The composer writes: A few years before I composed these settings by three American poets, I composed my Four Elizabethan Songs About Love (2016-2018). The texts I’ve used in Three American Poems About Love (2020) bring us forward in time about three centuries, and transpose the location from England to the USA. However, like the poems in the Elizabethan set, the texts in my American set are not all conventional love songs. The first, “Invitation to Love” (by Paul Laurence Dunbar) is a glowing reflection on the nature of love itself, rather than an expression of love directed towards a specific other. The second, “Spring Night” (by Sara Teasdale) is a wistful reflection on lovelessness, despite the consolations of beauty. Only the third, “Wedded Love” (by James Russell Lowell) is a love song in the conventional sense: a profession of enduring love between two people. TEXTS I: Invitation to Love Paul Laurence Dunbar Come when the nights are bright with stars Or come when the moon is mellow; Come when the sun his golden bars Drops on the hay-field yellow. Come in the twilight soft and gray, Come in the night or come in the day, Come, O love, whene’er you may, And you are welcome, welcome. You are sweet, O Love, dear Love, You are soft as the nesting dove. Come to my heart and bring it to rest As the bird flies home to its welcome nest. Come when my heart is full of grief Or when my heart is merry; Come with the falling of the leaf Or with the redd’ning cherry. Come when the year’s first blossom blows, Come when the summer gleams and glows, Come with the winter’s drifting snows, And you are welcome, welcome. II: Spring Night Sara Teasdale The park is filled with night and fog, The veils are drawn about the world, The drowsy lights along the paths Are dim and pearled. Gold and gleaming the empty streets, gold and gleaming the misty lake, The mirrored lights like sunken swords, Glimmer and shake. Oh, is it not enough to be Here with this beauty over me? My throat should ache with praise, and I Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. O, Beauty are you not enough? Why am I crying after love, With youth, a singing voice and eyes To take earth’s wonder with surprise? Why have I put off my pride, Why am I unsatisfied, I for whom the pensive night Binds her cloudy hair with light, I, for whom all beauty burns Like incense in a million urns? O, Beauty, are you not enough? Why am I crying after love? III: Wedded Love James Russell Lowell Our love is not a fading, earthly flower: Its wingèd seed dropped down from Paradise, And, nursed by day and night, by sun and shower, Doth momently to fresher beauty rise: To us the leafless autumn is not bare, Nor winter’s rattling boughs lack lusty green, Our summer hearts make summer’s fulness, where No leaf, or bud, or blossom may be seen: For nature’s life in love’s deep life doth lie, Love,—whose forgetfulness is beauty’s death, Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I Into the infinite freedom openeth, And makes the body’s dark and narrow grate The wind-flung leaves of Heaven’s palace-gate.