Fontainebleau

“Fontainebleau,” movement five from “Stars forever, while we sleep,” explores Sara Teasdale’s autumnal mood as she contemplates French palaces and the memory of lovely ladies who glide down gilded stairs. An autumn garden from centuries past is imagined along with the ghostly kings and hunters who roam through “four centuries of autumns four centuries of leaves” amid pentatonic modes. Polyphonic melodies intertwine throughout the piece at times sensuous, at times rhythmic.

Fontainebleau
By Sara Teasdale

Interminable palaces front on the green parterres,
And ghosts of ladies lovely and immoral
Glide down the gilded stairs,
The high cold corridors are clicking with the heel taps
That long ago were theirs.

But in the sunshine, in the vague autumn sunshine,
The geometric gardens are desolately gay;
The crimson and scarlet and rose-red dahlias
Are painted like the ladies who used to pass this way
With a ringletted monarch, a Henry or a Louis
On a lost October day.

The aisles of the garden lead into the forest,
The aisles lead into autumn, a damp wind grieves,
Ghostly kings are hunting, the boar breaks cover,
But the sounds of horse and horn are hushed in falling leaves,
Four centuries of autumns, four centuries of leaves.