Claude Debussy: Reflets dans l'eau (Reflections in the water), from Images, Book I, 1905.

Not just an onomatopoetic water piece, Debussy is interested in imitating not just water sounds, but reflections on water, that is, pictures that float, which don't necessarily make noises, so the challenge is greater than mere burbles, trickles, and raindrops. Such sounds in nature conjure up a picture in our mind of falling water, or droplets on ponds, or fountains. Debussy is interested in surviewing his contents, that is, in suggesting the pictures by the sounds, so obvious water sounds come to fabricate less and less obvious pictures which move and ripple on the water, monsters of the id rising from the deep, where sounds stand in for pictures, interpretations of nature, even philosophy. Music is transformed into grammar, into meaning. Judgements are handed down, a world is set in motion.

    The bittersweet calm of random drips grows vaster until it rains, a great guilt or terror arises from below until it becomes almost too intense, and suddenly random wind clears the pond's palette of past memories, a great discordant crisis is reached, flung outside the world of the pond by wild key progressions, and then the drips recur, wiser, sadder, in the great distance, until the final splash is an answer to the unanswerable riddle Debussy has posed, as if the answer to existential void were an almost religious comfort, the reassuring luxe, calme, and volupté of nature. The same drips which ask the questions answer them.

    Richard Wilbur has written a poem about a mid-winter thaw, a brief false summer, which captures the exact spirit of Debussy's reflections.