The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

  This extraordinary man, apart from composing many hundreds of songs, operas, pantomimes and dialogues, produced three music text books, and at least ten other publications, the most remarkable of which are his autobiography, The Professional Life of Mr Dibdin … With the Words of Six Hundred Songs (4 vols., 1803), which describes his relations with Garrick and other actors; and Observations on a Tour Through Almost the Whole of England and a Considerable Part of Scotland (2 vols., 1801–2), which he also illustrated with sepia prints of his own paintings. He was buried in Camden Town Cemetery, known now as St Martin’s Gardens. His tomb was inscribed with a few lines from ‘Tom Bowling’ (‘Though his body’s under hatches,/His soul is gone aloft!’) but fell into disrepair. A newspaper article reported the neglect in 1889, and as a result of public fundraising a monument was raised in his honour – a Celtic cross with a carved anchor, rope and lyre.

  CHARLES DIBDIN

  Tom Bowling1

  Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling,

  The darling of our crew;

  No more he’ll hear the tempest howling,

  For Death has broach’d him to.

  His form was of the manliest beauty,

  His heart was kind and soft;

  Faithful below he did his duty,

  And now he’s gone aloft.

  Tom never from his word departed,

  His virtues were so rare;

  His friends were many and true-hearted,

  His Poll was kind and fair:

  And then he’d sing so blithe and jolly,

  Ah, many’s the time and oft!

  But mirth is turned to melancholy,

  For Tom is gone aloft.

  Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather,

  When He, who all commands,

  Shall give, to call life’s crew together,

  The word to pipe all hands.2

  Thus Death, who kings and tars3 dispatches,

  In vain Tom’s life has doffed;

  For though his body’s under hatches,

  His soul is gone aloft.

  GEORGE CRABBE

  (1754–1832)

  Both the urban and the country schools have left their mark on the work of the last important writer in the eighteenth-century tradition. George Crabbe was not a polished artist. The long bleak narratives of rural life which make up the greater part of his work are often written in a style as bare as a guide-book; but there is something compelling about them. The patient accuracy with which he observes the world, the unillusioned wisdom with which he judges it, make one listen to his words and forbid one to forget them.

  LORD DAVID CECIL: The Heritage of English Literature (1983)

  The son of a collector of the salt-tax, Crabbe was born in Aldeburgh. He was apprenticed to a doctor, started writing and published, aged twenty-one, Inebriety, a passionate and slightly derivative poem about the evils of drink. He began to practise medicine in Aldeburgh, but was determined to make a career of writing. The Candidate (1780), however, was not well received by the critics, and Crabbe applied for patronage to a number of celebrities. Edmund Burke finally rescued him from anonymity, received him into his house, introduced him to influential friends and helped him to take holy orders. He became domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, and while there published The Village (1783), his first great success and perhaps his finest poem. In the same year he married Sara Elmy, the ‘Mira’ of his poems. The Newspaper appeared in 1785, after which he published nothing for twenty-two years. This silence was due in part to immersion in domestic life and also to the failing health of his wife. He re-entered the literary scene with The Parish Register and Sir Eustace Grey, a poem of fifty-five eight-line stanzas that takes place in a madhouse. The Borough (1810), a poem in twenty-four letters, depicts the life of a country town (based on Aldeburgh), and includes sections on Ellen Orford (Letter XX) and Peter Grimes (Letter XXII) that form the basis of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945). Tales in Verse followed in 1812. When his wife died in 1813, Crabbe moved away from Suffolk, became rector at Trowbridge, where he spent the rest of his life, renewed his contacts in London and was fêted by figures such as Thomas Moore and Scott. Like Coleridge, he had a taste for opium, which affected some of his later work, such as Tales of the Hall (1819).

  Crabbe’s star has now waned, but in the nineteenth century he was a highly popular and greatly revered poet: Byron dubbed him ‘Nature’s sternest painter yet the best’; he was said to have been Jane Austen’s favourite poet; and Sir Walter Scott, a close friend, called him ‘The English Juvenal’. He was one of the first poets whose subject matter was almost exclusively the life of the poor and the destitute. Other poets and dramatists had turned to low life for comedy, but Crabbe depicted their life with great seriousness and a total lack of sentimentality: never once in The Borough or The Village does he give any overt expression of his own feelings. Much of his work is written in heroic couplets, which display little rhythmic variety and can be an obstacle for readers accustomed to the variety, elegance and wit of, say, Alexander Pope. But the best of his poetry displays a wonderful realism, a delight in nature description (he wrote – and destroyed – an authoritative book on botany), a loathing of greed, hypocrisy and cruelty, and an unsurpassed ability to tell a story.

  BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Peter Grimes (1944–5/1945)

  Old Peter Grimes made fishing his employ,

  His wife he cabin’d with him and his boy,

  And seem’d that life laborious to enjoy:

  To town came quiet Peter with his fish,

  And had of all a civil word and wish.

  He left his trade upon the Sabbath-day,

  And took young Peter in his hand to pray:

  But soon the stubborn boy from care broke loose,

  At first refused, then added his abuse:

  His father’s love he scorn’d, his power defied,

  But being drunk, wept sorely when he died.

  Yes! then he wept, and to his mind there came

  Much of his conduct, and he felt the shame, –

  How he had oft the good old man reviled,

  And never paid the duty of a child;

  How, when the father in his Bible read,

  He in contempt and anger left the shed:

  ‘It is the word of life,’ the parent cried;

  – ‘This is the life itself,’ the boy replied;

  And while old Peter in amazement stood,

  Gave the hot spirit to his boiling blood: –

  How he, with oath and furious speech, began

  To prove his freedom and assert the man;

  And when the parent check’d his impious rage,

  How he had cursed the tyranny of age, –

  Nay, once had dealt the sacrilegious blow

  On his bare head, and laid his parent low;

  The father groan’d – ‘If thou art old,’ said he,

  ‘And hast a son – thou wilt remember me:

  Thy mother left me in a happy time,

  Thou kill’dst not her – Heav’n spares the double crime.’

  On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,

  This he revolved, and drank for his relief.

  Now lived the youth in freedom, but debarr’d

  From constant pleasure, and he thought it hard;

  Hard that he could not every wish obey,

  But must awhile relinquish ale and play;

  Hard! that he could not his cards attend,

  But must acquire the money he would spend.

  With greedy eye, he look’d on all he saw,

  He knew not justice, and he laugh’d at law;

  On all he mark’d, he stretch’d his ready hand;

  He fish’d by water, and he filch’d by land:

  Oft in the night has Peter dropp’d his oar,

  Fled from his boat and sought for prey on shore;

  Oft up the hedge-row glided, on his back

  Bearing the orchard’s produce in a
sack,

  Or farm-yard load, tugg’d fiercely from the stack;

  And as these wrongs to greater numbers rose,

  The more he look’d on all men as his foes.

  He built a mud-wall’d hovel, where he kept

  His various wealth, and there he oft-times slept;

  But no success could please his cruel soul,

  He wish’d for one to trouble and control;

  He wanted some obedient boy to stand

  And bear the blow of his outrageous hand;

  And hoped to find in some propitious hour

  A feeling creature subject to his power.

  Peter had heard there were in London then, –

  Still have they being! – workhouse-clearing men,

  Who, undisturb’d by feelings just or kind,

  Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind:

  They in their want a trifling sum would take,

  And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.

  Such Peter sought, and when a lad was found,

  The sum was dealt him, and the slave was bound.

  Some few in town observed in Peter’s trap

  A boy, with jacket blue and woollen cap;

  But none inquired how Peter used the rope,

  Or what the bruise that made the stripling stoop;

  None could the ridges of his back behold,

  None sought him shiv’ring in the winter’s cold;

  None put the question, – ‘Peter, dost thou give

  The boy his food? – What, man! the lad must live:

  Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,

  He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.’

  None reason’d thus – and some, on hearing cries,

  Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’1

  BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Five Flower Songs, Op. 47, for unaccompanied chorus (1950/1951)1

  Marsh flowers2

  Here the strong mallow strikes her slimy root,

  Here the dull nightshade hangs her deadly fruit:

  On hills of dust the henbane’s faded green,

  And pencil’d flower of sickly scent is seen;

  Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,

  Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume;

  At the wall’s base the fiery nettle springs,

  With fruit globose3 and fierce with poison’d stings;

  In ev’ry chink delights the fern to grow,

  With glossy leaf and tawny bloom below;

  The few dull flowers that o’er the place are spread

  Partake the nature of their fenny bed;

  These, with our sea-weeds, rolling up and down,

  Form the contracted Flora of our town.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  (1757–1827)

  To define the poetry of Blake one must find new definitions for poetry; but, these definitions once found, he will be seen to be the only poet who is a poet in essence; the only poet who could, in his own words, ‘enter into Noah’s rainbow, and make a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always entreat him to leave mortal things.’ In this verse there is, if it is to be found in any verse, the ‘lyrical cry’; and yet, what voice is it that cries in this disembodied ecstasy? The voice of desire is not in it, nor the voice of passion, nor the cry of the heart, nor the cry of the sinner to God, nor of the lover of nature to nature. It neither seeks nor aspires nor laments nor questions. It is like the voice of wisdom in a child, who has not yet forgotten the world out of which the soul came. It is as spontaneous as the note of a bird; it is an affirmation of life; in its song, which seems mere music, it is the mind which sings; it is lyric thought. What is it that transfixes one in any couplet such as this?

  If the sun and moon should doubt

  They’d immediately go out.

  It is no more than a nursery statement, there is not even an image in it, and yet it sings to the brain, it cuts into the very flesh of the mind, as if there was a great weight behind it. Is it that it is an arrow, and that it comes from so far, and with an impetus gathered from its speed out of the sky?

  ARTHUR SYMONS: The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1909)

  Blake’s father was a hosier who worked in London, which the poet hardly ever left (the house where he lived at 17 South Molton Street is still standing). His background was humble and he remained poor throughout his life. His parents supported him in his artistic endeavours and sent him at the age of ten to Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand. Blake’s claim to have seen angels in a tree in Peckham Rye earned him a sound thrashing from his father – the seed, perhaps, for his hatred of authoritarianism. He later became a radical freethinker and supported the French Revolution in 1789. When news reached London that the Bastille had fallen, he wrote an anti-royalist, partly obscene satirical poem; he illustrated an anti-slavery book by John Gabriel Stedman, which included a gruesome drawing with the caption: ‘A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to the Gallows’; he raged against the inhuman effects of the Industrial Revolution and remained a radical sympathizer throughout his life. In 1780, for example, he led a crowd of rioters who burned down Newgate Prison – an event he celebrated in a drawing called ‘Glad Day’. He hated the rationalism of England’s most famous philosophers and scientists, lamenting their lack of spirituality. The soul-destroying effects of mechanization inspired many poems of protest, such as ‘London’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, but they also encouraged him to cultivate the world of the imagination and centre his art on the world of mystic experience. The tendency to have visions continued. Were they genuine or was he making them up, as his father thought? Modern psychologists would probably say that he had eidetic vision – and projected his mental images onto the external world. Blake had an intimate knowledge of the King James Bible of 1611 and 1612, and the strong sense of religion in his poetry can be traced back to the devout community of the craftsmen who were his daily companions.

  Blake was apprenticed to an engraver, because engraving was a lowlier craft than painting, and apprenticeship was cheaper. Aged fifteen, he worked for James Basire, and in 1779 he was employed as an engraver by J. Johnson, the bookseller. Blake always referred to himself as ‘The engraver Blake’, and it was largely through engraving – rather than painting, poetry or printing – that he earned his living; by the age of forty he was, perhaps, the most celebrated engraver in the capital. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, who was later to assist him in hand-painting and binding the books that they sold for a few shillings each. By 1784, he was partner in a print shop, where a high-quality illustrated book of verse would have been economically desirable. He engraved and published his Songs of Innocence in 1789, to which the Songs of Experience were added in 1794. The full title now read Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Pastoral innocence and childhood are pitted against the adult world of corruption and repression; poems in the Experience section are often written as a ‘contrary’ to poems that had appeared in Innocence. Twenty-one copies exist of Songs of Innocence, twenty-seven of the combined work, but none of the Songs of Experience – suggesting that Blake was happy to have Songs of Innocence read separately, but not the contrary work. The works were engraved after a process of Blake’s own invention, according to which he applied words and pictures to copper plates, and then etched the surrounding surfaces away.

  Blake was an isolated figure; considered mad by some, he was a prophet and mystic, with no followers or imitators. The two people closest to him were his brother, Robert, who died aged twenty (the British Museum has a drawing in black chalk of ‘A Naked Youth Seen from the Side’ that perhaps depicts his brother) and Catherine Boucher, his wife, who shared Blake’s interest in the spiritual. His isolation gave birth to the arcane later poems such as those ‘Prophetic Books’: Milton and Jerusalem, which Blake considered to be ‘the grandest poem that the world contains’. He wrote of it with disingenuous modesty: ‘I may praise it since
I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in Eternity.’ Virtually ignored after his death (the thought of him rubbing shoulders with Sir Joshua Reynolds at the Royal Academy or with Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, would have been risible), it was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that interest in him began to revive, thanks to the Pre-Raphaelites and in particular Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was greatly influenced by the imaginative power of Blake’s poetry and art.