The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 50
The oxen1
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come; see the oxen kneel
‘In the lonely barton2 by yonder coomb3
Our childhood used to know’,
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
(Britten, Finzi, Gibbs)
JUDITH WEIR: from The Voice of Desire (2003)
The darkling thrush
[Written on terrestrial things]1
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems2 scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant3,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings4
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
(Milford)
W(ILLIAM) H(ENRY) HUDSON
(1841–1922)
He is, of course, a distinguished naturalist, probably the most acute, broad-minded, and understanding of all observers of Nature. And this, in an age of specialism, which loves to put men into pigeon-holes and label them, has been a misfortune to the reading public, who seeing the label Naturalist, pass on and reach down the nearest novel. Hudson has indeed the gifts and knowledge of a Naturalist, but that is a mere fraction of his value and interest. A really great writer such as this is no more to be circumscribed by a single word than America by the part of it called New York. The expert knowledge which Hudson has of Nature gives to all his work backbone and surety of fibre, and to his sense of beauty an intimate actuality. But his real eminence and extraordinary attraction lie in his spirit and philosophy. We feel from his writings that he is nearer to Nature than other men, and yet more truly civilised. The competitive, towny culture, the queer up-to-date commercial knowingness with which we are so busy coating ourselves, simply will not stick to him.
JOHN GALSWORTHY: Foreword to Far Away and Long Ago (1925)
Of American parents of English descent, he was born in Argentina near Buenos Aires, and worked on his father’s farm until he was fifteen, when rheumatic fever left him disabled for the rest of his life. His interest in ornithology now increased, and he began to publish essays and stories on natural history in English and Argentinian journals. In 1874 he emigrated to London, where he spent the rest of his life in sporadic poverty and loneliness. Although he published a number of novels and short stories, including The Purple Land that England Lost (1885), A Crystal Age (1887), much admired by Belloc, Green Mansions (1904), Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) and A Shepherd’s Life (1910), Hudson regarded himself more as a scientist, and it was his books on birds and natural life that he prized most: Argentine Ornithology (1888), The Naturalist in La Plata (1892), British Birds (1895), Birds in London (1898), Nature in Downland (1900), Birds and Man (1901) and Birds of La Plata (1920). In 1901 he was awarded a Civil List pension, which enabled him to explore England. His most popular work remains Far Away and Long Ago (1918), the autobiographical account of his childhood from which Tippett chose a passage for his Boyhood’s End.
MICHAEL TIPPETT: Boyhood’s End (1943/1945)1
What, then, did I want? – what did I ask to have? If the question had been put to me then, and if I had been capable of expressing what was in me, I should have replied: I want only to keep what I have; to rise each morning and look out on the sky and the grassy dew-wet earth from day to day, from year to year. To watch every June and July for spring, to feel the same old sweet surprise and delight at the appearance of each familiar flower, every new-born insect, every bird returned once more from the north. To listen in a trance of delight to the wild notes of the golden plover coming once more to the great plain, flying, flying south, flock succeeding flock the whole day long. Oh, those wild beautiful cries of the golden plover! I could exclaim with Hafiz2, with but one word changed: ‘If after a thousand years that sound should float o’er my tomb, my bones uprising in their gladness would dance in the sepulchre!’ To climb trees and put my hand down in the deep hot nest of the Bien-te-veo3 and feel the hot eggs – the five long pointed cream-coloured eggs with chocolate spots and splashes at the larger end. To lie on a grassy bank with the blue water between me and beds of tall bulrushes, listening to the mysterious sounds of the wind and of hidden rails and coots and courlans4 conversing together in strange human-like tones; to let my sight dwell and feast on the camaloté5 flower amid its floating masses of moist vivid green leaves – the large alamanda-like flower6 of a purest divine yellow that when plucked sheds its lovely petals, to leave you with nothing but a green stem in your hand. To ride at noon on the hottest days, when the whole earth is a-glitter with illusory water, and see the cattle and horses in thousands, covering the plain at their watering-places; to visit some haunt of large birds at that still, hot hour and see storks, ibises, grey herons, egrets of a dazzling whiteness, and rose-coloured spoonbills and flamingoes, standing in the shallow water in which their motionless forms are reflected. To lie on my back on the rust-brown grass in January and gaze up at the wide hot whitey-blue sky, peopled with millions and myriads of glistening balls of thistle-down, ever, ever floating by; to gaze and gaze until they are to me living things and I, in an ecstasy, am with them, floating in that immense shining void!
ROBERT BRIDGES
(1844–1930)
I will be what God made me, nor protest
Against the bent of genius in my time,
That science of my friends robs all the best,
While I love beauty, and was born to rhyme.
ROBERT BRIDGES: from The Growth of Love (1876)
Bridges was educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he met Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a close friend, and whose poems he published in 1918 – he had already included six of them in The Spirit of Man (1916), a highly original anthology of poetry and prose. Bridges regarded his finest work to be The Testament of Beauty (1929), a long philosophical poem which, published when he was eighty-four, was received with great acclaim but is now little read. Today he is best known for his lyric poetry. Always interested in the musical setting of words (he edited several editions of the Yattendon Hymnal, for which he wrote, translated or adapted forty-four hymns), he has been much set by song composers such as Bax, Bridge, Butterworth, Davies, Finzi, Gurney (fifteen songs), Hart, Holst, Howells, Moeran, Orr, Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Warlock. His poetry was published in one volume in 1912, and a year later he was appo
inted Poet Laureate. He experimented continually with prosody, studied the practice of others, wrote down his observations, and concluded:
When English poets will write verse governed honestly by natural speech stress, they will discover the laws [of prosody] for themselves, and will find open to them an infinite field of rhythm as yet untouched. There is nothing which may not be done in it, and it is perhaps not the least of its advantages that it makes excellence difficult.
His own poetry, though beautifully crafted, lacks the spontaneity and passion of his more gifted contemporaries. As Auden puts it in 19th Century British Minor Poets, ‘there is in his work something of the dying fall that characterizes so much late Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian verse’.
IVOR GURNEY
Thou didst delight my eyes (1921/1952)
Thou didst delight my eyes:
Yet who am I? nor first
Nor last nor best, that durst
Once dream of thee for prize;
Nor this the only time
Thou shalt set love to rhyme.
Thou didst delight my ear:
Ah! little praise; thy voice
Makes other hearts rejoice,
Makes all ears glad that hear;
And short my joy: but yet,
O song, do not forget!
For what wert thou to me?
How shall I say? The moon,
That poured her midnight noon
Upon his wrecking sea; –
A sail, that for a day
Has cheered the castaway.1
(Bridge, Finzi, Holst)
GERALD FINZI
Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913
[In terra pax]
for soprano, baritone, chorus, strings, harp, cymbals (1954, arr. full orchestra 1956)1
Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.2
A frosty Christmas Eve
when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone
where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village
in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me
peals of bells aringing:
The constellated sounds
ran sprinkling on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above
with stars was spangled o’er.
Then sped my thought to keep
that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
and marveling could not tell
Whether it were angels
or the bright stars singing.
[Now blessed be the tow’rs
that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer
unto God for our souls:
Blessed be their founders
(said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ
in the belfries of the night
With arms lifted to clutch
the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above
and the mad romping din.]
But to me heard afar
it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting
as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly
to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me
by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured
as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect
of th’eternal silence.
(Milford)
GERALD FINZI: from Oh Fair to See, Op. 13b (1956/1965)1
Since we loved
Since we loved, – (the earth that shook
As we kissed, fresh beauty took) –
Love hath been as poets paint,
Life as heaven is to a saint;
All my joys my hope excel,
All my work hath prosper’d well,
All my songs have happy been,
O my love, my life, my queen.
JUDITH WEIR: from The Voice of Desire (2003)
Nightingales
[The voice of desire]
Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,
And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom
Ye learn your song:
Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,
Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air
Bloom the year long!
Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,
A throe of the heart,
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,
No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,
For all our art.
Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men
We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,
As night is withdrawn
[From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,]
Dream, while the innumerable choir of day
Welcome the dawn.
(Finzi, Hart)
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
(1844–89)
Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889. He was one of the most remarkable technical inventors who ever wrote, and he was a major poet. Had he received the attention that was his due the history of English poetry from the nineties onward would have been very different. […] It is difficult not to believe that if the poems had been current they would have fertilized some young talent and we should not now be contemplating the futility of the Georgian attempt to regenerate English poetry.
F. R. LEAVIS: New Bearings in English Poetry (1932)
After Highgate School, Hopkins studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was greatly influenced by John Henry Newman. He joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1866 and two years later became a member of the Society of Jesus, at which point he destroyed much of his poetry and vowed to write no more, since he considered it inappropriate for a Jesuit priest. He served in a number of parishes, including a Liverpool slum – an experience he never forgot. In 1884 he was appointed Professor of Classics at University College, Dublin. When the passenger liner Deutschland sank in December 1875, he was profoundly affected. Three years later he wrote: ‘I was affected by the account [of the sinking] and, happening to say so to my rector, he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one’. The resulting 35-stanza poem was the first example of Hopkins’s ‘sprung’ rhythm. Poetry now flowed out of him. In particular, 1877 was an annus mirabilis, in which he composed ‘God’s grandeur’, ‘The starlight night’, ‘Spring’, ‘The windhover’, ‘Pied beauty’, ‘Hurrahing in harvest’ and ‘The caged skylark’ – all of which were written while he was studying theology, surrounded by the most beautiful scenery at St Beuno’s in the Vale of Clwyd in North Wales. He was ordained priest and continued to write poetry, intermittently, till his death from enteric fever twelve years later. ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’, ‘Binsey poplars’, ‘Henry Purcell’ and ‘Peace’ date from 1879, when he returned for a while to Oxford; ‘Carrion comfort’ and ‘No worst, there is none’ from 1885.
‘Man was created to praise,’ Hopkins wrote in a sermon, and such was the intensity of his feelings that, like Goethe, he often found it necessary to mint new words. His concern was to catch the essence of nature that lay behind what the eye perceived, for which he coined the word ‘inscape’. It was not a question of projecting his own emotions into the objects of nature, but of capturing the essence of nature’s manifestations. In order to express these things he abandoned overworked and outworn language, and sought through alliteration, internal rhyme, archaisms, dialect words, hyphenated neologisms, metrical innovations and individual syntax to express the intensity of his vision. In the late ‘terrible’ or ‘dark’ sonnets, poems that deal wit
h desolation and a sense of exile, we see a different Hopkins. Hopkins did not write for a public and was not concerned with publication. He showed his poems to a few friends, his parents, his two sisters and three poets: Robert Bridges, Coventry Patmore and Richard Watson Dixon, a teacher at Highgate School. A few poems had appeared in anthologies, but it was only in 1918, almost thirty years after his death, that some of them were published in book form by Robert Bridges, who had already included six of Hopkins’s poems in The Spirit of Man (1916). Had Hopkins’s startlingly original poetry been published in the year of his death (1889), English poetry might, as Leavis wrote, have been regenerated. As it was, it was not until the Georgian Movement began in 1912 that an attempt was made to foster new poetic talent.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from A.M.D.G., for mixed voices (1939/1989)1
God’s grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;2
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil3
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck4 his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(Dickinson, Rubbra)