Anne Barnard
(1750-1825)
Alas, that my heart is a lute,
Whereon you have learned to play!
For a many years it was mute,
Until one summer's day
You took it, and touched it, and made it thrill,
And it thrills and throbs, and quivers still!
I had known you, dear, so long!
Yet my heart did not tell me why
It should burst one morn into song,
And wake to new life with a cry,
Like a babe that sees the light of the sun,
And for whom this great world has just begun.
Your lute is enshrined, cased in,
Kept close with love's magic key,
So no hand but yours can win
And wake it to minstrelsy;
Yet leave it not silent too long, nor alone,
Lest the strings should break, and the music be done.
Since “To Summer” is a poem written by a man, I thought of looking for a poem written by a woman who lived and wrote at about the same time that Blake did. I found Anne Barnard, a Scottish artist and poet, and her poem, “My Heart is a Lute.” To a significant extent, “My Heart is a Lute” is not really a summer poem; it is interesting, however, that the persona’s discovery of love and life happens on a summer day, rendering summer as a season in which love blooms and life begins in earnest. The reference to “the light of the sun” to which one wakes when one has fallen in love reinforces this representation of summer as well. Finally, the metaphor of the persona’s heart as a lute, as an instrument capable of producing music, suggests notions of celebration and merrymaking that are usually associated with the joy of falling in love and the freedom and nonchalance of summer.
The poem’s central metaphor of the persona’s heart as a lute begins to develop in the first stanza of the poem. In this stanza, the persona talks about how her* heart is a lute, which used to be “mute” until the persona’s beloved “took it, and touched it, and made it thrill” on a summer day. In the second stanza, this metaphor is broken as the persona refers back to her heart and describes it as “burst[ing] one morn into song/And wak[ing] to new life with a cry.” After this description, the persona then likens her heart to a babe “that sees the light of sun/And for whom this great world has just began.” In the third and last stanza, the persona goes back to the lute metaphor; this time, however, the lute is treated as a symbol and is no longer the persona’s but the beloved’s—that is, “Your lute is….” The shift from metaphor to symbol and the change from “my” to “your” are significant in that both seem to signal how the persona has given her heart completely to the beloved. It is sad, however, that the lute is not playing music anymore; it is now “enshrined, cased in/Kept close with love’s magic key.” This suggests that the persona’s beloved has gone. However, it is not clear to where and why. The poem then ends with the persona warning the beloved that if the lute is kept silent and left alone for long, its “strings” will “break” and it will not play “music” anymore.
Overall, I believe that the lute metaphor works. However, the break in the lute metaphor and the introduction of a new metaphor, the baby, in the second stanza are a bit jarring, since these two images don’t seem to be consistent with each other. It may be argued, however, that the baby’s cry as a sign of life may be likened to the musical cry of the persona’s heart upon its discovery of love and life. In this poem then where love, light, life, and song converge on a summer day, summer becomes a season of joy, ripeness, celebration, and life. However, much like the lute that cannot play music forever, summer will have to end as well.
*For the purpose of convenience, I chose to follow the author’s gender in assigning the persona’s gender.
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