Symphony No.3, in D Minor

Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last. —Samuel Palmer, 1858 I. Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In Pan’s spring rain “drives his victims out to the animals with whom they become as one”— pain and paeans, hung in the mouth, to be sung II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal: A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature… Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest: I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down and The book I love is everywhere And not in idle words John,claritas tell us the words are not idle, the syllables are able to turn plantains into quatrains, tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to form corollas in light clusters of tones… Sam Palmer hit it: “Milton, by one epithet draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw, ‘Pine and monumental oak’: I have just been trying to draw a large one in Lullingstone; but the poet’s tree is huger than any in the park.” Muse in a meadow, compose in a mind! III.What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me Harris’s Sparrow— 103 species seen by the Georgia Ornithological Society in Rabun Gap, including Harris’s Sparrow, with its black crown, face, and bib encircling a pink bill It was, I think, the third sighting in Georgia, and I should have been there instead of reading Clare, listening to catbirds and worrying about Turdus migratorious that flew directly into the Volkswagen and bounced into a ditch Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I’d been going 40 you might be whistling in some grass. 10 tepid people got 10 stale letters one day earlier, I cannot be happy about that. IV.What the Night Tells Me the dark drones on in the southern wheat fields and the hop flowers open before the sun’s beckoning the end is ripeness, the wind rises, and the dawn says yes YES! it says “yes” V.What the Morning Bells Tell Me Sounds, and sweet aires that give delight and hurt not— that, let Shakespeare’s delectation bear us VI.What Love Tells Me Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien and prays: Dear God, Sweet Jesus, Save Us, Save Us… the Light in the Grass, the Wind on the Hill, are in my head, the world cannot be heard Leaves obliterate my  heart, we touch each other far apart… Let us count into the Darkness