About this work:
Lyrical settings of "Dawn," "Fringed Gentian," and "Evening."
DAWN
When night is almost done, And sunrise grows so near That we can touch the spaces, It's time to smooth the hair And get the dimples ready, And wonder we could care For that old faded midnight That frightened but an hour.
FRINGED GENTIAN
God made a little gentian; It tried to be a rose And failed, and all the summer laughed. But just before the snows There came a purple creature That ravished all the hill; And summer hid her forehead, And mockery was still. The frosts were her condition; The Tyrian would not come Until the North evoked it. "Creator! shall I bloom?"
EVENING
The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became.