Tarik O’Regan THE NIGHT’S UNTRUTH
The Night’s Untruth explores the use of sleep as metaphor by dint of excerpts from poems written in the 17th to 20th centuries. Death, love, fear, ecstasy, isolation, dreaming and rest are all textual “variations” on the “theme” of sleep and can be found in the chosen texts. The work’s title is taken from a line in a poem by Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) and speaks to the composition’s focus on sleep as a parallel, possibly dystopian, existence to the one experienced in our waking hours. Tarik O’Regan, March 2010 FIRST PERFORMANCE: 25 March 2010 at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, given by BBC Singers; Onyx Brass; Stephen Disley, organ and Nicholas Cleobury, conductor. TEXT: O soft embalmer of the still midnight! Shutting, with careful fingers and benign, Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine; O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close, In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes. from “To Sleep” by JOHN KEATS (1795 1821) Care-charmer sleep, son of the Sable night, Brother to death, in silent darkness born: Relieve my languish, and restore the light, With dark forgetting of my cares return. And let the day be time enough to mourn, The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth: Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn, Without the torment of the night's untruth. from “Care-charmer sleep” by SAMUEL DANIEL (1562 - 1619) Is it thy will thy image should keep open My heavy eyelids to the weary night? Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken, While shadows like to thee do mock my sight? Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee So far from home into my deeds to pry,
DURATION: 16 minutes
Order No. NOV091157
To find out shames and idle hours in me, The scope and tenor of thy jealousy? from “Is it thy will” by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) Cease dreams, th'imagery of our day desires, To model forth the passions of the morrow: [Care-charmer sleep, son of the Sable night, Brother to death, in silent darkness born: Relieve my languish, and restore the light, With dark forgetting of my cares return.] Never let rising Sun approve you liars, To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow. Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain; And never wake, to feel the day's disdain. from “Care-charmer sleep” by SAMUEL DANIEL Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star As though to join us at some distant hill Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep. from "The Harbor at Dawn" by HART CRANE (1899-1932)