"NIGHT" AND "DAY," TWO POEMS FOR PIANOFORTE[33] AND ORCHESTRA: Op. 11
These tone-poems, composed in 1904, derive their inspiration from lines by Walt Whitman, which serve as mottoes for the music. For the first of the two, "Night," he has chosen this line from "A Clear Midnight" (in the section, "From Noon to Starry Night"):
"This is thy hour, O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless."
"This," wrote Mr. Converse to the compiler of the Boston Symphony programme-books at the time of the first performance of the two poems,[34] "expresses quite completely the mood which I have tried to create in my music. Of 'Day,' Whitman says:
'Day full-blown and splendid—day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter.'
[35]
"As far as it goes, this describes my [second] poem very well, but the real essence is lacking, although it was the best and most fitting quotation I could find for a motto. The moods of 'action,' 'ambition,' 'laughter,' and of love, too (for the erotic impulse is suggested in the poem), are all there, but strung upon and incident to the one predominant and insistent theme of the struggle of life. This restless, stirring, eternal energy ... is the main strain of the poem, and the other emotional phases are eddies momentarily emerging from it, but always being absorbed again in it, until at the end the tragedy of it becomes apparent and dominant. This is what I have tried to express."
He also points out that the titles are only symbolical; that he has had no intention "of expressing the physical characteristics of night and day"; his purpose was "to suggest their psychological meaning, to put into music the moods suggested by them."