Word: lyre
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Orpheus, son of Apollo, played his lyre so well that birds and beasts were stilled and oak trees moved from their places to listen. Even Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of Hades, was lulled to sleep when the musician tried to bring Eurydice back from the dead. Jealous Thracian maidens killed Orpheus who was buried in Libethra where the nightingales are supposed to sing more sweetly than in any other part of Greece. He is remembered as the God of Music...
...Saarinen invited Sculptor Milles to teach and work at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in pleasant, rolling Bloomfield Hills, near Detroit. There Carl Milles created his huge Orpheus fountain which many of his admirers consider the greatest of his great work.* Milles modeled an Orpheus descending from Heaven, his lyre resting on his left shoulder, his right hand plucking its invisible strings. Directly beneath Orpheus a stylized Cerberus is about to doze off into careless sleep. Around the rim of the fountain nude figures are arrested in various postures by the strains of Orpheus' music. A very young girl...
Poet Frank Ernest Hill's The Westward Star, a narrative of covered-wagon days, points to another U.S. epic that has yet to be given definitive form. Poet Hill plucks his lyre with a surer hand. Though few would compare him with Homer, many would place him close to Masefield. A wagon train bound for the West, just before the days of the gold rush, comes safely through the central prairies, then divides, some for Oregon, some for the shorter but more dangerous trail to Cali fornia. To get her daughter Celeste away from Emmet, a rough-&-ready Westerner...
...well, but Charles Laughton, as the fat, indolent Nero, gives the picture its life blood. See him reclining after a heavy night of delicious debauchery while he puffs for breath as slaves manicure him, listen to him say "go away now," watch his eyes as he wildly strums the lyre as Rome burns and you will be convinced that he is one of the best actors that have gone to Hollywood without being robbed of their dramatic talent. He is much better than in "Devil and the Deep," where he played a more active role...
There are many today who would fill the place with patriotic dullness; John Masefield can, it is to be hoped, pluck the lyre of the Empire with greater else than some of his predecessors. The late Robert Bridges often refused to sing; may his successor follow the same path. There are more things for a Laureate to do than merely to chirp either at the royal or even the national behest. The position is as much one of honor as a lease upon his genius, and should it deprive us of the vigorous Masefield, and give us a patriotic poet...