for SATB Soli, SATB Chorus unaccompanied
By Byron Adams
This song was composed in wartime. Every morning I opened the newspaper and noted the mounting sorrow, the steady kness of deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. To express my grief, I turned to the versse of the great American poet Walt Whitman. With absolute reverence, I redacted some lines from one of his long poems dealing with the Civil Way, Ashes of Soldiers, which was written some years after the war and placed by Whitman in the "Songs of Parting" section of his monumental volume "Leavces of Grass."