There are certain pieces of music that seem to exist only in our minds, and there’s a good reason for that. They do exist only in our minds, put there not by strings or reeds or the human voice, or even by ovals and vertical lines and bars placed with some discernible pattern within or just outside of five parallel lines on a page, but in words, words written by someone who is not a musician, not a singer, not a composer, not even an electronic synthesizer, but by some writer.

Surely the most famous of these extra-musical events is the melody played, or not played, by the piper on Keats’s Grecian Urn, which is also just words on a page, not a real piper, not even a real urn for that matter. But the fact that this melody doesn’t exist, that we can’t actually hear it, should not be a problem, according to Keats. It might even be a benefit, because heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Wallace Stevens would back him up. Music, he says, “is feeling, not sound.” And some of those nonexistent compositions have a powerful effect. Nestor Castillo, in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, writes and rewrites a bolero called “Beautiful Maria of My Soul,” about a lost love in his lost homeland of Cuba, striving that unattainable perfection of beauty and heartache that he keeps coming close to, much as Keats, in one fervent summer, tried over and over again the capture the crystalline perfection of art, and perhaps never succeeded, but came as close, over and over again, as any mortal is likely to. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was made into a movie, and the filmmakers commissioned Robert Kraft to write a song to Oscar Hijuelos’s title. Kraft is a perfectly fine composer, responsible for the music for The Little Mermaid and Wide World of Sports, and he did a decent job of writing a bolero, but I don’t really remember it, and I will forever be haunted by Nestor Castillo’s imagined song of love.

Perhaps the most acclaimed literary creation of a nonexistent piece of music by a nonexistent composer comes from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s memorable character Swann, at a soiree, hears a sonata for violin and piano played by its composer, Vinteuil, and is particularly struck by one phrase of music from the sonata, which imprints himself on his consciousness. Swann comes to associate the phrase with Odette de Crecy, the courtesan he loves passionately and disastrously, but it is the little phrase itself, that haunting, devastating, insinuating piece of music that lodges itself in Swann’s consciousness, and ultimately in the consciousness of the narrator himself – it goes on being a touchstone in Marcel’s story, long after the death of Swann.

As potent as the little phrase is, Proust at one point in the novel discourses on how a particularly striking moment, like the little phrase, can draw us into a work of art. One can go back again and again to the sonata, as Swann does, barely hearing the rest, waiting for that little phrase. But gradually, one starts hearing the more complex, less obvious parts, and one gets drawn into them, to the point where the little phrase that first grabbed you and wouldn’t let go becomes subsumed into something large, and maybe ultimately more rewarding.

We can’t look at Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile forever. Sooner or later, we’re drawn to the hands, the other brightly lit portion of the painting, standing out from the chiaroscuro drapery around them, symbols of tranquility, folded across the arm of the chair—or are they? Is there tension underlying that repose? And what’s that twisty road behind her.

In New York right now, the Manet/Degas show is drawing multitudes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the main attraction is Manet’s “Olympia,” starring the lady herself, naked, available, sensual, challenging. And then you start to become aware that while this courtesan knows how good, how inviting she looks naked, she also knows that there’s not much sensual excitement in it for her. It’s a living, and posing for an old guy with a beard is just part of it—and a part that doesn’t really involve her having to fake pleasure. Her unblinking stare tells you she’s judging you as much as she’s making herself available to you. And who sent those flowers that she’s not especially interested in? And what exactly is that cat doing there? And are you asking yourself these questions because you can’t meet her gaze?

Maybe nowhere is this more true than in poetry. Poetry is full of little phrases, that are literally just that. Little phrases. Little groups of words that disengage themselves from their larger concept, stick in the mind, become part of the collective vocabulary. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Good fences make good neighbors. What happens to a dream deferred? Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? I took the road less traveled by. I’m nobody – who are you? Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Neither a borrower or a lender be. You must change your life.

Because they’re words, the most common currency of our lives, they can set up shop outside of their context, and live lives of their own. Swann couldn’t really just whistle the little phrase – or if he did, it would become an earworm, and pretty quickly drive him crazy. He really had to sit through the whole sonata to hear it, and that meant that even if all he really wanted to hear was the little phrase, and all he wanted to do was think about Odette, he was going to get the rest of it, and it was going to work on him in subtle ways. You can’t even hum or whistle the inscrutable smile, or Olympia’s hand cupping her genitals. But you can toss “Home is the place where when you have to go there…” into a conversation about real estate, or say “Let me count the ways” to your significant other, without bothering yourself with context at all.

Or make your own sardonic context. Let me count the ways. Your hips, your boobs, your penis, your money, your cute puppy. Or recontextualize Keats’s “She dwells with beauty, beauty that must die / And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu” to Big Joe Turner’s more practical and more immediate “Baby you’re so beautiful, but you got to die one day / Gimme little bit o’ loving before you pass away.”

This is arguably not a good thing. If little phrases can be decontextualized from poems more easily than from sonatas or paintings on canvas, does this make poems little more than a depository for homilies? If “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in” can be embroidered on a sampler and hung on a wall next to “It takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home,” does that make them kinda equal?

Well, maybe. But maybe not always. The little phrases can be a gateway drug. And just as the idea of bad gateway drugs can be wildly oversold – an occasional toke on a joint doesn’t turn most users into desperate heroin addicts – the idea of good gateway drugs can be undersold. The little phrase isn’t going to lead everyone back into the poem from whence it came, but it will lead a few people on – and that, if we’re in this game for love rather than the big bucks we were promised (“BE A POET! MAKE BIG BUCKS!”), should be enough. There are some people who will read beyond “Home is the place where, when you have to go there…” to Warren’s answer, ”I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Which is it? And what’s the subtle difference? Why did Frost put both of them into the poem? And pretty soon, just maybe, you have a reader.

Hey, it even worked on me. I hadn’t read “Death of the Hired Man” in a long time. I remembered that exchange between Mary and Warren, and I remembered the end, when Warren comes back from looking in on Silas—“’Dead,’ was all he answered.” So I got caught up in it again—what makes a life valuable? I got caught up in Frost’s refusal to answer that question. Silas thinks his ability to bundle a load of hay just right has a value that young Harold’s study of Latin, or his professorship at his college, can never match. And yet Silas has so little respect for his own accomplishments that he doesn’t dare present himself at the house of his brother, the banker – or is it because he does respect his own accomplishments? Warren doesn’t think he’s ever accomplished much. Mary thinks it doesn’t matter. And pretty soon you are caught up in Frost’s refusal to choose a value – college or farming? Learning Latin or learning how to bundle every forkful in its place, and tag and number it for future reference? And maybe, you might think at that point, is Frost thinking about himself, and the two worlds that he doesn’t quite fit into?

Maybe the embroidery on your sampler reads “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” And maybe at some point it occurs to you that that sounds pretty, but it doesn’t exactly mean anything, and maybe that takes you back to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which you read through for a clue, and find that Keats never gives you one, or maybe he gives you too many. And maybe it takes you back to the other odes, the greatest one summer’s work anyone has ever produced, and you read through all of them, and you still don’t know why beauty is truth and truth beauty, but you don’t exactly care anymore, because there’s so much in those poems that it makes your head spin.

You probably aren’t going to embroider “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” on a sampler, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take its place in your internal gallery of little phrases. And here, if you go the poem, you find out that Larkin did pretty much mean just that, but the rest of the poem can still get under your skin, and you can get pulled into Larkin, and you may find yourself still remembering little phrases like “Then she undid her dress, or Take that, you bastard!” but that’s OK, too, because there’s more behind the little phrases, and it has gone under your skin, and you will keep coming back to it.

After all,

A poem should not mean

But be.

To end on another little phrase, from a poem that was at one time more admired than it is today, and maybe that’s as it should be.

Or maybe not.