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The Full Text of “Music, When Soft Voices Die”
1Music, when soft voices die,
2Vibrates in the memory—
3Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
4Live within the sense they quicken.
5Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
6Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
7And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
8Love itself shall slumber on.
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Introduction
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The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "Music, When Soft Voices Die" in 1821. Comparing love to other beautiful experiences such as listening to music and smelling "sweet violets," the poem's speaker insists that even after their "belovèd" is "gone," the love that they shared will live on in the speaker's memory. Like many of Shelley's poems, "Music, When Soft Voices Die" was discovered and published by his wife, novelist Mary Shelley, after his death in 1822.
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Summary
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The sounds of a song echo in one's memory even after people have stopped singing. When lovely flowers wither, their scent lives on in the minds of those who smelled them.
When roses die, their petals are piled upon a loved one's bed. Likewise, when you're no longer around, love itself will rest atop thoughts of you.
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Themes
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Love, Death, and Memory
“Music, When Soft Voices Die” meditates on the way love lingers on even when a beloved is “gone,” whether just temporarily or for good. Just as “Music” continues to echo through one’s mind after it's stopped playing, and the memory of a violet’s scent lingers in memory after the flower has wilted, the speaker’s loving “thoughts” of their beloved will remain no matter where the beloved is. This poem suggests that, through the power of memory, love can survive any separation—even the ultimate separation of death.
Memories of delightful experiences, the speaker observes, stick around long after those experiences have ended. “When soft voices die,” for instance, the “Music” they sang continues to “Vibrate[] in the memory” of those who heard it. And although “sweet violets” eventually “sicken” and die, the perfumes they once emitted still “Live within the sense they quicken.” In other words, one can remember the flower’s pleasing fragrance long after the flower itself has shriveled.
In the same way, the speaker says, their beloved will remain in their memory no matter where the beloved is. Just as a dead rose’s “leaves” (that is, petals) can form a “bed” for a “beloved” to lie on, the speaker’s “thoughts” of the beloved when they’re gone will form a bed for “Love itself to slumber on.” In other words, the speaker’s love for this person won’t wither and die while the sweetheart is away: it will only rest gently on a bed of memories.
The speaker’s frequent images of death even suggest that their love will persist past the final separation of the grave. If music lasts past when “soft voices die,” scent remains when the violet “sickens,” and rose petals are still lovely after the rose is “dead,” then neither the speaker’s love nor their beloved can die completely, either: even if the speaker’s beloved is dead and gone, the speaker will go on loving them in memory.
Through memory, the poem thus suggests, love never dies: people can carry their beloved with them as long as they live.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Music, When Soft Voices Die”
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Lines 1-2
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—Each of the poem's four couplets provides a different example of how things live on in people's thoughts even after the things themselves have ceased to exist. The poem's opening couplet focuses on music. Just because "voices" stop singing, the speaker begins, that doesn't mean the listener no longer hears them. An echo of those voices "Vibrates" in the listener's "memory."
The comma after "Music" creates a pause (a caesura), making "Music" stand out in the poem much like it stands out in listeners' memories. Consider how differently the poem would read if the poet had instead started with something like, "When soft voices die / Music vibrates in the memory." There would. be less emphasis on the "Music" being discussed.
Part of the poem's own "Music" comes from its steady meter: it's written mostly in trochaic tetrameter, meaning that lines each contain four trochees (metrical feet that follow a stressed-unstressed pattern, creating a DUM-da rhythm). Here are the first two lines scanned:
Music, | when soft | voices | die,
Vibrates | in the | memor- | y—All these trochees create a propulsive, galloping rhythm. The meter contains variations, however, that keep readers on their toes. For example, readers might scan the second foot of line 1 as an iamb (an unstressed-stressed foot); some might even argue that this foot is a spondee (two stressed beats, "when soft"). Both lines are also catalectic, meaning they're missing their final expected syllables. As a result, they end with firm, stressed beats—perhaps subtly conveying the way the "Music" described lives on rather than fades away.
The poem also follows a straightforward couplet rhyme scheme. These rhyme pairs make the poem feel tightly knit, a subtle nod to the enduring connection between each of the elements described (and, maybe, to the speaker's own partnership with their beloved, something they'll get to later in the poem). The first rhyme (between "die" and "memory") is slant, which prevents the poem from sounding overly stiff or formal. Still, this neat rhyme scheme helps to emphasize the organization of the poem's argument.
In addition to meter and rhyme, these lines also use sibilance: there's the repetition of /s/ and /z/ sounds in "Music," "soft voices," and "Vibrates." This buzzing sibilance mimics those "soft voices" vibrating in listeners' ears.
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Lines 3-4
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
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Lines 5-6
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed; -
Lines 7-8
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Symbols
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Roses
Roses are common symbols of love. The speaker builds on this symbolism when they say that "Rose leaves" may be "heaped for the belovèd's bed." Adorning this bed with rose petals reflects the speaker's enduring affection for their loved one.
Given the poem's many references to dying, that bed might also refer to the beloved's death bed, or even to their grave—that is, their final "resting" place. Scattering a "heap" of rose petals over this bed thus reflects the way that the speaker's love persists beyond death.
The speaker further compares those "Rose leaves" to "thoughts" of their beloved. Just as the beloved themselves rests on a bed of rose petals, personified "Love" rests atop the speaker's memories of this person. These memories are like the "Rose leaves": an enduring testament to love.
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Parallelism
The poem is filled with parallelism: the speaker returns to the same grammatical structure again and again. This makes the poem's argument easy to follow and adds some emphatic rhythm to its language.
Each of the poem's four couplets begins with a grammatically identical line. There's a noun ("Music," "Odours," "Rose leaves," and "thy thoughts"), followed by a comma (creating a caesura); the second part of the phrase then begins with the word "when," followed by a reference to death. Take lines 1-2:
Music, when soft voices die,
[...]
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,The odd-numbered lines, meanwhile, each respond to this image of something pleasant dying, insisting that these things continue to exist in the minds of those who survive them. This lends the poem a kind of AB AB AB AB logical structure. Through this steady parallelism, the speaker makes it clear that these images are all meant to illustrate the same point: that love, beauty, and so on live on in people's memories.
Line 7 breaks up the rhythm a little by adding "And so" at the beginning of the line, before jumping right back into the expected pattern:
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
This slight shift in the rhythm adds emphasis to the speaker's final point about love enduring beyond death. That "And so" indicates that the everlasting nature of love was the speaker's point all along, the natural conclusion to all of the poem's previous points.
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Personification
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Sibilance
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Alliteration
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Odours
- Rose leaves
- Heaped
- Belovèd's
- Thy/Thou
- Art
- Slumber
Odours-
Scents or fragrances.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Music, When Soft Voices Die”
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Form
"Music, When Soft Voices Die" contains eight lines arranged into two quatrains (four-line stanzas), each of which contains two rhyming couplets.
The poem's brevity is part of what makes it so striking: the speaker conveys the enduring quality of love through memory in just a few fleeting lines.
Note that such brevity is uncharacteristic of Shelley, however, and it isn't clear whether he considered this piece a finished poem or whether it was simply a draft he might have later reworked. His wife, the novelist Mary Shelley, found it among his notebooks after his death and published it, along with many other fragments.
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Meter
Overall, the poem uses trochaic tetrameter. This means each line contains four trochees, metric feet that follow a stressed-unstressed pattern (DUM-da). Line 4 is a perfect example of this meter in action:
Live with- | in the | sense they | quicken.
This meter lends an insistent, driving rhythm to the poem, echoing its main idea that "sweet" things such as "Music," fragrances, beauty, and "Love" live on after death.
That being said, the poem's meter isn't exactly rigid. For instance, lines 1-2 are both catalectic, meaning that they're missing their final expected syllables:
Music, | when soft | voices | die,
Vibrates | in the | memor- | y—In ending these lines on stressed beats, the speaker makes them sound more emphatic; the lines land firmly rather than simply fading away. There's also an arguable iamb in the second foot of line 1, though readers might scan this as a spondee: "when soft"; either way, the poem keeps readers on their toes. Lines 5 and 8 are both catalectic as well.
Notice that lines 6-7 are actually in iambic tetrameter, following an unstressed-stressed rhythm—the opposite of trochaic meter:
Are heaped | for the | belov- | èd's bed;
And so | thy thoughts, | when thou | art gone,This subtle shift in the poem's rhythm corresponds with the speaker's movement from talking about more abstract loss—the fading of "Music" and the "sicken[ing]" of flowers—to the death of their "belovèd." It thus helps to emphasize what the poem is really about: the way "Love" continues to exist even after a person dies.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem follows a simple AABB CCDD rhyme scheme. The first of these rhymes, "die" and "memory," is slant, keeping the poem's sounds musical but not overly rigid.
Each of the poem's rhyming couplets corresponds with a different set of images: lines 1-2 describe "Music," lines 3-4 describe "Odours," lines 5-6 describe "Rose leaves," and lines 7-8 describe memories of a loved one. In this way, the poem's simple yet orderly rhyme scheme helps to emphasize the organization of the speaker's argument.
The use of couplets might also subtly reflect the partnership between the speaker and their beloved.
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Speaker
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The speaker of the poem is anonymous, never given a name, age, gender, occupation, and so on. This is appropriate for a poem about something most people can relate to. Though not everyone has lost a "belovèd," everyone, one hopes, knows what it's like to remember a beautiful or wonderful experience that has since ended.
While the poem seems to be describing a general experience of love, death, and memory rather than a specific one, Shelley himself had lost several loved ones (including a daughter) by the time he wrote it, and he was undoubtedly drawing on his own experiences.
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“Music, When Soft Voices Die” Setting
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The poem doesn't have a specific setting. Its themes are quite broad and can apply to any time or place, so it's fitting that its imagery doesn't tie it down to one location. Even when the speaker mentions "violets" and "rose[s]," they're not pointing to literal flowers. Instead, they're using the image of such flowers to describe the way beautiful things can live on in one's memory.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Music, When Soft Voices Die”
Literary Context
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a major figure in the artistic and literary movement known as Romanticism. This movement emerged in response to the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and rationality (itself brought about by advances in scientific inquiry, technology, and industry in the 1700s).
Shelley's work, like a lot of Romantic poetry, was concerned with deep feeling, the power of the natural world, and a desire for political and personal freedom. Where earlier Enlightenment-era writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift aspired to elegant phrasings and satirical wit, Shelley and many of his contemporaries preferred to write passionate verse that valued the mysteries and terrors of the imagination over crisp rationality.
Shelley wrote "Music, When Soft Voices Die" in 1821, only a year before his untimely death by drowning. The poem is rather uncharacteristic of Shelley in that it is shorter and simpler than many of his other famous poems, such as "Mont Blanc," "Adonais," or even shorter but still complex poems such as "Ozymandias." It isn't known whether he considered the poem finished or if he planned to revise or expand it. His wife, the novelist Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), discovered it among his notebooks after he died. It was published in 1824, in the Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which included a preface by his wife.
Historical Context
Shelley's short life was marked by tragedy. For example, while traveling in Italy in 1818, his 17-month-old daughter Clara fell ill and died. Mary Shelley fell into a severe depression after this event and grew distant from her husband, whom she held partly responsible for their daughter's death. Shelley himself died tragically young, drowning in a shipwreck in the Bay of Naples after he insisted on sailing out in a storm.
As a Romantic writer, Shelley's work was responding, in part, to the massive social changes spurred by the Industrial Revolution. During this time, factory work began to overtake farming as the country's primary form of labor, and cities like London and Manchester became bigger and more powerful as people moved there from the countryside, looking for work. This earthshaking period changed England from a largely rural society to a mostly urban one—and, many Romantic poets thought, robbed the world of its magic and natural beauty.
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More “Music, When Soft Voices Die” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poet's Life — A biography of Shelley from the Poetry Foundation.
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Shelley's Posthumous Rise to Fame — An article written on the 200th anniversary of Shelley's death.
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A Look at British Romanticism — The Poetry Foundation's introduction to one of the most important movements in English literature.
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A Documentary on Shelley's Life — A 2012 Write Like documentary looking at Shelley's upbringing and literary accomplishments.
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A Reading of the Poem — Listen to the poem read aloud.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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