SSATB, unaccompanied

NOTE FROM THE COMPOSER

Born in St. Louis, Teasdale’s major poetic themes were love, death, and nature’s beauty. Life rarely “lived up” to her expectations, so she constantly reached out for something that always eluded her.  Her poetry has an eloquence and passion, mixed with a restlessness and yearning – an inner struggle to find beauty and peace. Nature often provides that mask humans can hide behind and communicate things beyond the surface. It is a filter of innocence – unpretentious, straightforward, and somehow primal. Sara Teasdale understood that completely.

TEXT

I have loved hours at sea, gray cities,
The fragile secret of a flower,
Music, the making of a poem
That gave me heaven for an hour. …

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Commissioned by the Michigan Choral Commission Consortium
This work is only available on zrstroope.com.