Chamber Music

Chapter 4: III

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About This Book

A sequence of short lyric poems fashioned as intimate, songlike pieces that employ musical cadences and delicate diction to probe longing, desire, and romantic melancholy. Many poems address an absent beloved or a remembered moment, transforming emotion into images of night, river, garden, star, and instrument. Tones shift from playful flirtation to wistful regret, with recurring motifs of waiting, sleep and consolation. The collection favors melodic rhythm and pastoral tableaux, presenting variations on anticipation and loss rather than a continuous narrative.

III

At that hour when all things have repose,
    O lonely watcher of the skies,
    Do you hear the night wind and the sighs
Of harps playing unto Love to unclose
    The pale gates of sunrise?

When all things repose, do you alone
    Awake to hear the sweet harps play
    To Love before him on his way,
And the night wind answering in antiphon
    Till night is overgone?

Play on, invisible harps, unto Love,
    Whose way in heaven is aglow
    At that hour when soft lights come and go,
Soft sweet music in the air above
    And in the earth below.