Time & Perspective Quote by Rita Dove

Rita Dove hears the mandolin the way a poet hears a line: not as a single feeling, but as a chord where opposites keep rubbing against each other. “Cheerful and melancholy at the same time” is more than a tidy paradox. It’s a description of doubleness as a craft principle. The mandolin’s brightness is real, but it’s never unshadowed; the instrument is engineered to carry its own echo. By naming the “shadow string,” Dove turns a technical detail into a metaphor for how emotion works in art: the second string doesn’t merely reinforce the first, it complicates it, thickens it, gives it an afterimage.

The subtext is a quiet argument against simplistic moods. Dove’s work often moves through history and intimate life with a similar double register: pleasure haunted by what came before, beauty that knows its cost. The mandolin becomes a model for that sensibility. It’s not that sadness interrupts joy; they arrive fused, like paired strings struck together. That’s why the sound feels “curious” - it’s familiar happiness, but with a bruise-colored undertone you can’t ignore.

Context matters here: Dove is an American poet with an ear trained by music (and by the traditions she writes into and against). Her point isn’t romantic mysticism about instruments. It’s attentive listening as interpretation. She’s showing how the mechanics of a thing can explain the mechanics of feeling, and how art gets its power from the built-in “double” we usually try to smooth away.