Song, Voice and Performance
Explore how song, address, echo, and dramatic voice organize rhythm, character, and public expression.
12 items
Silvia
A song asks who Silvia is, answers by praising her holiness, beauty, wisdom and kindness, and ends by calling on the company to sing to her and bring her garlands.
Poetry · PoemYOU spotted snakes with double tongue
Fairies warn snakes, hedgehogs, spiders, beetles and snails away from their sleeping queen, with a sung lullaby refrain answering each set of warnings.
Poetry · PoemCOME unto these yellow sands
A singer calls dancers to take hands and foot it on the sands while the waves fall silent, then breaks off to listen to barking watch-dogs and a crowing cock.
Poetry · PoemWHERE the bee sucks, there suck I
A spirit names where it feeds, lies and couches among flowers, rides on a bat's back after summer, and promises itself a merry life under the blossom.
Poetry · PoemAt a Solemn Musick
The poem calls on Voice and Verse to present the unbroken song sung before the heavenly throne, recalls how sin jarred against nature's chime, and asks that earthly voices be brought back into tune with heaven.
Poetry · PoemFrom ‘Arcades’
A singer invites the listener to follow him across untrodden green and under star-proof elms to where a rural Queen sits clad in splendour befitting her deity.
Poetry · PoemTHE Star that bids the Shepherd fold
As the evening star rises and the sun sinks westward, the speaker declares severity asleep and calls for feasting, tipsy dance and midnight revelry, ending with a summons to knit hands in a round.
Poetry · Poemii Echo
A singer calls on the nymph Echo, lists the green and violet places where she may be hidden, and asks her to tell where a 'gentle Pair' has been concealed, promising her a place among the harmonies of heaven.
Poetry · PoemGratiana Dancing
The dancer's steps raise the floor she treads into a firmament bearing her like a heaven, and each step both binds her watchers' hopes and, when she stops, leaves the floor paved with broken hearts.
Poetry · PoemTo the Muses
The speaker searches heaven, earth, air and sea for the Nine Muses and ends by complaining that since they left, poetry's strings barely move and its notes are few.
Poetry · PoemThe Solitary Reaper
A passer-by stops to listen to a Highland girl reaping and singing alone, compares her voice to nightingale and cuckoo, wonders whether the song is about old battles or ordinary present sorrow, and carries the music with him long after it is out of hearing.
Poetry · PoemHymn of Pan
Pan claims that his piping silenced woods, waters, insects and nymphs and drew even the gods' envy, then reports changing his tune to the pursuit of a maiden who became a reed, a loss at which all his hearers wept.