Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MUSIC IN THE STREET by ANONYMOUS

First Line: IT ROSE UPON THE SORDID STREET
Last Line: A BLOSSOM DOWN THE TIDE
IT rose upon the sordid street,
A cadence sweet and lone;
Through all the vulgar din it pierced,
That low melodious tone.
It thrilled on my awakened ear
Amid the noisy mart,
Its music over every sound
Vibrated in my heart.

I've heard full oft a grander strain
Through lofty arches roll,
That bore on the triumphant tide
The rapt and captive soul.
In this the breath of my own hills
Blew o'er me soft and warm,
And shook my spirit, as the leaves
Are shaken by the storm.

As sounds the distant ocean wave
Within a hollow shell,
I heard within this far-off strain
The gentle waters swell
Around my distant island shore,
And glancing through the rocks,
While o'er their full and gliding wave
The sea-birds wheeled in flocks.

There, through the long delicious eves
Of that old haunted land
The Naiads, in their floating hair,
Yet dance upon the strand;
Till near and nearer came the sound,
And swelled upon the air,
And still strange echoes trembled through
The magic music there.

It rose above the ceaseless din,
It filled the dusky street,
As some cool breeze of freshness blows
Across the desert's heat.
It shook their squalid attic homes --
Pale exiles of our race --
And drew to dingy window panes
Full many a faded face.

And eyes whose deep and lustrous light
Flashed strangely, lonely there,
And many a young and wistful brow
Beneath its soft brown hair;
And other eyes of fiercer fire,
And faces rough and dark --
Brave souls! that bore thro' all their lives
The tempests on their bark.

In through the narrow rooms it poured,
That music sweeping on,
And perfumed all their heavy air
With flowers of summers gone,
With water sparkling to the lips,
With many a summer breeze,
That woke into one rippling song
The shaken summer trees.

In it, along the sloping hills,
The blue flax blossoms bent;
In it, above the shining stream,
The 'Fairy Fingers' leant;
In it, upon the soft green rath,
There bloomed the Fairy Thorn;
In their tired feet they felt the dew
Of many a harvest morn.

In it, the ripe and golden corn
Bent down its heavy head;
In it, the grass waved long and sweet
Above their kindred dead;
In it, the voices of the loved,
They might no more behold,
Came back and spoke the tender words
And sang the songs of old.

Sometimes there trembled through the strain
A song like falling tears,
And then it rose and burst again
Like sudden clashing spears;
And still the faces in the street,
And at the window panes,
Would cloud or lighten, gloom or flash,
With all its changing strains.

But, ah! too soon it swept away,
That pageantry of sound,
Again the parted tide of life
Closed darkly all around.
As in the wake of some white bark,
In sunshine speeding on,
Close in the dark and sullen waves,
The darker where it shone.

The faces faded from my view,
Like faces in a dream;
To its dull channel back again
Crept the subsiding stream.
And I, too, starting like the rest,
Cast all the spell aside,
And let the fading music go --
A blossom down the tide.


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