¨My Heart´s in the Highlands¨ by the Greatest Composer of the Human Era

Arvo Part is an Estonian composer of Western religious and classical music. His compositions consist mostly of psalms in the forms of Gregorian chants, though one does not need a religious affiliation in order to appreciate their magnificence. All of them qualify as poetry. When looking for a song, I was choosing between ¨An den Wassern zu Babel¨ and ¨My Heart´s in the Highlands¨. Although I think the former is better, the song that I will analyze is his version ¨My Heart´s in the Highlands,¨ (this song originated from Robert Burns) because it is his only composition sung in English. It does not belong to an album. Here are the lyrics: Texts and Translations of Arvo Part´s Music

The speaker is a man who feels the need to return to the Highlands not only because he feels out of place within his current home, but also because his ideals as well as his fondest memories can fit only within the Highlands. His intended audience is not clear, but they can either people who share his feelings or those who feel they are at home with the very place the speaker is unhappy with as seen in the clause ¨my heart is not here.¨

The song illustrates the Highlands in such a way that aligns with romantic and idealistic perspectives of nature and individualism. This perspective is further emphasized through his use personifying the heart. The heart represents how the Highlands are central to the singer´s feelings. The first clause ¨My heart´s in the Highlands,¨ is repeated in six out of the sixteen lines of the poem, thus conveying how clear love is for the Highlands if it wasn´t already so.

Although it is a staple for most songs to repeat their lines for added emphasis and to fit the rhythm, the repetition of the lines in this song add depth. When we typically think of highlands, we think of smooth, pleasant hills that happen to be elevated almost as highly as mountains are. As the writer creates this image through his experiences and memories of the nature around him, he also embeds what it feels like to live in the Highlands through the use of consistent first clauses and soft vowel end rhymes for my lack of better words. Reading this slowly also helps the emphasis. Had the song been about, say, the subject of a particular person, city, or even a mountain instead, there would most likely have been slopes in the tempo.

The reason I am capitalizing ¨Highland¨ is because, although the physical imagery depicted in the song can be applied to any highland from across the world, his yearning for the Highlands and his regret for where he currently is eloquently reflects the general feelings of the people who desired Scottish independence in the eighteenth century. Northern Scotland is notable for its highlands, hence the line ¨farewell to the North¨. So we can imagine that he means these highlands in particular.