Your eyes smile peace



Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, --

The finger-points look through like rosey blooms:

Your eyes smile peace.  The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, as far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge,

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorne-hedge. 

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. 

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosen'd from the sky: --

So this winged hour is drop't to us from above.

Oh! Clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, 

This close-companion'd, inarticulate hour

When two-fold silence was the song of love.  

Text by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, music by Vaughan-Williams.  This particular artsong has for many years been one of my favorites, especially from the piano bench.  I've accompanied the work numerous times, mostly for mezzos or sopranos.  Delighted I was to hear this performance by Ian Bostridge.  I realize that the voice itself does not necessarily "genderize" the text, that the singer is, in the larger scheme of things, merely a vehicle to relate musical and textual information.  Yet there are times that the gender of the voice may hinder some personal connection with the text.  The male voice here allows me, the male listener, to relate more easily to the text and to be reminded of similar personal experiences, either physical or emotional.