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To A Musician

by Sir John Collings Squire

Musician, with the bent and brooding face,

White brow and thunderous eyes: you are not playing

Merely the music that dead hand did trace.

Musician, with the lifted resolute face,

And scornful smile about your closed mouth straying,

And hand that moves with swift or fluttering grace,

It is not that man's music you are playing.

The grave and merry tunes he made you are playing,

Each march and dirge and dance he made endures,

But changed and mastered, and these things you're saying,

These joys and sorrows are not his but yours.

You take those notes of his: you seize and fling

His music as a dancer flings her veil,

Toss it and twist it, mould it, make it sing,

Whisper, shout savagely, lament and wail,

Rush like a hurricane, pause and faint and fail:

And as I watch, my body and soul are bound

Helpless, immovable, in thongs of sound.

Lonely and strange musician, standing there,

Your bent ear listening to your own soul speaking,

I hear vibrating on the smitten air

The crying of your suffering and your seeking.

Agonised! raptured! frustrate! you are haunted,

Pursued, beset, beleaguered, filled, possessed

By all you are, all things you have lost and wanted,

Things clear, too clear, things only to be guessed.

I do not know what earlier scenes you knew,

What sweet reproachful memories you hold

Of broken dreams you had before you grew

So conscious and so lonely and so old.

I do not know what women's words have taught

Your heart, and only dimly know by name,

The many wandering cities where you have sought

Splendour, and found the hollowness of fame,

Or where your sad and gentle reveries pass

To family and home, who have for signs

Of all your childhood, only the imagined grass

Of a bright steppe, the wind running in lines,

And only some old fairy-tale of sleighing,

Dark snow-deep forests, endless turning pines,

Bells tinkling, and wolves howling, and hounds baying.

Vague is your past, yet as your violin sings,

Its wildness held in desperate control,

I know them all, that world of bygone things

That have left their wounds and wonders in your soul.

Out in all weathers you have been, my friend,

Climbed into dawn, stood solitary and stark

Against the ashen quiet of twilight's end,

Brooded beneath the night's unanswering dark;

Through battering tempests you have blindly won,

And lived, and found a medicine for your scars

In resolution taken from the sun

And consolation from the unsleeping stars.

And here, in this crowded place an hour staying,

Your dim orchestra measuring off your bars,

So pale and proud, you stand your secrets flaying,

Resolving the tangle, pouring through your song

All your deep ache for Beauty, calm above

Your bitter silent anger and the strong

Ferocity and tenderness of your love,

Loud challenges and sweet and cynic laughter,

Movements of joy spontaneous and pure,

Remorse, and the dull grief that glimmers after

The obstinate sins you know you will not cure.

I see you subtly lying, soberly weighing

Gross questions, jesting at the things you hate,

In apathy, and wild despair, and praying

Bowed down before the shadowy knees of Fate,

And fearfully behind the visible groping

And standing by the heart's bottomless pit, and shrinking,

Who have known the lure and mockery of hoping,

The comic terrible uselessness of thinking.

O gay and passionate, gloomy and serene,

Your quivering fingers laugh and weep and curse

For all the phantoms you have ever been.

Yet would you wish another universe?

Let peace come if it will: your last long note

Dies on the quiet breast of space; and now

They clap: I see again your square frock coat,

Dark, foreign fiddler, you have stopped: you bow.