To --. '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 heaped for the beloved's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.
Words in this poem
- sicken v. t.
- To make sick; to disease.
- shall v. i.
- To owe; to be under obligation for. [OE. shal, schal, imp. sholde, scholde, AS. scal, sceal, I am obliged, imp. scolde, sceolde, inf. sculan; akin to OS. skulan, pres. skal, imp. skolda, D. zullen,]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
To --. 'Music, when soft voices die' is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 2, Project Gutenberg ebook #4798; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Percy Bysshe Shelley, To --. 'Music, when soft voices die', in Ode to the West Wind, and Other Poems (1816–1819), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #4798, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/shelley-later-poems/to-music-when-soft-voices-die.html, id L25652.
Form and metre
To --. 'Music, when soft voices die' is 8 lines in 2 stanzas of 4 lines each. The metre is trochaic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 86%).
See other poems in trochaic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 --AA die · memory · sickenA · quickenA
- 2 AABB deadA · bedA · goneB · onB
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against trochaic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Music, when soft voices die, | 7 | /˘··/˘· |
| Vibrates in the memory-- | 7 | /˘··/˘˘ |
| Odours, when sweet violets sicken, | 8 | /˘··/˘/˘ |
| Live within the sense they quicken. | 8 | ······/˘ |
| Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, | 7 | ······· |
| Are heaped for the beloved's bed; | 7 | ····˘/· |
| And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, | 8 | ········ |
| Love itself shall slumber on. | 7 | ·˘/·/˘· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.