Few poems ask the reader to do something as simple and as strange as listen. Rolfe Humphries' "Aberdovey Music" opens with a legend, the bells of Aberdovey sounding "from a buried city / Sunken far under the sea", and then spends four stanzas inside the act of hearing. The poem never tells a story about the drowned city. It gives us the sound, the doubt about the sound, and finally the way a sound can pull the very stones of the shore toward itself.
The legend is a Welsh coastal one, and the poem names its geography plainly: the bells are "carried inland, faintly, / As far as Montgomery." That detail does quiet work. The music is not grand or immediate; it travels a long way and arrives thinned out. The words "faintly" and "shadowy" set the tone early, and the command "Hearken!", repeated at the start of the first and fourth stanzas, pulls the reader into a posture of strained attention. Notice, though, that the poem never claims the bells are really there. The first stanza states the legend, but the second begins with "there *could* be voices there", and by the end the speaker is openly asking whether what we hear is "sound or echo."
That uncertainty is the poem's real subject. The central question arrives in the fourth stanza: "Is the lull / Pause of canticle or bell, / Rest or silence? Who can tell?" The poem lingers on the gap between music and its absence. Is a silence just a rest inside a song, or is it nothing at all? Humphries gives no answer, and the plain, almost conversational "Who can tell?" makes the doubt feel honest rather than decorative.
The sound itself is built from layered images. The second stanza supplies a drowned choir whose "intoning reaches far" up to "ghostly cloud and air," so the music moves through every element, from deep water to sky. The third stanza then offers a natural explanation in place of a supernatural one. Just as winds on land play "Aeolian-wise" across a harp or zither, so deep currents "Sweep strings of salt and silver / In their ultramarine room." The phrase "strings of salt and silver" is the poem's most striking image: the sea becomes an instrument, and the bells and choir may be only the ocean playing itself. Whether you read this as legend or physics, the poem suggests that the two can sit side by side.
The sound of the poem enacts what it describes. Humphries leans on soft, resonant consonants and long vowels, as in "intoning," "undertow," "ground-swell" and "profound," so that the lines seem to hum. The lines are short and flexible, with a rhythm that sways rather than marches. Rhyme is present but never insistent. It shows up as echoes, with "city" and "faintly" at the line-ends of the first stanza, or "swell" and "tell" in the fourth. Many of the rhymes are slant or partial, as with "stormy" and "Montgomery" or "zither" and "water." A rhyme that almost lands is a fitting form for a poem about sounds that are heard only half-clearly. Even the structure plays along: the third stanza ends on "Break off, resume, and linger," a line that does exactly that, stopping and restarting as if the music were drifting in and out of hearing.
The ending is where the poem becomes more than atmosphere. During the "calm interval," the "stones of sarn and sea-wall / Come closer; call to them, call / The music." A sarn is a causeway, and in the legend it is tied to the drowned land. In the poem's closing movement the stones themselves seem to lean in, and the imperative "call" turns the music into something summoned rather than merely overheard. The poem ends on "undertow and ground-swell," the sea's hidden motions, leaving us with the sense that the real source of the music is movement we cannot see.
What makes "Aberdovey Music" worth reading is its restraint. It takes a well-known legend and declines to settle it, choosing instead to dwell in the pause between hearing and knowing. It is a poem about attention, and it rewards the reader who, like its speaker, is willing to stand at the shoreline and wait.