Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor’s breast
And the harbor’s eyes.
—Carl Sandburg, Lost first published in Poetry Magazine (Mar. 1914).
Listen to Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, a piece for chamber orchestra from 1906 (revised in 1934), performed here by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas:
