Ernst Bacon: Nature (The Lied and Art Song Texts Page: Texts and Translations to Lieder, mélodies, canzoni, and other classical vocal music)


Pink, small, and punctual,
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May,

Dear to the moss,
Known by the knoll,
Next to the robin
In every human soul.

Bold little beauty,
Bedecked with thee,
Nature forswears
Antiquity.

(With the first Arbutus.)

?. As if some little Arctic flower

Language: English

Authorship

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Poems of Emily Dickinson


 As if some little Arctic flower,
 Upon the polar hem,
 Went wandering down the latitudes,
 Until it puzzled came
 To continents of summer,
 To firmaments of sun,
 To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
 And birds of foreign tongue!
 I say, as if this little flower
 To Eden wandered in -
 What then? Why, nothing,
 Only, your inference therefrom!

?. A wind like a bugle

Language: English

Authorship

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Poems by Emily Dickinson

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Available translations (or transliterations, if applicable):

FRE

French


There came a wind like a bugle,
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass

We barred the window and the doors
As from an emerald ghost
The doom's electric moccasin
That very instant passed.

On a strange mob of planting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
[The living looked that day,]¹

The bell within the steeple wild,
The flying tidings [whirled]².
How much can come and much can go,
And yet abide the world!

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¹ Perle: "Those looked that lived that day -"
² Perle: "told"

?. The gentlest mother

Language: English

Authorship

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Poems by Emily Dickinson

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Available translations (or transliterations, if applicable):

FRE

French


Nature, the gentlest mother
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest or the waywardest, -
Her admonition mild

In forest and the hill
By traveller is heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.

How fair her conversation,
A summer afternoon, -
Her household, her assembly;
And when the sun goes down

Her voice among the aisles
Incites the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.

When all the children sleep
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light her lamps;
Then, bending from the sky,

With infinite affection
And infiniter care,
Her golden finger on her lip,
Wills silence everywhere.

Input by Ted Perry

?. Winter afternoons

Language: English

Authorship

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Poems of Emily Dickinson

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There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'T is the seal, despair, -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

?. A spider

Language: English

Authorship

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Poems by Emily Dickinson

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A spider sewed at night
Without a light
Upon an arc of white.
If ruff it was of dame
Or shroud of Gnome,
Himself, himself inform.
Of immortality
His strategy
Was physiognomy.