A Musical Instrument by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Form: Lyric | Year: 1860

Full Text

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river)
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Overview

"A Musical Instrument" retells the myth of Pan creating the first reed pipe, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning transforms it into a meditation on what art costs. Pan tears a reed from the riverbed, destroys the ecosystem around it—"the broken lilies a-dying lay, / And the dragon-fly had fled away"—then hacks, hollows, and notches the reed into an instrument. The violence is meticulous and deliberate. Only after this destruction does the music come, and when it does, it is transcendently beautiful: "Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! / Piercing sweet by the river!" The poem's argument is that artistic creation is an act of violence against the raw material—including the artist. "Making a poet out of a man" means destroying the ordinary human to produce something capable of beauty. The reed "grows nevermore again / As a reed with the reeds in the river"—it can never return to its natural state. This is the irreversible cost of art. The final stanza pulls back to judge Pan: "half a beast is the great god Pan, / To laugh as he sits by the river." The creative god is partly savage. And "the true gods sigh for the cost and pain"—even the gods recognize that the price of beauty is too high, but they pay it anyway. Browning wrote this poem in the last year of her life, and it reads as a summation of what she believed about poetry: that it requires the destruction of something living, that the result is genuinely miraculous, and that no honest account of art can ignore the wreckage it leaves behind.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-6

The first stanza introduces Pan as a force of chaos: "Spreading ruin and scattering ban." He splashes with "hoofs of a goat"—he is animal, not refined. He breaks "the golden lilies afloat" and disturbs the dragon-fly. The river is an ecosystem of beauty that Pan invades and disrupts. The refrain "by the river" anchors every stanza in the same location, making the destruction cumulative.

Lines 7-12

Pan tears out a reed—the raw material for art. "The limpid water turbidly ran"—the clear water turns muddy, a one-word transformation from purity to ruin. "The broken lilies a-dying lay" extends the damage. Everything that was alive and beautiful in the river suffers for the sake of what Pan will make. The dragon-fly flees—nature withdraws from the scene of creation.

Lines 13-18

The crafting begins. Pan "hacked and hewed as a great god can"—the language is brutal, not delicate. "Hard bleak steel at the patient reed"—the reed endures its transformation passively. "Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed / To prove it fresh from the river"—Pan strips every trace of the reed's natural identity. The raw material must be unrecognizable before it can become art.

Lines 19-24

"He cut it short, did the great god Pan, / (How tall it stood in the river!)"—the parenthetical mourns what was lost. The reed was magnificent in its natural state. "Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man"—the simile makes explicit what the poem has been implying: the reed is a person. To make art, you hollow out the heart. "The poor dry empty thing"—the reed is now gutted, ready to be played.

Lines 25-30

Pan laughs—"This is the way... since gods began / To make sweet music, they could succeed." The laughter is unsettling: Pan enjoys the destruction. This is not reluctant sacrifice but gleeful power. He drops "his mouth to a hole in the reed" and blows "in power"—the breath of a god entering the hollowed-out vessel. The instrument requires both divine breath and destroyed material.

Lines 31-36

The music arrives, and it is overwhelming: "Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! / Piercing sweet... / Blinding sweet." The triple repetition, then the escalating modifiers—piercing, blinding—make the sweetness almost painful. And the effect is miraculous: "The sun on the hill forgot to die, / And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly / Came back to dream on the river." The very ecosystem Pan destroyed is restored by the music. Art repairs what its creation broke—but only temporarily, and only in effect, not in fact.

Lines 37-42

The final stanza delivers the judgment. "Half a beast is the great god Pan"—the creator is part savage. "Making a poet out of a man"—the most important line. A poet is not a natural being; a poet is what remains after a man has been hollowed out. "The true gods sigh for the cost and pain"—even divinity recognizes the price is terrible. "The reed which grows nevermore again / As a reed with the reeds in the river"—the transformation is irreversible. The poet can never go back to being merely human.

Themes

The cost of artistic creation—destruction as prerequisite for beauty
The transformation from natural being to instrument of art
The irreversibility of becoming a poet
Divine creativity as partly savage, partly transcendent
Nature destroyed and restored by art
The hollowing out of the self that art demands
Beauty as compensation for violence

Literary Devices

Refrain: "the great god Pan" and "by the river" — Both phrases repeat in every stanza, creating an incantatory rhythm that mirrors the mythic, ritualistic quality of the creation story. The repetition also anchors the escalating violence in one unchanging place.
Simile: "Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man" — The comparison makes explicit what the allegory implies: the reed is a human being. Drawing out its pith is drawing out the heart. The poem is about what happens to a person who becomes a poet.
Pathetic Fallacy: "The sun on the hill forgot to die, / And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly / Came back to dream on the river" — Nature responds to the music by reversing its own processes—the sun pauses, dead lilies revive. The music is so powerful it alters physical reality, but this is an emotional truth, not a literal one.
Intensifying Repetition: "Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! / Piercing sweet... / Blinding sweet" — The triple "sweet" and then the escalating modifiers create a sense of beauty that is almost unbearable—so intense it pierces and blinds. The sweetness is not gentle; it overwhelms.
Contrast: "Spreading ruin and scattering ban" vs. "the lilies revived" — The poem moves from destruction to restoration, but the contrast is not a simple reversal. The reed itself is never restored. The beauty benefits everything except the instrument that produces it.
Allegory: "Making a poet out of a man" — The entire poem operates as an allegory for poetic creation. Pan is the creative force, the reed is the raw human, and the music is the poem. The allegory insists that art requires the sacrifice of the ordinary self.

Historical Context

Published in 1860, the year before Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death. It appeared in her final collection, Poems Before Congress (though some editions place it separately). The myth of Pan and Syrinx comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses—the nymph Syrinx fled from Pan and was transformed into reeds by river nymphs; Pan then cut the reeds to make his pipes. Browning strips away the erotic pursuit and focuses entirely on the act of creation and its violence. The poem is often read autobiographically: Browning spent her youth as an invalid, and her poetic vocation came at the cost of conventional life. Her husband Robert Browning called it one of her finest achievements.