Robert Fuller Murray's poem imagines sleep as a force that meets us at the end of the day and does battle on our behalf against the pain we have carried from the day. Where sunlight illuminates and exposes, throwing every wound into sharp relief, night comes to dissolve them, drawing the weary self down into the “drowning deep”. My setting takes fragments of melody, threaded through the texture like gossamer threads, delicate and half-formed.

These interweaving lines ebb and flow with the sense of the text, tightening where the poem strains against its pain, loosening where it begins to yield. By the close, the music has surrendered argument altogether. What remains is a simple, repeating figure — chant-like,  and almost liturgical — circling on itself as though in prayer. It is here that the piece finds its rest: the mind's vanities cast aside, and the body given over to sleep.