Incidental Similarities

In AP Lit a few days ago, I was tickled by the images of Coleridge's 'The Eolian Harp.' It had been a long, long time since I had read this poem. But I was reminded of a few similar ideas from two other poems I read more recently. Compare and contrast:


"Full many a thought uncalled and undetained,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!"


--- 'An Eolian Harp,' Samuel Taylor Coleridge


"Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you"


---'Peter Quince at the Clavier,' Wallace Stevens


"O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul."


---'Sailing to Byzantium,' William Butler Yeats


Image Credit: 'The Music Lesson' by Vermeer.
[you know, the guy who did 'Girl with the Pearl Earring']