I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
Versatile and talented, Shelley was, among other things, a most gifted translator from German, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Arabic, and a marvellously descriptive letter-writer. Though he lacked Byron’s wit, there was a visionary quality in much that he wrote which links him with Blake. He was an impractical dreamer, an idealist (Thomas Love Peacock satirizes him as such – along with Byron and Coleridge – as Scythrop Glowry in Nightmare Abbey) who found it difficult to distinguish between poetry and politics. The quality of his long visionary poems is decidedly uneven; but he wrote some of the most exquisite love lyrics in the language, and it is for these that musicians will remember him. His poetry has been set by a great variety of composers, including Bantock, Barnett, Bax, Brian, Bridge, Burrows, Butterworth, Coleridge-Taylor, Delius, van Dieren, Elgar, Foulds, Gardiner, Gibbs, Gurney, Hadley, Head, Howells, Hurlstone, Kelly, O’Neill, Parry, Quilter, Respighi, Rubbra, Stanford, Tippett, Warlock and Maude Valérie White among many others. Several of his poems (‘The Indian serenade’, ‘To Jane’ (‘The keen stars were twinkling’), ‘A dirge’) were expressly written to be set to music and included in masques and plays.
His remarkably intense and active life – he was a fine pistol shot, horse-rider, swimmer and walker – is contradicted somewhat by Leigh Hunt’s description of him, a few days before the poet’s death (Autobiography, 1850):
His figure was tall and slight, and his constitution consumptive. He was subject to violent spasmodic pains […] his shoulders were bent a little, owing to premature thought and trouble […] Like the Stagyrite’s [i.e. Aristotle’s, who was born at Stagira], his voice was high and weak. His eyes were large and animated, with a dash of wildness in them […] He had brown hair, which, though tinged with grey, surmounted his face well, being in considerable quantity, and tending to curl […] when fronting and looking at you attentively his aspect had a certain seraphical character that would have suited a portrait of John the Baptist, or the angel whom Milton describes as holding a reed ‘tipt with fire’.
Music for Shelley’s Poetry: An Annotated Bibliography of Musical Settings of Shelley’s Poetry, edited by Burton R. Pollin, was published by the Da Capo Press in 1974.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
The fugitives
[translated anonymously as ‘Die Flüchtlinge’, Op. 122/2] declamation for voice and piano (1852/1853)
I
The waters are flashing,
The white hail is dashing,
The lightnings are glancing,
The hoar-spray is dancing –
Away!
The whirlwind is rolling,
The thunder is tolling,
The forest is swinging,
The minster bells ringing –
Come away!
The Earth is like Ocean,
Wreck-strewn and in motion:
Bird, beast, man and worm
Have crept out of the storm –
Come away!
II
‘Our boat has one sail,
And the helmsman is pale; –
A bold pilot I trow,
Who should follow us now,’ –
Shouted he –
And she cried: ‘Ply the oar!
Put off gaily from shore!’ –
As she spoke, bolts of death
Mixed with hail, specked their path
O’er the sea.
And from isle, tower and rock,
The blue beacon-cloud broke,
And though dumb in the blast,
The red cannon flashed fast
From the lee.
III
And ‘Fear’st thou?’ and ‘Fear’st thou?’
And ‘Seest thou?’ and ‘Hear’st thou?’
And ‘Drive we not free
O’er the terrible sea,
I and thou?’
One boat-cloak did cover
The loved and the lover –
Their blood beats one measure,
They murmur proud pleasure
Soft and low; –
While around the lashed Ocean,
Like mountains in motion,
Is withdrawn and uplifted,
Sunk, shattered and shifted
To and fro.
IV
In the court of the fortress
Beside the pale portress,
Like a bloodhound well beaten
The bridegroom stands, eaten
By shame;
On the topmost watch-turret,
As a death-boding spirit,
Stands the gray tyrant father,
To his voice the mad weather
Seems tame;
And with curses as wild
As e’er clung to child,
He devotes to the blast,
The best, loveliest and last
Of his name!
MAUDE VALÉRIE WHITE1
Lines 38–47, 72–97, from Prometheus Unbound, Act II, sc. v
[My soul is an enchanted boat] (1882)
Asia
Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his
Whose echoes they are: yet all love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God:
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still, after long sufferings,
As I shall soon become. […]
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sweeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside a helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon the many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound:
Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In music’s most serene dominions;
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,
Without a course, without a star,
But, by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace2 glided,
The boat of my desire is guided:
Realms where the air we breathe is love,
Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,
Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above.
(Stanford)
CHARLES IVES
The world’s wanderers (1895)
I
Tell me, thou Star, whose wings of light
Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
Will thy pinions close now?
II
Tell me, Moon, thou pale and gray
Pilgrim of Heaven’s homeless way,
In what depth of night or day
Seekest thou repose now?
III
[Weary Wind, who wand
erest
Like the world’s rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow?]
(Bantock, Heise)
FRANK BRIDGE: from Three Songs (1982)
On a faded violet
[A dead violet] (1904)
I
The odour from the flower is gone
Which like thy kisses breathed on me;
The colour from the flower is flown
Which glowed of thee and only thee!
II
A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,
It lies on my abandoned breast,
And mocks the heart which yet is warm,
With cold and silent rest.
III
I weep, – my tears revive it not!
I sigh, – it breathes no more on me;
Its mute and uncomplaining lot
Is such as mine should be.
(MacCunn, Respighi, Taneyev)
A dirge (1903)
Rough wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, –
Wail, for the world’s wrong!
(Ives, Respighi, Rorem)
EDWARD ELGAR: from Four Choral Songs (1907)1
Ode to the West Wind
[O, wild West Wind]
O, wild West Wind […]
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth2!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
(Henze)
OTTORINO RESPIGHI
Arethusa
[translated by R. Ascoli] for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (1910)
I
Arethusa1 arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian2 mountains, –
From cloud and from crag,
With many a jag,
Shepherding her bright fountains.
She leapt down the rocks,
With her rainbow locks
Streaming among the streams; –
Her steps paved with green
The downward ravine
Which slopes to the western gleams;
And gliding and springing
She went, ever singing,
In murmurs as soft as sleep;
The Earth seemed to love her,
And Heaven smiled above her,
As she lingered towards the deep.
II
Then Alpheus3 bold,
On his glacier cold
With his trident the mountains strook;
And opened a chasm
In the rocks – with the spasm
All Erymanthus4 shook.
And the black south wind
It unsealed behind
The urns of the silent snow,
And earthquake and thunder
Did rend in sunder
The bars of the springs below.
And the beard and the hair
Of the River-god were
Seen through the torrent’s sweep,
As he followed the light
Of the fleet nymph’s flight
To the brink of the Dorian deep.
III
‘Oh, save me! Oh, guide me!
And bid the deep hide me,
For he grasps me now by the hair!’
The loud Ocean heard,
To its blue depth stirred,
And divided at her prayer;
And under the water
The Earth’s white daughter
Fled like a sunny beam;
Behind her descended
Her billows, unblended
With the brackish Dorian stream: –
Like a gloomy stain
On the emerald main
Alpheus rushed behind, –
As an eagle pursuing
A dove to its ruin
Down the streams of the cloudy wind.
IV
Under the bowers
Where the Ocean Powers
Sit on their pearlèd thrones;
Through the coral woods
Of the weltering floods,
Over heaps of unvalued stones;
Through the dim beams
Which amid the streams
Weave a network of coloured light;
And under the caves,
Where the shadowy waves
Are as green as the forest’s night: –
Outspeeding the shark,
And the sword-fish dark,
Under the Ocean’s foam,
And up through the rifts
Of the mountain clifts
They passed to their Dorian home.
V
And now from their fountains
In Enna’s mountains,5
Down one vale where the morning basks,
Like friends once parted
Grown single-hearted,
They ply their watery tasks.
At sunrise they leap
From their cradles steep
In the cave of the shelving hill;
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore; –
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more.
(Bantock)
The sunset
[translated as ‘Il tramonto’ by R. Ascoli] for string quartet and mezzo-soprano (1914)1
There late was One within whose subtle being,
As light and wind within some delicate cloud
That fades amid the blue noon’s burning sky,
Genius and death contended. None may know
The sweetness of the joy which made his breath
Fail, like the trances of the summer air,
When, with the lady of his love, who then
First knew the unreserve of mingled being,
He walked along the pathway of a field
Which to the east a hoar wood shadowed o’er,
But to the west was open to the sky.
There now the sun had sunk, but lines of gold
Hung on the ashen clouds, and on the points
Of the far level grass and nodding flowers
And the old dandelion’s hoary beard,
And, mingled with the shades of twilight, lay
On the brown massy woods – and in the east
The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose
Between the black trunks of the crowded trees,
While the faint stars were gathering overhead. –
‘Is it not strange, Isabel2’, said the youth,
‘I never saw the sun? We will walk here
To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’
That night the youth and the lady mingled lay
In love and sleep – but when the morning came
The lady found her lover dead and cold.
Let none believe that God in mercy gave
That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild,
But year by year lived on – in truth I think
Her gentleness and pat
ience and sad smiles,
And that she did not die, but lived to tend
Her agèd father, were a kind of madness,
If madness ’tis to be unlike the world.
For but to see her were to read the tale
Woven by some subtlest bard, to make hard hearts
Dissolve away in wisdom-working grief; –
Her eyes were black and lustreless and wan:
Her eyelashes were worn away with tears,
Her lips and cheeks were like things dead – so pale;
Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins
And weak articulations might be seen
Day’s ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self
Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day,
Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee!
‘Inheritor of more than earth can give,
Passionless calm and silence unreproved,
Whether the dead find, oh, not sleep! but rest,
And are the uncomplaining things they seem,
Or live, or drop in the deep sea of Love;
Oh, that like thine, mine epitaph were – Peace!’
This was the only moan she ever made.
ROGER QUILTER: from Three Songs, Op. 3 (1904–5)
Love’s philosophy (1905)1
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine? –
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 33