"The Lotus" from Song Offerings (2020)

The composer writes: Rabindranath Tagore’s Song Offerings are the poet’s own English-language translations of his Bengali-language Gitanjali. While Tagore’s translations are far from literal, they present to the Western world a window into the tradition of Hindu devotional poetry. (Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for literature for the collection.)

The Lotus" is the last movement of my setting of four Tagore poems for soprano and string quartet. Like many of these poems, "The Lotus" is richly infused with images from nature, which serve as metaphors for inward beauty and spirituality.