w i l l i a m k e ac h about the question of this lyric’s “music”? Byron sent the poem to Moore untitled but in response, he says, to a request for a “song,” so it is fair to ask: what actual music could these “Stanzas” be “for”? I can think of no nineteenth-century composer – not even Robert Schumann, creator of the brilliant sequence of song-settings for Heinrich Heine’s passionate and bitterly ironic “Dichterliebe” (“Poet’s Love,” 1840) – whom we can imagine producing music appropriate to Byron’s “Stanzas.” The poem may be an anti-lyric lyric in this literal as well as in other figurative senses Its disturbing metrical aura has more to with a troping of conventions and expectations peculiar to the speech rhythms of popular verse such as Moore’s and Robinson’s than it does with writing that in some sense aspires to the condition of music The dimension of lyrical musicality would appear to be quite differently and more predictably present in an 1816 poem that also came to bear the title “Stanzas for Music” when it was published by John Murray in the collected Poems of that year: There be none of Beauty’s daughters With a magic like thee; And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me: When, as if its sounds were causing The charmed ocean’s pausing, The waves lie still and gleaming, And the lull’d winds seem dreaming: (ll 1–8) This first stanza spins out its sequence of similes – the first negative, the next two positive – to approximate in words the effect on the speaker’s feelings of the addressee’s singing All we can know about the singing itself is registered, ironically, in terms of a deepening quietness and suspension of agitation in the speaker’s emotions: the singer’s voice moves by producing stillness The lyric subject’s voice, by contrast, moves the reader through a contrapuntal rhythm that expands as it thwarts prosodic habits It is worth looking back here to W W Robson’s 1966 essay on Byron and its attentiveness to connections between a lyric’s articulation of subjective depth and “the individuality of its verse-rhythm.” The thematic substance of “There be none of Beauty’s daughters,” he observes, “is no more than a gravely conventional compliment, in the Regency manner The imagery is of the same quality as Byron’s friend Tom Moore’s.” But, Robson continues, through “subtle abrogations of regularity” in the rhythm and tempo of the opening lines “(Everything is lost, if we make the semantically insignificant change [in the second line] 228 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008