"entertains the music's soft report," which begins with a flying prelude, to which the lady of the tree "carves out her dainty voice" with "quick volumes of wild notes."
"His nimble hand's instinct then taught each string,
A cap'ring cheerfulness; and made them sing
To their own dance."
She
"Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note
Through the sleek passage of her open throat:
A clear, unwrinkled song."
The contention invites every art of expression. The highest powers of the lute are evoked in rapid succession closing with a martial strain:
"this lesson, too,
She gives him back, her supple breast thrills out
Sharp airs, and staggers in a warbling doubt
Of dallying sweetness, hovers o'er her skill,
And folds in waved notes, with a trembling bill,
The pliant series of her slippery song;
Then starts she suddenly into a throng
Of short thick sobs, whose thund'ring vollies float,
And roll themselves over her lubric throat
In panting murmurs, 'still'd out of her breast,
That ever-bubbling spring, the sugar'd nest
Of her delicious soul, that there does lie
Bathing in streams of liquid melody,
Music's best seed-plot; when in ripen'd airs
A golden-headed harvest fairly rears
His honey-dropping tops, ploughed by her breath,
Which there reciprocally laboreth.
In that sweet soil it seems a holy quire,
Founded to th' name of great Apollo's lyre;
Whose silver roof rings with the sprightly notes
Of sweet-lipp'd angel imps, that swill their throats
In cream of morning Helicon; and then
Prefer soft anthems to the ears of men,
To woo them from their beds, still murmuring
That men can sleep while they their matins sing."
What wealth of imagery and proud association of ideas—the bubbling spring, the golden, waving harvest, "ploughed by her breath"—the fane of Apollo suggesting in a word images of Greek maidens in chorus by the white temple of the God, the dew of Helicon, the soft waking of men from beneficent repose. It is all very well to talk of a bird doing all this: we admire nightingales, but Philomela never enchanted us in this way; it is the sex with which we are charmed. The poet's "light-foot lady" tells us the secret. We are subdued by the loveliest of prima-donnas.
There is more of this, and as good. The little poem is a poet's dictionary of musical expression. Its lines, less than two hundred, deserve to be committed to memory, to rise at times in the mind—the soft assuagement of cares and sorrows.
A famous poem of Crashaw is "On a Prayer-Book sent to Mrs. M.R." It breathes a divine ecstasy of the sacred ode:
"Delicious deaths, soft exhalations
Of soul; dear and divine annihilations;
A thousand unknown rites
Of joys, and rarefied delights."