Most poems about music try to make us hear something: thunder in the strings, a melody that flows like water. Theodore Enslin's "Listening to Mozart" does nearly the opposite. It opens by telling us not to ask music for anything beyond itself, then spends four short movements quietly showing what that self-sufficiency can do for a listener.
The section titles come straight from a score: Allegro assai, Andantino Grazioso, Tempo di Menuetto, Presto assai. The poem borrows the shape of a four-part work (quick, gentle, dance-like, quick) without naming any particular piece. Each part also behaves a little like its marking.
The first is an argument, and its pivot is a pun. Music's "means / are what it means": its methods and its meaning are the same thing, so "no one / should ask more." The line break after "no one" leaves the phrase hanging for a beat before the rebuke arrives. The imagery then turns to craft. "Intaglio" is a design cut into a surface, and here the "tools incised" a "whole century." The light, courtly "Style Galante" is "fused... into the blood of a man." The poem never says his name, but the title strongly suggests who the man is. The section ends on a single word, "Music.", with a full stop that works like a final chord.
The second movement drops the theory and gives us weather. After "four days of rain" the sun appears "hesitantly / above the film / edge / of a cloud," and the lines shrink to a word or two at a time, as if the light were testing the air. The instruction "Brush it away, / as if a cobweb caught the eye" is gentle and domestic. Pollen "pick[s] up the dampness / and fall[s]." Then comes "-Tentative-", which reads like a performance direction slipped into the landscape, and finally the small, plain "narcissus / in the dooryard." Nothing here stands for anything else. The scene simply is what it is, which is the opening principle carried out in nature.
The minuet is the most fragmentary section, and it dances. "Chance is not random / nor co- / incidental" splits "coincidental" across a line break so that the halves step apart like partners. Then a quoted line, "There was a man who lived / in our town—", sounds like the opening of a folk tale or nursery rhyme, and it is never finished. "Oh the measure" holds three meanings at once: a bar of music, a dance step, and a sense of proportion. The section ends by circling back on its own opening phrase, "the / complete / the light," the way a dance figure returns to its starting place.
The finale, appropriately, is the most personal. "Because of particular bent - / - the associations -" admits that the speaker came to the music carrying something private, and the poem refuses to say what. We only know that "the G minor darkness / cured me / -thoroughly---." The key word is "homoeopathic," the old idea that "like cures like." The darkness in the music did not console the speaker by pointing elsewhere. It healed by matching what was already there. The last lines return to the opening pun, but it has changed: music's substance "made of music / what the music meant." What began as a theory has become a result.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and repetition does the work rhyme might have done: "means" and "means," "light" and "light," "music" again and again. The dashes, some short and some stretched to three, behave like rests, giving the reader silences of different lengths.
The poem is significant because it avoids the usual rhapsody. It does not describe how Mozart sounds. It makes a modest claim, that music's meaning lies in what it is, and then tests that claim against a human need. The answer is that this "pure" music is not cold or abstract. A listener who asks nothing beyond the music may receive more than he expected.