Written for Soprano and Tenor soloists and SATB chorus. These two short Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) settings, commissioned by Craig Hella Johnson and Conspirare for their September 2007 concert series in Texas, were designed to frame an evening's program rather like a compositional inhalation and exhalation, a crescendo and decrescendo or a prelude and postlude. Densely textured, the music aims to hint at the myriad readings Dickinson's surface-simple poetry yields in its many readers. Each setting uses a solo soprano and tenor, their voices referencing the polarities inherent in each poem (sun and shade; love and hate).