When The Music Hits You, You Feel No Pain

When the music hits you, you feel no pain

There is a Charm: a Power that sways the breast;
Bids every Passion revel or be still;
Inspires with Rage, or all your Cares dissolves;
Can sooth Distraction, and almost Despair.
That Power is Music.

A Poet he, and touch'd with Heaven's own fire;
Who, with bold rage or solemn pomp of sounds,
Inflames, exalts, and ravishes the soul;
Now tender, plaintive, sweet almost to pain,
In Love dissolves you; now in sprightly strains
Breathes a gay rapture thro' your thrilling breast;
Or melts the heart with airs divinely sad;
Or wakes to horror the tremendous strings.

Such was the bard, whose heavenly strains of old
Appeas'd the fiend of melancholy Saul.
Such was, if old and heathen fame say true,
The man who bade the Theban domes ascend,
And tam'd the savage nations with his song;
And such the Thracian, whose harmonious lyre,
Tun'd to soft woe, made all the mountains weep;
Sooth'd even th' inexorable powers of Hell,
And half redeem'd his lost Eurydice.

Music exalts each Joy, allays each Grief,
Expells Diseases, softens Pain,
Subdues the rage of Poison, and the Plague;
And hence the wise of ancient days ador'd
One power of Physic, Melody, and Song.

John Armstrong
The Art of Preserving Health (1744)
IV 481-485, 497-518
as quoted in Music and Medicine (1948),
Dorothy M. Schullian and Max Schoen


When the music hits you,
You feel no pain.
Bob Marley