This short work is a paraphrase on the second of my two Valedictions for cello and piano (2000), which can be heard on TOCC-CD150. The cello movement was a response to John Donne’s poem of 1611–12 A Valediction: forbidding mourning, in which the poet typifies the parting of true lovers thus:
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
My new work for string orchestra is an airy expansion of a single phrase from the older piece; a free polyphonic fantasia, cast in a simple A-B-A form.