Internationally acclaimed poet, philosopher, and environmentalist Wendell Berry created this beautiful pastoral text that appears in one of his Sabbath Poems (Shoemaker and Hoard Publishers).  The music seeks to interpret Berry’s beautiful words, and capture the mood and motion implied through the poetry.  The entire setting uses “word painting,” and the subject of the text ponders the phenomenon of fear, both in the forms of fear toward the poet and fear within the poet toward something else.  The poet contemplates this phenomenon as he is sitting quietly, observing circles of water.  The essence of the text is that when fear is expressed toward an object or if fear is within an object, being in the presence of the other might possibly erase the fear as we “hear its song.”  The poet eventually sings, and your students will sing as they journey through the Kentucky countryside, and contemplate a profound life-lesson.