Cross by Adam Soper

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

The guitar is representative of the crucifixion, the wood structured to spatially indicate the four cardinal points, or the four material elements. Christ is represented on the instrument by the strings, tensioned across these four points as a bridging, unifying force, but anchored to them by the nails (on the guitar this is the tuning pegs and the bridge, ensuring that ‘Christ’ maintains its ‘correct’ tension). The six strings of the guitar can be seen as a combining of God and man, just as Christ was, six is equal to two lots of three (two as the duality of man, where three is the holy trinity), six is also half of the zodiac, and half of the guitar’s octave (12 notes). In a ‘standard’ tuned guitar, the six strings are not tuned to six separate notes however, only to five with the first and sixth strings equal in pitch (although divided by two octaves), this can stand in once more for Christ as unifier of the material and spiritual, much like occult interpretations of the pentagram of the four material elements joined to spirit; or the four letters of the tetragrammaton Y H V Y (the A, D, G, and B strings), plus the one divided in two of the human duality (the two E strings).

Adam Soper is an improviser, performer and composer based in the North East of England