Humming the music won't quite do either, though I know people who can hum the melody line of a late-Beethoven quartet. You can't summarize a poem, just as you can't really transfer a quartet, even though there are numberless transcriptions. A piece of chamber music is pure form. It is locked in its form, like the very best poems we know. Style is content.
Form is substance.
A scene by Proust cannot exist without the cadences of his style. Nowhere do mind and sense, spirit and desire come so close together as to become totally indistinguishable. I once called this blissful state of suspension timelessness, but the word no longer satisfies me. So let me give it its true name and say that it approaches what for a godless individual seems holy. It has the clarity and the immediacy of the Eucharist.