🏆 Winning composition of the 2026 Delius Singers Prize.
This piece was originally written for the Delius Singers and their conductor Alexander Pott.
It was awarded First Place in the 2026 ‘Nature’s Voice’ Composition Competition hosted by the Delius Singers.
This piece is a direct response to a program featuring Frederick Delius’ ‘An Arabesque’.
The poetry of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins invites us to hear the natural world in both mystery and majesty.
Dickinson’s ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ provides a fleeting serpentine encounter and leaves us with an intimate and unsettling vision of one of nature’s most notorious characters.
Hopkins’ ‘Pied Beauty’, by contrast, manages to find praise and admiration for the entire natural world—both the weird and the wonderful.
While both Hopkins and Dickinson have explicit and implicit religious voices respectively, this piece should be viewed through a secular lens and reflect on the extraordinary variety and intensity that nature’s voice provides.
On a technical note, this piece has no further divisi than SSAATTBB and is suitable for performance by a vocal octet or chamber choir.
‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ – Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is –The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on –He likes a Boggy Acre –
A Floor too cool for Corn –
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at NoonHave passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone –Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of CordialityBut never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
‘Pied Beauty’ – Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889):
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
🏆 Winning composition of the 2026 Delius Singers Prize.
This piece was originally written for the Delius Singers and their conductor Alexander Pott.
It was awarded First Place in the 2026 ‘Nature’s Voice’ Composition Competition hosted by the Delius Singers.
This piece is a direct response to a program featuring Frederick Delius’ ‘An Arabesque’.
The poetry of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins invites us to hear the natural world in both mystery and majesty.
Dickinson’s ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ provides a fleeting serpentine encounter and leaves us with an intimate and unsettling vision of one of nature’s most notorious characters.
Hopkins’ ‘Pied Beauty’, by contrast, manages to find praise and admiration for the entire natural world—both the weird and the wonderful.
While both Hopkins and Dickinson have explicit and implicit religious voices respectively, this piece should be viewed through a secular lens and reflect on the extraordinary variety and intensity that nature’s voice provides.
On a technical note, this piece has no further divisi than SSAATTBB and is suitable for performance by a vocal octet or chamber choir.
‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ – Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is –The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on –He likes a Boggy Acre –
A Floor too cool for Corn –
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at NoonHave passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone –Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of CordialityBut never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
‘Pied Beauty’ – Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889):
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
