Poetry and Music

Music inspires my life, and poetry is one way to express that inspiration. But Siegfried Sassoon has said it better than I can in his early poem, Dead Musicians:

From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,
The substance of my dreams took fire.
You built cathedrals in my heart,
And lit my pinnacled desire.

Unfortunately, the First World War swept away the musical inspiration, and the musicians became truly "dead". It was only later in life that Sassoon, writing under the inspiration of a fugue by Bach, could once again feel the musical momentum in the poem, From a Fugue by Bach, which he ends: "And the notes of the fugue that were voices from vastness divine". It is this vastness that still inspires my life and art.