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Canticum Ressurectionis

Song Cycle by Wilfrid Howard Mellers (b. 1914)

?. That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows / flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs / they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, / wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long / lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous / ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; / in pool and rutpeel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed / dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks / treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it.  Million-fueled, / nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest / to her, her clearest-selved spark
Man, how fast his firedint, / his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned.  O pity and indig / nation!  Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, / death blots black out; nor mark
                Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time / beats level.  Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion!  Away grief's gasping, / joyless days, dejection.
                Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; / world's wildfire, leave but ash:
                In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                            Is immortal diamond.

Text Authorship:

  • by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection"

See other settings of this text.

Note: the typography is reproduced as found in the Babbitt score (slashes and all).

Researcher for this page: T. P. (Peter) Perrin
Total word count: 240
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