It is a solo vocal cantata scored for a solo soprano or tenor accompanied by string orchestra, and features settings of four texts by Thomas Traherne (1636/37–1674), a seventeenth-century English Metaphysical poet, priest and theologian.
Dies Natalis is a cantata for solo voice and string orchestra.
[4] In 1964, his son Christopher Finzi conducted the work for its second recording with the soloist Wilfred Brown.
[7] Finzi's biographer, Diana McVeagh, describes Brown's interpretation in the recording as "among his finest: intelligent, poetic, and informed with his acute but gentle feeling for words.
I was a stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys: my knowledge was divine.
Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and could not make more melody to Adam than to me.
The green trees, when I saw them first, transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.
and the young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty!
The skies in their magnificence The lovely, lively air, O how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!
The stars did entertain my sense; And all the works of God, so bright and pure, So rich and great, did seem, As if they ever must endure In my esteem.
A native health and innocence Within my bones did grow, And while my God did all His Glories show, I felt a vigour in my sense That was all Spirit.
These little limbs, these eyes and hands which here I find, This panting heart wherewith my life begins; Where have ye been?
From dust I rise and out of nothing now awake, These brighter regions which salute my eyes, A gift from God I take, the earth, the seas, the light, the lofty skies, The sun and stars are mine: if these I prize.