Is it darkest just before the dawn?

In 2013 I finished the first of two songs I wanted to set to poems by William Carlos Williams.  Today I finished the second song, making this musical interval between daybreak and dawn about twelve years. After finishing "Daybreak," I wrote the opening measures of "Dawn," but I abandoned the idea of having a set of both songs because I didn't know where to go with it beyond the opening. Now, perhaps inspired by the need for some light during these dark nights of the soul (which are turning into dark months of the soul) that we are all experiencing, I put my head down and plowed forward.

Musical victories may be meaningless to most people, but they are victories to me.

Daybreak

Half a moon is flaming in the south below clear little stars.
Vague shapes begin to stir among
the yellow-poppy street lamps.
Oblique masses of purple and black
lift themselves. Is it earth or sky?
It is the beginning! —again?
Answer, answer! Huntress who spreadest
vitreous dawn before dawn!

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings—
beating color up into it
at a far edge,—beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,—
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
of things,—runs free at last
out into the open—! lumbering
glorified in full release upward—
songs cease.

I made a post with links to the music on my thematic catalog blog. But, if you like, you can read the poetry and listen to some computer-generated recordings here:

Daybreak
Dawn