"A Toccata of Galuppi's" begins with an outburst, a dramatic apostrophe. "Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro," the speaker cries, "this is very sad to find!" He's speaking to someone who isn't there: the 18th-century composer Baldassare Galuppi (whose name he gets slightly wrong).
Galuppi isn't there in person, at least. But he's there in spirit through his "old music." The speaker is listening to (or perhaps playing) a Galuppi toccata—that is, a short, virtuosic piece meant to show off the composer's skill and voice. Through that toccata, the speaker feels, Galuppi is speaking to him, and he's saying something terribly and unavoidably sad. "I can hardly misconceive you," the speaker tells him: he'd be a fool not to understand the bad news Galuppi is trying to tell him.
It might take readers a moment, though, to understand where the speaker's sadness is coming from. The first things he describes hearing in Galuppi's toccata are romantic visions of Galuppi's native Venice:
Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
The old and glorious Venice the speaker pictures here goes way back, even before Galuppi's time. The speaker's allusions to doges (Venice’s elected leaders, who were indeed often wealthy merchants) solemnly throwing rings into the sea evoke the Renaissance, when the city-state of Venice was a major power. And the legendary glory of St. Mark's Basilica calls up older times still: the current church building was completed in the middle ages.
Already, then, there's a hint that some of the sadness the speaker hears in the toccata is about days gone by. Galuppi lived in the time of the last Venetian doges; only 12 years after his death, Napoleon's armies would conquer Venice, bringing an end to a long-lived and glorious republic. Galuppi's music, in conjuring up the loveliness of the old city, speaks of something lost.
But the poem's form doesn’t exactly suggest grief and loss. The rhythms and sounds here are light and lively:
- The tercets (three-line stanzas) rhyme in triplets—a swift, emphatic one-two-three pattern.
- Those punchy tercets are written in trochaic octameter: that is, lines of eight trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm, like this: "Oh, Gal- | uppi, | Baldas- | saro, | this is | very | sad to | find!" (The missing unstressed syllable on the end makes this catalectic trochaic octameter, no less.)
This difficult, virtuosic, quick-moving shape itself sounds an awful lot like a Galuppi toccata. And that makes sense: this poem will be all about a longing for life, love, color, and meaning in the face of dark and mysterious death. By evoking swift, exhilarating movement, the toccata (and the poem) suggest what makes the final stillness of death so "very sad" to face.