Elinor Wylie wrote Incantation and Sunset on the Spire in 1921 after a series of failed pregnancies and marriages and just before her launch to literary fame in New York. These poems find her at the crossroads - expressing a dissatisfaction with the realities of life and an aspiration to a more gratifying world of art and beauty, along with an eagerness to embrace a wild new existence.
The setting begins with Incantation, a meditative set of short stanzas about darkness facing light. Sunset on the Spire is a dreamy whirlwind of a poem, full of warmth and insistence.
Written for SSAA and violin, violin, viola, and cello, and drawing from these poems, this piece is appropriate for a good community, collegiate or professional women’s chorus.
Text from Incantation and Sunset on the Spire by Elinor Wylie, 1921
A white well
In a black cave;
A bright shell
In a dark wave.
A white rose
Black brambles hood;
Smooth bright snows
In a dark wood.
A flung white glove
In a dark fight;
A white dove
On a wild black night.
A white door
In a dark lane;
A bright core
To bitter black pain.
All that I dream
By day or night
Lives in that stream
Of lovely light.
Here is the earth,
And there is the spire;
This is my hearth,
And that is my fire.
From the sun’s dome
I am shouted proof
That this is my home,
And that is my roof.
Here is my food,
And here is my drink,
And I am wooed
From the moon’s brink.
And the days go over,
And the nights end;
Here is my lover,
Here is my friend.
A bright spark
Where black ashes are;
In the smothering dark
One white star.