This song was written during Ives' college days at Yale. Since most assignments handed down by Ives' composition teacher, Horatio Parker, were German poems that had already been set by one or another of the great masters of Romantic Lieder (such as Schumann or Brahms), so it is most likely that Ives himself chose this text, and felt freer to stray from Parker's rather inflexible reading of "rules" of musical composition. Thus there are such items as "forbidden" parallel fifths and some more chromaticism and use of out-of-key "passing chords" than, one surmises, Parker would readily accept.

Tennyson's lengthy poem is a rather ironic coupling of the pretty tales of mythology and a commentary on the real world. The first half of the poem concerns Amphion, a figure in Greco-Roman mythology. Like Orpheus, he was a great musician. He was one of the unexpected consequences of Jupiter's penchant for dalliance, this time with the Queen of Thebes.

He was left exposed on Mount Olympus, but was rescued and became one of the shepherds that tend flocks on the lower slopes. Mercury gave Amphion a lyre and taught him to play it.

In Tennyson's poem, the magic of Amphion's music tames the wilderness and the beasts, causing them to grow fruitful. But in the second half of the poem Tennyson professes to have tried the trick with his own fiddle, with no success, and concludes that success must come the hard way.

Ives' setting focuses on two groups of lines telling the magical results of Amphion's playing on the trees and the shepherds. Thus Ives' song is concerned with the power of music, and ignores the irony of Tennyson's description of this characteristic.

Despite the song's use of rather unusual chord progressions, it is an attractive and quite conventional late nineteenth century song.

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