Most love poems boast about how much the speaker can say. Robert Smithdas's "Fugue" does something stranger and more moving: it opens with an elaborate wish, spends nine lines admitting failure, and then turns that failure into the poem's real music. The speaker wants to praise "dearest" with "many voices," but because he lacks "an angel's tongue," he must find another way to speak, and the discovery of that other way is the whole drama of the poem.
The structure is a single sentence built on a conditional. "Had I the music of heaven and earth" begins a long catalogue of everything the speaker would use if he could: the "changing tempo of winds and seasons," the "lilting chorus of singing birds," the "endless chant of waters moving." Notice how generous this list is. Wind, birds, water and leaves are all given sounds, and each sound is slightly softened: the leaves are "lisping," the birds "lilting." It is a gentle, almost whispering orchestra, which quietly prepares us for the poem's final turn toward quietness.
That turn arrives with "But," the hinge of the poem. Everything before it is hypothetical; everything after it is what the speaker actually does. And what he does is paradoxical. He plays "on the muted strings of my heart / With the heavy bow of the sky's loud silence." The phrase "loud silence" is the poem's boldest stroke. Silence cannot literally be loud, yet anyone who has stood under a vast open sky, or felt unable to answer an overwhelming feeling, knows what it means: a silence so full that it presses on the ears. The speaker's love is too large for ordinary words, and so the very lack of sound becomes his instrument. The bow is "heavy," suggesting that the feeling is weighty and slow, drawn across the heart's strings with enormous effort and restraint.
The title deepens this. A fugue is a musical form in which a melody is introduced and then taken up again and again, overlapping with itself. The poem does not follow the strict rules of a musical fugue, of course, but the title hints at a theme repeated in different guises. Judging by the text, the repeated theme is the contrast between sound and silence, abundance and restraint: first the many voices of nature, then the single muted heart, then the "quiet seas" that close the poem. Each image answers the earlier ones. The "endless chant of waters" in line four returns transformed as the "depthless passion of quiet seas," where the water is no longer chanting but still, and its depth stands in for a feeling that cannot be measured.
The sound of the poem supports its meaning. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter; the lines are free and unhurried, rolling on in long, breathing phrases. This suits a poem about music that refuses to be forced into pattern. Yet there is plenty of sonic texture inside the freedom: the soft repeated s sounds in "seasons," "singing," "spring," "strings," "sky's," and "silence," and the gentle l's of "lilting," "lisping," "leaves." The poem seems to hush itself as it goes, so that by the last line we are nearly whispering along with it.
What makes "Fugue" worth reading is its honesty about the limits of language. Many poems of praise pile up compliments; this one confesses that compliments will not do, and suggests that the deepest devotion may be the kind that does not announce itself. The final image, "the depthless passion of quiet seas," gives the lesson in miniature: the stillest water is often the deepest. For a student, the poem is a good reminder that restraint is not the same as emptiness. By saying, in effect, "I cannot say this," the speaker says it more convincingly than any chorus of birds could.