Few poems ask so much of music in so few words. Robert Herrick, the seventeenth-century English poet and clergyman, gives it six lines and a series of orders. The speaker is not a passive listener. He tells music exactly what to do to him, and in what sequence: first move me to tears, then drive me wild, then bring me back to calm. The central idea is that music's power over us is something we can want, even demand. The speaker is a willing victim who has planned the whole emotional journey.
The poem is built in three rhyming couplets, and each couplet is one stage of that journey. The first is tenderness: "melt me into tears." The second is violence of feeling, as the "active hand" hurries across the lyre and makes his "spirits frantic with the fire." The third is release, a "silvery strain" that leaves him "smooth as balm and oil again." The form matches the content. Each pair of lines is a self-contained movement, and the three together make a small composition with a slow opening, a fast middle and a slow close. The metre is regular iambic pentameter, which keeps the poem controlled. That control is a kind of joke, because the speaker is asking to be thrown into frenzy while the verse itself stays perfectly in step.
The verbs carry most of the drama. Nearly every line opens on a command: "Begin," "let," "That done," "And make." Music is addressed as "thou," as if it were a person or a powerful servant, and the speaker is oddly bossy for someone about to be overwhelmed. "That done" is almost businesslike, like a customer ticking off items on a list. The politeness of the order is part of the charm, since he asks for passion in the tone of someone giving instructions.
The imagery works through the body and through changes of state. In the first line music "strok'st mine ears," so a sound becomes a touch, and the listener is caressed rather than merely addressed. Then he "melts," so he becomes liquid, and the tears are the proof. The second couplet turns to fire, and the rhyme of "lyre" with "fire" fuses the instrument and the flame. The word "scud" suits this, because it suggests something driven fast, like clouds before the wind, and the line itself seems to hurry. "Frantic" is a strong word for a pleasure, since it suggests losing one's reason, yet the speaker asks for it.
The last couplet answers the first two with a different kind of liquid. The melting of tears becomes the "balm and oil" of healing. The sounds change to match. The line "sink down into a silvery strain" is full of soft, hissing s sounds and the vowels slow down, so the music seems to settle as we read. "Smooth as balm and oil" is smoother still, with its m, b and l sounds. Because Herrick was a clergyman, a reader might also hear a faint echo of anointing in "oil," though that is an inference from the imagery rather than something the poem states.
The final word, "again," is worth lingering on. It means the speaker is returned to where he began, with the tears and fire spent. It could also suggest a pattern he already knows and wants repeated. Music, in this picture, is a kind of cure that works by first stirring things up. It lets feeling rise to its height and then smooths it away. Few people would describe a song's effect more neatly.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so small a space. It has a complete emotional arc in six lines, a clear sense of music as a physical force, and a speaker with a distinct personality: eager, a little commanding, and entirely at ease with surrender. It also shows that a short poem can enact its subject. The poem, like the music it describes, begins gently, speeds up, and then eases to a close.