3. Into the Twilight

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Text: “Into the Twilight” by William Butler Yeats, 1893:

OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

Musicians: SATB chorus, S solo, violin*, & flute* [*or equivalent organ stops]

Length: 4:15

Style: Irish Romantic

Program notes: The poem and the music go through mood swings as Yeats contrasts his conflicted modern life with the consolation he finds in the lore and landscape of ancient Ireland.