Crossing the bar

Crossing the bar is a late poem of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), written in 1889. It compares death to the act of crossing the sand bar between the river of life and the ocean beyond death. I set it in a simple four-part homophonic style in 2016. The third and fourth verses repeat the music of the first and second, with harmonic elaboration and a brief coda.