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The Harp in Literature
From The Eolian Harp (1795)
And what if all animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the soul of each, and God of all?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From Paradise Canto 14; 11-123
“And as the chime of minstrel music, the harp and help
With many strings, a pleasant dinning makes
To him, who heareth not distinct the note.
So from the lights, which there appear’d to me,
Gathered across the cross a melody
That, indistinctly heard, with ravishment posses’d me.
Dante Alighieri
From Fragments connected with Epipsychidion 1 134-9
There is a power, a Love, a Joy, a God
Which makes in mortal hearts its brief abode,
A Pythian exhalation, which inspires
Love, only love – a wind which o’er the wires
Of the soul’s giant harp
There is a mood which language faints beneath
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I learnt a heavenly melody
with my own two hands on the end of a bench,
and what I learnt
Brought honour to the harp for a while.
This is the melody, there upon my bench
That I composed for a love-tryst
Weaving a noble girl’s praise
On Love’s embroidering frame.
Dafydd ap Gwilym
Mirage
The hope I dreamed of was a dream,
Was but a dream; and now I wake,
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,
For a dream’s sake.
I hang my harp upon a tree,
A weeping willow in a lake;
I hang my silent harp there, wrung and snapped
For a dream’s sake.
Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream’s sake.
Christina Rossetti
Lines on Parish Alvars
The harp he seized;
The harp he loved – loved better than his life;
The harp which uttered deepest notes, and held
The ear of thought, a captive to its song.
He searched, and meditated much, and whiles
With rapturous hand in secret touched the lyre,
Aiming at glorious strains – and searched again
For theme deserving of immortal verse.
…They sat entranced as it in some blest dream
They heard the witching melody of heaven;
For at that harpist’s touch such notes were given-
So sweet and strange, they more than mortal seemed.
Apthomas
Posted on: November 16, 2011.