Poem of the Day: ‘Stanzas for Music’

Lord Byron (1788–1824) gave five different poems the title “Stanzas for Music” — simply as a generic name by which he meant either that he heard the rhythm of a melody while he wrote the poems, or that he hoped eventually some composer would set them to music. As it happens, four out of the five are about grief at a loved one’s death, which may say something interesting about Byron’s sense of the emotions of music. Only today’s “Stanzas for Music” — the 1816 poem that begins “There be none of Beauty’s daughters” — is a present-tense love poem: a claim of awe at the presence of the object of love. The poem, two rhymed stanzas of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, gets much of its melodic power from its mostly trochaic feet, those falling sounds that Byron was always so good at. But another part of its sense of melody comes from the way the poem builds, stretching its metaphor: the moon as worshiping the sea as a lover worships his belovèd.