Seven Poems on the Power of Music

By Various Authors

May 21, 2022

Amy Lowell

’T is you that are the music, not your song.

The song is but a door which, opening wide,

Lets forth the pent-up melody inside,

Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong

Sing but of you. Throughout your whole life long

Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide

This perfect beauty; waves within a tide,

Or single notes amid a glorious throng.

The song of earth has many different chords;

Ocean has many moods and many tones

Yet always ocean. In the damp Spring woods

The painted trillium smiles, while crisp pine cones

Autumn alone can ripen. So is this

One music with a thousand cadences.

Amy Lowell (1824–1925) was an American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously in 1926.

To Music: A Song

Robert Herrick

Music, thou queen of heaven, care-charming spell,

That strik’st a stillness into hell;

Thou that tam’st tigers, and fierce storms, that rise,

With thy soul-melting lullabies;

Fall down, down, down, from those thy chiming spheres

To charm our souls, as thou enchant’st our ears.

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was an English lyric poet and cleric best known for his poetry volume Hesperides.

Music

Walter de la Mare

When music sounds, gone is the earth I know,

And all her lovely things even lovelier grow;

Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees

Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.

When music sounds, out of the water rise

Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes,

Rapt in strange dreams burns each enchanted face,

With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.

When music sounds, all that I was I am

Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came;

And from Time’s woods break into distant song

The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet, novelist, and short story writer.

Sonnet 8

William Shakespeare

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:

Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,

By unions married, do offend thine ear,

They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;

Resembling sire and child and happy mother,

Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,

Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language.

On Music

Thomas Moore

When through life unblest we rove,

Losing all that made life dear,

Should some notes we used to love,

In days of boyhood, meet our ear,

Oh! how welcome breathes the strain!

Wakening thoughts that long have slept,

Kindling former smiles again

In faded eyes that long have wept.

Like the gale, that sighs along

Beds of oriental flowers,

Is the grateful breath of song,

That once was heard in happier hours.

Fill’d with balm the gale sighs on,

Though the flowers have sunk in death;

So, when pleasure’s dream is gone,

Its memory lives in Music’s breath.

Music, oh, how faint, how weak,

Language fades before thy spell!

Why should Feeling ever speak,

When thou canst breathe her soul so well?

Friendship’s balmy words may feign,

Love’s are even more false than they;

Oh! ’tis only music’s strain

Can sweetly soothe, and not betray.

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was a celebrated Irish writer, poet, and lyricist whose Irish Melodies popularized much English-language verse by setting it to Irish tunes.

The Strange Music

G. K. Chesterton

Other loves may sink and settle, other loves may loose and slack,

But I wander like a minstrel with a harp upon his back,

Though the harp be on my bosom, though I finger and I fret,

Still, my hope is all before me: for I cannot play it yet.

In your strings is hid a music that no hand hath e’er let fall,

In your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;

Pleasure subtle as your spirit, strange and slender as your frame,

Fiercer than the pain that folds you, softer than your sorrow’s name.

Not as mine, my soul’s annointed, not as mine the rude and light

Easy mirth of many faces, swaggering pride of song and fight;

Something stranger, something sweeter, something waiting you afar,

Secret as your stricken senses, magic as your sorrows are.

But on this, God’s harp supernal, stretched but to be stricken once,

Hoary time is a beginner, Life a bungler, Death a dunce.

But I will not fear to match them-no, by God, I will not fear,

I will learn you, I will play you and the stars stand still to hear.

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English author, philosopher, and arts critic.

Alexander’s Feast; or, the Power of Music

A song in honour of St. Cecilia’s day, 1697

John Dryden

’Twas at the royal feast for Persia won

By Philip’s warlike son—

Aloft in awful state

The godlike hero sate

On his imperial throne;

His valiant peers were placed around,

Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound

(So should desert in arms be crown’d);

The lovely Thais by his side

Sate like a blooming Eastern bride

In flower of youth and beauty’s pride:—

Happy, happy, happy pair!

None but the brave

None but the brave deserves the fair!

Timotheus placed on high

Amid the tuneful quire

With flying fingers touch’d the lyre:

The trembling notes ascend the sky

And heavenly joys inspire.

The song began from Jove

Who left his blissful seats above

Such is the power of mighty love!

A dragon’s fiery form belied the god;

Sublime on radiant spires he rode

When he to fair Olympia prest,

And while he sought her snowy breast,

Then round her slender waist he curl’d,

And stamp’d an image of himself, a sovereign of the world.

The listening crowd admire the lofty sound;

A present deity! they shout around:

A present deity! the vaulted roofs rebound:

With ravish’d ears

The monarch hears,

Assumes the god;

Affects to nod,

And seems to shake the spheres.

The praise of Bacchus then the sweet musician sung,

Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young:

The jolly god in triumph comes;

Sound the trumpets, beat the drums!

Flush’d with a purple grace

He shows his honest face:

Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes!

Bacchus, ever fair and young,

Drinking joys did first ordain;

Bacchus’ blessings are a treasure,

Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure:

Rich the treasure,

Sweet the pleasure,

Sweet is pleasure after pain.

Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain;

Fought all his battles o’er again,

And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain!

The master saw the madness rise,

His glowing cheeks, his ardent eyes;

And while he Heaven and Earth defied

Changed his hand and check’d his pride.

He chose a mournful Muse

Soft pity to infuse:

He sung Darius great and good,

By too severe a fate

Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,

Fallen from his high estate.

And weltering in his blood;

Deserted at his utmost need

By those his former bounty fed;

On the bare earth exposed he lies

With not a friend to close his eyes.

With downcast looks the joyless victor sate,

Revolving in his alter’d soul

The various turns of chance below;

And now and then a sigh he stole,

And tears began to flow.

The mighty master smiled to see

That love was in the next degree;

’Twas but a kindred sound to move,

For pity melts the mind to love.

Softly sweet, in Lydian measures

Soon he soothed his soul to pleasures.

War, he sung, is toil and trouble,

Honour but an empty bubble;

Never ending, still beginning,

Fighting still, and still destroying;

If the world be worth thy winning,

Think, O think, it worth enjoying:

Lovely Thais sits beside thee,

Take the good the gods provide thee!

The many rend the skies with loud applause;

So Love was crown’d, but Music won the cause.

The prince, unable to conceal his pain,

Gazed on the fair

Who caused his care,

And sigh’d and look’d, sigh’d and look’d,

Sigh’d and look’d, and sigh’d again:

At length with love and wine at once opprest

The vanquish’d victor sunk upon her breast.

Now strike the golden lyre again:

A louder yet, and yet a louder strain!

Break his bands of sleep asunder

And rouse him like a rattling peal of thunder.

Hark, hark! the horrid sound

Has raised up his head:

As awaked from the dead

And amazed he stares around.

Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries,

See the Furies arise!

See the snakes that they rear

How they hiss in their hair,

And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!

Behold a ghastly band,

Each a torch in his hand!

Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain

And unburied remain

Inglorious on the plain:

Give the vengeance due

To the valiant crew!

Behold how they toss their torches on high,

How they point to the Persian abodes

And glittering temples of their hostile gods.

The princes applaud with a furious joy:

And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;

Thais led the way

To light him to his prey,

And like another Helen, fired another Troy!

Thus, long ago,

Ere heaving bellows learn’d to blow,

While organs yet were mute,

Timotheus, to his breathing flute

And sounding lyre

Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.

At last divine Cecilia came.

Inventress of the vocal frame;

The sweet enthusiast from her sacred store

Enlarged the former narrow bounds,

And added length to solemn sounds,

With Nature’s mother-wit, and arts unknown before.

Let old Timotheus yield the prize,

Or both divide the crown;

He raised a mortal to the skies,

She drew an angel down!

John Dryden (1631–1700) was the leading poet and literary critic of his day, and he served as the first official poet laureate of England.