Bitter Fruit

Instrumentation: Soprano, Electronics

Duration: ca. 5:00

Program Note:

Bitter Fruit is a setting of the poem Sheltered Garden by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an early 20th century American Imagist poet. Several of my works have interacted with H.D.’s writing, all setting texts from her collection Sea Garden.

Doolittle’s poem depicts confinement in a world that is safe and shielded from the elements yet unable to cultivate any growth or fruition. Paradoxically, the very shelter that protects the garden from the destructive wind at the same time smothers and “chokes out life” from anything attempting to grow within its confines, leaving only the taste of “wadding and dead grass.” Conversely, the poet imagines the vitality of a different place, aromatic with resin seeping from scarred trees yet cultivating pungent, ripened fruit.

The riddles at the heart of H.D.’s text mirror the important and ongoing role that the concept of constraint has played in my work and life. As Doolittle illuminates, that which appears to be lack or deprivation may paradoxically bring about growth, strength, and beauty.

Bitter Fruit was premiered as part of the 2022 highSCORE Festival virtually hosted in Pavia Italy.

Premiere: August, 2022; Cremona, Italy (recording for the virtual premiere). Anna Piroli, soprano; Alberto Barberis, electronics.

Text:

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.

Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest—
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.

I have had enough—
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.

O for some sharp swish of a branch—
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent—
only border on border of scented pinks.

Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light—
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?

Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit—
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.

Or the melon—
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste—
it is better to taste of frost—
the exquisite frost—
than of wadding and of dead grass.

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves—
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince—
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.