Four Poems by Walt Whitman [premiere]

Todd Fitzpatrick, baritone
Charles Woodward, piano

I. Halcyon Days

Not from successful love alone.
Nor wealth, nor honor'd middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finished'd and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

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II. The Voice of the Rain

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, stange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of the Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out tof the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed,
and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,
and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,
Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)

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II. Continuities

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form -- no object of the world.
Nor life, nor foce, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space -- ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold -- the embers left fromearlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sund now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

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IV. Old Salt Kossabone

Far back, related on my mother's side,
Old Salt Kossabone, I'll tell you how he died:
(Had been a sailor all his life -- was nearly 90 -- lived with his married grandchild, Jenny;
House on a hill, with view of bay at hand, and distant cape, and stretch to open sea;)
The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year his regular custom,
In his great arm chair by the window seated,
(Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,)
Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to himself --
And now the close of all:
One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long --
cross-tides and much wrong going,
At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck veering,
And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly entering,
cleaving, as he watches,
She's free -- she's on her destination." -- these the last words --
when Jenny came, he sat there dead,
Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother's side, far back.

[click here for sample pages of the music]

Copyright © 2001 Old Dominion University , Norfolk, VA 23529 - 683-4175