Christopher Churcher
A Lament for Lost Words (2026)
for SATB voices (divisi)
approx. duration: 6 minutes
composed for The Delius Singers
To graceful names and lovely woods farewell
To acorn, adder, ash, to beech and bluebell,
Farewell old friends I name you in my sonnet
Buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet
Farewell, your fields are brick, our books are barren
No dandelion or fern, hazel or heron
We’ll go no more alone, no more together
The mountain thyme is gone and gone the heather
The clinging ivy’s gone and soon to go
The kingfisher’s blue bolt, the mistletoe
Nectar, newt, and otter, pasture, willow
To their last rites my muse comes footing slow
We’ll hear no more the heaven-scaling lark
We’ll all go down together in the dark.
Malcom Guite (b.1957)
Programme Note
A Lament for Lost Words sets a poem by Malcolm Guite, written in response to the removal of a number of nature words from The Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words such as catkin, acorn, cowslip, otter and meadow were taken out to make room for newer terms like broadband, chatroom and celebrity. Guite’s poem presents these lost words in alphabetical order, creating a quiet elegy for the names, sounds and images that are slipping from our everyday language. It prompts us to think about the loss behind these vanishing words: a deeper grief for the plants, creatures and places we are losing through our neglect of the natural world.
My setting takes on a simple, slightly folk-tinted language. The lower voices move in slow, hymn-like phrases, as if singing a funeral dirge, while the sopranos pick out the lost words in lightly ornamented lines above them. I wanted the music to feel like a gentle farewell, but also a way of cherishing these words, and keeping them with us a little longer.
