NED ROREM: from Nantucket Songs (1978–9)
Ferry me across the water1
‘Ferry me across the water,
Do, boatman, do.’
‘If you’ve a penny in your purse
I’ll ferry you.’
‘I have a penny in my purse,
And my eyes are blue;
So ferry me across the water,
Do, boatman, do.’
‘Step into my ferry-boat,
Be they black or blue,
And for the penny in your purse
I’ll ferry you.’
(Finzi, Homer, Ireland, Peel, Stanford)
LEWIS CARROLL
(1832–98)
There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children. A child who enjoys the Alice books will continue to enjoy them when he or she is grown up, though his ‘reading’ of what they mean will probably change.
W. H. AUDEN: ‘Lewis Carroll’, in Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the son of a country parson, who was born at Daresbury in Cheshire, and educated at Rugby School. At Christ Church, Oxford, he studied mathematics and, having taken a degree, was invited by the university to teach and lecture – something he found difficult with his shyness and bad stammer. He was ordained in 1861 but preached only seldom – again because of his stammer. He had started writing as a child in the school holidays, producing a magazine which consisted to a great extent of his own verse. As an adult he began to publish mathematical text-books and, occasionally, comic verse. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) met with immediate success, although the title was arrived at only with difficulty. In a letter to Tom Taylor a year before publication, he wrote:
I should be very glad if you could help me in fixing on a name for my fairy-tale […] Here are […] names I have thought of:
Alice among the elves/goblins
Alice’s hour/doings/adventures
in elf-land/wonderland.
The fairy tale was inspired by a boat trip that Dodgson made with Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of his college, and her two sisters, ‘all in the golden afternoon’ of 4 July 1862. His best-seller was followed by Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876). Carroll was a keen amateur photographer, and his penchant for photographing semi-clad young girls has led to much recent psychological speculation.
LIZA LEHMANN: from Nonsense Songs from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (1908)
Mockturtle soup
Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Soo–oop of the e–e–evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!
Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Soo–oop of the e–e–evening,
Beautiful, beauti–FUL SOUP!
LEE HOIBY
Jabberwocky (1986)1
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!’
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
(1837–1909)
If a man does not hear the melody of Swinburne’s verse, he must be deaf; he would not hear the melody of any verse. But if, as many do, he thinks its melody the best, he must have a gross ear. The man who now calls Swinburne the most musical of poets would, if he had been born one hundred and fifty years earlier, have said the same of Pope. To the ears of his contemporaries Pope’s verse was perfection: the inferiority of Milton’s and Shakespeare’s was not a thing to be disputed about but to be explained and excused. The melody of Pope and of Swinburne have this in common, and owed their acceptation to this, that they address themselves frankly and almost exclusively to what may be called the external ear. This, in different ways and by different methods, they fill and delight: it is a pleasure to hear them, and a pleasure to read them aloud. But there, in that very fact, you can tell that their music is only of the second order. To read aloud poets whose music is of the first, poets so much unlike one another as Blake and Milton, is not a pleasure but an embarrassment, because no reader can hope to do them justice. Their melody is addressed to the inner chambers of the sense of hearing, to the junction between the ear and the brain; and you should either hire an angel from heaven to read them to you, or let them read themselves in silence.
A. E. HOUSMAN: Swinburne
George Frederic Watts’s penetrating portrait of Swinburne hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Swinburne was small of stature with flaming red hair, and was nicknamed ‘dear little Carrots’ by Edward Burne-Jones, to whom the poet dedicated his Poems & Ballads (1866). Of aristocratic parentage – his father was Admiral Charles Swinburne, his mother Lady Jane Ashburnham – Swinburne was educated at Eton, where he was bullied and beaten. Despite leaving Balliol College, Oxford, without a degree, he developed a fascination for languages (he learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian) and the intricacies of poetic form. He was at Oxford at the same time as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and Holman Hunt, who attempted, unsuccessfully, to fresco the walls of the Oxford Union. He lived for a while with Rossetti and George Meredith at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and was influenced to some degree by all these friends. His early publications were plays – The Queen-Mother and Rosamund (1860) and Chastelard (1865) – but it was only with the publication of his Poems and Ballads (1866), which celebrated ‘the roses and raptures of vice’ and contained such pagan poems as ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, ‘Laus Veneris’ and others that celebrate physical love and moral and spiritual rebellion, that he made his mark. Bourgeois Victorian society, which was used to such poems as Tennyson’s Maud, was outraged. Swinburne’s break with contemporary taste continued apace. Ave Atque Vale followed in 1868, Songs Before Sunrise (1871), Erechtheus (1876), Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878). His addiction to alcohol threatened to kill him, but he was rescued by Theodore Watts-Dunton, who cared for him at his home in Putney. He recovered sufficiently to publish ten more collections of verse in the next two decades. He wrote too much, and much of what he did write suffers from over-elaborate diction and a gratuitous interest in metrical pyrotechnics; but he provided much-needed opposition to
the prudery of the age, attempted to rejuvenate what he felt was an outworn poetic language, and wrote some undisputed gems.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Rondel (c.1895–6)
Kissing her hair I sat against her feet,
Wove and unwove it, wound and found it sweet;
Made fast therewith her hands, drew down her eyes,
Deep as deep flowers and dreamy like dim skies;
With her own tresses bound and found her fair,
Kissing her hair.
Sleep were no sweeter than her face to me,
Sleep of cold sea-bloom under the cold sea;
What pain could get between my face and hers?
What new sweet thing would love not relish worse?
Unless, perhaps, white death had kissed me there,
Kissing her hair?
PERCY GRAINGER
A reiver’s neck-verse1 (1908/1911)
Some die singing, and some die swinging,
And weel mot a’ they be:
Some die playing, and some die praying,
And I wot sae winna we, my dear,
And I wot sae winna we.
Some die sailing, and some die wailing,
And some die fair and free:
Some die flyting2, and some die fighting,
But I for a fause love’s fee, my dear,
But I for a fause love’s fee.
Some die laughing, and some die quaffing,
And some die high on tree:
Some die spinning, and some die sinning,
But faggot and fire for ye, my dear,
Faggot and fire for ye.
Some die weeping, and some die sleeping,
And some die under sea:
Some die ganging, and some die hanging,
And a twine of a tow for me, my dear,
A twine of a tow for me.
WILLIAM WALTON
The winds (1918/1921)
O weary fa’ the east wind,
And weary fa’ the west:
And gin I were under the wan waves wide
I wot weel wad I rest.
O weary fa’ the north wind,
And weary fa’ the south:
The sea went ower my good lord’s head
Or ever he kissed my mouth.
Weary fa’ the windward rocks,
And weary fa’ the lee:
They might hae sunken sevenscore ships,
And let my love’s gang free.
And weary fa’ ye, mariners a’,
And weary fa’ the sea:
It might hae taken an hundred men,
And let my ae love be.
(Hart)
MAUDE VALÉRIE WHITE
A match
[April’s lady] (1902)
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or grey grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune,
With double sound and single
Delight our lips would mingle,
With kisses glad as birds are
That get sweet rain at noon;
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune.
If you were life, my darling,
And I your love were death,
We’d shine and snow together
Ere March made sweet the weather
With daffodil and starling
And hours of fruitful breath;
If you were life, my darling,
And I your love were death.
If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy,
We’d play for lives and seasons
With loving looks and treasons
And tears of night and morrow
And laughs of maid and boy;
If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy.
If you were April’s lady,
And I were lord in May,
We’d throw with leaves for hours
And draw for days with flowers,
Till day like night were shady
And night were bright like day;
If you were April’s lady,
And I were lord in May.
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain,
We’d hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.
(Cowen)
MURIEL HERBERT
Cradle song (1922)1
Baby, baby dear,
Earth and heaven are near
Now, for heaven is here.
Heaven is every place
Where your flower-sweet face
Fills our eyes with grace.
Till your own eyes deign
Earth a glance again,
Earth and heaven are twain.
Now your sleep is done,
Shine, and show the sun
Earth and heaven are one.
THOMAS HARDY
(1840–1928)
I have been looking for God 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him.
FLORENCE EMILY HARDY, quoting Thomas Hardy in The Life of Thomas Hardy, chapter XVIII (1962)
The son of a builder and master mason, Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, a hamlet on the edge of a stretch of heathland that he was later to immortalize as Egdon Heath. As a child he absorbed much local folklore, a love of nature and a deep sympathy for animals. The cottage (described in one of his first poems, ‘Domicilium’) where he spent his childhood and his young manhood, and where he wrote Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd, now belongs to the National Trust, who acquired it in 1948. His father taught Hardy the violin, and his mother encouraged him to read, giving him among other books Johnson’s Rasselas. From 1850 to 1856 he attended school in nearby Dorchester, after which he was apprenticed to a local architect, John Hicks. William Barnes, the Dorset poet, kept a school next to the office where Hardy worked, and a lasting friendship developed. It was Barnes who first resurrected the ancient name of Wessex, used by Hardy to designate the area in which his works took place. Barnes’s mastery of the Dorset dialect rubbed off on Hardy, who occasionally used the same language in his novels and poetry.
Aged twenty-two, he went to London to work for the celebrated architect Arthur Blomfield. He remained in the capital from 1862 to 1867, lost his religious faith, immersed himself in London’s music and theatre scene, and made his first appearance in print with ‘How I Built Myself a House’. When Hicks died, Hardy was offered a position in the Weymouth office of the firm, and it was there in 1869 that he began to write Desperate Remedies, his first published novel (1871). The following year he was sent by his employer to carry out a survey of the church at St Juliot in Cornwall, and there met his future wife, Emma Gifford (see ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’). During the next twenty-five years he published the sequence of novels by which he is best known today: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872); A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), which includes fine translations of Heine’s ‘Ich stand in dunklen Träumen’ and the first verse of Schiller’s ‘Ritter Toggenburg’; Far from the Madding Crowd (1874); The Return of the Native (1878); The Trumpet-Major (1880); The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); The Woodlanders (1887); Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891); and Jude the Obscure (1895).
Hardy, although he had written verse since his youth, only turned his full attention to poetry after his fifteenth and final novel, Jude the Obscure, had been panned by the critics (he referred to the ‘shrill crescendo of invective’). The res
ulting Wessex Poems and Other Verses, which Hardy kept a closely guarded secret, appeared in 1898, and although it was ill received, he was happy at not having to meet deadlines for novels, and delighted that he could now indulge his passion for music and drawing (Wessex Poems was accompanied by some of his own sketches). A third of the fifty-one poems in Wessex Poems and Other Verses had been written in the 1860s and then reworked. In the remaining thirty years of his life collections of his poetry appeared thick and fast: Poems of the Past and Present (1902), Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909), Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914), which included ‘Poems of 1912–13’ that reflect his personal remorse and sadness after the death of Emma Hardy in November 1912, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925) and the posthumous Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).
Hardy’s relationship with Emma Gifford, central to much of his poetry, was never an easy one. Despite initial mutual attraction (‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’), they were an ill-matched pair, and the thirty-year-old Emma might well have seen in Hardy her last chance to escape the loneliness of a remote Cornish village. Yet despite their differences, they shared common interests: literature (they would read to each other till shortly before Emma’s death), foreign travel, a love of animals and cycling – all the rage in the 1890s. Strains in their marriage gradually manifested themselves, exacerbated no doubt by their living in a great number of rented rooms and houses in London and Dorset, by Emma’s childlessness, her constantly thwarted social and literary ambitions, their different outlook on religion (she a militant Protestant, he an atheist), and by Hardy’s susceptibility to other women, in particular Mrs Florence Henniker in the 1890s and, from 1905, Florence Dugdale, nearly forty years younger. When Emma died, however, in 1912, Hardy was consumed with guilt and remorse, and poured out his feelings in the twenty-one poems that were published as ‘Poems of 1912–13’ in Satires of Circumstance (1914). At the head of the collection he printed a phrase from Virgil (Veteris vestigia flammae – ‘Ashes of an old flame’). These love poems, some of the finest that Hardy ever wrote, must have caused untold pain to Florence Dugdale, who for the previous five years had been the happy recipient of Hardy’s poetic tributes. When Thomas and Florence married in 1914, Hardy wrily expressed the view that ‘the union of two rather melancholy temperaments may result in cheerfulness’.
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 45