The Aeolian Harp (1888, Melville)

 In the Odyssey, Aeolus' kingdom of Aeolia was purely mythical, a floating island surrounded by "a wall of unbreakable bronze".  

Later writers came to associate Aeolia with one of the Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily. 

 

   

The Aeolian Harp

At The Surf Inn,  by Herman Melville 

List the harp in window wailing

  Stirred by fitful gales from sea:

Shrieking up in mad crescendo—

  Dying down in plaintive key!

Listen: less a strain ideal

Than Ariel's rendering of the Real.

  What that Real is, let hint

  A picture stamped in memory's mint.

Braced well up, with beams aslant,

Betwixt the continents sails the Phocion,

For Baltimore bound from Alicant.

Blue breezy skies white fleeces fleck

Over the chill blue white-capped ocean:

From yard-arm comes—"Wreck ho, a

    wreck!"

Dismasted and adrift,

Longtime a thing forsaken;

Overwashed by every wave

Like the slumbering kraken;

Heedless if the billow roar,

Oblivious of the lull,

Leagues and leagues from shoal or shore,

It swims—a levelled hull:

Bulwarks gone—a shaven wreck,

Nameless and a grass-green deck.

A lumberman: perchance, in hold

Prostrate pines with hemlocks rolled.

It has drifted, waterlogged,

Till by trailing weeds beclogged:

  Drifted, drifted, day by day,

  Pilotless on pathless way.

It has drifted till each plank

Is oozy as the oyster-bank:

  Drifted, drifted, night by night,

  Craft that never shows a light;

Nor ever, to prevent worse knell,

Tolls in fog the warning bell.

From collision never shrinking,

Drive what may through darksome smother;

Saturate, but never sinking,

Fatal only to the other!

  Deadlier than the sunken reef

Since still the snare it shifteth,

  Torpid in dumb ambuscade

Waylayingly it drifteth.

O, the sailors—O, the sails!

O, the lost crews never heard of!

Well the harp of Ariel wails

Thought that tongue can tell no word of!

In Greek mythology, Aeolus (Ancient Greek: Αἴολος, Aiolos), 

" the son of Hippotes, was the ruler of the winds encountered by Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey. Aeolus was the king of the island of Aeolia, where he lived with his wife and six sons and six daughters.  

To ensure safe passage home for Odysseus and his men, Aeolus gave Odysseus a bag containing all the winds, except the gentle west wind.  

But when almost home, Odysseus' men, thinking the bag contained treasure, opened it and they were all driven by the winds back to Aeolia.  

Believing that Odysseus must evidently be hated by the gods, Aeolus sent him away without further help" 

An Aeolian harp (also wind harp) is a musical instrument that is played by the wind. Named after Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the wind, the traditional Aeolian harp is essentially a wooden box including a sounding board, with strings stretched lengthwise across two bridges. 

 It is often placed in a slightly opened window where the wind can blow across the strings to produce sounds. 

 The strings can be made of different materials (or thicknesses) and all be tuned to the same pitch, or identical strings can be tuned to different pitches. 

The harp is driven by the von Kármán vortex street effect.  

The motion of the wind across a string causes periodic vortices downstream, and this alternating vortex causes the string to vibrate.  

Lord Rayleigh first solved the mystery of the Aeolian harp in a paper published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1915. 

The effect can sometimes be observed in overhead utility lines, fast enough to be heard or slow enough to be seen 

The effect results in Aeolian harps only producing overtones. Were the strings plucked, they would produce the fundamental frequency in addition to several overtones. 

When the string oscillates due to the wind, though, it always does so in fractions such as halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, and so on. 

 This naturally produces overtones, most commonly the third, octave, and twelfth, without resulting in the fundamental frequency being played 

Aeolian harps have been featured and mentioned in a number of poems. These include at least four Romantic-era poems: "The Eolian Harp" and "Dejection, an Ode", both by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and "Mutability" and "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

The former of these two appears alongside his essay "A Defence of Poetry". Henry David Thoreau also wrote a poem called "Rumors from an Aeolian Harp", which he included in the "Monday" chapter of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. 

Aeolian harps have also been mentioned in several novels. These include George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2), Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major (1880) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), and Lawrence Durell's novel "Clea" (fourth book of the Alexandrian Quartet) (1960). James Joyce had a short section "O, Harp Eolian!" in the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses (1922).[12] More recently, an Aeolian harp was also featured in Ian Fleming's 1964 children's novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang to make a cave seem haunted.  

In the Mimbres Valley of New Mexico, there is an Aeolian Harp, titled Tempest Song, exceeding seven metres in height.  

Tempest Song is similar in appearance to a standard harp with 45 strings tuned to the C minor pentatonic scale and a central bearing originally being from a semi-truck..

It was built by Bob Griesing and Bill Neely in June and July 2000, and at the time was mistakenly declared the "World's Largest Aeolian Harp". 

An even larger Aeolian harp, measuring in at eight metres tall, can be found at the Exploratorium, a museum in San Francisco. 

This harp was built in 1976 by Douglas Hollis, a local artist. Its volume is amplified by two metal disks placed on one side of it. In addition, a natural wind tunnel ensures enough wind is passing over the harp's seven high-pitched strings