Let A Bard - Analysis

A poet who refuses the job of shining

The poem’s central gesture is a refusal: the speaker rejects poetry as a public service—praise, romance, immortality—and chooses something like withdrawal as his true subject. From the first stanza he draws a blunt contrast between the professional performer and himself: Let a bard runs after happiness with a hired cup of incense, while the speaker insists I’m feared of light and lives a dark existence. This isn’t modesty; it’s a declaration that visibility itself feels false, even threatening. The speaker positions his life on an ov’rgrown path, suggesting a deliberate move away from the cleared roads where reputations are made.

Choirs, half-gods, and the disgust with applause

In the second stanza the public version of poetry arrives in force: a choir of singers roaring praises that grant immortality to many a half-god. The speaker answers with the opposite soundscape: My voice is still; his abode is always mute. Even the instruments are framed as a kind of harassment—loud string and boring—as if music becomes noise when it is used for social elevation. The tension here is sharp: poetry traditionally promises endurance, but this speaker experiences that promise as a temptation to vanity, a bargain that costs him the right to quiet.

Love poetry rejected: Tsitereya and the absent Cupids

The poem then refuses a second traditional task: love-singing. And let ovids make love into an endless series of odes; the speaker says he is robbed of peace by shadow Tsitereya’s—a darkened Aphrodite figure whose presence doesn’t enliven but unsettles. Cupids, too, are stripped of their usual cheerful power: Cupids don’t send him happy days. The mythic references aren’t decorative; they intensify the speaker’s sense that even the standard gods of desire have turned into agents of disturbance. Love, in this mind, is not warmth but insomnia.

Morpheus as the chosen muse

Where other poets seek fame or passion, this speaker names a different patron: I sing a sleep, calling it the great gift from Morpheus. That phrase recasts sleep not as laziness but as a positive power—almost a spiritual dispensation. The closing couplet pushes the claim further: he will well-teach you how to lie in silent grip, in strong and pleasant sleep. The surprising move is that the poem doesn’t end in pure solitude; it ends in instruction. He rejects the marketplace of song, yet still addresses a listener—offering not applause, not romance, but an education in retreat.

The uneasy promise: is sleep peace or disappearance?

The poem’s most unsettling contradiction is that it speaks powerfully in order to praise muteness. The speaker says My voice is still while delivering a tightly argued manifesto, and he offers peace through a silent grip that can sound tender—or coercive. If sleep is the great gift, what kind of life remains for the waking self who is feared of light? The poem asks the reader to feel both sides at once: the genuine relief of darkness and rest, and the faint dread that this chosen quiet resembles erasure.