When You Are Old
For SATB Choir, a cappella    (2'20")

Gladde Music Pub. (GMP9804)
$1.60

From the composer -
    "When I attended the ACDA Regional Convention in Reno in 1998, I was deeply moved when a choir sang this text which had been set by a San Francisco composer.  I took the W. B. Yeats poem home with me and tucked it away.  I wanted to set it myself, but didn't want my setting to be derivative of another composer's.  I waited until my memory of it faded.  Many months later, my setting emerged from Yeat's wonderful, bittersweet poem."

 

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountain overhead
*And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~ William Butler Yeats, 1892

 

"And hid his face amid a crowd of stars."


 

When You Are Old, p.1

When You Are Old, p.2

When You Are Old, p.3

When You Are Old, p.4

 

~ Page 5 excluded ~

 

When You Are Old, p.6

When You Are Old, p.7

When You Are Old, p.8