Moore opens with a bleak premise: a life "unblest," a wandering ("rove") in which we have lost "all that made life dear." Then a few notes from "days of boyhood" reach the ear, and everything shifts. Nobody decides to remember. The tune does it, "wakening thoughts that long have slept" and "kindling former smiles again / In faded eyes that long have wept." The poem's central claim is that music is the most trustworthy of consolations. It revives lost happiness without the deceptions that speech, friendship and love can practise.
The form suits the subject. There are three stanzas of eight lines, each rhymed abab cdcd, and the lines are short, seven syllables in a falling, trochaic rhythm: "WHEN through LIFE un-BLEST we ROVE." Each line starts and ends on a stress, so it lands with a small, even beat, almost like a tune being tapped out. Moore is remembered as a lyric poet whose words were meant to be sung, and this poem reads as if it wants to be music while arguing for music.
The first stanza works through two quiet metaphors. Dormant thoughts "sleep" and are woken, and smiles are "kindled" like a fire that was never quite out. The word "faded" is more unusual than it looks. We expect it of colours and flowers, so applying it to eyes worn out by weeping suggests that grief has drained the brightness from them. The music does not create a new smile. It relights an old one.
The second stanza supplies the poem's best image. Music is like a "gale" that "sighs along / Beds of oriental flowers," the word "oriental" adding a touch of faraway richness. The comparison has a subtle twist. The flowers "have sunk in death," yet the breeze is still "fill'd with balm." Music, then, does not contain happiness. It carries it, as wind carries a scent from a garden that no longer exists. "Pleasure's dream is gone," but its "memory lives in Music's breath." Breath runs through the whole poem: the strain "breathes," the song is a "breath," and in the last stanza music can "breathe" the soul of Feeling. In a poem so full of loss and death, breath keeps pointing back to the living body and the voice.
The third stanza turns from "we" to a direct address, "thou," and the tone grows more argumentative. "Language fades before thy spell" echoes the "faded eyes" of stanza one, as if words wither where music flourishes. There is an obvious irony, since Moore makes this point in words. His answer is to make the verse as song-like as he can. The rhetorical question "Why should Feeling ever speak, / When thou canst breathe her soul so well?" personifies Feeling as a woman who needs music to speak for her.
The final four lines are the darkest. "Friendship's balmy words may feign" borrows "balm" from the second stanza, but the sweetness is now a pretence. The same soothing quality that makes music healing makes spoken kindness a tool for deceit. Then comes the cold comparison, "Love's are even more false than they," and the last line, with its absolute "only": "Can sweetly soothe, and not betray." Music is trusted here, the poem implies, because it makes no promises and so cannot break them. In a poem that began with losing everything, "betray" gives the ending a bitter edge.
The poem is not subtle psychology, and many readers would dispute that love's words are always false. Its significance lies in how neatly it joins two ideas that feel true: a tune from childhood can reach us before thought does, and some feelings seem too large for sentences. The poem's rhythm, its recurring images of breath and balm, and its movement from consolation to distrust make that argument something you can hear as well as follow.