Sunset on the Spire

2022. SSAA, string quartet / 6 min

Score PDF

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.