He stooped to get a worm and look’d up to get a fly
And then he flew away e’re his feathers they were dry
Little trotty wagtail he waddled in the mud
And left his little footmarks trample where he would
He waddled in the water pudge2 and waggle went his tail
And chirrupt up his wings to dry upon the garden rail
Little trotty wagtail you nimble all about
And in the dimpling water pudge you waddle in and out
Your home is nigh at hand and in the warm pigsty
So little Master Wagtail I’ll bid you a ‘Good bye’
(Jeffreys, Rubbra, Warlock)
The peasant poet
He loved the brooks soft sound,
The swallow swimming by.
He loved the daisy covered ground
The cloud bedappled sky
To him the dismal storm appeared
The very voice of God
And when the evening rock was reared
Stood Moses with his rod1
And every thing his eyes surveyed
The insects i’ the brake
Were creatures God Almighty made
He loved them for his sake
A silent man in lifes affairs
A thinker from a Boy
A Peasant in his daily cares
The poet in his joy.
Turkeys
The turkeys wade the close to catch the bees
In the old border full of maple trees
& often lay away & breed & come
& bring a brood of chelping chickens home
The turkey gobbles loud & drops his rag
And struts & sprunts1 his tail and drags
His wing on ground & makes a huzzing noise
Nauntles2 at passer bye & drives the boys
& bounces up & flies at passer bye
The old dogs snaps and grins nor ventures nigh
He gobbles loud & drives the boys from play
They throw their sticks & kick & run away.
The fox
The shepherd on his journey heard when nigh
His dog among the bushes barking high
The ploughman ran & gave a hearty shout
He found a weary fox & beat him out
The ploughman laughed & would have ploughed him in
But the old shepherd took him for the skin.
He lay upon the furrow stretched & dead
The old dog lay & licked the wounds that bled
The ploughman beat him till his ribs would crack
& then the shepherd slung him at his back
& when he rested to his dogs surprise
The old fox started from his dead disguise
& while the dog lay panting in the sedge
He up & snapt & bolted through the hedge
He scampered [to] the bushes far away
The shepherd call[ed] the ploughman [to] the fray
The ploughman wished he had a gun to shoot
The old dog barked & followed the pursuit
The shepherd threw his hook & tottered past
The ploughman ran but none could go so fast
The woodman threw his faggot from the way
& ceased to chop & wondered at the fray.
But when he saw the dog & heard the cry
He threw his hatchet but the fox was bye
The shepherd broke his hook and lost the skin
He found a badger hole and bolted in
They tryed to dig but safe from dangers way
He lived to chase the hounds another day.
RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT: from The Aviary, for unison voices and piano (1965)
The early nightingale
When first we hear the shy come nightingales
They seem to mutter oer their songs in fear
& climbing e’er so soft the spinney rails
All stops as if no bird was anywhere
The kindled bushes with the long leaves thin
Let curious eyes to search a long way in
Untill impatience cannot see or hear
The hidden music – gets but little way
Upon the path – when up the songs begin
Full loud a moment & then low again
But when a day or two confirms her stay
Boldly she sings & loud for a half a day
& soon the village brings the woodmans tale
Of having heard the new come nightingale
HENRY FRANCIS LYTE
(1793–1847)
Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.
LUKE xxiv. 29
Born in West Mains near Kelso, Lyte retained an affection for Scotland throughout his life, although he never lived for long in the country – see his unpublished poem ‘On my native land’, which begins ‘Beloved Scotland, how shall I forbear/To cast a fond but heavy look to thee’. His family, who came from Somerset, emigrated in 1804 to Ireland, where Lyte attended Trinity College, Dublin. Having taken Anglican holy orders in 1815, he held a curacy near Wexford, before moving to England for health reasons. He eventually settled at All Saints in Lower Brixham, a Devon fishing village, where the church bells have for over a century daily rung out with the tune of ‘Abide with me’. Lyte wrote the words of the hymn at Berry Head House (now a hotel), watching the sun set over Tor Bay in the summer of 1847. He was suffering from tuberculosis, and died in Nice en route for Italy, where he hoped to regain his health, three weeks after giving his farewell sermon. He published several works in his lifetime: Tales in Verse Illustrative of Several of the Petitions in the Lord’s Prayer (1826), Poems, Chiefly Religious (1833) and The Spirit of the Psalms (1834). Remains, a memoir containing some of his poems, was published posthumously. Apart from ‘Abide with me’, his best-known hymns are ‘When at Thy footstool, Lord, I bend’ and ‘Praise, my soul, the King of heaven’ – the carillon of All Saints plays them daily at 8 a.m., noon, and 8 p.m. Though Lyte wrote his own setting of ‘Abide with me’, the most celebrated version is by William H. Monk, who, according to Mrs Monk, composed the melody ‘at a time of great sorrow – when together we watched, as we did daily, the glories of the setting sun. As the last golden ray faded, he took some paper and pencilled that tune which has gone all over the earth.’ It was sung in the trenches of the First World War and also, according to the Anglican chaplain who visited her the night before she was shot by the Germans for her role in helping British soldiers escape from occupied Belgium, by Edith Cavell. It was also sung at the weddings of the future George VI to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and of their daughter Elizabeth to Prince Philip. It has since 1927 been bawled at the FA Cup Final, and on 21 September 2001 it was played at Ground Zero by a Salvation Army band to commemorate the 9/11 attacks.
WILLIAM H. MONK
Abide with me (1861)
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide:
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide:
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see:
O thou who changest not, abide with me.
I need thy presence every passing hour;
What but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who like thyself my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.
I fear no foe with thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?1
I triumph still, if thou abide with me.
Hold thou thy Cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies:
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.2
(Liddle)
JOHN KEATS
(1795–1821)
His shoulders were very broad for his size; he had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up, an eager power checked and made patient by ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. The face was rather long than otherwise […] the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large dark and sensitive.
LEIGH HUNT: Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828)
The first of four children in a family of a well-to-do coachman, Keats is to many the Romantic poet par excellence. Yet in some ways this pugnacious young man, who was stunted in growth – five foot tall – was the antithesis of the beautiful poet of Romanticism: at school in Enfield he initially excelled more at cricket and boxing than academe, and his hedonism showed itself in his love of claret, his delight in good company and his conviction that poetry should be ‘felt on the pulses’. His father died in a riding accident when Keats was eight, and his mother succumbed to tuberculosis when he was fourteen. He left school at the age of fifteen to become apprenticed to an apothecary, but returned regularly to Clarke’s School to pursue his friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster’s son, who encouraged his interest in literature. Clarke described how Keats ‘ramped through’ Spenser’s Faerie Queen ‘like a young horse turned into a Spring meadow’. He spent four years studying surgery at Guy’s Hospital, where he also started to read widely in English literature. Leigh Hunt published his sonnet ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ in 1816; Poems was published in 1817, followed by Endymion in 1818. Despite much negative criticism (Blackwood’s Magazine referred to him as a member of the ‘Cockney School’, and Wordsworth described Endymion as ‘a pretty piece of paganism’), he began work on Hyperion.
When in 1818, the year in which he nursed his brother Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis, he moved to Charles Armitage Brown’s house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, he fell obsessively in love with Fanny Brawne, the next-door neighbour – a relationship, never easy, that produced some of the most wonderful (and, at times, agonizing) love letters in the language. In the spring of 1819, in a burst of inspiration that matches that of Shelley at the same period in Italy, and of Hardy during 1912–13, Keats wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and a series of odes by which his name is now best known to lovers of literature: ‘On indolence’, ‘On a Grecian urn’, ‘To Psyche’, ‘To a nightingale’ and ‘On melancholy’. ‘Ode to autumn’ followed in the second half of 1819. His second volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, was published in July 1820, by which time he was ill with tuberculosis. Aware that he might have only a few years to live, he sailed for Italy in September with his friend Joseph Severn, whose portrait of Keats hangs in the National Portrait Gallery; the hope that the warm climate might ease his condition proved illusory. Shelley had invited him to stay with his family, but instead he settled in Rome. He wrote no more poetry and died, aged twenty-five years and four months, in a small apartment above the Spanish Steps. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery, described thus by Shelley in his preface to Adonais (1821): ‘The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.’
Keats is, perhaps, the most sensuous of English poets, even though Byron referred to ‘Johnny Keats’s p-ss a bed poetry’ and his ‘drivelling idiotism’ (letter to John Murray, dated ‘Ravenna, 8bre 12o, 1820’). Few have agreed with his strictures. Keats’s reputation increased after his death; he was admired by Tennyson, who considered him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century; Arnold commended his ‘intellectual and spiritual passion’; and in the twentieth century he has been celebrated by T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Christopher Ricks and Andrew Motion.
CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1877)1
I
O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
II
O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
III
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
IV
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
V
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone2;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
VI
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy’s song.
VII
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said –
I love thee true.
VIII
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.3
IX
And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dream’d – Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
X
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried – ‘La belle dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!’
XI
I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill’s side.
XII
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
(Bush, Dyson, Gibbs, Goehr, Hindemith, O’Neill, Rubbra)
HUBERT PARRY: from English Lyrics IV (1896)
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art
[Bright star]1
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.
FRANK BRIDGE: from Two Songs (1905)1
Where be ye going, you Devon maid
[The Devon maid]2 (1903)
I
Where be ye going, you Devon maid?
And what have ye there i’ the basket?
Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?
II
[I love your meads and I love your flowers,
And I love your junkets mainly;
But ’hind the door I love kissing more –
>
Oh, look not so disdainly!]
III
I love your hills and I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating –
But O, on the heather to lie together,
With both our hearts a-beating!
IV
I’ll put your basket all safe in a nook,
Your shawl I hang up on this willow,
And we will sigh in the daisy’s eye
And kiss on a grass-green pillow.
(Argento, Quilter)
FRANK BRIDGE
Extracts from an Opera VI
[Adoration] (1905, rev. 1918)1
Asleep! Oh, sleep a little while, white pearl!
And let me kneel, and let me pray to thee,
And let me call Heaven’s blessing on thine eyes,
And let me breathe into the happy air,
That doth enfold and touch thee all about,
Vows of my slavery, my giving up,
My sudden adoration, my great love!
(Woodforde-Finden)
GUSTAV HOLST: from First Choral Symphony, Op. 41, for soprano solo, chorus and orchestra (1923–4/1925)1
Ode on a Grecian urn
Many of Holst’s friends, including Clifford Bax, doubted the wisdom of Holst’s decision to edit such celebrated poems by Keats. His daughter Imogen, however, wrote: ‘There is a clear thread of thought linking each movement: it is the conviction that the poet, in the strength of his imagination, can triumph over the shortcomings of material existence.’
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 35