A concert hall is an odd place to go looking for childhood, yet that is exactly where Daniel Whitehead Hicky's speaker takes us. "At the Symphony" begins with a command, "Hold now my hand in yours", and the whole poem is an invitation to a lover or companion: let the music carry us back to a summer meadow, then bring us home, older, into the dark. What starts as a description of an orchestra becomes a meditation on time, and on how little protection we have against it except one another.
The opening stanza gives the music a physical force. The conductor's baton "trembles and rises" and then "carves the motionless air", a verb that turns silence into something solid, like stone waiting for the chisel. What follows is a "river of notes / Rushing headlong across the reaches of darkness." The river is the poem's governing image, and it returns in the final stanza as a "river of music" that has "spent its last bright torrent." So the concert is not only a setting but a model of a life: a surge of energy that begins, runs and drains away. The line that ends the first stanza, with notes "Exploding like flowers of light in our ears, in our throats," mixes the senses boldly. Sound becomes light, and light becomes bloom, which quietly plants the flower imagery that blossoms in the middle of the poem.
That middle section is where the poem softens. The speaker asks to be held "as though you were holding the autumn's first leaf, / Warming the cup of your hand with its earliest veins of fire." It's a tender, slightly surprising comparison. A leaf is fragile and already turning, and the word "autumn" slips a note of ageing into the scene before the speaker mentions age directly. Then comes a striking instruction: "Let us not whisper our praise, nor turn toward the eyes of each other." The couple are to stay silent and look straight ahead, letting the music do the talking. Intimacy here is not eye contact but shared absorption, two people facing the same direction and the same memory.
The third stanza is the emotional centre, and its verbs are all about play: "run like children again on feet that challenge the wind," "count off the petals of daisies," "taste of its wine's hushed purple." The images are lush and sensory, and the phrase "hushed purple" is especially well judged, since it makes a blackberry's color sound like a quiet. The stanza ends with a gentle, drowsy line, "Lie down in the grasses of peace till the long green hour is done," where the stretched-out sounds and the phrase "long green hour" make time itself feel slow and warm. It is the only stretch of the poem where time seems generous.
Formally, the poem is built from long, rolling lines, many running to fourteen or fifteen syllables with a loose, galloping rhythm that suits all that rushing and running. The rhymes are subtle rather than chiming: "notes" with "throats," "fire" with "desire," "sun" with "done," "own" with "rain" only by a looser echo in the stanza's closing movement. This restraint helps the poem sound like music rather than like a jingle, allowing the sentences, not the rhyme, to carry the momentum.
The last stanza turns the poem's argument. "Let us capture this moment completely; call it securely our own," the speaker urges, though the sheer insistence of "securely" suggests how insecure the moment really is. Then comes the closing image: "Bowed with our years, let us go out to the blinding night and the rain." The couple have been given back their youth only for the length of a concert, and the poem does not pretend otherwise. The ending is not bitter, though. The phrase "Let us go out" is still a shared, chosen act, and the word "blinding" makes the dark night brilliant rather than empty.
What makes the poem worth reading is that honesty. It doesn't claim music can stop time; it claims music can lend us a few minutes of it, and that holding a hand is how we make those minutes count.