About this work:
The underlying themes of "`The Stillness in the Air'" (1985, 2011, 2016) are mortality and rapture--two seemingly contrary ideas that Emily Dickinson's poetry repeatedly brings together.
“There’s A Certain Slant of Light” dwells on uneasy, half-conscious intimations of mortality thatpress ever more insistently for conscious recognition; pauses and hesitations in the vocal line register the difficulty of the experience.
"Apparently with no Surprise" is a pungent refusal to accept props and bromides; the very brief song is like a grim scherzo.
“I Heard a Fly Buzz” is about the experience of dying; its music is the darkest in the cycle. The vocal hesitations of the first song return here at the close in heightened form.
“As Imperceptibly as Grief” is an elegy of sorts, but one more wistful than mournful; the music is more praise than lament. But its grip is tenuous; at a crucial point, led by the obbligato, lament breaks through and is not necessarily appeased.
“Of Bronze and Blaze” contemplates mortality from the perspective of an observer both elevated and dwarfed by the scale of the cosmos as embodied in the aurora borealis.
Picking up on the gentler aspect of “Imperceptibly,” “These are the Days when Birds Come Back” tries to represent the awareness of mortality as a kind of uncanny elation. The poem represents the secular appreciation of passing things as a sacrament. The music, piano throughout, responds with the most liquid vocal line of the cycle.
The poems as printed and set here are the public domain versions,lightly altered in a few spots (in the spirit, but not the word--or punctuation!-- of the later copyrighted
editions) to undo the attempt by Dickinson's first editors to make her texts more conventional.