The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 49
Foul days and fair
Here, too, prevail,
And gust and gale
As everywhere.
But lonely shepherd souls
Who bask amid these knolls
May catch a faery sound
On sleepy noontides from the ground:
‘O not again
Till Earth outwears
Shall love like theirs
Suffuse this glen!’
The market-girl
Nobody took any notice of her as she stood on the causey1 kerb,
All eager to sell her honey and apples and bunches of garden herb;
And if she had offered to give her wares and herself with them too that day,
I doubt if a soul would have cared to take a bargain so choice away.
But chancing to trace her sunburnt grace that morning as I passed nigh,
I went and I said ‘Poor maidy dear! – and will none of the people buy?’
And so it began; and soon we knew what the end of it all must be,
And I found that though no others had bid, a prize had been won by me.
(Bax)
I look into my glass1
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide2.
It never looks like summer1
‘It never looks like summer here
On Beeny by the sea2.’
But though she saw its look as drear,
Summer it seemed to me.
It never looks like summer now
Whatever weather’s there;
But ah, it cannot anyhow,
On Beeny or elsewhere!
At a lunar eclipse
Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea1,
Now steals along upon the Moon’s meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.
How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil2 and misery?
And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven’s high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?
Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?
Life laughs onward
Rambling I looked for an old abode
Where, years back, one had lived I knew;
Its site a dwelling duly showed,
But it was new.
I went where, not so long ago,
The sod had riven two breasts asunder;1
Daisies2 throve gaily there, as though
No grave were under.
I walked along a terrace where3
Loud children gambolled in the sun;
The figure that had once sat there
Was missed by none.
Life laughed and moved on unsubdued,
I saw that Old succumbed to Young:
’Twas well. My too regretful mood
Died on my tongue.
GERALD FINZI: I Said to Love, Op. 19b (1958)
I need not go
I need not go
Through sleet and snow
To where I know
She waits for me;1
She will tarry me there
Till I find it fair,
And have time to spare
From company.
When I’ve overgot
The world somewhat,
When things cost not
Such stress and strain,
Is soon enough
By cypress sough
To tell my Love
I am come again.
And if some day,
When none cries nay,
I still delay
To seek her side,
(Though ample measure
Of fitting leisure
Await my pleasure)
She will not chide.
What – not upbraid me
That I delayed me,
Nor ask what stayed me
So long? Ah, no! –
New cares may claim me,
New loves inflame me,
She will not blame me,
But suffer it so.
At Middle-Field gate in February1
The bars are thick with drops that show
As they gather themselves from the fog
Like silver buttons ranged in a row,
And as evenly spaced as if measured, although
They fell at the feeblest jog.
They load the leafless hedge hard by,
And the blades of last year’s grass,
While the fallow ploughland turned up nigh
In raw rolls, clammy and clogging lie –
Too clogging for feet to pass.
How dry it was on a far-back day
When straws hung the hedge and around,
When amid the sheaves in amorous play
In curtained bonnets and light array
Bloomed a bevy now underground!2
Two lips1
I kissed them in fancy as I came
Away in the morning glow:
I kissed them through the glass of her picture-frame:
She did not know.
I kissed them in love, in troth, in laughter,
When she knew all; long so!
That I should kiss them in a shroud thereafter
She did not know.
1967
[In five-score summers]
In five-score summers! All new eyes,
New minds, new modes, new fools, new wise;
New woes to weep, new joys to prize;
With nothing left of me and you
In that live century’s vivid view
Beyond a pinch of dust or two;
A century which, if not sublime,
Will show, I doubt not, at its prime,
A scope above this blinkered time.
– Yet what to me how far above?
For I would only ask thereof
That thy worm should be my worm, Love!
For Life I had never cared greatly
For Life I had never cared greatly,
As worth a man’s while;
Peradventures1 unsought,
Peradventures that finished in nought,
Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately
Unwon by its style.
In earliest years – why I know not –
I viewed it askance;
Conditions of doubt,
Conditions that leaked slowly out,
May haply have bent me to stand and to show not
Much zest for the dance.
With symphonies soft and sweet colour
It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,
Till evasions gave in to its song,
And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller
Than life among men.
Anew I found nought to set eyes on,
When, lifting its hand,
It uncloaked a star,
Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar,
And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon
As bright as a brand.
And so, the rough highway forgetting,
I pace hill and dale
Regarding the sky,
Regarding the vision on high,
And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting
My pilgrimage fail.
I said to Love
I said to Love,
‘It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
All else above;
Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One1
Who spread a heaven beneath the sun,’
I said to Love.
I said to him,
‘We now know more of thee than then;
We were but weak in judgment when,
With hearts abrim,
We clamoured thee that thou would’st please
Inflict on us thine agonies,’
I said to him.
I said to Love,
‘Thou art not young, thou art not fair,
No elfin darts, no cherub air,
Nor swan, nor dove2
Are thine; but features pitiless,
And iron daggers of distress,’
I said to Love.
‘Depart then, Love! …
– Man’s race shall perish, threatenest thou,
Without thy kindling coupling-vow?
The age to come the man of now
Know nothing of? –
We fear not such a threat from thee;
We are too old in apathy!
Mankind shall cease. – So let it be,’
I said to Love.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Winter Words (1953/1954)
Britten completed these settings of eight Hardy poems at Aldeburgh in September 1953, and they were given their first performance on 8 October 1953 by Peter Pears and the composer at Harewood House as part of the Leeds Festival. Like Les Illuminations, the Michelangelo and the Donne Sonnets, Winter Words is not a cycle but rather a set of songs – what is known in German as a Liederreihe. Britten did not originally intend the songs to be performed together: they were not composed consecutively and the shape only gradually emerged. At the first performance they were simply called ‘Hardy Songs’, and it was Peter Pears who eventually suggested the title. Although Winter Words is the title of the poet’s last collection of verse (1928), the poems that Britten set were selected from six of Hardy’s volumes of poetry: ‘Wagtail and baby’ and ‘Before life and after’ (Time’s Laughingstocks, 1909); ‘At day-close in November’ (Satires of Circumstance, 1914); ‘Midnight on the Great Western’ and ‘The choirmaster’s burial’ (Moments of Vision, 1917); ‘The little old table’ and ‘At the railway station, Upway’ (Late Lyrics and Earlier, 1922); and ‘Proud songsters’ (Winter Words, 1928). Despite this apparent lack of homogeneity, the work has a unity of its own: the songs are mostly narrative; there is a well worked-out tonal scheme, beginning in D minor (‘At day-close in November’) and ending in D major (‘Before life and after’); and most of the songs have a darkness almost as bleak as that of Winterreise. Britten originally intended there to be ten songs, but ‘If it’s ever spring again’ and ‘The children and Sir Nameless’ were not published until the revised edition appeared in 1994.
At day-close in November
The ten hours’ light is abating,
And a late bird wings across,
Where the pines, like waltzers waiting,
Give their black heads a toss.
Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time,
Float past likes specks in the eye;
I set every tree in my June time,1
And now they obscure the sky.
And the children who ramble through here
Conceive that there never has been
A time when no tall trees grew here,
That none will in time be seen.
(Corp)
Midnight on the Great Western
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
And the roof-lamp’s oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came.
In the band of his hat the journeying boy
Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box,
That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
Like a living thing.
What past can be yours, O journeying boy
Towards a world unknown,
Who calmly, as if incurious quite
On all at stake, can undertake
This plunge alone?
Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,
Our rude realms far above,
Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete1
This region of sin that you find you in,
But are not of?
Wagtail and Baby
A baby watched a ford, whereto
A wagtail came for drinking;
A blaring bull went wading through,
The wagtail showed no shrinking.
A stallion splashed his way across,
The birdie nearly sinking;
He gave his plumes a twitch and toss,
And held his own unblinking.
Next saw the baby round the spot
A mongrel slowly slinking;
The wagtail gazed, but faltered not
In dip and sip and prinking1.
A perfect gentleman then neared;
The wagtail, in a winking,
With terror rose and disappeared;
The baby fell a-thinking.
The little old table1
Creak, little wood thing, creak,
When I touch you with elbow or knee;
That is the way you speak
Of one who gave you to me!
You, little table, she brought –
Brought me with her own hand,
As she looked at me with a thought
That I did not understand.
– Whoever owns it anon,
And hears it, will never know
What a history hangs upon
This creak from long ago.
The choirmaster’s burial1
He often would ask us
That, when he died,
After playing so many
To their last rest,
If out of us any
Should here abide,
And it would not task us,
We would with our lutes
Play over him
By his grave-brim
The psalm he liked best –
The one whose sense suits
‘Mount Ephraim’ –2
And perhaps we should seem
To him, in Death’s dream,
Like the seraphim.
As soon as I knew
That his spirit was gone
I thought this his due,
And spoke thereupon.
‘I think,’ said the vicar,
‘A read service quicker
Than viols out-of-doors
In these frosts and hoars.
That old-fashioned way
Requires a fine day,
And it seems to me
It had better not be.’
Hence, that afternoon,
Though never knew he
That his wish could not be,
To get through it faster
They buried the master
Without any tune.
But ’twas said that, when
At the dead of next night
The vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstoned grass,
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster’s grave.
Such the tenor man told3
When he had grown old.
Proud songsters
See above, under Finzi.
At the railway station, Upway1
‘There is not much that I can do,
For I’ve no money that’s quite my own!’
Spoke
up the pitying child –
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, –
‘But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one ’tis, and good in tone!’
The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
As the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
With grimful glee:
‘This life so free
Is the thing for me!’
And the constable smiled, and said no word,
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in –
The convict, and boy with the violin.
Before life and after
A time there was – as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell –
Before the birth of consciousness,
When all went well.
None suffered sickness, love, or loss,
None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;
None cared whatever crash or cross
Brought wrack to things.
If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,
If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;
If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed,
No sense was stung.
But the disease of feeling germed,
And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;
Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed
How long, how long?1
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: from Hodie, Christmas cantata for soprano, tenor, baritone, SATB, boys’ chorus, orchestra (1953–4)