Tree-Burial

2022. SSAA, piano, flute and bassoon / 6 min

Score PDF

I was taken in by the story in the poem “Tree-Burial” by William Cullen Bryant, a 19th century American romantic poet - about a Native American ritual of burying a child high among the trees rather than in the ground. This ritual and the words spoken seem a powerful balm in the face of grief and sadness. The text reflects the mother’s tenderness to the child - sorrowful but loving and beautiful. I found the poem in a collection of “Poems About Trees,” celebrating sacred groves, wild woodlands, and bountiful orchards, paying lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth.

Composed for women’s voices, the flute and bassoon add a doleful fullness to this piece. My composition borrows from the longer poem.

Also available in SSA & piano, flute, oboe/clarinet and bassoon.

Performed here by the Rocky Mountain Chamber Choir - Virtual Singers.

Tree-Burial

 

INTRODUCTION - SPOKEN

Near our southwestern border, when a child

Dies in the cabin of a Native American wife,

She makes its funeral-couch of delicate furs,

Blankets and bark, and binds it to the bough

Of some broad branching tree with leathern thongs

And sinews of the deer. A mother once

Wrought at this tender task, and murmured thus:

————————————

“Child of my love, I do not lay thee down

Among the chilly clods where never comes

The pleasant sunshine. There the greedy wolf

Might break into thy grave and tear thee thence,

And I should sorrow all my life. I make

Thy burial-place here, where the light of day

Shines round thee, and the airs that play among

The boughs shall rock thee. Here the morning sun,

Which woke thee once from sleep to smile on me,

Shall beam upon thy bed and sweetly here

Shall lie the red light of the evening clouds

Which called thee once to slumber. Here the stars

Shall look upon thee -

Here too the birds,

Whose music thou didst love, shall sing to thee,

And near thee build their nests and rear their young

With none to scare them.

And now, oh wind, that here among the leaves

Dost softly rustle, breathe thou ever thus

Gently,”