Summary
Written in commemoration of St. Cecilia’s Day, 1697, “Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music” is a poem about the ability of music to influence human emotion and behavior. Giving a fictionalized account of a feast held by Alexander the Great (on the occasion of his victory over Persia under King Darius), an anonymous speaker describes how different parts of a musical performance at the event elicit different emotional responses from the king, and how the performance eventually encourages him and his people to destroy the Persian capital.
Stanza 1 describes the temporal and spatial settings of the event, and introduces several main characters of the poem. According to the opening lines, Macedonia’s military victory against Persia, under the leadership of Alexander the Great, has provided an occasion for communal festivity. Describing the opulent royal feast, the speaker glorifies the “godlike” king, his “valiant” men, and his beautiful lover Thais, declaring that “[n]one but the brave deserves the fair.”
Stanza 2 introduces Timotheus, the bard of the event, and describes the beginning of his congratulatory performance. The bard’s song—celebrating King Alexander’s birth as the son of Olympia and the Roman god Jove—receives an enthusiastic response from the members of the audience, who glorify the king as a deity.
Stanza 3 takes the poem to the hedonistic segment of Timotheus’s performance, which invokes Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, and celebrates inebriation, festivity, and the “sweet [] pleasure [that comes] after pain.”
The poem takes a turn in Stanza 4 when this celebration of victory and pleasure-seeking inspires great hubris in King Alexander. The bard then decides to perform a song that will help Alexander reflect upon the tragedy that he has caused by brutally murdering, and abandoning the body of, his enemy Darius—now a “joyless victor,” Alexander looks back on his brutality with remorse, shedding tears of regret.
In Stanza 5, Timotheus notices this change of heart and shifts the subject matter of his song again to that of love, gratitude, and pacifism. The bard prompts the monarch to recognize how grateful he must be, for instance, for the relationship he has with his beautiful lover Thais. Both the audience, who applaud passionately, and Alexander, who tearfully sinks upon Thais’s breast, are moved by this song.
Stanza 6 marks yet another dramatic transition in the poem, as Timotheus begins to sing of revenge. Stirred to anger as a result of this song, the king, his lover, and his followers set the capital of Persia on fire as an act of vengeance.
Stanza 7 closes the poem with the speaker’s reflection upon this series of events. The speaker expresses a sense of wonder towards Timotheus’s ability to manipulate human emotion by means of music, and compares it to Catholic martyr St. Cecilia’s ability to invent a musical instrument (the organ) that perfects humankind’s musical knowledge and connects the divine with the earthly.
Analysis
"Alexander’s Feast” is both an ode and a narrative poem, and thus features a rich combination of lyrical elements—the rhythms and jingles that make this poem pleasant to the ear—and plot elements—the dramatic transitions and ironies that arrest the attention of the reader. In terms of its plot, the poem can be divided into four different parts: Stanzas 1 to 3 (scenes of festivities and hedonism), Stanzas 4 and 5 (scenes of mourning and penitence), Stanza 6 (scenes of vengeance and violence), then Stanza 7 (the speaker’s analysis).
The first three stanzas provide the backdrop to the poem’s narrative, as they describe the pleasure, hubris, and excess involved in the beginning of Alexander the Great’s celebration of his military success. Descriptions in this part of the poem are focused on images of visual and auditory extravagance, such as the brows of Alexander's peers adorned “with roses and with myrtles,” or the majestic opening of Timotheus’s song, which inspires ecstasy and passion in its listeners (“The trembling notes ascend the sky / And heavenly joys inspire”). These scenes of jubilation are accompanied, however, by the onset of a dangerous sense of hubris: While Timotheus’s performance is dedicated to the deities (celebrating Jove’s sovereignty and Bacchus’s euphoria), these invocations lead to pride rather than religious humility, as they encourage Alexander to “[assume] the god” and the audience to exalt him as a “present deity.” At this point in the narrative, the king and his people are oblivious to their own vainglory.
As though mirroring the opulence of the feast, Stanzas 1 to 3 feature a plethora of lyrical devices that evoke feelings of joy and ecstasy. The exuberant rhythmicality of the introduction is compressed into the first two lines, a heroic couplet (rhyming couplet) in ballad meter (a line in iambic tetrameter followed by another in iambic trimeter). The occasional variations in iambic dimeter (e.g., “None but the brave / None but the brave”; “With ravish’d ears / The monarch hears”), as well as the use of alliterations (e.g., “With flying fingers touch’d the lyre”) and assonance (e.g., “Sound the trumpets, beat the drums! / Flush’d with a purple grace”) amplify the buoyant mood.
The second part of the narrative—Stanzas 4 and 5—marks a transition from ecstatic celebration to repentance and mourning. Once Timotheus detects the hubris rising in King Alexander, his song transforms into an elegy (which could perhaps form a separate poem on its own) mourning the tragic death of King Darius, and then to a philosophical musing upon both the futility of war and the need for gratitude, love, and peace. The most conspicuous narrative element of this section is the situational irony in which King Alexander, in response to the performance, cries for the death of Darius—defying the reader’s expectations, the war hero who has been celebrating his triumph (now a “joyless victor” with “downcast looks”) begins to display not only empathy for his enemy but also great emotional vulnerability.
The shift in content across Stanzas 4 and 5 is accompanied once again by tonal and phonetic changes. While the content of the song shifts from celebratory to didactic, the repetitions in Stanza 4 (“Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, / Fallen from his high estate”), as well as those in Stanza 5 (“still”; “ending,” “beginning,” “fighting,” “destroying,” “winning,” “enjoying”; “sigh’d and look’d”), augment both the emphatic voice of Timotheus and the intensity of Alexander’s epiphany. The polysyndeton (i.e. the use of conjunctions in succession), used in lines such as “And now and then a sigh he stole, / And tears began to flow” or “And sigh’d and look’d, sigh’d and look’d / Sigh’d and look’d, and sigh’d again,” slows down the pace of the poem and creates an atmosphere that is appropriate for lamentation and reflection.
Stanza 6, then, puzzles the reader with its rapid transition to a destructive arson scene that marks the climax of the poem. When Alexander and his people, stirred by the thundering sounds of Timotheus’s lyre, proceed to burn down the city of Persepolis, the poem, too, turns toward vengeance, anger, and violence. The sudden turn illustrates two different effects of music. First, it proves how easily music can manipulate the emotions and actions of its listeners; second, it shows that music can inspire a broad spectrum of emotions, ranging from the joy and hubris of Stanzas 1 to 3, to the grief and gratitude in Stanzas 4 and 5, now to the destructive (but perhaps also cathartic—e.g., “furious joy”) rage of Stanza 6. Meanwhile, the climax of the poem is enriched with allusions and mythological allegories, such as Timotheus’s reference to the Furies (Roman deities of vengeance) and the speaker’s comparison between the beautiful and aggressive Thais and Helen of Troy (a woman whose beauty is known for having initiated the Trojan War).
As with previous stanzas, the musicality of Stanza 6 approximates its content. The rapid and aggressive trimeter lines (“And unburied remain […] To the valiant crew!”), hurled upon the reader one after another, mimic the violent burning of the capital. The use of sibilance and airy “h” alliterations (“See the snakes that they rear / How they hiss in their hair”) make this a seething stanza.
Stanza 7 closes the poem with the final remarks of the speaker, who makes two key observations about the entire sequence of events. First, the speaker praises the ability of the bard Timotheus to inspire a variety of emotions (“Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire”). Rather than empathizing with either of the two opposing political forces (the Macedonians who sought vengeance and the Persians who had their capital city burnt down), the speaker seems to identify with the musician who demonstrates the ability to manipulate those in power as well as the masses of people under their rule. How, then, does the poet, Dryden, fit into this dynamic? Perhaps Timotheus is a persona of the poet; or perhaps not, and Dryden is telling a cautionary tale about the dangerous power that an artist—and art itself—can hold over the minds of many.
The second argument made by the speaker is that there exists a hierarchy between Timotheus, a pagan bard, and the Catholic musician St. Cecilia. The speaker champions Christianity when they claim that St. Cecilia is the technically and spiritually superior musician. On the other hand, it is as though the poem is trying to remind itself that it was written on the occasion of a Christian holiday—there seems to be a certain degree of tension and anxiety when the speaker declares, “Let old Timotheus yield the prize,” then somewhat hesitantly adds, “Or both divide the crown.” Is this poem about the triumph of St. Cecilia as the superior musician, inventor, and Christian, or about the anxiety of a poet who hesitates between orthodox artistry and the pagan greats?
“Alexander’s Feast” is more than a poem that narrates a royal celebration followed by a military confrontation between Macedonia and Persia. It is about the internal tension within Alexander as he responds to Timotheus's musical performance, and it is about the conflict between the mind and the power of art to put it under its control. The poem also addresses points of tension such as those between music and politics, Christianity and paganism, and the poet and his persona. Form and content, too, constantly interact, making this piece not only a breathtaking narrative, but also a work of exquisite lyrical beauty.
