, so I don't really know what you think of Conrad Aiken, how much you've

looked at Conrad Aiken, what your experience is with Conrad Aiken. So I thought I'd just start out by

asking that. I'd never read anything by him until I read this poem, though I'd heard of him.

And I also, I believe I took a picture of his bench in the Savannah Cemetery for you.

Bonaventure. Yeah, Bonaventure. Okay. Yeah. So I knew, I knew enough to know that he was from Savannah

...