Tenor Bruce Reed and Frank DiGiacomo
Photography by Rick Powers 

Acknowledgments for lyrics from The Collected Poems of D.H. Lawrence, are to Laurence Pollinger Limited, the Estate of the late Mrs. Frieda Lawrence, William Heinemann, Ltd., and The Viking Press, Inc.

Composer Frank DiGiacomo had a very special affinity for the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, one of the titans of English verse. He made a selection of six poems, from the hundreds that Lawrence wrote, to form a song cycle on the growth of a relationship between a man and a woman. It was a clever conception, not intended by Lawrence of course, but which gave DiGiacomo the lyrics he needed to tell a very human story of a couple’s initial contact, their marriage, their trials and their joys, through to their separation by her death, while the man waits for his own death to achieve eternal union with her.
The live recordings offered on this website were made in 1979, with tenor Bruce Reed, accompanied by Mr. DiGiacomo. Selections from the song cycle were performed publicly in 1975, 1976, 1977 and 1979.

 LYRICS
1. December Night
Take off your cloak and your hat
and your shoes, and draw up at my hearth
Where never woman sat.

I have made the fire up bright;
let us leave the rest in the dark
and sit by firelight.

The wine is warm on the hearth;
the flickers come and go.
I will warm your limbs with kisses
until they glow.

2. Other Women
Other women have reared in me
bitter and painful flow’rs;
diff’rent, yes, shall the posies be
from this love of ours!

My flesh is ready like tilled loam
to catch afire with life,
with a steady rush of living, a foam
of flow’ring strife.

My heart is firm and solid, it needs
only you like the sun
of spring upon it, and it speeds
for the joy like a fount undone.

Ah! Happy am I, a naked sprig,
in my bursting and budding; I feel
my joy-blossoms shaping, am big
with gladness, reel
prolific; I am a blossoming twig.

3. A Young Wife
The pain of loving you
is almost more than I can bear.

I walk in fear of you.
The darkness starts up where
you stand, and the night comes through
your eyes when you look at me.

Ah, never before did I see
The shadows that live in sun!

Now ev’ry tall glad tree
turns round its back to the sun
and looks down on the ground, to see
the shadow it used to shun.

At the foot of each glowing thing
A night lies looking up.

Oh, and I want to sing
and dance, but I can’t lift up
my eyes from the shadows: dark
they lie spilt around the cup.

What is it? —Hark!
The faint fine seethe in the air!

Like the seething sound in a shell!
It is death still seething where
the wildflow’r shakes its bell
and the skylark twinkles blue—

The pain of loving you
is almost more than I can bear.

Ah!

4. Spring Morning
Ah, through the open door is there
an almond tree aflame with blossom!
    Let us fight no more.

Among the pink and blue of the sky
and the almond flow’rs a sparrow flutters.
    We have come through,

It is really spring! See, when he thinks himself alone
how he bullies the flow’rs.
    Ah, you and me,

How happy we’ll be! See him?
He clouts the tufts of flow’rs in his impudence.
    But, did you dream it would be so bitter?

Never mind, it is finished, the spring is here.
And we’re going to be summer-happy
    and summer-kind.

We have died, we have slain, and been slain,
we are not our old selves anymore. I feel new and eager
    to start again.

It is gorgeous to live and forget. And to feel quite new.
See the bird in the flow’rs?—he’s making
    a rare to-do!

He thinks the whole blue sky is much less than the bit of blue egg
he’s got in his nest. We’ll be happy
    you and I, I and you.

With nothing to fight anymore, in each other at least.
See, how gorgeous the world is.
    See, outside the door!

5. Shades
Shall I tell you, then, how it is?
There came a cloven gleam
like a tongue of darkened flame
to flicker in me.

And so I seem
to have you still the same
in one world with me.

In the flicker of a flower,
in a worm that is blind, yet strives, yet strives,
in a mouse that pauses to listen

glimmers our
shadow; yet it deprives
them none of the glisten.

In ev’ry shaken morsel
I see our shadow tremble
as if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.

As if it were part and parcel,
one shadow, and we need not dissemble
our darkness: do you understand?

For I have told you plainly how it is.

6. A Love Song
Reject me not if I should say to you
I do forget the sounding of your voice,
I do forget your eyes, that searching through
the days perceive our marriage, and rejoice.

But, when the apple blossom opens wide
under the pallid moonlight’s fing’ring,
I see your blanch’d face at my breast, and hide
my eyes from tedious work, maling’ring.

Ah, then upon the bedroom I do draw
the blind to hide the garden, where the moon
enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.

And I do lift my aching arms to you,
and I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
and I do weep for the very pain of you,
and fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

And I do toss through the troubled night for you,
dreaming your yielded mouth is given to mine,
feeling your strong breast carry me on, on into
the sleep no dream nor doubt can undermine.