The Mewlips-Tone Poem for String Orchestra

This is a song, Tolkien setting, I wrote in 1993 at the age of 24, and recently arranged as a tone poem for string orchestra.  It is so dissonant that the music scares the composer!  Eb Minor might be considered a weird key to begin with, but even I have trouble telling what key it is in!  Not atonal, post-mahlerian perhaps, but it is about swamp monsters that eat you, so...

The Mewlips-Tone Poem for String Orchestra Free Sheet Music by Robert C. Fox for Various Instruments | Noteflight

The poem is posted in the Noteflight comments, so you can follow the music with the words, if you can stand to listen to it; again, it scares me!

The Shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

You sink into the slime, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While down the grinning gargoyles stare
And noisome waters pour.

Beside the rotting river-strand
The drooping willows weep,
And gloomily the gorcrows stand
Croaking in their sleep.

Over the Merlock Mountains a long and weary way,
In a mouldy valley where the trees are grey,
By a dark pool's borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, the Mewlips hide.

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they've finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips - and the Mewlips feed.

Anyway, I think this piece I wrote more than half my life ago has some legs.  Too much dissonance for my old age...😉