Paul Laurence Dunbar's lovely poem wins on at least two accounts: First, it expresses a universal yearning to be loved, to be visited by love, to be completed by love—no matter the time of year or the season of one's life. His petition is as gentle and honeyed as his imagery is inclusive: who hasn't seen a starry night, a tree in bloom, or been weighed down by a heart full of grief? He writes to and from our most basic, shared, human experience. Second—from a musical perspective—Dunbar, knowingly or not, makes life easy for us composers. The word “come” centers itself in an elegant, singable vowel, like a meditative “ohm,” that can be stretched and colored endlessly. As that “ohm” repeats (many times) throughout the piece, I hear it like a reassuring wave at the ocean's edge or pulse in my own heart. Further, the text—a series of couplets with end-rhymes—sits naturally in a larger, three-stanza form: please come; you are sweet; please, please come. This becomes a musical form, then, as the text itself guides the repetition and juxtaposition of music, doing something like half of the composer's own work! For my part, I attempted to set Dunbar's text in music colored in golden yellows and soft grays, contoured to match the poet's urgency and vulnerability, with some attention to mirroring the text's imagery in the music, such as a bird returning, through the air, to its welcome nest.
Performance by The Gesualdo Six
Invitation to Love
By Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906)
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene’er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.
You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.
Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd’ning cherry.
Come when the year’s first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter’s drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.
(Public domain)