Poetry Series: Week 5

This post was inspired by a few random thoughts which just happened to fit together quite well...yesterday in church, Pastor mentioned Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her sermon (one of my favorite poets!!!!), and I decided I wanted to use one of her poems for the poetry series today. However, my dear Miss Browning has so many amazing works to choose from, I couldn't decide which to use!....but then I remembered the music meme that's been circulating around many of our blogs, and I thought that I'd spotlight two wonderful poems of hers that focus on music....enjoy :)


A Musical Instrument
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river)
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

I think the most fantastic line in this poem is "The sun on the hill forgot to die/And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly/Came back to dream on the river." LOVE IT!

And here's another:

Perplexed Music
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

EXPERIENCE, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand,
Whence harmonies, we cannot understand,
Of God; will in his worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad-perplexed minors: deathly colds
Fall on us while we hear, and countermand
Our sanguine heart back from the fancyland
With nightingales in visionary wolds.
We murmur 'Where is any certain tune
Or measured music in such notes as these ? '
But angels, leaning from the golden seat,
Are not so minded their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed cadences,
And, smiling down the stars, they whisper--
SWEET.

I've never seen this poem until today, and I think it's just made itself one of my all-time favorites. The language is so absolutely beautiful; words like dulcimer and sanguine and countermand just give me goosebumps! And the overall idea of the poem...that God blesses the world with such unbelievable beauty that often, our human eyes and ears can't even begin to comprehend it... my favorite part of this poem is easily the end: "And, smiling down the stars, they whisper --/SWEET." oooooooooh....*happy sigh*