1. Where Dream Begins

Strip off kindness,

Strip off shelter,

Stripped down, friendless,

Nor pride, nor warm shoes,

Nor any covering

A cold man might use

When there is no sun,

When heart is gone.

Without coat or cape,

Shoestring or doorlatch,

Or one cosy hope,

Stripped of odds and ends,

Even at last of love,

Where the world ends,

Go rich in poverty,

Go rich in poetry.

This nothingness

Is plentitude,

Honeycomb wilderness

Where the wild hare runs,

Wind in the torn seams,

Where rise buried suns,

Where darkness begins.

Here dream begins.

2. Understatement

This wind, corruption in the city

(Spirit pent up in an enclosure)

That steals, seductive, without pity,

The heart's composure.

Think of it gusting over a field today,

Setting the cows to lowing with surprise,

Spreading the sweet smell of manure and hay,

Bringing tears to the eyes.

Oh, there are places, where this evil wind

Would work a blessed charm,

Where a wild thing like this warm wind

Would do no harm.

3. The Other Place

We are suddenly there

In the other place;

After the long war

Discover peace:

I touch your face.

The open palm

Marries your bone,

Beyond all things calm

Finds crucial form,

Lies still as stone.

Flesh is made whole

That held us caught.

There is no wall.

We lie where we fought

Lost in pure thought.

Our truth is here

In this still pond

Where without fear

The soul's alive beyond what we can understand.

4. Composition

Here is the pond, here sky, and the long grasses

That lean over the water, a slow ripple

Under the slightest wandering air that passes

To shift the scene, translating flat to stipple

On still blue water and troubling the green masses.

Three elements are spaced and subtly joined

To rest the restless mind and lift us where

Nothing in us is baffled or constrained,

Who wake and sleep as casual as they are,

And contain earth, and water, and the wind.

Take blue; take green; take the pale gold sand;

Take the slow changing shimmer of the air;

Take a huge sky above a steadfast land;

Take love, the tiger ocean in its lair,

And gentle it like grass under the wind.

5. Kinds of Wind

Wind in the stiff green wheat,

A thistly sound and sweet;

Wind in the barley tassels,

A heavy silk that rustles;

Wind seething in the leaves,

Waves on unbreaking waves.

The greening wind, the kind,

That comes from West or South,

All gently to unbind.

There is a fiercer blast,

That fills the whole sky's mouth,

That comes from North or East,

A god who can break through

The massive clouds to show

The coldest pure blue,

Or sometimes sudden snow.

Impersonal, immense,

It rushes toward silence.

Who feels this other wind,

Less gentle and less kind,

This cleansing ruthless will,

Learns the wind's heart is still,

Learns that pure love lies there

With grave wide open eyes,

The huge, the quiet skies,

The depth on depth of air.

6. Now Voyager

Now voyager, lay here your dazzled head.

Come back to earth from air, be nourishèd,

Not with the light on light, but with this bread.

Here close to earth be cherished, mortal heart,

Hold your way deep as roots push rocks apart

To bring the spurt of green up from the dark.

Where music thundered let the mind be still,

Where the will triumphed let there be no will,

What light revealed now let the dark fulfill.

Here close to earth the deeper pulse is stirred,

Here where no wings rush and no sudden bird,

But only heartbeat upon beat is heard.

Here let the fiery burden be all spilled,

The passionate voice at last be calmed and stilled

And the long yearning of the blood fulfilled.

Now voyager, come home, come home to rest,

Here on the long lost country of earth's breast

Lay down the fiery vision and be blest.

Notes from the Composer:

In 1988 I wrote to May Sarton asking for permission to use several of her poems as song texts. She responded granting me permission to use any of her poems, as she very much enjoyed hearing the resulting songs. In 1989 I completed a cycle for soprano and piano, Three by May Sarton. For that cycle I assembled three poems, “Definition” from In Time Like Air (1953-58), “Lullaby” from The Leaves of the Tree (1948-50) and “Canticle” from The Lion and the Rose (1938-48). Although this was a departure from one common practice -- of creating a song cycle by setting poems originally written for a single collection -- the 1989 cycle followed another traditional model for song cycles -- consisting of several individual songs that are highly contrasting in tempo, texture, and motivic material. I was and am happy with that cycle, and it served as a significant introduction to May Sarton and her work, particularly as we exchanged several letters about the recordings I sent her of early performances of those songs. But I was interested in a different approach for this project.

For this project, I worked from May Sarton: Collected Poems (1930-1993), published by WW Norton. Between the appearance of this collection in 1993 and the start of preliminary work on this composition, I had dog-eared dozens of pages in my copy of this book, informally identifying each of the poems I had previously encountered over the years, as well as those new to me, that seemed promising for use, someday, as song texts. When I began choosing poems for this project I worked from that pool of (dog-eared) Sarton poems. For some weeks I had little luck reducing the number to a shorter list of preferred poems. But as the time passed, I began to feel more and more compelled to come to a decision. One day, during a free class period, I spent a furious 45 minutes assembling a tentative list of six poems arranged in a particular sequence. To my surprise, that list and that order continued to survive as my most preferred collection, and these are the poems that serve as texts for Where Dream Begins.

“Where Dream Begins” from In Time Like Air (1953-1958)

“Understatement” from Inner Landscape (1936-1938)

“The Other Place” from In Time Like Air

“Composition” from A Durable Fire (1969-1972)

“Kinds of Wind” from The Land of Silence (1950-1953)

“Now Voyager” from The Lion and the Rose (1938-1948)

I chose these six poems and arranged them in this order before I began writing any of the music, and, in that sense, musical ideas originated through consideration of these poems. On the other hand, I had built into the arrangement of the poems a linkage between the second poem and the third (through the image of “place”) and between the fourth poem and the fifth (through the image of “wind”). But it took about four months of daily composition work on this project before I suddenly realized that I had intended all along to organize the composition into four “movements” consisting of song 1, songs 2 & 3, songs 4 & 5 and song 6, and that the poems had been chosen and arranged in this order to facilitate this plan. I really felt a bit dim-witted that it took me so long to notice this -- to discover my unconscious "precompositional plan" -- but because it did, I always felt, throughout the project, that the music was responding to the text.

The song cycle, Where Dream Begins, derives its title from the first poem, “Where Dream Begins” from In Time Like Air (1953-1958). But, additionally, the entire cycle concerns three elements represented in this title:

“Where” -- a place...

“Dream” -- the state of truth, or creative grace...

“Begins” -- the sense in which each experience of this state is a beginning or a renewal

Read in sequence, the six individual poems chosen for this cycle form are meant to suggest a secondary narrative (beyond the implications of any individual poem) concerning this continual search for, and need for, the intense renewing, synthesizing, creative experience, despite the disruptive or distracting forces of the ordinary world -- an overall narrative of a life ever “in progress.” Of course, since these poems were written over a span of about 35 years and were originally published in five different collections, such continuity, to whatever extent it may be suggested by my reading of the poems, and the order in which I have arranged them, is surely artificial. But this is what I hoped to bring to the experience of these six poems, so ordered, and set to this music: the projection of an overall musical narrative extending from the beginning of song one through the end of song six.

The original version of this cycle was composed for soprano Christine Seitz and a chamber ensemble of string quartet and harp and was premiered at Northwestern University and at the University of Wisconsin. In that form, the contrast between the infinite and dynamically variable sustain of the strings was contrasted with the inevitable rapid decay of notes on the harp. That aspect of two distinct types of instrumental music in the composition made the creation of a version for soprano and piano very challenging, requiring a reconsideration of the poems and the creation of quite a bit of completely new music in this version, while striving to retain the original formal plan. This process was enriched and motivated by the knowledge that two consummate performers, Christine Seitz and Jessica Paul, wished to present the premiere of this new version. I am extremely grateful to them both.

-- Paul Seitz