Lines Composed in a Concert Room

Nor cold, nor stern, my soul! yet I detest
These scented Rooms, where, to a gaudy throng,
Heaves the proud Harlot her distended breast,
In intricacies of laborious song.

These feel not Music’s genuine power, nor deign
To melt at Nature’s passion-warbled plaint;
But when the long-breathed singer’s uptrilled strain
Bursts in a squall—they gape for wonderment.

Hark! the deep buzz of Vanity and Hate!
Scornful, yet envious, with self-torturing sneer
My lady eyes some maid of humbler state,
While the pert Captain, or the primmer Priest,
Prattles accordant scandal in her ear.

O give me, from this heartless scene released,
To hear our old Musician, blind and gray
(Whom stretching from my nurse’s arms I kissed),
His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play,
By moonshine, on the balmy summer night,
The while I dance amid the tedded hay
With merry maids, whose ringlets toss in light.

Or lies the purple evening on the bay
Of the calm glossy lake, O let me hide
Unheard, unseen, behind the alder trees,
For round their roots the fisher’s boat is tied,
On whose trim seat doth Edmund stretch at ease,
And while the lazy boat sways to and fro,
Breathes in his flute sad airs, so wild and slow,
That his own cheek is wet with quiet tears.

But O, dear Anne! when midnight wind careers,
And the gust pelting on the outhouse shed
Makes the cock shrilly in the rainstorm crow,
To hear thee sing some ballad full of woe,
Ballad of shipwreck’d sailor floating dead,
Whom his own true love buried in the sands!
Thee, gentle woman, for thy voice remeasures
Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures
The things of Nature utter; birds or trees,
Or moan of ocean gale in weedy caves,
Or where the stiff grass mid the heath-plant waves,
Murmur and music thin of sudden breeze.