The Moon’s Funeral (2024)

For Tenor and Piano
Duration: 10 minutes
Composed for Justin Vickers
First performed by Justin Vickers and Geoffrey Duce, March 25, 2025

Note: This work is in two parts. Each part can also be performed as a 5-minute standalone composition. Part I has a revised ending if performed independently.


Text by Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc (“The Moon’s Funeral”):

The Moon is dead. I saw her die.
She in a drifting cloud was drest,
She lay along the uncertain west,
A dream to see.
And very low she spake to me:
“I go where none may understand,
I fade into the nameless land,
And there must lie perpetually.” 
And therefore I,
And therefore loudly, loudly I
And high
And very piteously make cry:
“The Moon is dead. I saw her die.”

And will she never rise again?
The Holy Moon? Oh, never more!
Perhaps along the inhuman shore
Where pale ghosts are
Beyond the low lethean fen
She and some wide infernal star…
To us who loved her never more,
The Moon will never rise again.
Oh! never more in nightly sky
Her eye so high shall peep and pry
To see the great world rolling by.
For why?
The Moon is dead. I saw her die.

Copyright © 2025 Alex Stephenson. All rights reserved.