Weary is a setting of William Blake’s “Ah! Sun-flower,” a poem shaped by longing, exhaustion, mortality, and the passage of time. The soprano remains largely in its lower register, giving the voice a dark, weighted quality that reflects the weariness at the center of the text.

The prepared piano extends that atmosphere. Its muted and altered resonance suggests distance and decay, while repeated attacks evoke the ticking of a clock: time moving forward with quiet, indifferent persistence. Rather than treating Blake’s poem as a purely pastoral or mystical image, Weary emphasizes its human fatigue—the desire for rest, release, and some form of solace beyond the limits of the body.

The piece is intimate, spare, and unsettled, shaped by the tension between beauty and depletion.

—SC

“Ah! Sunflower” by William Blake

From Songs of Experience

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.