For SATB or SSAA choir and piano
Duration: ca. 5'
Original art song version commissioned by the Cincinnati Song Initiative and the National Association for Teachers of Singing (NATS) with special support from Lori Laitman. 

Excerpt of letter by Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Thursday, January 21, 1926.
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Vita Sackville-West. Copyright © Vita Sackville-West

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: 

I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. 

You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.”