So may it be is the title Charles Ives gave this song in his collection 114 Songs (1922). It is an adaptation of an earlier chamber music piece called The Rainbow, Kv 35. The song is a setting of the well-known Wordsworth poem including the line "The child is father of the man." The song probably existed in an earlier form at the time the chamber work was written.

The song divides naturally into two sections. The first is marked "moderately fast." Although it is mostly in gradations from medium-quiet to medium-loud (sinking into quiet music at the end of the section), the chords in the middle range of the piano are dense, strange constructions of notes, made dramatic by their strange dissonances and irregular rhythms.

The rhythms even out for a transition, leading to the famous line quoted above. The music becomes soft, the textures thinner but still based on strange, "visionary" harmonies, the rhythms slow and regular.

The music strikes this writer as more interesting in its original chamber version, but this is an effective example of Ives' "visionary" style.

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