Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass (Rossetti) (The LiederNet Archive: Texts and Translations to Lieder, mélodies, canzoni, and other classical vocal music)

Your hands lie open in the long fresh...

Language: English

Available translation(s): CAT FRE SPA

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.

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View original text (without footnotes)
¹ Vaughan Williams: "skies"

Authorship

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882), "Silent noon", appears in Ballads and Sonnets, first published 1881 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

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] [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Henry Clough-Leighter (1874 - 1956), "Silent noon", published 1910 [high voice, piano, and string quartet], from The Day of Beauty [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Edward Toner Cone (b. 1917), "Silent noon", published 1964 [soprano and piano], in the collection New Vistas of Song [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Frederick Shepherd Converse (1871 - 1940), "Silent noon", published <<1940. [voice and piano] [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by John Henry Diercks (b. 1927), "Pastorale", 1957. [SSA chorus and piano] [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Ernest Bristow Farrar (1885 - 1918), "Silent noon", op. 10 no. 2, published 1911 [voice and piano], from Vagabond Songs, no. 2. [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Miriam Gideon (1906 - 1996), "Silent noon", 1983 [medium voice and piano (or flute, oboe, vibraphone, violin, and violoncello)], from Wing'd Hour, no. 2, New York, Peters [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Robert William Manton (1894 - 1967), "The wing'd hour", 1954. [medium voice and piano] [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Charles Wilfred Orr (1893 - 1976), "Silent noon", published 1922. [baritone and piano] [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Masters van Someren-Godfery (d. 1947), "Silent noon", published 1925. [voice and piano] [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]
by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958), "Silent noon", 1903, published 1904 [voice and piano], from The House of Life, no. 2. [ sung text checked 1 time]
by Elinor Remick Warren (1900 - 1991), "Silent noon", published 1928. [voice and piano] [ sung text not yet checked against a primary source]

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 14
Word count: 113