Walter de la Mare’s “Music” captures how sound can lift a listener out of ordinary reality. When music begins, the familiar earth becomes more vivid: flowers blaze, forest trees seem burdened with stillness and ecstasy. Then myth enters—naiads rise from water, their faces so radiant they dim the speaker’s waking sight. In the final stanza, music restores a purer, older self, as if the speaker has returned to a time before this “haunt of brooding dust.” The hours themselves seem to sing from the woods of time. The mood is dreamlike, rapt, and slightly unearthly, as though music briefly dissolves the boundary between the real and the imagined.
Music — Summary
When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, And all her lovely things even lovelier grow; Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees, Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.
When music sounds, out of the water rise Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes, Rapt in strange dream burns each enchanted face, With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.
When music sounds, all that I was I am Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came; While from Time's woods break into distant song The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.