Good Friday

West window of St Mary's, Upton, Merseyside

Here’s my setting of ‘Good Friday’ by Christina Rossetti:

Am I a stone and not a sheep
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon—
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

There is a PDF of the score here or from the ChoralWiki; and this is, as usual, under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. That means you can have the score for free, make copies for free, perform it for free, and so on, but if you want to prevent people making copies of your arrangements, recordings or similar, you need to get in touch with me to negotiate other terms.

This is another movement from my Stations of the Cross.