The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

  And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,

  And the musk of the rose is blown.

  For a breeze of morning moves,

  And the planet of Love is on high,

  Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

  On a bed of daffodil sky,

  To faint in the light of the sun she loves,

  To faint in his light, and to die.

  All night have the roses heard

  The flute, violin, bassoon;

  All night has the casement jessamine stirred

  To the dancers dancing in tune;

  Till a silence fell with the waking bird,

  And a hush with the setting moon.

  […]

  Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

  Come hither, the dances are done,

  In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

  Queen lily and rose in one;

  Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,

  To the flowers, and be their sun.

  There has fallen a splendid tear

  From the passion-flower at the gate.

  She is coming, my dove, my dear;

  She is coming, my life, my fate;

  The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;

  And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;

  The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;

  And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

  She is coming, my own, my sweet;

  Were it ever so airy a tread,

  My heart would hear her and beat,

  Were it earth in an earthy bed;

  My dust would hear her and beat,

  Had I lain for a century dead;

  Would start and tremble under her feet,

  And blossom in purple and red.

  (Balfe, Delius, Massenet)

  10 The fault was mine1

  ‘The fault was mine, the fault was mine’ –

  Why I am sitting here so stunned and still,

  Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill?

  It is this guilty hand! –

  And there rises ever a passionate cry,

  […]

  A cry for a brother’s blood:

  It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die.

  […]

  11 Dead, long dead1

  Dead, long dead,

  Long dead!

  And my heart is a handful of dust,

  And the wheels go over my head,

  And my bones are shaken with pain,

  For into a shallow grave they are thrust,

  Only a yard beneath the street,

  And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,

  The hoofs of the horses beat,

  Beat into my scalp and my brain,

  With never an end to the stream of passing feet,

  Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying,

  Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter;

  And here beneath it is all as bad,

  For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;

  To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?

  But up and down and to and fro,

  Ever about me the dead men go;

  And then to hear a dead man chatter

  Is enough to drive one mad.

  […]

  O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?

  Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,

  Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?

  Maybe still I am but half-dead;

  Then I cannot be wholly dumb;

  I will cry to the steps above my head

  And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come

  To bury me, bury me

  Deeper, ever so little deeper.

  12 O that ’twere possible

  O that ’twere possible

  After long grief and pain

  To find the arms of my true love

  Round me once again!

  […]

  13 My life has crept so long1

  My life has crept so long on a broken wing

  Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear,

  That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing:

  My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year

  When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs,

  […]

  That like a silent lightning under the stars

  She seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,

  And spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars –

  […]

  And it was but a dream, yet it yielded a dear delight

  To have looked, though but in a dream, upon eyes so fair,

  That had been in a weary world my one thing bright;

  And I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath

  With a loyal people shouting a battle cry,

  Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly

  Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.

  […]

  The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

  Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,

  We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,

  I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,

  I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.

  LIZA LEHMANN: In Memoriam (1899)

  In Memoriam A.H.H., written by Tennyson between 1833 and 1850, the year of its publication, was inspired by the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, the poet’s closest friend. They met at Trinity College, Cambridge, and shared a passion for poetry. Hallam met Tennyson’s sister Emily during Christmas 1829, and was soon in love – a relationship of which his father disapproved, insisting that his son should not see or correspond with her till after his twenty-first birthday. Tennyson and Hallam travelled to Spain together in 1830 to take part in the Carlist wars, but only reached the Pyrenees – Tennyson could recall every detail of the trip till the end of his life. When Hallam died of apoplexy in Vienna, Tennyson was devastated. As Sir Charles Tennyson, his brother, wrote:

  To both Alfred and Emily, the blow was overwhelming. On Arthur’s betrothed it fell at a moment when, after years of trial and disappointment, there seemed good prospect that their hopes would at last be crowned with marriage. For Alfred, a sudden and brutal stroke had annihilated in a moment a love ‘passing the love of women’. The prop, round which his own growth had twined itself for four fruitful years, was suddenly removed. A lifelong prospect, founded on his own friendship and Emily’s hoped-for union with a friend, was blotted out instantly and for ever.

  T. S. Eliot, referring to In Memoriam in 1936, wrote: ‘It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience. In Memoriam is a poem of despair, but of despair of a religious kind.’ Tennyson considered two other titles for his great poem: The Way of the Soul and Fragments of an Elegy – an appropriate description of the poem’s structure, which is a sequence of 131 short poems, written over a period of some seventeen years, from Hallam’s death in 1833 to the publication of the poem in 1850. The fragmentary nature of In Memoriam A.H.H. is held together by what Eliot called ‘the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown’. The title was suggested by Tennyson’s fiancée, Emily Sellwood, whom he married in 1850, the year that In Memoriam was published.

  Liza Lehmann considered In Memoriam one of her greatest works, although it never rivalled the popularity of In a Persian Garden. She chose the words herself from Tennyson’s poem, reducing it to twelve sections.

  from Canto XXI

  I sing to him that rests below,

  And, since the grasses round me wave,

  I take the grasses of the grave,

  And make them pipes whereon to blow. […]

  I do but sing because I must,

  And pipe but as the linnets sing:
r />   And one is glad; her note is gay,

  For now her little ones have ranged;

  And one is sad; her note is changed,

  Because her brood is stolen away.

  from Canto LIX

  O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me

  No casual mistress, but a wife,

  My bosom-friend and half of life,

  O Sorrow!

  from Canto XLIII

  If Sleep and Death be truly one,

  And every spirit’s folded bloom

  Through all its intervital1 gloom

  In some long trance should slumber on;

  Unconscious of the sliding hour,

  Bare of the body, might it last,

  And silent traces of the past

  Be all the colour of the flower.

  from Canto LXXII

  Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,1

  And howlest, issuing out of night,

  With blasts that blow the poplar white,

  And lash with storm the streaming pane?

  Day, when my crowned estate begun

  To pine in that reverse of doom,

  Which sickened every living bloom,

  And blurred the splendour of the sun; […]

  Lift as thou mayst thy burthened brows

  Through clouds that drench the morning star,

  And whirl the ungarnered sheaf afar,

  And sow the sky with flying boughs,

  And up thy vault with roaring sound

  Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;

  Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,

  And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

  Canto LXVII

  When on my bed the moonlight falls,

  I know that in thy place of rest

  By that broad water of the west,1

  There comes a glory on the walls;

  Thy marble bright in dark appears,

  As slowly steals a silver flame

  Along the letters of thy name,

  And o’er the number of thy years.

  The mystic glory swims away;

  From off my bed the moonlight dies;

  And closing eaves of wearied eyes

  I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:

  And then I know the mist is drawn

  A lucid veil from coast to coast,

  And in the dark church2 like a ghost

  Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

  from Canto LXX

  I cannot see the features right,

  When on the gloom I strive to paint

  The face I know; the hues are faint

  And mix with hollow masks of night;

  Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,

  A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,

  A hand that points, and pallèd shapes

  In shadowy thoroughfares of thought. […]

  Till all at once beyond the will

  I hear a wizard music roll,

  And through a lattice on the soul

  Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

  from Canto LXXXVIII

  Wild bird1, whose warble, liquid sweet,

  Rings Eden through the budded quicks2,

  O tell me where the senses mix,

  O tell me where the passions meet,

  Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ

  Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,

  And in the midmost heart of grief

  Thy passion clasps a secret joy. […]

  from Canto IV

  To Sleep I give my powers away;

  My will is bondsman to the dark;

  I sit within a helmless bark,

  And with my heart I muse and say:

  O heart, how fares it with thee now,

  That thou should’st fail from thy desire,

  Who scarcely darest to enquire,

  ‘What is it makes me beat so low?’

  Something it is which thou hast lost,

  Some pleasure from thine early years,

  Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,

  That grief hath shaken into frost!1

  from Canto LXXXVI

  Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,

  That rollest from the gorgeous gloom

  Of evening […]

  fan my brows and blow

  The fever from my cheek, and sigh

  The full new life that feeds thy breath

  Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,

  Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

  From belt to belt of crimson seas

  On leagues of odour streaming far,

  To where in yonder orient star

  A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace’.

  from Canto CXIV

  Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail

  Against her beauty? […]

  Let her work prevail.

  But on her forehead sits a fire: […]

  Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain –

  She cannot fight the fear of death.

  What is she, cut from love and faith,

  But some wild Pallas1 from the brain

  Of Demons?

  from The Prologue

  Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

  Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

  By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

  Believing where we cannot prove;

  Thine are these orbs of light and shade1;

  Thou madest Life in man and brute;

  Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot

  Is on the skull which thou hast made.

  Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

  Thou madest man, he knows not why,

  He thinks he was not made to die;

  And thou hast made him: thou art just.

  Epilogue (spoken) from Canto CXXV

  Whatever I have said or sung,

  Some bitter notes my harp would give,

  Yea, though there often seemed to live

  A contradiction on the tongue,

  Yet Hope had never lost her youth;

  She did but look through dimmer eyes;

  Or Love but played with gracious lies,

  Because he felt so fixed in truth.

  ROGER QUILTER: from Three Songs, Op. 3 (1904–5)

  Now sleeps the crimson petal (1904/1904)1

  Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

  Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

  Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:

  The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

  [Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,

  And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

  Now like the earth all Danaë to the stars,

  And all thy heart lies open unto me.

  Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

  A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.]

  Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

  And slips into the bosom of the lake:

  So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

  Into my bosom and be lost in me.

  (Holst, Rorem)

  EDWARD ELGAR: from Mary Tudor (1875)

  Queen Mary’s [lute] song (1887/1889)

  Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing,1

  Beauty passes like a breath and love is lost in loathing:

  Low! my lute:

  Speak low, my lute, but say the world is nothing.

  Low! lute, low!

  Love will hover round the flowers when they first awaken;

  Love will fly the fallen leaf, and not be overtaken;

  Low, my lute!

  O low, my lute! We fade and are forsaken,

  Low, dear lute, low!

  (Stanford)

  EDWARD ELGAR: from Four Choral Songs (1907)

  from The Lotos-Eaters

  [There is sweet music]

  There is sweet music here that softer falls

  Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

  Or night-dews on still waters between walls

&n
bsp; Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;

  Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

  Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;

  Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

  Here are cool mosses deep,

  And through the moss the ivies creep,

  And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,

  And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

  (Parry)

  BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Serenade, Op. 31, for tenor, horn and strings (1943/1944)

  Blow, bugle, blow

  (Nocturne)

  The splendour falls on castle walls1

  And snowy summits old in story:

  The long light shakes across the lakes,

  And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

  Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

  Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

  O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,

  And thinner, clearer, farther going!

  O sweet and far from cliff and scar

  The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

  Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:

  Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

  O love, they die in yon rich sky,

  They faint on hill or field or river:

  Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

  And grow for ever and for ever.

  Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

  And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

  (Bax, Burrows, Gibbs, Holst, Stanford, Thomson, Vaughan Williams, Wood)