Transient Butterfly
Song Cycle for Soprano & Viola
Score and parts vailable for purchase at JW Pepper and Sheet Music Plus. See below for details.
1. The Dragonfly
2. Mariposa
3. Daphne
4. The Curse
Title: Transient Butterfly
Instrumentation: soprano, viola
Date of Composition: 2023
Duration: 15 minutes
This song cycle appears on the 2024 album "What Shall I Sing Today?"featuring soprano Ann Moss and violist Justin Ouellet.
Program Note
Four evocative songs on Edna St. Vincent Millay's mysterious poetry about change and transformation.
Composed for the gifted Soprano/Viola duo of Ann Moss and Justin Ouellet, I felt that the intimate timbre of soprano and viola would enhance the sense of mystery in these four poems. Each highlights some form of change or transformation: The Dragonfly emerges from an ugly cocoon to free-flying magnificence; Mariposa explores the thin lines between truth and falsity, life and death; Daphne is an assertive perspective on the transformation from pursued nymph to triumphant laurel tree; and lastly, The Curse describes a rage-powered reincarnation from ashes to bitter berry.
The Dragonfly
I wound myself in a white cocoon of singing,
All day long in the brook’s uneven bed,
Measuring out my soul in a mucous thread;
Dimly now to the brook’s green bottom clinging,
Men behold me, a worm spun-out and dead,
Walled in an iron house of silky singing.
Nevertheless at length, O reedy shallows,
Not as a plodding nose to the slimy stem,
But as a brazen wing with a spangled hem,
Over the jewel-weed and the pink marshmallows,
Free of these and making a song of them,
I shall arise, and a song of the reedy shallows!
Mariposa
Butterflies are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.
All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour,
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish you
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.
Daphne
Why do you follow me?—
Any moment I can be
Nothing but a laurel-tree.
Any moment of the chase
I can leave you in my place
A pink bough for your embrace
Yet if over hill and hollow
Still it is your will to follow,
I am off;—to heel, Apollo!
The Curse
Oh, lay my ashes on the wind
That blows across the sea.
And I shall meet a fisherman
Out of Capri,
And he will say, seeing me,
"What a Strange Thing!
Like a fish's scale or a
Butterfly's wing."
Oh, lay my ashes on the wind
That blows away the fog.
And I shall meet a farmer boy
Leaping through the bog,
And he will say, seeing me,
"What a Strange Thing!
Like a peat-ash or a
Butterfly's wing."
And I shall blow to your house
And, sucked against the pane,
See you take your sewing up
And lay it down again.
And you will say, seeing me,
"What a strange thing!
Like a plum petal or a
Butterfly's wing."
And none at all will know me
That knew me well before.
But I will settle at the root
That climbs about your door,
And fishermen and farmers
May see me and forget,
But I'll be a bitter berry
In your brewing yet.
Transient Butterfly