The Choric Song by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Set to Music for Soprano Solo, Chorus and Orchestra, by C. Hubert Parry
Alice Moxon, The Wireless Symphony Orchestra, and The Wireless Chorus, conducted by Stanford Robinson

Ulysses in his wanderings came to a certain district in which the lotos tree grew abundantly. The drugging sweetness of its fruit so worked upon his companions that they lost the desire to return home, and wanted nothing but to enjoy the delicious languor that they thus experienced.
Tennyson, in this 'Choric Song,' gives beautiful expression to their feeling, and describes the lovely scenes upon which they gazed. There are eight sections in the Song (lines from which are often quoted).
1. It opens in three-part chorus, with
There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass...
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes....
II.
Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,
And utterly consum'd with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
Here a fourth part (the Bass) is added to the Chorus, and the music, with a change of key, becomes more animated.
III. This opens with a Soprano Solo, at the words
Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud
With winds upon the branch....
IV.
Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why Should life all labour be? Let us alone....
The Chorus, in more agitated mood, declaims thus; then the music becomes calmer, and we pass to
V. Soprano Solo
How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream
With half-shut eyes ever to seem Falling asleep in a half-dream.
VI. Men's voices only
Dear is the memory of our wedded lives..... but all liatli suffer'd change.
For surely now our household hearths are cold...
Let what is broken so remain.
VII. Soprano Solo
But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)...
To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill....
VIII. Chorus
The Lotos blooms below the barren peak We have had enough of action.... Let us swear an oath...
In the hollow Lotus-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind....
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.