The Send Off, The End (Jeremy Rawson)
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- (Posted 2018-03-16) CPDL #49064:
- Editor: Jeremy Rawson (submitted 2018-03-16). Score information: A4, 14 pages, 173 kB Copyright: Personal
- Edition notes:
General Information
Title: The Send Off, The End
Composer: Jeremy Rawson
Lyricist: Wilfred Owen
Number of voices: 4vv Voicing: SATB and Soprano solo
Genre: Secular, Unknown
Language: English
Instruments: Piano, or piano and string quartet
First published: 2018
Description: A setting of two poems by Wilfred Owen, composed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. The link on this page is to the vocal score which has just piano accompaniment. For the version with accompaniment by piano and string quartet, please visit the composer's website (see link below).
External websites:
Original text and translations
English text
(Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori)
(The old lie…)
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding shed
And lined the train with faces grimly gay
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp
Then, unmoved, signals nodded and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed up,
They went, they were not ours.
We never heard to which front these were sent
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train loads?
A few, too few, may creep back silent to still village wells
Up half known roads.
After the blast of lightning from the east
The flourish of loud clouds, the chariot throne,
After the drums of time have rolled and ceased
And from the bronze west long retreat is blown,
Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?
Of fill these void veins full again with youth
And wash with an immortal water, age?
When I do ask White Age, he saith not so,
"My head hangs weighed with snow"
And when I hearken to the earth, she saith
"My fiery heart sinks aching, it is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified
Nor my titanic tears the seas be dried."