foresong

plural foresongs

1. A song sung as an opener to an event or story; prelude

   A "Foresong" precedes, and an "Aftersong" follows, but the "Vision" itself is comprised in "A Song of Songs."

   1902, The Sewanee Review, volumes 1-10

   4 more examples

   Descender from the plains, ultimate moon of all flames, from tumescences of fruit and flower dropping, darkened your face already— fool or baptist, summer's fool, echoer, necrologue, or foresong of glaciers, anyway nutcracker, sedge-cutter, ponderer of platitudes—[...]

   1960, Gottfried Benn, Primal Vision

   For the smiles across their oiled, blackened faces, a foresong to the future; the loincloth across their groins, only resplendent of an uneducated, poverty-stricken youth.

   2003, Neelima Wig, Daybreak

   But when the speaker resolves his foresong into a claim of predilection for the life (and poetics) of love, he does so.

   2012, Barbara K. Gold, A Companion to Roman Love Elegy

   Swinburne never published a volume entitled Songs of Democracy, but the third section of “Christmas Antiphones,” “Beyond Church,” is in Swinburne's terms “a foresong of democracy and humanity.”

   2013, Oscar Wilde, Matthew Hofer, Oscar Wilde in America