Sure on this Shining Night–Two Wonderful Versions

WARNING: INTENSE LITERARY ANALYSIS FOLLOWS!

Here’s the rather puzzling text:

Sure on this shining night of star made shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me this side the ground.
The late year lies down the north.  All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth. hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder
Wand’ring far alone of shadows on the stars.

After wading through a fair amount of blather I can say at least a few things with at least some certainty:

The text of the two pieces, one by Samuel Barber and one by Morten Lauridsen, is not the complete poem. It’s ripped from the middle of a longer poem titled “Description of Elysium” by Agee, who is much better known as a screenwriter, film critic, novelist and journalist than he is as a poet. His one volume of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, was published in 1934. His most famous work, though, is the text he wrote to go with photographs of sharecroppers during the Great Depression in a book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Barber and Agee were contemporaries, and Barber was a true lover of poetry: “Throughout Barber’s life, the composer was never without a volume or two of poetry at his bedside. Poetry was . .  as necessary to his existence as oxygen. In his impeccable choice of song texts, Barber was drawn to a wide variety of contemporary writers.” (Song of America: “Samuel Barber”) I am therefore going to assume that Barber was familiar with Agee’s entire poem and very mindfully and deliberately selected the lines that he used for the song. It’s interesting, by the way, that Barber’s greatest strength as a composer can be seen in his songwriting, even though we don’t think of him that way today. To quote again from the excellent source referenced above: “But perhaps it is as a songwriter that Barber is at his most Romantic and impassioned. A fine baritone himself, Barber’s love of poetry and his intimate knowledge and appreciation of the human voice inspired all his vocal writing.” I’m sure it was a bit discouraging to Barber that his greatest fame was from his “Adagio for Strings” and that his other works were somewhat neglected, but there it is.

Barber chose the section of Agee’s poem that deals with our lives here on earth rather than in “elysium,” or heaven, so I’ll just deal with the lines he chose. What’s it like to be down here, looking up at the stars? Well, for one thing, the stars cast shadows; there are obstacles in the way. (One description I read that I did like, amidst the blather, said that we could imagine ourselves walking through a pine forest at night, with the starlight shining through the branches.) And we all know, even if we’re extremely limited in our astronomical knowledge, that the stars don’t really twinkle; that visual phenomenon is caused by fluctuations in the atmosphere. So we don’t see the stars as they really are as long as we’re in this life, looking up at them.

What’s left for us here, “this side the ground,” that is, before we’re buried in the ground, is kindness, which isn’t the trivial idea we sometimes think it is: paying the toll for the person behind you in line, for instance. Agee probably means the more intense idea of what the Bible calls “lovingkindness”–self-sacrificing acts of service motivated by love and compassion. He’s out at night at a time when “the late year lies down the north,” so winter is past, and “high summer holds the earth.” One might think, then, that the reference is simply to the season, but he also says “all is healed, all is health” and “hearts all whole.” Those phrases seem to indicate that he himself is also in the summer of his life. He weeps “for wonder,” wandering alone at night among the stars. Is he weeping at the beauty of life, or at its brevity, or both? It’s hard to say. Agee died very young, at 46, but this poem was published 20 years before that. I doubt that he was plagued with thoughts of life’s shortness while he was in his mid-twenties, but who knows?

The foregoing is at least one way to look at the poem but if you feel that my explanations have in any way destroyed your perceptions of the text, throw it out and go with what you think it all means. For Agee’s entire poem, go to “Agee: Description of Elysium.” It’s very dense and difficult, but also very beautiful.

I must include an anecdote here about Barber’s version of the song. Apparently (I’m always a little suspicious of these too-good-to-be-true tales), in 1979 Samuel Barber had just moved into a new apartment in New York City and gotten a different phone number. He was away from home and needed to call there and speak to his houseguest, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, but he couldn’t remember the new number. So he called directory assistance, but the operator was reluctant to give out that information; she apparently thought that he was some celebrity stalker and not actually Barber himself. But, she said, she was very fond of “Sure on This Shining Night.” Could Barber sing the opening phrase? He did so and was rewarded with the phone number. (The article I read said that “No doubt the popularity of  ‘Sure on this Shining Night’ was amplified by Barber’s frequent retelling of an anecdote that directly involved the song.” Hmmm.)

So there it is. Along with Barber and Lauridsen at least two other composers have set these words to music. (I was going to say that the poem must have really struck a chord with them, but I decided not to do that.) I wonder if Lauridsen et al even realized that Barber’s lyrics did not constitute the entire original poem?

And a special extra tidbit that I ran across when I was doing some more research on Morten Lauridsen–a performance of “Shining Night” in 2019 with Lauridsen at the piano and his wife, Dr. Amber Kim Lauridsen, conducting. (I have been unable to find a wedding date for them, but do know that they were not husband and wife in 2018 when they attended a gala for the LA Master Chorale together. Don’t want to get all People magazine here! But I thought it was pretty cool to track this eminent composer’s love life IRT, as the kids say.)

And here’s a nice performance of the Barber version by a choir of 14-16-year-olds:

© Debi Simons