Milton Byron Babbitt: Two Sonnets (The Lied and Art Song Texts Page: Texts and Translations to Lieder, mélodies, canzoni, and other classical vocal music)


Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, / vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous
Evening strains to be time's vast, / womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, / her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, / stars principal, overbend us,
Fire-featuring heaven.  For earth / her being has unbound; her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; / self in self steeped and pashed -- quite
Disremembering, dismembering / all now.  Heart, you round me right
With:  Our evening is over us; our night / whelms, whelms, and will end us.
Only the beakleaved boughs dragonish / damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it.  Our tale, O our oracle! / Let life, waned, ah let life wind
Off her once skeined stained veined variety / upon, all on two spools; part, pen, pack
Now her all in two flocks, two folds -- black, white; / right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But these two; ware of a world where but these / two tell, each off the other; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, / thoughts against thoughts in groans grind.

Note: the typography is reproduced as found in the score (slashes and all). Bartleby.com has some notes on some of the words found in here like "throughther".

Input by T. P. Perrin

2. That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

Language: English

Authorship

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

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Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows / flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs / they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, / wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long / lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous / ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; / in pool and rutpeel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed / dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks / treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it.  Million-fueled, / nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest / to her, her clearest-selved spark
Man, how fast his firedint, / his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned.  O pity and indig / nation!  Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, / death blots black out; nor mark
                Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time / beats level.  Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion!  Away grief's gasping, / joyless days, dejection.
                Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; / world's wildfire, leave but ash:
                In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                            Is immortal diamond.

Note: the typography is reproduced as found in the score (slashes and all).

Input by T. P. Perrin