"Music, When Soft Voices Die" first appeared in Posthumous Poems, John and Henry L. Hunt, London, 1824.
First published in
Posthumous Poems
Subject(s)
Endurance of the memories of events and of sensations
Publisher
John and Henry L. Hunt
Publication date
1824 (1824)
Lines
8
"Music, When Soft Voices Die" is a major poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1824 in London by John and Henry L. Hunt with a preface by Mary Shelley.[1] The poem is one of the most anthologised, influential, and well-known of Shelley's works.[2][3]
Text
Music, When Soft Voices Die
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
Summary
The poem was published as "To---" in 1824 under Miscellaneous Poems in Posthumous Poems. It is composed of two stanzas containing two couplets each.
The theme of the poem is the endurance of the memories of events and of sensations.[4]
Mary Shelley edited the poems and wrote the preface to the collection. She described the poems: "Many of the Miscellaneous Poems, written on the spur of the occasion, and never retouched, I found among his manuscript books, and have carefully copied: I have subjoined, whenever I have been able, the date of their composition."[5][6][7][8]
^
Palgrave, Francis T., ed. The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, selected and arranged with notes by Francis Turner Palgrave. London: Macmillan, 1875.
^Havens, Raymond D. "Structure and Prosodic Pattern in Shelley's Lyrics". PMLA, Vol. 65, No. 6 (December 1950), pp. 1076–1087.
^Massey, Irving. "Shelley's 'Music, When Soft Voices Die': Text and Meaning." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 59, No. 3 (July 1960), pp. 430–438.
^Unterecker, John. "Shelley's 'To ---(Music, When Soft Voices Die')." Explicator, XV (1957), item 26.
^Hirsch, E. D., Jr. "Further Comment on 'Music, When Soft Voices Die'." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 60, No. 2 (April 1961), pp. 296–298.