The central idea of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Music When Soft Voices Die’ is that love transcends this materialistic world and lasts forever. To prove his point, Shelley gives examples of transient things which leave behind them transcendent effects. He says that four of our senses — auditory, olfactory, visual and tactile — are the recipients of these transcendent effects. These senses respond to the aesthetic appeal and preserve the peasant impressions in our mind. He implicitly concludes that when individually these effects are so powerful, how could then the cumulative effect of all, in form of his beloved’s memories, be things of past. This is a poem from the Romantic Period, and Shelley beautifuly portrays the characteristic features of this period, that is, idealism and rebellion against the impermanence of things
The poem was published as "To---" in 1824 under Miscellaneous Poems in two stanzas of four couplets each containing four lines in Posthumous Poems.
The theme of the poem is the endurance of the memories of events and of sensations.[4]
Mary Shelley edited the poems and wrote the preface to the collection. She described the poems: "Many of the Miscellaneous Poems, written on the spur of the occasion, and never retouched, I found among his manuscript books, and have carefully copied: I have subjoined, whenever I have been able, the date of their composition."[5][6][7][8]