The speaker, Joseph Dixon, looks at his own gravestone and wonders who carved a broken harp on it. He was a piano and harp tuner, so the image feels pointed: he spent his life making instruments sweet again, yet death has left his own music “shattered.” There’s some gentle hurt in his voice. But he moves from that personal complaint into a larger question—if a human ear can sense the hidden order in sound, isn’t there some greater Ear that tuned him? He imagines a tuning fork reaching through space, catching music and light. The mood is quiet and searching, mixing pride in his craft with a hope that the harmony he served might prove he was part of something bigger, and that he might be tuned and used again.
Joseph Dixon — Summary
Who carved this shattered harp on my stone? I died to you, no doubt. But how many harps and pianos Wired I and tightened and disentangled for you, Making them sweet again—with tuning fork or without? Oh well! A harp leaps out of the ear of a man, you say, But whence the ear that orders the length of the strings To a magic of numbers flying before your thought Through a door that closes against your breathless wonder? Is there no Ear round the ear of a man, that it senses Through strings and columns of air the soul of sound? I thrill as I call it a tuning fork that catches The waves of mingled music and light from afar, The antennæ of Thought that listens through utmost space. Surely the concord that ruled my spirit is proof Of an Ear that tuned me, able to tune me over And use me again if I am worthy to use.