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This chorus is a setting of a sonnet from an 1874 collection by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). It vividly describes the appearance of The Galaxy (The Milky Way) with a stream of images: “Torrent of light,” the “river of the air” whose bed of “glimmering stars” appear “Like gold and silver sands in some ravine / Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!”
Before sharing his poetic opinion of just what The Galaxy is, Longfellow dismisses the view of the eleventh-century Spaniard, who sees it as “the pathway” for Santiago Matamoros* to “descend…in celestial armor” to save the Christians from the Muslim Moors. Nor does he endorse the ancient Greek view that The Galaxy amounts to a sky “scorched [by] the hoofs” of Phaeton's§ horses, when he almost set the world on fire by driving his sun chariot too close to the earth.
Ultimately Longfellow sees The Galaxy as “the white drift of worlds o'er chasms of sable, / The star-dust…whirled a loft…From the invisible chariot-wheels of God”.
The music reflects many of the poem's images, for example: women's voices alone at “gold and silver sands”; an open fifth at “channels bare”; a quicker tempo at the militant reference to the Spaniard; longer notes at “heav'ns were fair”; fugato entrances and a faster tempo at “hot coursers trod”; upward spiraling sixteenth notes at “stardust that is whirled aloft”; and a climax followed by a softening uncharacteristic chord progression at “invisible chariot-wheels of God”.
The Galaxy
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Torrent of light and river of the air,
Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen
Like gold and silver sands in some ravine
Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!
The Spaniard sees in thee the pathway, where
His patron saint descended in the sheen
Of his celestial armor, on serene
And quiet nights, when all the heav'ns were fair.
Not this I see, nor yet the ancient fable
Of Phaeton's§ wild course, that scorched the skies
Where'er the hoofs of this hot coursers trod;
But the white drift of worlds o'er chasms of sable,
The star-dust that is whirled aloft and flies
From the invisible chariot-wheels of God.
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