Ode to a Nightingale

2024 . for SATB choir . c. 4’30 .

Reading with piano reduction by the University of Iowa Kantorei

This work is about summertime sadness. Suddenly, you hear a nightingale outside your window, and you become aware of a world happening outside of yourself. You realize you can go on again.

Text

Excerpts from Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
. . . I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs. But with embalmed darkness, guess each sweet, Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild, White hawthorne and pastoral eglantine, Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves
And Mid-May’s eldest child.
. . . Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
. . . She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
. . Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
. . . Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?