And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
(Backer-Gro/ndahl, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Cowen, Delius, Gounod, Heininen, Heise, Lehmann)
ROGER QUILTER: from Six Songs, Op. 25
From the Arabic: An imitation
[Arab love song] (1927/1927)
My faint spirit was sitting in the light
Of thy looks, my love;
It panted for thee like the hind at noon
For the brooks, my love.
Thy barb whose hoofs outspeed the tempest’s flight
Bore thee far from me;
My heart, for my weak feet were weary soon,
Did companion thee.
(Sullivan)
To — [Music, when soft voices die] (1926/1927)1
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory –
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
(Bantock, Bax, Bridge, Bush, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Lehmann, Parry, Searle, Somervell, Vaughan Williams, Warlock)
ROGER QUILTER
The Indian serenade
[I arise from dreams of thee]
Op. 29, Serenade for tenor and orchestra (1929/1931)1
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night –
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee –
And a spirit in my feet
Has borne me – Who knows how?
To thy chamber window, sweet! –
The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream –
The champak2 odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint –
It dies upon her heart –
As I must on thine
O beloved as thou art!
O lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast.
Oh press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.
(Bax, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Delius, Head, MacCunn, O’Neill, Parry, Respighi)
To Jane: ‘The keen stars were twinkling’
[Music and moonlight] (1935/1947)1
The keen stars were twinkling
And the fair moon was rising among them,
Dear Jane!
The guitar was tinkling,
But the notes were not sweet till you sung them
Again. –
As the moon’s soft splendour
O’er the faint cold starlight of Heaven
Is thrown –
So your voice most tender
To the strings without soul had then given
Its own.
The stars will awaken,
Though the moon sleep a full hour later,
Tonight;
No leaf will be shaken
Whilst the dews of your melody scatter
Delight.
Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
(Beach, Coleridge-Taylor, Elgar, Rorem, Searle, White)
To —
[One word is too often profaned] (1946/1947)
I
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
II
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not, –
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
Lines
[Far, far away] (?1947)1
I
Far, far away, O ye
Halcyons of memory,
Seek some far calmer nest
Than this abandoned breast!
No news of your false spring
To my heart’s winter bring,
Once having gone, in vain
Ye come again.
II
Vultures, who build your bowers
High in the Future’s towers,
Withered hopes on hopes are spread!
Dying joys, choked by the dead,
Will serve your beaks for prey
Many a day.
EDMUND RUBBRA
A widow bird sate mourning Op. 28 (1930/1931)1
A widow bird sate mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.
There was no leaf upon the forest bare,
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel’s sound.
(Bantock, Bax, Bliss, Darke, Howells, Kelly, Lehmann, MacDowell, Maconchy, White)
PAUL HINDEMITH: from Nine English Songs (1942–4)
The waning moon
[The moon]1
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless light –
(Bloch, Castelnuovo-Tedesco)
To the moon
[The moon]
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, –
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
(Bax, Blyton)
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Nocturne, Op. 60, for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and string orchestra (1958/1959)
Lines 164–71 from Prometheus Unbound
[On a poet’s lips I slept]
On a poet’s lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on aëreal kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be:
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality!
[One of these awakened me,
And I sped to succour thee.]
(Brian)
MICHAEL TIPPETT
Music (1960)
I
I pant for the music which is divine,
My heart in its thirst is a dying flower;
Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine,
Loosen the notes
in a silver shower;
Like a herbless plain, for the gentle rain,
I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.
II
Let me drink of the spirit of that sweet sound,
More, oh more, – I am thirsting yet;
It loosens the serpent which care has bound
Upon my heart to stifle it;
The dissolving strain, through every vein,
Passes into my heart and brain.
III
As the scent of a violet withered up,
Which grew by the brink of a silver lake,
When the hot noon has drained its dewy cup,
And mist there was none its thirst to slake –
And the violet lay dead while the odour flew
On the wings of the wind o’er the waters blue –
IV
As one who drinks from a charmèd cup
Of foaming and sparkling, and murmuring wine,
Whom, a mighty Enchantress filling up,
Invites to love with her kiss divine …
(Quilter)
JOHN CLARE
(1793–1864)
The poems of Clare’s that still make a catch in the breath and establish a positive bodily hold upon the reader are those in which the wheel of total recognition has been turned. At their most effective, Clare’s pentameters engage not just the mechanical gears of a metre: at their most effective, they take hold also on the sprockets of our creatureliness. By which I mean only that on occasion a reader simply cannot help responding with immediate recognition to the pell-mell succession of vividly accurate impressions. No one of these is extraordinary in itself, nor is the resulting poem in any way spectacular. What distinguishes it is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY: ‘John Clare’s Prog’, a lecture written for the bicentenary of the poet’s birth (1993)
As W. H. Auden points out in 19th Century British Minor Poets, Clare was virtually the only British poet of the nineteenth century who did not belong to the middle or upper-middle class. Born at Helpstone between Peterborough and Stamford, his father was a labourer, his mother illiterate. He had little formal education but read the Bible, bought a copy of Thomson’s The Seasons and was familiar with Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress. After the publication of his first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. By John Clare a Northamptonshire Peasant (1820), he left his first love, Mary Joyce, and married Martha Turner – something that he regretted for the rest of his life. Mary had been his childhood sweetheart; when they met in 1800, he was seven and she was three, and in the wood of the church vestry at Glinton, near Peterborough, he carved his adoration: ‘J.C. 1808 Mary’. Most of the poems addressed to her were written late in his life, and he wrote in his autobiography, Sketches: ‘She was a beautiful girl & as the dream never awoke into reality her beauty was always fresh in my memory.’ The Village Minstrel appeared in 1821, followed by The Shepherd’s Calendar; With Village Stories and Other Poems (1827) and The Rural Muse (1835), which Clare originally wished to call The Midsummer Cushion, a title that referred to the local custom of gathering midsummer flowers, which he was persuaded to change by his friend Eliza Emmerson. In 1832 he left Helpston for Northborough, where he was given a cottage; but deprived of the scenery around Helpston, which he associated with Mary, his mind began to give way. He increasingly identified himself with the hunted animals of the countryside he knew so well: the badgers, the hares and foxes.
As his mental health declined, he believed he had married Mary, addressed her as his wife in his letters, and worried that he was committing bigamy with his actual wife, Martha, who gave birth to seven of his children. In 1837 he was admitted to an asylum in High Beach, Epping, where he was treated well and allowed to wander in the Forest. He escaped, however, in 1841, walking all the way to Northampton, where he deludedly thought that he would be reunited with Mary (he wrote a wonderful prose account of this journey called Recollections of a Journey from Essex). He stayed with his wife for a few months, but at the end of the year he was certified insane and spent the rest of his life in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he wrote some of his best work, including ‘Little trotty wagtail’ and ‘The peasant poet’. The house steward, William Knight, befriended him and encouraged him to write poetry – it is to Knight’s transcription of the manuscripts that we owe the survival of the asylum poems. Clare read Byron, and in his delusion thought that he was Byron. His madness was perhaps partly caused by the declining sales of his work, and it was only in the twentieth century that new editions of his poetry, prose and letters appeared. Clare wrote over 3,500 poems (fewer than a quarter were published in his lifetime), and the best of them reveal an extraordinary ability to capture the sights and sounds of nature in verse – in a way that even Wordsworth, Crabbe and Thomson cannot equal. Artificial poetic diction was alien to him, and his best work is characterized by a profound knowledge of the countryside, a love of animals and birds, and a wonderful directness of utterance, expressed with idiosyncratic spelling and grammar – which is why we print the poems here as they appear in the scholarly nine volumes edited by Geoffrey Summerfield and Eric Robinson – later joined by David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson – (OUP, 1984–2003), who do not tamper with the text but present us with the poems as they originally appeared, unpunctuated, erratically spelt and often with suspect syntax. For another view, see Jonathan Bate’s excellent biography of Clare (Faber) in which he describes how the poet wanted friends and publishers to help him prepare the poems for the press. Clare rarely gave titles to his poems, and those printed here – with the exception of ‘Little trotty wagtail’ and ‘The peasant poet’ – were supplied by the composers.
IVOR GURNEY
Ploughman singing (1920/1952)
Here morning in the ploughmans songs is met
Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky
& twilight in the east a doubt as yet
Shows not her sleeve of grey to know her bye
Woke early I arose and thought that first
In winter time of all the world was I
The old owls might have halooed if they durst
But joy just then was up & whistled bye
A merry tune which I had known full long
But could not to my memory wake it back
Untill the ploughman changed it to the song
O happiness how simple is thy track
– Tinged like the willow shoots the easts young brow
Glows red & finds thee singing at the plough
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Spring Symphony, Op. 44, for soprano, alto and tenor solos, chorus, boys’ choir and orchestra (1949/1949)1
The driving boy2
The driving boy beside his team
Will oer the may month beauty dream
& cock his hat & turn his eye
On flower & tree & deepning skye
& oft bursts loud in fits of song
& whistles3 as he reels along
Crack[ing] his whip in starts of joy
A happy, dirty, driving boy
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Five Flower Songs, Op. 47, for unaccompanied chorus (1950)
Evening primrose
[The evening primrose]
When once the sun sinks in the west
& dewdrops pearl the evenings breast
All most as pale as moon beams are
Or its companionable star
The evening primrose opes anew
Its delicate blossoms to the dew
And shunning-hermit of the light
Wastes its fair bloom upon the night
Who blind fold to its fond caresses
Knows not the beauty it possesses
Thus it blooms on till night is bye
& day looks out with open eye
Bashed at the gaze it cannot shun
It faints & withers & is done
STEPHEN DODGSON: Four Poems
by John Clare, for voice and guitar (1962)1
‘Trotty Wagtail’ sports several interrelated figures to depict her ‘waddling in and out’ etc., and the vocal range exceeds the intentionally claustrophobic limits set upon it by Britten. This is one of John Clare’s most famous poems, written in the Northampton Asylum in which the latter part of his life was passed and where many of his greatest poems were written. The final ‘Good byes’ to ‘Master Wagtail’ (the words had to be repeated in a musical setting!) are a heartbreaking farewell to the natural world which Clare loved and understood perhaps more deeply than any other English poet. ‘The peasant poet’ expresses this, and with extreme poignancy. It seems to me to cover an enormous range; an intense stillness on the flanks, and a majestic centre for ‘Moses with his rod’. ‘The Turkeys’ provide a scherzo (equivalent situation to Britten’s ‘Herd boy’) which appealed to me greatly with its quaint country terms to describe behaviour by turkeys which stretches the imagination. I have made a verbal jumble of the sticks and the kicks and the running away of the boys at the end as an illustrative device in a cycle which I conceived as increasingly pictorial as it continues. So that the final song becomes in effect a miniature scena; ‘The fox’, outwitting dog and humans in lively pursuit ‘to chase the hounds another day’. I am made to think of Janáček’s ‘Little sharp ears’, a work which (foxes apart) has influenced me a good deal. Of Elizabethan references, there are none, though I have elsewhere made an attempted tribute to Robert Jones in a work based closely on one of his songs. (Stephen Dodgson.)
Little trotty wagtail
Little trotty wagtail1 he went in the rain
And tittering tottering sideways he near got straight again
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 34