Tonight’s singing was the one closest to my fiftieth birthday. So of course I had to lead 50 t “Mortality.” It was a particularly strong group of singers tonight (especially the bass section), so even though there were less than twenty singers, it was a real wall of sound standing in that hollow square and listening to Isaac Watts’ powerful poetry:
Death, like an over-flowing stream,
Sweeps us away; our life’s a dream,
An empty tale, a morning flower,
Cut down and withered in an hour.Our age to seventy years is set;
How short the time! How frail the state!
And if to eighty we arrive,
We’d rather sigh and groan than die.