Macheath
Were I laid on Greenland’s Coast,
And in my Arms embrac’d my Lass;
Warm amidst eternal Frost,
Too soon the Half Year’s Night would pass.
Polly
Were I sold on Indian Soil,
Soon as the burning Day was clos’d,
I could mock the sultry Toil,
When on my Charmer’s Breast repos’d.
Macheath
And I would love you all the Day,
Polly
Every Night would kiss and play,
Macheath
If with me you’d fondly stray
Polly
Over the Hills and far away.
HENRY CAREY
(?1687–1743)
Let the singing singers
With vocal voices, most vociferous,
In sweet vociferation, out-vociferise
Ev’n sound itself.
HENRY CAREY: Chrononhotonthologos, ‘being the Most Tragical Tragedy that ever was tragediz’d by any company of tragedians’ (1734)
Carey’s parentage and the date of his birth remain a mystery. Poems on Several Occasions, his first book of poems, was published in London in 1713 (there were eventually three editions), and he spent some time in the capital teaching in boarding schools and private families. A talented musician, he was for a while a pupil of Dr Pepusch. Much of his early career was spent in theatres, writing prologues and epilogues for the plays of other authors, and composing music for their songs. He excelled in writing burlesques. Chrononhotonthologos, premiered at the Haymarket in 1734, parodies the inflated rhetoric of contemporary heroic tragedy, and The Dragon of Wantley (1737) is a wonderful burlesque of Italian opera which was performed sixty-seven times during the first season, thus surpassing Gay’s record of sixty-three nights for The Beggar’s Opera. Despite these successes, Carey remained poor all his life: because there was no adequate system of copyright, he suffered from plagiarism and unscrupulous printers. As he wrote bitterly in 1735: ‘Pyrate Printers rob me of my gain,/And reap the labour’d harvest of my brain’. In 1737 he set 100 of his best poems to music and published them as The Musical Century, which went into a second (1740) and a third (1743) edition. He hanged himself at his house in Dorrington Street, Coldbath Fields, on the morning of 4 October 1743, and also killed one of his sons, thus leaving a widow and four small children. Shortly after his death there was a benefit performance at Covent Garden in which Kitty Clive played a major part.
Many of Carey’s poems were written to be set to music; as he himself wrote in the second edition of Poems on Several Occasions: ‘Poetry being my amusement, not my profession, the following pieces appear in a much worse light than otherwise they would were I less taken up with business.’ Nonetheless, his burlesques and songs, composed in the wake of Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, assure Carey of a place in eighteenth-century literary and musical history. He also coined the word namby-pamby, used to mock the sentimental poems of Ambrose Philips, which were also pilloried by Pope and Gay. He may possibly have been the author of ‘God save the King’.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Folk Song Arrangements, Vol. 5 (1961/1961)
Sally in our alley
The Argument
A vulgar error having long prevail’d among many persons, who imagine Sally Salisbury1 the subject of this ballad, the author begs leave to undeceive and assure them it has not the least allusion to her, he being a stranger to her very name at the time this song was compos’d. For as innocence and virtue were ever the boundaries of his muse, so in this little poem he had no other view than to set forth the beauty of a chaste and disinterested passion, even in the lowest class of human life. The real occasion was this: A shoemaker’s ’prentice, making holiday with his sweetheart, treated her with a sight of Bedlam2, the puppet-shews, the flying chairs, and all the elegancies of Moorfields, from whence proceeding to the farthing pye-house, he gave her a collation of buns, cheese-cakes, gammon of bacon, stuff’d beef, and bottl’d ale, through all which scenes the author dodg’d them, charm’d with the simplicity of their courtship, from which he drew this little sketch of nature; but being then young and obscure, he was very much ridicul’d by some of his acquaintance for this performance, which, nevertheless, made its way into the polite world, and amply recompensed him by the applause of the divine Addison3, who was pleased more than once to mention it with approbation.
Of all the girls that are so smart
There’s none like Pretty Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.
There’s ne’er a lady in the land
That’s half so sweet as Sally;
She is the darling of my heart
And she lives in our alley.
[Her father he makes cabbage-nets,
And through the streets does cry ’em;
Her mother she sells laces long
To such as please to buy ’em;
But sure such folks could ne’er beget
So sweet a girl as Sally;
She is the darling of my heart
And she lives in our alley.]
When she is by I leave my work,
I love her so sincerely;
My master comes like any Turk
And bangs me most severely;
But let him bang his bellyfull,
I’ll bear it all for Sally;
She is the darling of my heart
And she lives in our alley.
Of all the days that’s in the week
I dearly love but one day,
And that’s the day that comes betwix
A Saturday and Monday,
For then I’m dressed all in my best
To walk abroad with Sally;
She is the darling of my heart
And she lives in our alley.
My master carries me to church,
And often I am blam’d
Because I leave him in the lurch
As soon as text is nam’d;
I leave the church in sermon time
And slink away to Sally;
She is the darling of my heart
And she lives in our alley.
[When Christmas comes about again,
O, then I shall have money;
I’ll hoard it up, and box and all,
I’ll give it to my honey;
And would it were ten thousand pounds,
I’d give it all to Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.]
My master and the neighbours all
Make game of me and Sally,
And, but for her, I’d better be
A slave, and row a galley;
But when my seven long years are out,
O, then I’ll marry Sally;
O, then we’ll wed, and then we’ll bed,
But not in our alley.
(Beethoven)
ANON1
A loyal song
Sung at the Theatres
God save great George our King,2
Long live our noble King,
God save the King.
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the King.
O Lord our God, arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politicks,
Frustrate their knavish tricks;
On him our hopes we fix;
O save us all.
Thy choicest gifts in store
On George be pleased to pour;
Long may he reign.
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause
To say with heart and voice,
God save the King.
ALEXANDER POPE
(1688–1744)
The fact is, that the exquisite beauty of their [Pope’s and Dryden’s] versification has withdr
awn the public attention from their other excellences, as the vulgar eye will rest more upon the splendour of the uniform than the quality of the troops. It is this very harmony, particularly in Pope, which has raised the vulgar and atrocious cant against him: – because his versification is perfect, it is assumed that it is his only perfection; because his truths are so clear, it is asserted that he has no invention; and because he is always intelligible, it is taken for granted that he has no genius. We are sneeringly told that he is the ‘Poet of Reason,’ as if this was a reason for his being no poet. Taking passage for passage, I will undertake to cite more lines teeming with imagination from Pope than from any two living poets, be they who they may. To take an instance at random from a species of composition not very favourable to imagination – Satire: set down the character of Sporus [An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, lines 305–33], with all the wonderful play of fancy which is scattered over it, and place by its side an equal number of verses, from any two existing poets, of the same power and the same variety – where will you find them?
LORD BYRON: from ‘Some Observations upon an article in Blackwood’s magazine’ (1820)
In the An Epistle To Dr. Arbuthnot mentioned by Byron above, Pope described how he became a poet (lines 125–132):
Why did I write? what sin to me unknown
Dipt me in Ink, my Parents’, or my own?
As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame,
I lisp’d in Numbers, for the Numbers came.
I left no Calling for this idle trade,
No Duty broke, no Father dis-obey’d.
The Muse but serv’d to ease some Friend, not Wife,
To help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life […]
Pope, at the age of twelve (when he was already a published poet), fell ill with a tubercular infection of the spine, which crippled his growth. As Thackeray wrote in The English Humourists: ‘His body was crooked: he was so short that it was necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other people at table [Adolph von Menzel suffered the same ignominy]: he was sewed up in a buckram suit every morning and required a nurse like a child.’ Prevented from attending university by his Roman Catholic faith, he lived with his parents at Binfield in Windsor, was largely self-taught and gained financial independence by translating Homer’s Iliad into heroic couplets (1715–20), followed by the Odyssey (1725–6). He first made his mark in the literary world with his Pastorals, written according to his own testimony (not always to be believed) when he was sixteen. Edith Sitwell writes in Alexander Pope (1930) that the Pastorals are ‘of an astonishing perfection, with their lovely and skilful use of liquids, and their complete absence of overweighting’. It is little surprise that Handel quotes from them, either verbatim or tangentially, in Semele and Acis and Galatea.
The connection between Handel and Pope is a fascinating one. The composer was introduced to both Gay and Pope during his Burlington and Chandos years, and Pope’s amused admiration of Handel’s stirring music is evident from these lines from The Dunciad, Book IV, lines 65–70:
‘Strong in new Arms, lo! Giant Handel stands,
Like bold Briareus, with a hundred hands;
To stir, to rouze, to shake the Soul he comes,
And Jove’s own Thunders follow Mars’s Drums.
Arrest him, Empress; or you sleep no more’ –
She heard, and drove him to th’ Hibernian shore.
(Contrast Gay’s description of Handel’s music in his Trivia: or The Art of Walking the Streets of London:
There Hendel strikes the Strings, the melting Strain
Transports the Soul, and thrills through ev’ry Vein;
There oft I enter (but with cleaner Shoes)
For Burlington’s belov’d by every Muse.)!
The admiration was mutual, for Handel used Pope’s words in a number of his operas and oratorios: the trio from Acis and Galatea is adapted from the Pastorals; ‘Autumn’, 40–46, and the chorus ‘Wretched lovers’ from the same work lean heavily on Pope’s translation of the Iliad (XIII, 27–33). That the libretto to Esther was written by Pope is suggested not only by the advertisements of the Villiers Street performance on 20 April 1732, but also this entry by Viscount Percival (later Earl of Egmont) in his diary: ‘From dinner I went to the Music Club, where the King’s Chapel boys acted the History of Hester, writ by Pope, and composed by Hendel.’ Whatever the truth – and there is still controversy – there are distinct verbal parallels between the libretto and the Rape of the Lock in particular. And one of Pope’s most famous lines, ‘Whatever Is, is RIGHT’, occurs in the chorus, beginning ‘How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees!’ that ends Part II of Jephtha. It was on reaching the words ‘All hid from mortal sight’ that Handel noticed the first signs of blindness in his left eye; he scribbled in a mixture of English and German at the foot of the page that his eye was too ‘relax’d’ to continue – it was only ten days later that he was able to resume. Jephtha was premiered in February 1752.
Pope’s best-known works are satirical: The Rape of the Lock (1712 and 1714) and The Dunciad (1728 and 1743) – a scathing attack against ‘Dulness’ in general and Lewis Theobald’s criticism of Pope’s incapacity as an editor of Shakespeare in particular. In the final edition of 1743 it is Colley Cibber who bears the brunt of Pope’s satirical barbs. Though Pope excelled in satire, he was also capable of writing tender love poetry: Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard (1717); but, in general, lyrical verse – despite the success of the lovely Pastorals – was not his forte, as we see from his Ode for Musick, on St Cecilia’s Day (1713). ‘The Dying Christian to his soul’ is the second of two Adaptations of the Emperor Hadrian (1712). Pope had originally written a poem with the title ‘Adriani morientis ad animam’, or ‘Hadrian to his Departing Soul’, after which Richard Steele, editor of The Spectator, urged the poet to pen a Christian equivalent. Herder’s translation of ‘The dying Christian to his soul’, the text used by Schubert for ‘Verklärung’, first appeared in an essay called ‘How the Ancients looked at Death’ (1786).
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL: from Semele (1743)
Jupiter
Where-e’er you walk, cool Gales shall fan the Glade,1
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a Shade,
Where-e’er you tread, the blushing Flow’rs shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your Eyes.
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL: from Jephtha (1751)1
[How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees!
All hid from mortal sight!
All our joys to sorrow turning,
And our triumphs into mourning,
As the night succeeds the day;
No certain bliss,
No solid peace,
We mortals know
On earth below.
Yet on this maxim still obey:]
Whatever Is, is RIGHT.
FRANZ SCHUBERT
The dying Christian to his soul, Ode
[translated as ‘Verklärung’, D59, by Johann Gottfried Herder] (1813/1832)
Vital spark of heav’nly flame!
Quit, oh quit this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,
Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.
Hark! they whisper; Angels say,
Sister Spirit, come away.
What is this absorbs me quite?
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?
Tell me, my Soul, can this be Death?
The world recedes; it disappears!
Heav’n opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy Victory?
O Death! where is thy Sting?
JAMES THOMSON
(1700–1748)
[…] sweet Poet of the y
ear! […]
ROBERT BURNS: ‘Address to the Shade of Thomson’ (1791)
Thomson, the son of a minister, was a Scot who attended Edinburgh University. He came to London in 1725 where he wrote ‘Winter, a Poem’, the first part of The Seasons, which the reviewer in the London Journal of 4 June 1726 praised as attaining ‘the two great ends of poetry, of instructing and delighting the reader […]’. The Seasons was finally finished in 1730, then greatly expanded in the versions of 1744 and 1746. Thomson soon made the acquaintance of Gay and Pope, and was supported financially by Lord Lyttelton. Having travelled extensively through France and Italy as a private tutor, he published the patriotic Liberty (1735–6), and then produced a series of tragedies that are no longer read. The masque Alfred, written with his fellow Scot David Mallet (or Malloch) was performed in 1740, and contained the now celebrated ‘Rule, Britannia’, probably written by Thomson himself. The Castle of Indolence, a celebration of idleness and an allegory of material progress, was published three months before his death in 1748. He was buried in Richmond church and eulogized in what is possibly the most celebrated short funeral elegy in the language, William Collins’s ‘Ode occasioned by the death of Mr Thomson’ (‘In yonder grave a Druid lies,/Where slowly winds the stealing Wave!/The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise/To deck its poet’s sylvan grave! […]’). The Seasons, set to music by Haydn at the end of his life to the German text of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, owes much to Virgil’s Georgics and Milton’s Paradise Lost, but remains entirely original in its idealization of rustic innocence and its espousal of deism. It was greatly admired by Wordsworth, though Tennyson and Coleridge criticized the rather artificial diction; Coleridge, although he dubbed Thomson ‘a great poet, rather than a good one’, went on to say that ‘his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were natural’.
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 20