Music, When Soft Voices Die

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ceremonially written poem “Music, When soft voices die” talks of mortality, as do other poems. Shelley’s poetry reflects on the long-lasting essence of life, most definitely the thoughts of a person right after his or her demise. This gave a feeling of resentful-sweetness surrounding the death and continuity of a person and his inventions when the sight of them repeats endlessly through heaven.

The poem contrasts a human’s death with the fading of music because music “vibrates” and tends to be played even after the play is finished by the artist. This also corresponds with the flowers’ persistent texture, long once they are gone. This is filled with imagery, including a person’s death as well as the end of history. Shelley represents the ultimate turn of phrase which relates the symbolism of the poem to a human element. The stanza appears to be explaining the funeral ceremony and the cycle of remembrance.

The narrator undoubtedly may not know when the music should stop much as he does not guess where he or someone else could finish up. This understanding fosters the notion of premature mortality, and man’s real unknown transience. Shelley makes the meaning abundantly clear that while an ending is imminent and unpredictable, memory allows events to ‘live in the sense that they quicken’.

Shelley coined the word “vibrate” to explain the music and what it does in certain conditions. Shelley tries to invoke the idea that the echo will not only vanish, that when one disappears, it does not actually fail to function, but instead remains in remembrance. The symbolism of a clock and the passage of time is an idea that we have come to be tied to mortality. Shelley was actually not speaking to himself, but instead to a forgotten relation. This is compatible with the belief that Shelley is using this poem to mourn the death of someone he genuinely cared about.

The poem explains how although the flowers have “sickened”, they nevertheless work in remembrance. Shelley uses the term “sweet violets” which generates a good atmosphere about these flowers and adds meaning to the poem. He deliberately chooses violets about their color change and what the violets have come to signify. People are indeed often coming to equate the color, blue, with melancholy. Such glumness is a mood that they strongly equate with the grieving of a deceased loved one.

The poem comes to an end with the idea of the immortality of man and of nature. The poem notes, though, that the rose is gone. This tells everyone that the deceased was like a rose to Shelley. Shelley verifies that the deceased was once stunning and vibrant, to display the effect of their absence. Shelley chooses to indicate rose leaves instead of the whole because it implies that although the human body can no longer be the soul, even like the leaves stay. The ‘Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed’, indicating they are collated and appear to be seen.