Good-bye

This piece was written for submission to (and subsequently won) the 2022 Peninsula Musical Arts Association Choral Composition Competition, whose them was "Identity, Community, Home, Peace." For this, I decided to set the first and third stanzas of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "Good-Bye", a poem about leaving civilization and returning "home" -- i.e. to the natural world. The stanzas read as such: Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home: Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam; A river-ark on the ocean brine. Long I've been tossed like the driven foam; But now, proud world! I'm going home! I am going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone, -- A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green, the livelong day Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod A spot that is sacred to thought and God.