Pain, this sonnet suggests, is music heard too early. Elizabeth Barrett Browning turns Experience, the sum of what life does to us, into a "pale musician" who holds "a dulcimer of patience" and plays harmonies "we cannot understand." The tune comes out in "sad-perplexed minors," and the listeners, chilled and confused, decide it has no pattern at all. Only in the final word, whispered by angels, does the poem reveal that a pattern exists and that we have not yet heard far enough to find it.
The opening image is gentler than we might expect. Experience is not a tyrant or a punisher but a tired craftsman with a single modest instrument in his hand. A dulcimer is played softly, string by string, and its material here is "patience," which implies that the music can only be played slowly. The word "pale" adds a sense of weariness, as if the musician has suffered through the tune himself.
The rest of the octave describes what that music does to us, and the language turns physical and military. "Deathly colds / Fall on us," like weather arriving. Then the music "countermand[s]" our "sanguine heart," a word that means both hopeful and warm-blooded. Countermanding is an officer's act, an order reversed, so the heart is marched back from "the fancyland / With nightingales in visionary wolds." That coinage, "fancyland," sounds like a child's name for a place, and it makes our optimism seem charming but unreal. The rhyme reinforces the idea. Only two rhyme sounds run through the eight lines, and "understand," "countermand" and "fancyland" share a sound. Our failure to understand, the order to retreat and the lost dream are bound together by the poem's own music.
That leads to the poem's neatest irony. The speakers complain that they cannot find "any certain tune / Or measured music," yet the poem making the complaint is tightly measured. It is a sonnet in iambic pentameter, with a strict octave rhyme scheme (ABBAABBA), and the one rhythmic stumble comes in the first line, where "EXPERIENCE" lands with a heavy stress that puts the abstract noun in charge from the start. The form itself argues that order can sit inside what feels like chaos.
The turn comes at "We murmur." The verb is small and grumbling, and the question that follows spills across a line break as though the speakers are unsure how to finish it. The sestet's rhymes then behave like unresolved music. "Tune" and "won," and "these" and "cadences," only half-rhyme, so the ear is left slightly short of satisfaction. The full rhyme arrives at the very end, when "seat" meets "SWEET." The poem has delivered the resolution it describes.
The angels are the only ones who know how the piece ends. Their "fine ear hath won / The issue of completed cadences." Here "won" suggests that the hearing is earned, and "issue" means outcome, while a cadence is the musical phrase that closes a passage and brings it to rest. We hear the middle of the piece and they hear the close. The detail that they are "leaning from the golden seat" makes them attentive listeners, and when they are "smiling down the stars" the light of the stars seems to carry their smile. Then comes the dash, the pause, and one word in capitals. Capitals usually mean shouting, but the speakers are whispering. The paradox suits the poem. The consolation is large but quiet, and the gap before it works like the silence before a final chord.
What gives the poem its force is that it does not rush to comfort. The cold is allowed to be "deathly," and the doubt gets its own line in the speakers' question. The reassurance comes from angels rather than from the speakers, so it is offered as a hope to be trusted, not a fact proved. The poem asks us to accept that being confused by suffering is a matter of where we stand in the music, and that the confusion does not mean there is no tune.