This is one of several songs that Ives wrote to texts by his wife. Harmony Twichell, daughter of a famous minister and sister of a noted physician, had spent most of her twenties as a nurse in various settlement houses. She had a deep love of literature and wrote some decent poetry herself.

The shy up and coming insurance man Charles Ives had been her brother's college friend, and they had known each other for some years when the started seeing each other around 1906. They carried on a discreet courtship and by 1907 Harmony was not going out with anyone else.

Although only her side of their correspondence (for the most part) is preserved, during that year there is a marked trend for her to send him poetry to consider using in songs. Ives' biographer has pointed out that during this period their texts become more forthright about finding love, or, conversely, about fear of loneliness, the expression in this song.

This is not to say that there is overt passion or flirtatiousness in the song. In addition to the discretion and proprieties of the post-Victorian times, both were very high-minded and idealistic about love, mostly seeing their growing love as a reflection of God's love.

Still, there is a certain poignancy to the words of a woman approaching thirty in 1907, still unmarried and clearly having decided her preference was for this tall, shy artistic businessman: In the song, Spring comes to a winter-brown hill and issues its annual call to the woods. "Now all the dry brown things are answering," she says, save one: "I, only, heard her not, and wait, and wait."

It's questionable whether Charlie got the hint in this song, but he did set it to a pretty song he had written to a different text five years later. (This version has since become lost.)

Although by this time he had developed most of the radical aspects of his style, including atonality, simultaneous separate rhythmic and harmonic planes in music, and wild, unprecedented dissonances, Ives at this time was careful as to how strange he would permit his music to be when setting Harmony's poems; he certainly wouldn't risk alienating her by an impertinent quotation here or a tone cluster here.

Rather the song is sensitive, in a generalized Late Victorian fashion. It stays in one time signature (3/4) throughout, has no difficult cross rhytyms, and sticks to common chord formations. The melodic line is pretty, in the manner of an elevated Edwardian parlor song. In fact, it is likely that Ives expected members of the Twichell family to sing it for each other or for company, to show off Harmony's verse. Perhaps for that reason that piano part is fairly simple and has no stretches over an octave (and only one instance of that) in either hand.



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