The text comes from Whitman’s “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” a lengthy elegy in memory of Abraham Lincoln. My choral setting of another part of this poem has been my most popular work to date. I composed “Sing on there in the swamp” just a few months later and it is in a very similar style and mood. The poem is imbued with a bittersweetness that I have tried to reflect in the music. The beautiful things about spring—the lilacs, the singing of the birds, the “lustrous” western star—perennially remind the speaker of the “departing comrade.”
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