Full Lyrics
Sing for the morning’s joy, Cecilia, sing,
in words of youth and phrases of the spring.
Walk the bright colonnades by fountains spray
and sing as sunlight fills the waking day.
Till angels, voyaging in upper air,
pause on a wing, and gather the clear sound
into celestial joy, wound and unwound,
a silver chain or golden as your hair.
Sing for your loves of heaven and of earth,
in words of music, and each word a truth,
marriage of heart and longings that aspire,
a bond of roses and a ring of fire.
Your summertime grows short and fades away,
terror must gather to a martyr’s death,
but never tremble, the last indrawn breath
remembers music as an echo may.
Through the cold aftermath of centuries
Cecilia’s music dances in the skies,
lend us a fragment of the immortal air
where with your choiring angels we may share.
A word to light us through timefettered night,
water of life, a rose of paradise;
so from the earth another song shall rise
to meet your own in heaven's long delight.
— by Ursula Vaughan Williams (19112007)
Copyright © 1961 by The Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust. Used by permission.
