Wind and Tree

text by Paul Muldoon
for SATB choir, 6'
2025

This setting of Paul Muldoon's 'Wind and Tree' had a long gestation. I'd wanted to set the poem since reading it on the first page of Muldoon's Selected Poems, but it took a long time and much tinkering for it to find a form I was content with. I've found find the poem itself often just as out of reach; sometimes I know exactly what it's about but at other times I'm not quite sure. In any case, I wanted to set some of Muldoon wonderful poetry for New College choir as I first heard him give a reading in the colelge chapel when I was a student. I remember him taking the time to explain a word in a poem before reading it and him noting that it was a word used only in Northern Ireland. I forever regret: a) not telling him that the word was also used back home in Pembrokeshire; and b) having from that day on completely forgotten what the word was!   

   In the way that most of the wind
   Happens where there are trees,
  
   Most of the world is centred
   About ourselves.
  
   Often where the wind has gathered
   The trees together and togethers,
  
   One tree will take
   Another in her arms and hold.
  
   Their brances that are grinding
   Madly together and together,
  
   It is no real fire.
   The are breaking each other.
  
   Often I think I should be like
   The single tree going nowhere,
  
   Since my ow arm could not and would not
   Break the other. Yet by my brokens bones
  
   I tell new weather.

   Paul Muldoon © 2001