What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
(Bantock, Beach, Homer)
Song
I
Nay but you, who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?
Holds earth aught – speak truth – above her?
Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
And this last fairest tress of all,
So fair, see, ere I let it fall?
II
Because, you spend your lives in praising;
To praise, you search the wide world over:
Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught – speak truth – above her?
Above this tress, and this, I touch
But cannot praise, I love so much!
(Toye)
The worst of it
Would it were I had been false, not you!
I that am nothing, not you that are all:
I, never the worse for a touch or two
On my speckled hide; not you, the pride
Of the day, my swan, that a first fleck’s fall
On her wonder of white must unswan, undo! […]
But what will God say? Oh, my sweet,
Think, and be sorry you did this thing!
Though earth were unworthy to feel your feet,
There’s a heaven above may deserve your love:
[Should you forfeit heaven for a snapt gold ring
And a promise broke, were it just or meet?] […]
Dear, I look from my hiding-place.
Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?
Be happy! Add but the other grace,
Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?
I knew you once: but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face.
After
Take the cloak from his face, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst!
How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And, absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.
Ha, what avails death to erase
His offence, my disgrace?
I would we were boys as of old
In the field, by the fold:
His outrage, God’s patience, man’s scorn
Were so easily borne!
I stand here now, he lies in his place:
Cover the face!
from Easter-Day
[And I cowered deprecatingly –]
‘Thou Love of God! Or let me die,
‘Or grant what shall seem heaven almost!
‘Let me not know that all is lost,
‘Though lost it be – leave me not tied
‘To this despair, this corpse-like bride!
‘Let that old life seem mine – no more –
‘With limitation as before,
‘With darkness, hunger, toil, distress:
‘Be all the earth a wilderness!
‘Only let me go on, go on,
‘Still hoping ever and anon
‘To reach one eve the Better Land!’
The year’s at the spring1
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
(Bantock, Beach, Ives, Marzials, Rorem, Vaughan Williams)
MICHAEL HEAD
Home-thoughts, from abroad
[Oh, to be in England] (1960)
I
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever walks in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!
II
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower –
– Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
EDWARD LEAR
(1812–88)
Edward Lear
Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white
Italian shore, his Terrible Demon1 arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.
The legions of cruel inquisitive They
Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset
By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:
But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.
How prodigious the welcome was. Flowers took his hat
And bore him off to introduce him to the tongs;
The demon’s false nose made the table laugh; a cat
Soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand;
Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs;
And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.
W. H. AUDEN
Lear, one of twenty children, was born in Holloway. Son of a stockbroker, he was mostly looked after by his sister Ann. Having worked for a while as a draughtsman at the Zoological Gardens, he was commissioned by the Earl of Derby to sketch the animals in his extensive menagerie at Knowsley Hall. It was while working there that he wrote A Book of Nonsense (1846) for the Earl of Derby’s grandchildren. As his fame grew, he received more prestigious commissions, and gave drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. Further volumes of nonsense verse include Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), which contains ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and ‘The Jumblies’; More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc. (1871); and Laughable Lyrics (1877). Having travelled throughout Europe and beyond (he visited India and Ceylon), he finally settled at San Remo in Italy. A great friend of Tennyson, Lear spent the end of his life in a villa named Villa Tennyson on the Swiss–Italian border, where he planned to sketch a series of illustrations to accompany Tennyson’s poems – in fact he completed 200 but none were published in his lifetime. Lear was afflicted by a deep-rooted melancholy, and his comic verse can be seen as a compensation. The footnotes in the nonsense rhymes set by Stanford are by the composer.
CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD: Nonsense Rhymes by Edward Lear Set to Music by Karel Drofnatski (1960), Op. 365
There was a Young Lady of Norway
[The hardy Norse-woman]1
There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the door squeezed her flat, she exclaimed ‘What of that?’
This courageous Young Lady of Norway.
There was an Old Man of the Isles
[The compleat virtuoso]1
(dedicated to his friends, the great Violinists of Europe)
There was an Old Man of the Isles,
Whose face was pervaded with smiles:
He sung high dum diddle, and played on the fiddle,
That amiable Man of the Isles.
> There was an Old Man with a beard
[The absent barber]1
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!’
There was an Old Man who said, How
[The Cow and the coward]1
An Obiter Dictum
There was an Old Man who said, ‘How,
Shall I flee from this horrible Cow?
I will sit on this stile, and continue to smile,
Which may soften the heart of that Cow.
There was a young Lady of Ryde
[Barkerolle]1
There was a young Lady of Ryde,
Whose shoe-strings were seldom untied;
She purchased some clogs, and some small spotty dogs,
And frequently walked about Ryde.
There was a young Lady of Tyre
[Dithyramb]1
There was a young Lady of Tyre,
Who swept the loud chords of a lyre;
At the sound of each sweep, she enraptured the deep,
And enchanted the city of Tyre.
There was an Old Man in a pew
[The generous parishioner]1
There was an Old Man in a pew,
Whose waistcoat was spotted with blue;
But he tore it in pieces, to give to his nieces, –
That cheerful Old Man in a pew.
There was an Old Man in a boat
[Boat song]1
(dedicated to Signor Robinsonis Carusoe)
There was an Old Man in a boat,
Who said, ‘I’m afloat! I’m afloat!’
When they said, ‘No! you ain’t!’ he was ready to faint,
That unhappy Old Man in a boat.
There was an Old Person of Philæ
[Nileinsamkeit]1
There was an Old Person of Philæ,
Whose conduct was scroobious and wily;
He rushed up a Palm, when the weather was calm,
And observed all the ruins of Philæ.
There was an Old Man with a nose
[The aquiline snub]1
There was an Old Man with a nose,
Who said, ‘If you choose to suppose,
That my nose is too long, you are certainly wrong!’
That remarkable Man with a nose.
There was a Young Lady of Russia
[Tone poem]1
There was a Young Lady of Russia,
Who screamed so that no one could hush her;
Her screams were extreme, no one heard such a scream,
As was screamed by that Lady of Russia.
There was an Old Man with a gong
[Gongdichtung]1
There was an Old Man with a gong,
Who bumped at it all the day long;
But they called out, ‘O law! you’re a horrid old bore!’
So they smashed that Old Man with a gong.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
The Owl and the Pussy-cat (1966)1
I
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’
II
Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
III
‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible2 spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
(Corp, Hely-Hutchinson, Rutter)
EMILY BRONTË
(1818–48)
The real difficulty in making a selection of the Brontë poems is the simple one, that the most fragmentary and faulty of Emily’s poems, even if it is but a few inconsequent lines, is more interesting, to speak frankly, than the most polished and finished poem by either Charlotte or Anne. It was not that Emily’s experience was more poignant or tragic, it was not either that her human affections were deeper – indeed her attachment to animals and places was so strong that she seems to have formed scarcely any human alliances, except with her sister Anne. But her attitude to life was somehow larger and bolder, and the scanty glimpses we gain of her spirit give the sense of a consuming fire.
A. C. BENSON: ‘Introduction’ to Brontë Poems (1915)
Emily Jane was the daughter of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, a Church of England clergyman from Northern Ireland, and Maria Branwell from Cornwall. Her siblings were Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick and Anne. Maria and Elizabeth, the oldest, were born in Hartshead, near Dewsbury in Yorkshire; the others in Thornton, near Bradford. In 1820, the year before Maria Branwell’s death, the Reverend Patrick Brontë took up the living of Haworth, a bleak and desolate weaving village not far from Thornton. This environment and the parsonage now became the centre of the children’s lives. Emily spent a few brief periods away from Haworth – in 1837 as governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, followed by a sojourn in Brussels at the pensionnat run by Monsieur Constantin Heger, to improve her knowledge of German and French. She proved resistant to the teaching methods of M. Heger, who found her too independent-minded. While in Brussels, she gave piano lessons to some of the pupils, and practised her talents as a draughtswoman – Emily was, perhaps, the most artistic of the Brontë family. When her older sister Charlotte wrote to the English Poet Laureate Robert Southey, requesting him to advise her about writing, she received this withering reply: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called & when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.’
Three years before Emily’s death, Charlotte discovered her younger sister’s poems, and arranged for a joint publication: Poems, by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, which was published in 1846 and all but ignored by the critics. It was also Charlotte who urged the publication of the novels that she and her sisters had written. The Professor, Charlotte’s novel about her experiences in Brussels, was rejected, but published posthumously in 1857. Four novels, however, did appear while their authors were still alive: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847), written between October 1845 and June 1846, and Anne’s Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Emily, the most solitary of the sisters (unlike Charlotte she had no close friends), created with Anne the imaginary world of Gondal which inspired some of her most successful dramatic ballads, such as ‘Remembrance’. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848 and is now considered in some quarters as one of the most original poets of the century, although she did not publish during her lifetime a single poem under her own name. The decade of her literary activity (roughly 1836–46) occurred at a time when only John Cla
re and Tennyson, among other English poets, were at the height of their powers. Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge were dead, while Browning was only just appearing in print. Emily Brontë rarely gave titles to her verse – the sole exception here being ‘A day dream’; and she did not always punctuate her manuscript poems.
JOHN IRELAND: from Three Songs (1926/1928)
Love and friendship1
Love is like the wild rose briar,
Friendship, like the holly tree
The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
The wild rose briar is sweet in spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair
Then, scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly’s sheen
That when December blights thy brow
He still may leave thy garland green –
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
A day dream
[The company of heaven]
for soprano, tenor, chorus and orchestra (1937/1990; rev. 1992)1
[On a sunny brae, alone I lay
One summer afternoon;
It was the marriage-time of May
With her young lover, June.]
[…]
A thousand thousand gleaming fires
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 41