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Poetry for a Midsummer's Night
for mezzo-soprano, double bass and piano
total duration: 5½ minutes
How the Lovers Found True Love After All

Like Words, Like Music

How the Lovers Found
True Love After All


They say the woods are full of mystery,
who venture in and do not reappear
until such time as they achieve a mastery
of signs employed by sprites, who feel no fear.

Not so, the lovers, who, not knowing better,
scatter their emotions like plucked daisies
across the forest floor, some sweet, some bitter:
spasmatic measures of how much love is crazy.

  The trick's to have the one you love in view
when he or she can see no one but you.
It helps, to get the other in the mood,
to call them out at night to walk the wood.

People will tell you the forest has its way
with those who walk it all-worked-up.
Desperate, lonely, lovesick every day,
they sniff the devil's paintbrush, the buttercup.

Who can predict when Cupid's state is bliss,
and Eros can spare an amorous advance?
Our lovers, heretofore astray, amiss,
found true love's path by the seat of their pants.

How the Lovers Found True Love After All

Like Words, Like Music
Like Words, Like Music

Some have heard the music in the trees
that has no words, but words they have
more than music, and so they sing.

Others have heard the words of love
that make no sound, but sounds they have
more than silence, and so they speak.

For them, there's crackling music in a fire,
a round in the rapids, shimmery chords
midair, and a drumming in the earth.

What's worth more than our poverty
that needs such speech and song as poets
and lovers are helpless not to utter?

  Lovers have a music in their heads,
the words by heart, and could not love long
were they less heartfelt, less headstrong.

Midsummer's a confluence of time
and passion, when those halfway to matrimony
labor to compose their love symphony.

Shakespeare knew his meters and strewed them
along the garden path and in the wood
that those who needed most to hear them could.

Lovers, though you be neither courtly nor English,
yet you have other traits worth a show,
so sing and play together, for you never know.

All cited poems are used with permission; © Marvin Bell; Music: © 2002 David Gompper
Program Notes
Two poems from Poetry for A Midsummer's Night by Marvin Bell were written for a recital featuring Katherine Eberle, Diana Gannett, and the composer at the piano, that took place during the Double Bass Convention (5th Einco) in Goiania, Brazil on August 24, 2000. While the first poem is reflective and quiet, set as a duet between singer and double bass, the second poem is lively and rhythmic. The latter is what I imagined Brazilian music to be, with seventh-chord arpeggios in the double bass and those quick dance rhythms found in the piano.

Performances
-University of Iowa, Marvin Bell Celebration, February 19, 2012
-June 5, 2011, Movimento Musik, Munich, Germany (Gregory Weist)
-University of Iowa, Faculty Recital, September 27, 2000
-University of Iowa, Faculty Recital, September 8, 2000
-Federal University of Goias, Goiania, Brazil, Einco V,