Peter Bird

In these 3 sonnets, Longfellow uses Romantic imagery and sound effects to dramatize 3 important moments in his life as an artist: "Mezzo cammin" describes the mid-life crisis that impelled him to begin writing seriously. "The sound of the sea" is a metaphor for a happy time when artistic inspiration arrived as a gift unforseen and flowed freely. "The poets' is a retrospective summation of a life given to poetry (or 'Song' as he calls it) with its mostly internal rewards. Because he invokes the great poets who went before, I have imagined this scene in a grand interior like the Panthéon of Paris, and written a series of single or double accompanied echo canons with increasing delay, suggesting an expanding space.