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62 Lisa Goldfarb
Whether Stevens' ideas of music and memory derive from his reading of
More is less important, for the purposes of this chapter, than the way his Write review Page 62 ■
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meditation looks ahead to his own more abstract figurations of music:
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A little phantasy to beguile you—a bit of patch-work—and about

Result 1 of 2music.... Whatfor
in this book is the
ivesmysterious
- < Previouseffect
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music,
allthe vague effect we Clear search
feel when we hear music, without ever defining it? .. [sic] It is consid-
ered that music, stirring something within us, stirs the Memory. I do
not mean our personal Memory—the memory of our twenty years and
more—but our inherited Memory, the Memory we have derived from
those who lived before us.... While I had always known of this infi-
nite extension of personality, nothing has ever made it so striking as
this application of Music to it.... So that, after all, those long chords
on the harp, always so inexplicably sweet to me, vibrate on more than
the "sensual ears—vibrate on the unknown.... And what one listens
to at a concert, if one knew it, is not only the harmony of sounds, but
the whispering of innumerable responsive spirits within one, momen-
tarily revived, that stir like the invisible motions of the mind wavering
between dreams and sleep: that does not realize the flitting forms that
are its shadowy substance. 11.. 136)

On the one hand, More reinforces Stevens' understanding that music 'stirs"
the "personal Memory," as the Schubert symphony awakened his own experi-
ence in Cambridge. On the other, he kindles Stevens imagination by suggest-
ing that music also elicits 'our inherited Memory" which "we have derived
from those who lived before us." Importantly, music for Stevens, as for Mom,
gives us the means to probe beyond the limits of what we know and have
experienced. Most striking in the language of the above passage is the way
Stevens describes music as reaching into an intangible realm. His language
is marked by words that look forward to the enigmatic role music and the
musical-poetic analogy play in his work: he lightheartedly refers to his own
words as "A little phantasy" for Elsie that will "beguile" her; he longs to
understand music's "mysterious effect," and indicates that it lies beyond defi-
nition. The voice of music comprises an "infinite extension of personality,"
and its allure transcends the rational, for it is "inexplicably sweet." Almost in
expectation of his description of poetry as an "unalterable vibration" (CPP
662) more than thirty years later in his essay "The Noble Rider and the
Sound of Words," in the above passage Stevens describes music as that which
"vibrate's/ on more than the 'sensual car'—vibratels1 on the unknown."
Music, as the poetic music Stevens will himself write, evokes what we intuit
but cannot firmly know: it is "whispering," "invisibk," "shadowy."
Indeed, sometimes the phrasing of these early letters evokes poetic lines
we will see take shape many years later. In earlier poems, Stevens seems to ■
gesture toward "a music" that "vibratels1 on more than the 'sensual ear'":
in "Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds," Stevens compares the "pomps