Description
Kallman Creates Publications
SATB, piano four-hands. Duration: 2’15”
This is the first piece in the set called Three About Babies.
(Note: Score is in manuscript form.)
Listen to “The Poet and the Baby”
(The Meistersingers of Cherry Creek High School, Englewood, CO; Richard Larson conducting)
Text
The Poet and the Baby
How’s a man to write a sonnet, can you tell,—
How’s he going to weave the dim, poetic spell,—
When a–toddling on the floor
Is the muse he must adore,
And this muse he loves, not wisely, but too well?
Now, to write a sonnet, every one allows,
One must always be as quiet as a mouse;
But to write one seems to me
Quite superfluous to be,
When you ‘ve got a little sonnet in the house.
Just a dainty little poem, true and fine,
That is full of love and life in every line,
Earnest, delicate, and sweet,
Altogether so complete
That I wonder what’s the use of writing mine.
–Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1913
