Stanzas for Music BY LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON) Most Romantic Poem

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There be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like thee;

And like music on the waters

Is thy sweet voice to me:

When, as if its sound were causing

The charmed ocean's pausing,

The waves lie still and gleaming,

And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:


And the midnight moon is weaving

Her bright chain o'er the deep;

Whose breast is gently heaving,

As an infant's asleep:

So the spirit bows before thee,

To listen and adore thee;

With a full but soft emotion,

Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

“Stanzas for Music” is a brief lyric poem of sixteen lines, one of five that Byron wrote with the same title. As its title suggests, it was written to be set to music, and its musical qualities have bearing upon its theme and structure.

The poem is written as an address by the poet to a person with whom he is infatuated. It is couched in feminine references and is most conveniently discussed as a love lyric to a woman, but it is important to note that the gender of the addressee is never specified. For that matter, the word love is never mentioned. The tone of the poem is one of adoration, and the poet carefully chooses words and images to evoke emotions that transcend feelings of simple affection. In the first two lines, for example, he creates a persona for his addressee by comparing her favorably to “Beauty’s daughters.” By alluding that she is more enchanting than the children of a personified ideal, he endows her with a godlike presence. He reinforces this apotheosis through the application of synecdoche, the use of a part or element to suggest a whole. The only aspect of the addressee that the poet describes is her voice, and just as readers are able to infer the totality of the Old Testament God from his manifestation as a disembodied voice, so can they envision a being of divine nature from the phenomena for which the woman’s voice alone is responsible.

The poet conveys the majesty of his subject by comparing her effect upon him to the effect of a supernatural influence upon the ocean. He attributes “magic” to her and imagines that she has the power to leave the ocean “charmed” to stillness. Throughout the poem, the poet treats these powerful subjective impressions as objective reality: The woman has “magic” because her effect upon him can be understood in terms of natural phenomena that are beyond ordinary human control.

The poem is rich with sensory images. The poet begins by comparing the woman’s “sweet voice” to “music on the waters” whose sound causes the waves to pause. In the absence of their sound and movement, a striking visual tableau presents itself: an ocean whose waves “lie still and gleaming” as “the midnight moon is weaving/ Her bright chain o’er the deep.” The sensuality of these images notwithstanding, their impact on the poet transcends the physical and achieves a spiritual quality. As he tells the woman, “the spirit bows before thee,/ To listen and adore thee.” Ultimately, the poem is a paean to a person who inspires near-religious veneration in the poet.