"Edelweiss" (from The Sound of Music)

A couple weeks ago, I learned the melody for "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music.  I figured it out and notated it from memory, but when I checkt the recording on The Sound of Music soundtrack, I discovered that I even had it in the right key:  Bb major.  I standardized the note values a bit compared to how Christopher Plumber sings it, and I might have been a bit liberal with the rests:

After playing this a few times, I realized something about the melody to which "Blossom of snow may you bloom and grow / Bloom and grow forever" is sung:

The musical phrase to which each "Bloom and grow" is sung ascends, with the second starting higher than the first:

Individually, each musical phrase portrays growth through that ascent, and the effect is compounded because the second starts at a higher pitch than the first.

The second thing I noticed about this phrase is that the "forever" is sung to six beats spanning three measures.  It starts with a quarter note (on the third beat of the measure), continues into the next measure with a dotted half note, and then ends in a third measure with a half note.  This "forever" has more syllables than any other word in the song (aside from "edelweiss" itself) and spans more measures than any other word (every instance of "edelweiss" fits within two measures).  The "forever" in the line "Bless my homeland forever" has the same note values distributed across measures in the same way; it's just sung to different pitches.  That these "forever"s are sung spanning three measures demonstrates the long period of time for which the edelweiss flower is supposed to "bloom and grow" and "bless my homeland."