As I write this post my beloved choir has recently performed a great concert of Irish music in the latest of our every-other-year Celtic concerts. (Sadly, because of the pandemic, as of March 2020, we have just had to cancel our final concert of the year that would have been performed in May. But we’ll be back!) The tenors and basses (in other words, the men plus me) sang “Oft in the Stilly Night” with text by the early-19th-century Irish poet Thomas Moore. So I want to explore the imagery of the poem and then take a look at the composer of the version we sang.