Not long before I composed Five Poems of Emily Dickinson, I had relocated from the cool humidity of the mountains of western North Carolina to the heat and drought-plagued Wiregrass region of southern Alabama. The poems reflect not only my longing for the mountains, but also my process of adjusting to my new home.
In these songs the voice and clarinet parts are equal, as opposed to the more traditional relationship of voice and accompanying instrument. At times one part may be more obvious than the other, but at no time is either less important.
In Apotheosis the clarinet is both the hesitancy of the poet, and the bee that becomes lost in the flower. In In Lands I Never Saw, although the parts are equally significant, the role of the clarinet is to emphasize the dilemma presented by the poet. The wind and the snowflake are expressed in the constant movement of the clarinet line in Beclouded, while the voice part tells the story. My longing for the fall colors of the mountains is the reason I chose As Imperceptibly As Grief. Here, the clarinet reflects my homesickness, and that moment when you realize that summer has become fall. In Evening, the clarinet represents the fading of the day and the expansiveness of nightfall.
Come slowly, Eden!
Lips unused to thee,
Bashful, sip thy jasmines,
As the fainting bee,
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums,
Counts his nectars- enters,
And is lost in balms!
In lands I never saw, they say,
Immortal Alps look down,
Whose bonnets touch the firmament,
Whose sandals touch the town, --
Meek at whose everlasting feet
A myriad daisies play.
Which sir, are you, and which am I,
Upon an August day?
The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.
A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away, --
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone, --
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.
And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.
The crickets sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbor, came, --
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home, --
And so the night became.
Emily Dickinson
