Stevenson, the Scottish author of *Treasure Island*, is not the first name that comes to mind for yearning, devotional verse, yet this double sonnet turns a stretch of listening into something close to a prayer. A listener hears chords roll out, feels his troubles fall away, and almost at once wants more than relief. He wants the music to take him somewhere he can never stay.
The opening gives the music the force of a natural power. The chords seem to flow from "some abiding central source of power" and "carry virtue" in the older sense of strength. Beneath them, "the vain tumultuous passions of the hour / Fleet fast and disappear." The central image is a simile of weather: as sunlight falls on "the wake of tempests," so a "strong contentment" falls over "the shattered ruins of my past." The speaker's inner life is a wrecked landscape after a storm. Notice, though, that the contentment is only "as of battles won." It is a feeling like victory, not a victory, and the poem soon exposes the gap.
That exposure comes with "And yet I cry in anguish." The music is a "long drawn pageant" moving "magnificently forth into the night," and what hurts is that it is leaving. It comes from a "fair land" and a "sphere / Of strength and love," and the speaker begs it to take him along. The refrain, "O even wings of music, bear my soul!", is well chosen. "Even" means smooth and level, the opposite of the "tumultuous" passions below.
The construction supports this. The poem is really two sonnets, each with an octave and a sestet, in steady iambic pentameter that matches the "steady chords." The first octave rhymes ABBA CDDC and the second ABBA ABBA, so the rhymes keep turning back on themselves like an enclosed space. Both sestets end on "soul," first rhymed with "roll" and then with "Goal." The refrain is nearly identical both times, but its meaning shifts. The first time it is a cry, and the second time it is a bet placed under doubt.
The second sonnet begins with a reproach: "Ye have the power, if but ye had the will." The speaker addresses the chords as if they could choose to rescue him. The paradise he describes is defined by what it lacks: a land "where good is no more ravelled up with ill," with a river's "windless strand" that answers the earlier tempests. "She and I" are unnamed, and the poem gives no clue about who she is. The last line of the octave is almost bare of ornament: "And follow nature simply, and be still." The monosyllables and the repeated "and" slow the line down until it stops on "still."
The final sestet is the darkest. The world is a place where "prisoned, we / Sit bound with others' heart-strings as with chains, / And, if one moves, all suffer." The pun on "heart-strings" is the poem's cleverest stroke. Strings are what make music, yet here they are the bonds that hold the speaker down. Human attachment and musical beauty are made of the same material, and one frees him while the other confines him. Then the confidence of earlier lines starts to crack. The "fair land" that was "yon" and visible becomes "if such a land, if such a sphere, there be." The speaker also asks to escape "life and all life's joys and pains," so he wants release from the pleasures as well.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses a tidy consolation. Music heals the speaker for a moment and in doing so shows him how far he is from peace. It gives a glimpse of a better place without guaranteeing that the place exists. Many poems praise music, but this one captures the ache it can leave behind, and its repeated final cry sounds less like faith than like hope reaching for something it cannot be sure of.