To the tally of my soul (Whitman, set by P. Hindemith, R. Sessions) (The Lied and Art Song Texts Page: Texts and Translations to Lieder, mélodies, canzoni, and other classical vocal music)


To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight [that was bound in my eyes]¹ unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.

[And]² I saw askant the armies,
[And]³ I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke and torn and bloody,
And at last [but]⁴ a few shreds left on the staffs, (all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
[But I]⁵ saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.

View text without footnotes
¹ omitted by Sessions
² omitted by Hindemith
³ inserted by Hindemith
⁴ Sessions: "for"
⁵ Sessions: "and we"

Input by Ahmed E. Ismail

Authorship

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Memories of President Lincoln

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

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd

Text is used as part of a longer work

Roger Sessions (1896-1985)

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd

full setting text

Date added to the website: 2005-01-13.

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