My lifelong fascination with the Concord Transcendentalists led me to consider, in the 1980s, a song cycle based on the poetry of many of them; instead, it ultimately led to my choral cycle on poems of Jones Very, Transcendental Sonnets. But one brief poem I did set was this one by Ellen Sturgis Hooper, published in 1840 in that Transcendentalist organ The Dial:

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.

Another, even briefer (Charles Ives had taught me that it was OK for a song to be extremely brief), was Thoreau's "In the Busy Streets," which expressed a sentiment I fully shared. It appeared in his Journal of 1838:

In the busy streets, domains of trade,
Man is a surly porter, or a vain and hectoring bully,
Who can claim no nearer kindredship with me
Than brotherhood by law.

The Thoreau song was written in 1984, the Hooper in 1991.

- Kyle Gann

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