Shakespeare's twelve-line song claims music can make mountains bow and grief die
Trees bend, frozen peaks lower their heads, flowers spring up as if summer had moved in for good, and even ocean waves lie down to listen. Shakespeare's short lyric about Orpheus and his lute builds to a startling promise: sweet enough music can put sorrow to sleep, or kill it outright.
The song falls into two six-line stanzas with a bouncing rhyme scheme suited to singing. The first celebrates the legendary musician's power over the land. When he played, trees and icy summits bowed, and plants and flowers kept sprouting to his tunes, as though sunshine and rain together had fixed the season at permanent spring.
The second stanza moves out to sea and then inward. Everything that heard him, the billows included, hung their heads and fell still. Then the lyric draws its moral about the art in sweet music: care that gnaws at people, and grief of the heart, either drop off to sleep or, on hearing it, simply die. The final line is neat and ambiguous, since it can suggest the sorrows perish, or that listeners are overwhelmed.
Much of the charm lies in scale. Shakespeare starts with nature at its most immovable, mountains and the sea, before reaching the thing hardest to shift, a troubled mind. The progression makes the last claim feel earned rather than sentimental.
Details of the author's own path to London are hazy. After his twins were baptised in February 1585, he almost vanishes from records until he surfaces in the city's theatre world in 1592, and scholars call the gap the lost years. Legends fill it: that he fled Stratford after poaching deer on Thomas Lucy's estate, that he held horses outside playhouses, or that he taught school in the country. Little beyond later hearsay supports any of them. What is firm is that in 1623 two fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published the First Folio collecting 36 of his plays.
Source: PoetryDB — Orpheus with his Lute Made Trees · Public domain (GB: author died 1616, life+70 expired; US: author died 1616, so every lifetime publication is from 1930 or earlier)
