Music's Spell: Poems About Music and Musicians [Hardcover]

Music may be the universal language that needs no words—the “language where all language ends,” as Rilke put it—but that has not stopped poets from ancient times to the present from trying to represent it in verse.

Here are Rumi and Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop and Billy Collins; the wild pipes of William Blake, the weeping guitars of Federico García Lorca, and the jazz rhythms of Langston Hughes; Wallace Stevens on Mozart and Thom Gunn on Elvis—the range of poets and of their approaches to the subject is as wide and varied as music itself.

The poems are divided into sections on pop and rock, jazz and blues, specific composers and works, various musical instruments, the human voice, the connection between music and love, and music at the close of life. The result is a symphony of poetic voices of all tenors and tones, the perfect gift for all musicians and music lovers.Foreword

THE POWER OF MUSIC
William ShakespeareFromThe Tempest
William CongreveFromThe Mourning Bride
Rainer Maria RilkeTo Music
Walt Whitman“That music always round me”
Percy Bysshe ShelleyTwo Fragments:
Music And Sweet Poetry
To Music
John DrydenFromA Song for St Cecilia’s Day
William Butler YeatsA Crazed Girl
Walter De La MareMusic
Amy LowellMusic
Robert HerrickTo Music, to Becalm His Fever
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeFromThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Elizabeth BishopSonnet
John MiltonFromAt a Solemn Musick
Robert HerrickTo Musick
Walt WhitmanA Song of Joys
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeFromDejection: An Ode
Ben Jonson“Slow, slow, fresh fount”
Czeslaw MiloszIn Music
George HerbertChurch-Musick
Henry VaughanThe Morning Watch
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningPerplel3œ