Echoes and Remembrance

Contents

“How Sweet The Answer” (Thomas Moore)
“Harp of Wild and Dream-like Strain” (Emily Brontë)
“At Ostend, July 22nd 1787” (William Lisle Bowes)
“When I Am Dead, My Dearest” (Christina Rossetti)
“Music, When Soft Voices Die” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Listen

“How Sweet The Answer”

 

“Harp of Wild and Dream-like Strain”

 

“At Ostend, July 22nd 1787”

 

“When I Am Dead, My Dearest”

 

“Music, When Soft Voices Die”

Poems

I Thomas Moore

How sweet the answer echo makes to music at night,
And, roused by lute or horn, she wakes,
And far away o’er lawns and lakes goes answering light:

Yet love half echoes truer far and far more sweet
Than e’er, beneath the moonlight’s star,
Of horn or lute or soft guitar the songs repeat.

‘Tis when the sigh – in youth sincere and only then –
The sigh that’s breathed for one to hear,
Is by that one, that only dear breathed back again.

II Emily Brontë

Harp of wild and dream-like strain, when I touch thy strings,
Why dost thou repeat again long-forgotten things?

Harp, in other, earlier days, I could sing to thee;
And not one of all my lays vexed my memory.

But now, if I awake a note that gave me joy before,
Sounds of sorrow from thee float, changing evermore.

Yet, still steeped in memory’s dyes, they come sailing on,
Darkening all my summer skies, shutting out my sun.

III William Lisle Bowes

How sweet the tuneful bells’ responsive peal!
As when at opening morn the fragrant breeze
Breathes on the trembling sense of wan disease
So piercing to my heart their force I feel!
And hark! With lessening cadence now they fall.
And now along the white and level tide
They fling their melancholy music wide
Bidding me many a tender thought recall
Of summer days and those delightful years
When by my native streams, in life’s fair prime
The mournful magic of their mingling chime
First waked my wondering childhood into tears!
But seeming now when all those days are o’er
The sounds of joy once heard, and heard no more.

IV Christina Rossetti

When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me with showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight that does not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.

V Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.

Instrumentation	Harp and Voice
Genre	Original
Composer	Marson, John
Artist	Dall’Olio, Gabriella
Level	Advanced
Harp Type	Pedal Harp
Collection	Collection