"The Desire for Hermitage" (translated by Seán Ó Faoláin)
"The Heavenly Banquet" text is attributed to St. Brigid according to Samuel Barber's score, who shares the patronage of Ireland with St. Patrick. She is known to practicing Catholics also as the patron saint of beer.[2]
"[These songs] are small poems, thoughts or observations, some very short, and speak in straightforward, witty, and often surprisingly modern terms of the simple life they led - close to nature, their animals, and God. Some are literal translations and others were translated more freely (where existing translations seemed inadequate). Robin Flower has written in "The Irish Tradition": “It was not only that these scribes and anchorites lived by the destiny of their dedication in an environment of wood and sea; it was because they brought into that environment an eye washed miraculously clear by a continual spiritual exercise that they had that strange vision of natural things in an almost unnatural purity.”
See also
Masterworks Portrait, Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915; Dover Beach; Hermit Songs; Andromache's Farewell. Various artists.[3]
References
^Allen, William Duncan (Autumn 1973). "Musings of a Music Columnist". The Black Perspective in Music. 1 (2): 107–114. doi:10.2307/1214445. JSTOR1214445.