Stanford completed Song to the Soul Op. 97b on 1 May 1913 and created a single choral movement from two of three Whitman settings he had composed for his Songs of Faith Op. 97 in 1906, ‘To the Soul’ (which Vaughan Williams had also used for his own choral work Toward the Unknown Region) and ‘Joy, shipmate, joy’ (which Delius later used in his Songs of Farewell). Stanford was no stranger to Whitman. As early as 1884 in his Elegiac Ode for the Norwich Festival he had set Whitman’s famous words on the death of President Lincoln, ‘When lilacs in the dooryard bloom’d’. This first appeared in the pages of Broadway Magazine in 1868 in London, but later appeared in a group of poems entitled ‘Whispers of Heavenly Death’ in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. In reconstituting his two songs in a new symphonic guise, Stanford had an eye on the prospect of an American tour to the east coast (at the invitation of Professor Horatio Parker and Karl Stoeckel, a wealthy patron of the arts and the founder of the Litchfield County Choral Union) where he looked forward to the premiere of his Second Piano Concerto at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut, an honorary doctorate at Yale, and concerts (in the capacity of conductor) with the New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestra. For the first part of his choral work, Stanford composed an extensive orchestral fantasy-introduction based on ‘To the Soul’ and proceeded to expand the music of the song itself into a larger organic paragraph (although much of the thematic material is still entirely conspicuous) in which the sense of mystery was amplified. After a majestic climax in which the soul seeks to fulfil its fullest potential, the second song, ‘Joy, shipmate, joy’, breaks loose, signifying a new freedom in death. It is one of Stanford’s most exhilarating choral utterances, full of orchestral colour and vitality, striking key changes and inventive (yet simple) choral writing. The final climax, in particular, where Stanford recalls the slow, processional melody of the first song, is splendidly impressive, as is the uplifting coda which carries us heavenward. In the end Song of the Soul was not performed at the Norfolk Festival and the work remained both unperformed and unpublished at Stanford’s death. It was one of many disappointments he had to forbear (and there were many) which included being unable to travel to the United States in 1915, after his passage across the Atlantic was subverted by the tragic sinking of the liner Luisitania on which he had booked his passage. It was then deemed too dangerous to make the crossing, and Stanford feared that, should he have succeeded in reaching America, he might be marooned there for the rest of the war.