III
At that hour when all things have repose,
O lonely watcher of the skies,
Do you hear the night wind and the sighs
Of harps playing unto Love to unclose
The pale gates of sunrise?
When all things repose, do you alone
Awake to hear the sweet harps play
To Love before him on his way,
And the night wind answering in antiphon
Till night is overgone?
Play on, invisible harps, unto Love,
Whose way in heaven is aglow
At that hour when soft lights come and go,
Soft sweet music in the air above
And in the earth below.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 25, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“III” was published in Chamber Music (Elkin Matthews, 1907). Of the collection, Benjamin Boysen, an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Southern Denmark, writes in his essay, “Music, Epiphanies, and the Language of Love: James Joyce’s ‘Chamber Music,’” “The poetical collection, Chamber Music (1907), is probably a minor work, but a minor work by a great author, and the poems prove, by closer inspection, to be less simple than first presumed. The juvenile and self-centred verses give an excellent illustration of the melancholic narcissism, which Joyce later castigated intensely in the works of his prime.” He continues, “It is, generally speaking, by means of music that love is expressed in these verses: ‘Play on, invisible harps, unto love’ and it proves to be an attendant to love throughout the whole of the poetical collection.”
James Joyce
James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1882. A major figure in avant-garde modernism and twentieth-century English literature, he is the author of Collected Poems (The Black Sun Press, 1936) and Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922), among others.