I Shall Not See the Shadows (Movement X from “The Lost Birds”)

Description

Text: Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson

“I Shall Not See the Shadows” is based on Christina Rossetti's poem “When I Am Dead My Dearest.” It portrays death at its most indifferent–unnoticed, unheralded, unremembered. It suggests that forgetting is a form of extinction, too–that the finality of species lies not in the death of its last remaining members, but in the failure to preserve their memory.