This is the third piece of my Twice Whittier series, where I put poems by John Greenleaf Whittier (a distant cousin of mine) to music. This song is set to the poignant text of Whittier’s ‘In School-Days.’ In it, the narrator describes a schoolhouse as it looks today and also how it looked in his youth, alongside the memories he had there. The poem captures the nostalgic essence of youthful innocence and friendship, as well as the longing for that which one loses along the way. I tried to create much the same appreciation for the passage of time in this rendition, both through the gentle interplay between piano and voice and through the changing ostinato.