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By the yawning tree in the twilight
The King unbound his sword,
Severed the harp of all his goods,
And there in the cool and soundless woods
Sounded a single chord.
--
G. K. Chesterton, describing Alfred going incognito about England as a harpist, in The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), Book III : The Harp of Alfred

 

Alfred the Great

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Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.

 

Hermann Hesse

 

Into the woods, my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him,
The little gray leaves were kind to Him:
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him,
When into the woods He came.

 

Jesus Christ

 

Grant us the single heart once more
That mocks no sacred thing,
The Sword of Truth our fathers wore
When Thou wast Lord and King.

 

Alfred Noyes

 

On the harp of the road what true melodies are being sounded! and its notes pierce the heart:
There the Eternal Fountain is playing its endless life-streams of birth and death.

 

Kabir

 

I'm not terribly interested in playing harp on other people's music right now. Partly because I feel like many people view the harp as this kind of gimmick. You know, like they have songs that are fully realized, complete songs, and then they think "How do we make this special? - Ooh, let's bring the harp in!" and they kind of want a harpist to play a glissando and play some heavenly noise in the background. I'm really interested in the harp as a fully actualized, self-contained way of presenting songs. That there is a bass in the harp - there is a way to create a rhythmic sense without drums - there's a way to have all sorts of textural variations and expressive variations.
I also don't want to feel bound to the harp, I'd be interested in bringing other instruments in at some time. But I think the harp has been viewed in one particular way for so long, and has been limited for so long, that I feel like I am really interested in stretching the boundaries of what it's capable of doing and how it's perceived.

 

Joanna Newsom