Almost two hundred years ago, in 1832, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in ‘With a Guitar, To Jane’, speaks in the voice of Ariel, the airy sprite from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Shelley’s Ariel claims to have served Miranda and her father Prospero faithfully, only to be rewarded with solitude or imprisonment, and forgotten. Therefore, with the boundaryless illogic of passionate submission, Ariel presents Miranda with a gift. Ariel is a fool for love. Shelley, in ninety-one lines like one deep exhalation, presents us twice with the word ‘love’. The ‘silent token’ of Ariel’s devotion is a ‘loved Guitar’, loved by the luthier who made it. The last line assures Miranda, Jane, the troubadour’s lady, the person to whom you read this poem aloud, that it will reserve its finest music ‘For one beloved Friend alone’. The lover, or poem, has been wrought with sharp tools into a musical instrument.

Playable by many, to any air they choose, the lover, or poem, nonetheless promises a certain kind of exclusivity. The lyric of swoon and glow, that we freely rehearse, secretly has one and only one recipient, and one and only sender. ‘With a Guitar, To Jane’, belongs in concert to that servant-sender and adored recipient. We catch an echo of a thrill built up of unutterable and unequal experience, some shared, some separate. Unusually, Ariel flashes back to the felling of the tree from which the guitar was crafted, and thence to the harmonious ecology of the trees murmuring their praise and love in tune with the natural/created world. By dying to its tree-identity, ...