Silent noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, -
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing [clouds]1 that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hour glass.

Deep in the sunsearched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: -
So this winged hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) , "Silent noon", from Ballads and Sonnets, published 1881

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive)

by George Frederick Boyle (1886-1948) , "Your hands lie open", published 1939. [voice and piano]
by Henry Clough-Leighter (1874-1956) , "Silent noon", published 1910 [suite: high voice, piano, and string quartet], from The Day of Beauty
by Edward Toner Cone (1917-) , "Silent noon", published 1964 [soprano and piano], from New Vistas of Song
by Frederick Shepherd Converse (1871-1940) , "Silent noon", published <<1940. [voice and piano]
by John Diercks (1927-) , "Pastorale", 1957. [SSA and piano]
by Ernest Bristow Farrar (1885-1918) , "Silent noon", op. 10 no. 2, published 1911 [voice and piano], from Vagabond Songs, no. 2.
by Miriam Gideon (1906-1996) , "Silent noon", 1983 [medium voice and pf (or flute, oboe, vibraphone, violin, and violoncello)], from Wing'd Hour, no. 2.
by Robert William Manton (1894-1967) , "The wing'd hour", 1954. [medium voice and piano]
by Charles Wilfred Orr (1893-1976) , "Silent noon", published 1922. [baritone and piano]
by Masters van Someren-Godfery (-1947) , "Silent noon", published 1925. [voice and piano]
by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) , "Silent noon", 1903, published 1904 [voice and piano], from The House of Life, no. 2.
by Elinor Remick Warren (1900-1991) , "Silent noon", published 1928. [voice and piano]

Added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.

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