Am I a child?

It's a melancholy sort of day. I stepped out into a cold clear morning and noticed the grass, so green from the excess moisture from a run of atmospheric rivers, was now white with frost, crunchy beneath my feet.

A killing frost. 

It put me in mind of ephemeral things. Like the voice of a treble. 

Cai Thomas is, the last I checked, thirteen, and his voice is changing. Luckily, his particularly pure and sweet treble voice has been recorded for posterity, on a recent album entitled Seren, which is a popular wish list of most classical or folk piece you'd like to hear a gifted treble sing.  (His rendition of Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de confessore is stunning.)

The song I keep returning to, however, is a new one to me:   Ēriks Ešenvalds' setting of "Only in Sleep", a 1920 poem by American Sara Teasdale, which puts us in the rather odd position of listening to a pre-adolescent boy sing the words of a thirty-something woman looking back to the playmates of her childhood.  The recording, of course, is better, and if you'd rather listen to the perfection, follow the link.

However, it's rather fun to see Cai Thomas, by this time, shooting up into a gangly and fidgety adolescent, sing, still very beautifully and professionally, captured by an amateur camera, as he sings the fancy fade-out:  "Am I a child?"

Not for long, evidently.

  Only in sleep I see their faces,

Children I played with when I was a child,

Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,

Annie with ringlets warm and wild

Only in sleep Time is forgotten --

What may have come to them, who can know?

Yet we played last night as long ago, 

And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,

I met their eyes and found them mild --

Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,

And for them am I too a child?

- Sara Teasdale (1920). (Sarah Teasdale committed suicide in 1933, at the age of 49.)