A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink & sing;
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength & breath;
And the want2
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
(Bantock, Bolcom, Brian, Duke, Segerstam, Sykes)
Proverbs 12, 11, 10
The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock;
But of wisdom, no clock can measure.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
Ah! Sun-flower
See above, under Vaughan Williams.
Auguries of Innocence1
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. […]
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
We are led to believe a Lie
When we see not Thro’ the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in realms of day.
(Dickinson, Hart)
WILLIAM BOLCOM: from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, for symphony orchestra, soloists and choir (1956–82/1984)
Bolcom first read the poetry of Blake at the age of eleven and immediately harboured the ambition to compose the entire Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Some of the songs were penned in 1956, but most of the work was completed between 1973–4 and 1979–82. The work was premiered in Stuttgart in 1984. Bolcom describes his approach to Blake in the notes to his Naxos recording:
The Blakean principles of contraries – ‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) – would also dominate my approach to the work, particularly in matters of style. Current Blake research has tended to confirm what I had assumed from the first, that at every point Blake used his whole culture, past and present, highflown and vernacular, as sources for his many poetic styles. Throughout the entire Songs of Innocence and of Experience, exercises in elegant Drydenesque diction are placed cheek by jowl with ballads that could have come from one of the ‘songsters’ of his day (small, popular books or pamphlets of words set to well-known tunes, in the manner of John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera). It is as if many people from all walks of life were speaking, each in a different way. The apparent disharmony of each clash and juxtaposition eventually produces a deeper and more universal harmony, once the whole cycle is absorbed. All I did was to use the same stylistic point of departure as Blake in my musical settings.
The Little Vagabond (Songs of Experience)1
Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,
But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm:
Besides I can tell where I am use’d well,
Such usage2 in heaven will never do well.
But if at the Church they would give us some Ale.
And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale:
We’d sing and we’d pray all the live-long day:
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.
Then the Parson might preach & drink & sing.
And we’d be as happy as birds in the spring:
And modest dame Lurch3, who is always at Church
Would not have bandy4 children nor fasting nor birch
And God like a father rejoicing to see.
His children as pleasant and happy as he:
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel
But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel.5
(Sykes)
ROBERT BURNS
(1759–96)
What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay! It is strange; a true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physique of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one’s self, that we alone can prevent them from disgusting.
LORD BYRON: Journal (1813)
More obfuscation, often self-imposed, surrounds Burns than almost any other poet. He delighted in acting out the role of the untutored child of nature, the ploughman-poet that the Edinburgh literati had foisted on him; the poems he wrote in praise of the bottle have in some quarters encouraged the view that he was a heavy drinker; he sent a copy of his most famous poem, ‘Auld lang syne’, to James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum and wrote that the old song had ‘never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man’s singing’. The truth is rather different. He took an intelligent interest in the political questions of his day, and sympathized with the American and French Revolutions. Fluent in French and well-grounded in Latin, he was a voracious reader of his own language, had an intimate knowledge of the Bible and Shakespeare, and relished the poetry of Milton, Dryden and Pope. More workaholic than alcoholic, he ran a farm at Ellisland that had been leased him by a friend; he was appointed to the Excise Division in Dumfries in 1789, where he carried out his duties with such efficiency that he was soon promoted; and between 1786 and 1796 he wrote or reworked from earlier sources an extraordinary number of poems for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum and travelled extensively in the Highlands and the Borders, collecting tunes and words for George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. He also assembled a notorious collection of bawdy verse, The Merry Muses of Caledonia, some of which he wrote himself.
Burns is, with Byron, the finest satirical poet of the nineteenth century – but it is as a love poet that he, perhaps, is best known. He was by all accounts a passionate lover, had nine children by Jane Armour (whom he met in 1785 and eventually married in 1788), but also fathered children on Helen Armstrong, Jenny Clow, Ann Park and Elizabeth Paton. Margaret Campbell (the ‘Highland Mary’ of his poems) probably died in childbirth, and Margaret Cameron (‘May’) took out a paternity suit against him. Despite this apparent promiscuity, Burns’s love poems are as tender and direct as those of Goethe, a contemporary whose own sexual appetite rivals that of his Scottish contemporary. Few male poets writing in English have written more poems spoken by a woman, and the range of feeling is enormous. Some of his most touching poems – rarely sentimental because of their directness of utterance – deal with women deserted in love or abandoned because pregnant: Goethe’s Gretchen poems (‘Ach neige’ and ‘Wie anders, Gretchen’ spring to mind, or his bitter ‘Vor dem Gesetz’). The language used by the characters in Burns’s poems is a hybrid, whose vocabulary is a mixture of English and Scottish, and whose syntax mostly derives from English. Burns, characteristically, was ambiguous on the matter: although he often talks of writing in his ‘native language’, he elsewhere describes his work as containing a ‘sprinkling’ of Scottish words. Scottish, of course, is not the language of the Highlands (where a form of Gaelic is spoken) but refers rather to the dialect of English called ‘Scottish’, ‘Scots’ or ‘Lallans’.
Though Burns was scarcely set during his lifetime and only sporadically in the years immediately following his death, more and more composers turned to his poetry as the nineteenth century
wore on: Coleridge-Taylor, Walford Davies, Franz, Jensen, MacCunn, Mackenzie, Mendelssohn, Somervell, Sterndale Bennett, Sullivan and, especially, Robert Schumann, who, rejected by Ferdinand Wieck, must have been aware of the similarity to Burns’s predicament. Aged nineteen, having provoked his father’s anger by a carefree lifestyle, Burns left home to establish a flax trade. When his father died in 1784 Burns returned to his parents’ farm, but a succession of poor harvests persuaded him to abandon farming. It was at this time that he wrote some of his most famous lyrics, in praise of Jean Armour, the beautiful village girl he wished to marry. This wish, however, was vehemently opposed by her father, with the result that Burns, having failed in his numerous business enterprises, considered in his despair emigrating to Jamaica. As it turned out, he was suddenly catapulted to fame by Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), and Jean’s family now agreed to the wedding plans.
In the nineteenth century it was Schumann (some twenty settings), in the twentieth Francis George Scott (thirty-five), who seemed to have the closest rapport with Burns. Most remarkable of all, however, is Burns’s popularity in Russia, where he became the state’s adopted national poet. Samuil Marshak began translating Burns in 1924, and by the 1950s some 600,000 copies of the poet had been sold in the Soviet Union. Among the most important Russian settings of Burns are those by Sviridov, Denisov, Shostakovich, Levitin and Khrennikov.
CLARA SCHUMANN
Musing on the roaring ocean1
[translated as ‘Am Strande’ by Wilhelm Gerhard] (1840/1841)
Musing on the roaring ocean,
Which divides my love and me,
Wearying heav’n in warm devotion
For his weal where’er he be.
Hope and Fear’s alternate billow
Yielding late to Nature’s law,
Whispering spirits round my pillow,
Talk of him that’s far awa’!
Ye whom sorrow never wounded,
Ye who never shed a tear,
Care-untroubled, joy-surrounded,
Gaudy day to you is dear!
Gentle night, do thou befriend me!
Downy sleep, the curtain draw!
Spirits kind, again attend me,
Talk of him that’s far awa!
(Beethoven, Bennett)
ROBERT SCHUMANN: from Myrthen, Op. 25 (1840/1840)
For the sake of Somebody
[translated as ‘Jemand’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]1
My heart is sair2, I dare na tell,
My heart is sair for Somebody;
I could wake a winter night,
For the sake o’ Somebody!
Oh-hon! for Somebody!
Oh-hey! for Somebody!
I could range the world around,
For the sake o’ Somebody!
Ye Powers that smile on virtuous love,
O, sweetly smile on Somebody!
Frae ilka3 danger keep him free,
And send me safe my Somebody!
Oh-hon! for Somebody!
Oh-hey! for Somebody!
I wad do – what wad I not?
For the sake o’ Somebody!
(Franz, Fuchs, Jensen, Marschner)
The Highland widow’s lament
[translated as ‘Die Hochländer-Witwe’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]
O, I am come to the low countrie –
Ochon, ochon, ochrie! –
Without a penny in my purse
To buy a meal to me.
It was na sae1 in the Highland hills –
Ochon, ochon, ochrie! –
Nae woman in the country wide
Sae happy was as me.
For then I had a score o kye2 –
Ochon, ochon, ochrie! –
Feeding on yon hill sae high
And giving milk to me.
And there I had three score o yowes3 –
Ochon, ochon, ochrie! –
Skipping on yon bonie knowes4 –
And casting woo5 to me.
I was the happiest of a’ the clan –
Sair6, sair may I repine! –
For Donald was the brawest man7,
And Donald he was mine.
Till Charlie Stewart cam at last
Sae far to set us free:
My Donald’s arm was wanted then
For Scotland and for me.
Their waefu fate what need I tell?
Right to the wrang did yield;
My Donald and his country fell
Upon Culloden field.
Ochon! O Donald, O!
Ochon, ochon, ochrie!
Nae woman in the warld wide,
Sae wretched now as me!
My heart’s in the Highlands
[translated as ‘Hochländers Abschied’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]1
CHORUS
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer,
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe –
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go!
1
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birthplace of valour, the country of worth!
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
2
Farewell to the mountains, high cover’d with snow,
Farewell to the straths2 and green valleys below,
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods,
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods!
The Highland balou
[translated as ‘Hochländisches Wiegenlied’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]
Hee balou1, my sweet wee Donald,
Picture o’ the great Clanronald!
Brawlie2 kens our wanton Chief
Wha gat my young Highland thief.
Leeze me on thy bonnie craigie3!
An’ thou live, thou’ll steal a naigie4,
Travel the country thro and thro’,
And bring hame a Carlisle cow!
Thro’ the Lawlands, o’er the Border,
Weel, my babie, may thou furder5,
Herry the louns6 o’ the laigh Countrie7,
Syne8 to the Highlands hame to me!
(Britten)
The captain’s lady
[translated as ‘Hauptmanns Weib’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]
O mount and go,
Mount and make you ready!
O mount and go,
And be the Captain’s Lady!
When the drums do beat,
And the cannons rattle,
Thou shalt sit in state,
And see thy love in battle.
When the vanquish’d foe
Sues for peace and quiet,
To the shades we’ll go,
And in love enjoy it.
The bonie lad that’s far awa
[translated as ‘Weit, weit’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]
O how can I be blythe and glad,
Or how can I gang brisk and braw1,
When the bonie lad that I lo’e best
Is o’er the hills and far awa?
It’s no the frosty winter wind,
It’s no the driving drift and snaw;
But ay the tear comes in my e’e,
To think on him that’s far awa.
[My father pat me frae his door,
My friends they hae disown’d me a’;
But I hae ane will tak my part –
The bonie lad that’s far awa.]
A pair o’ gloves he bought to me,
And silken snoods he gae me twa;2
And I will wear them for his sake,
The bonie lad that’s far awa.
[O, weary Winter soon will pass,
And Spring will cleed the birken shaw,3
And my sweet babie will be born,4
And he’ll be hame that’s far awa!5]
(Beethoven)
I hae a wife o’ my ain
[translated as �
��Niemand’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]1
I hae a wife o’ my ain,
I’ll partake wi’ naebody:
I’ll take cuckold frae nane,
I’ll gie cuckold to naebody.
I hae a penny to spend,
There – thanks to naebody!
I hae naething to lend,
I’ll borrow frae naebody.
I am naebody’s lord,
I’ll be slave to naebody.
I hae a guid braid sword,
I’ll tak dunts2 frae naebody.
I’ll be merry and free,
I’ll be sad for naebody;
Naebody cares for me,
I care for naebody.
Out over the Forth
[translated as ‘Im Westen’ by Wilhelm Gerhard]
Out over the Forth I look to the north –
But what is the north and its Highlands to me?
The south nor the east gie ease to my breast,
The far foreign land or the wild rolling sea!
But I look to the west, when I gae to rest,
That happy my dreams and my slumbers may be;
For far in the west lives he I loe best,
The lad that is dear to my babie and me.
(Marschner, Somervell)
ROBERT SCHUMANN
My luve is like a red, red rose
[translated as ‘Dem roten Röslein gleicht mein Lieb’, Op. 27/2, by Wilhelm Gerhard] (1840)1
O, my luve is like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June.
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 25