The study of any choral lyric, properly so called, and designed to be sung and otherwise performed by a group of executants on a specific public occasion, must be considerably hampered when its original musical setting is not at hand. Indeed the appreciation of such a poem as Alexander's Feast can be only partial at best if the text is read with the comparatively simple apparatus that one usually brings to bear upon a sonnet by Sidney. When the music to a choral ode was no afterthought but rather an integral part of the whole performance, the divorcement of the words from their setting results in an inevitable loss of understanding and of proper response. The ideal way to absorb any choral lyric, whether it be by Pindar, the author of the Book of Judges, or Dryden, would be to hear, if not to participate in, the complex display of sound through which its author intended it to be proclaimed. And since one cannot be present at the original performance of any save contemporary compositions of the kind, it becomes imperative to reconstruct, through the vigorous use of both study and imagination, the original circumstances and the original music which accompanied the poem.