The remarkable song The White Gulls is one of Ives' most consistently dark, depressed compositions, comparable in that respect most closely to another song with the imagery of descending birds, Like a Sick Eagle.

After his heart attack in 1918 Charles Ives turned his attention to creating a legacy, including putting together a volume of 25 to 30 songs. As he went through his accumulated music he expanded the project until it became the book, 114 Songs. It included songs dating from his childhood and student days to several early songs in standard, conservative harmonic style, to the development and the flowering of his radical and unique approach to music.

In the process, he composed several new songs that he included. Many of these are at the back of the book, which otherwise begins with his toughest, most "modern" song (The Majority) and works backwards. (It still ends with Slow March, written on the death of a family pet when he was about 13.)

The White Gulls is a setting of a translation from the original Russian by writer Maurice Morris of the New York Evening Sun. The imagery of the poem is bleak and depressing. The poem pictures gulls wheeling over waters "gray like steel," then settling to rest on the waters. Then the link is made to men: "Souls of men that turn and wheel over waters colds as steel." They also "sink to rest on an all receiving breast."

The song is slow, dark-toned, and ominous. Its chords mostly lie below the middle of the treble clef; that is in the octave just above "middle C" and lower. For the most part the chords are complex and chromatic. The only consistent high notes are a plaintive slow figure that sketches a chord in fifths: F, G (a ninth higher), and down to C.

It is true that in the end of this song there is a clarifying of the dense chromatic harmonies and a promise of redemption. But this is the redemption of death after a life that, the chords tell us, is consumed in futility.

The cause of Ives' pessimism in this song is not hard to find. Besides his health, he had seen the defeat of the proposed League of Nations and of the designated Democratic successor to President Woodrow Wilson. It was not just that Ives had become a supporter of Wilson over World War I, and now saw that effort seeming more and more to have been futile. Ives was a Progressive. From that movement's high point in 1912—three major presidential candidates, all from progressive wings of the major parties—1920 represented the collapse of the movement in national politics for a dozen years. Moreover, Ives was an early proponent of world government—what he called the People's World Nation (or Union)—and as such was devastated by the collapse of the proposition of American membership in the League of Nations.

© All Music Guide