Heaven-Haven
A nun takes the veil
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
(Barber, Bliss, Burrows, Dickinson)
NED ROREM
Spring and fall (1946/1947)1
to a young child
Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal2 lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,3
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Spring (1947/1953)
Nothing is so beautiful as spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens1, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
(Rubbra)
LENNOX BERKELEY: from Autumn’s Legacy, Op. 58 (1962/1963)
Hurrahing in harvest1
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
W(ILLIAM) E(RNEST) HENLEY
(1849–1903)
Burly is a man of great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly’s manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol’d, and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end up arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: Memories and Portraits (1887)
Stevenson’s description of Henley as a man ‘condemned to much physical inaction’ refers to the illness he suffered as a child – tubercular arthritis. Doctors amputated one foot, and to save the other Henley went in 1873 to Edinburgh, where Lister treated him in the Infirmary. During his year of hospitalization he worked at his Hospital Sketches, first published in the Cornhill in 1875. It was in hospital that he was introduced to Stevenson, who became a close friend, until they parted on bitter terms. Henley’s sonnet ‘Apparition’ from In Hospital paints a brutally honest but affectionate portrait of Stevenson. The character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island was based on Henley, and the two friends collaborated on a number of plays: Deacon Brodie (1880), Admiral Guinea (1884), Beau Austin (1884) and Macaire (1885). His own literary output includes several volumes of poetry: A Book of Verses (1888), The Song of the Sword and Other Verses (1892), London Voluntaries (1893) and For England’s Sake (1900). He also compiled several anthologies, the most popular of which was Lyra Heroica (1891), a selection of verse for boys. Henley broke away from many of the old conventions of genteel late-Victorian verse and became a forerunner of the imagists. He was also a most original editor of various newspapers, magazines and journals, publishing works by Hardy, Kipling, Stevenson and Yeats. Painting was one of his hobbies – he became editor of The Magazine of Art in 1882 and promoted the work of both Whistler and Rodin. Henley dedicated one of his best poems (‘Under a stagnant sky …’), a free verse evocation of the Thames, to Whistler, whose pictures he greatly admired. The model for the character of Wendy Darling in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan was Henley’s own daughter, Margaret, who died aged five of cerebral meningitis. The little girl was very fond of Barrie and used to call him ‘fwendy’ – her version of ‘friendly’. The title of Henley’s best-known poem, ‘Invictus’ (‘Unconquered’), was chosen by John Carlin for his book about the 1995 Rugby World Cup Tournament staged in Cape Town; discussing the poem, Carlin states that Nelson Mandela pasted a copy of it on the wall of his cell on Robben Island, thus giving him heart ‘during his long prison years’. Fritz Hart composed more than twenty songs to Henley’s verse.
ROGER QUILTER: from Four Songs, Op. 14 (1910)
Echoes XLV. To W.B.
[A last year’s rose]
From the brake the Nightingale
Sings exulting to the Rose;
Though he sees her waxing pale
In her passionate repose,
While she triumphs waxing frail,
Fading even while she glows:
Though he knows
How it goes –
Knows of last year’s Nightingale
Dead with last year’s Rose.
Wise the enamoured Nightingale,
Wise the well-belovèd Rose!
Love and life shall still prevail,
Nor the silence at the close
Break the magic of the tale
In the telling, though it shows –
Who but knows
How it goes! –
Life a last year’s Nightingale,
Love a last year’s Rose.
Echoes XVIII. To A.D.
[Song of the blackbird]1
The nightingale has a lyre of gold,
The lark’s is a clarion call,
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,
But I love him best of all.
For his song is all of the joy of life,
And we in the mad, spring weather,
We two have listened till he sang
Our hearts and lips together.
(Beach, Delius, Hart)
GEORGE BUTTERWORTH: Love Blows as the Wind Blows, song cycle for baritone and string quartet (1911–12/1921)1
Echoes XXV
[In the year that’s come and gone]
In the year that’s come and gone, love, his flying feather
Stooping slowly, gave us heart, and bade us walk together.
In the year that’s coming on, though many a troth be broken,
We at least will not forget aught that love hath spoken.
In the year that’s come and gone, dear, we wove a tether
All of gracious words and thoughts, binding two together.
In the year that’s coming on with its wealth of roses
We shall weave it stronger yet, ere the circle closes.
In the year that’s come and gone, in the golden weather,
Sweet, my sweet, we swore to keep the watch of life together.
In the year that’s coming on, rich in joy and sorrow,
We shall light our lamp, and wait life’s mysterious morrow.
(Hart)
To K. de M.1
[Life in her creaking shoes]
Life in her creaking shoes
Goes, and more formal grows,
A round of calls and cues:
Love blows as the wind blows.
Blows! … in the quiet close
As in the roaring mart,
By ways no mortal knows
Love blows into the heart.
The stars some cadence use,
Forthright the river flows,
In order fall the dews,
Love blows as the wind blows:
Blows! … and what reckoning shows
The courses of his chart?
A spirit that comes and goes,
Love blows into the heart.
Echoes VII
[Fill a glass with golden wine]
Fill a glass with golden wine,
And the while your lips are wet
Set their perfume unto mine,
And forget,
Every kiss we take and give
Leaves us less of life to live.
Yet again! Your whim and mine
In a happy while have met.
All your sweets to me resign,
Nor regret
That we press with every breath,
Sighed or singing, nearer death.
(Quilter)
Echoes XXXVIII
[On the way to Kew]
On the way to Kew,
By the river old and gray,
Where in the Long Ago
We laughed and loitered so,
I met a ghost to-day,
A ghost that told of you –
A ghost of low replies
And sweet, inscrutable eyes
Coming up from Richmond
As you used to do.
By the river old and gray,
The enchanted Long Ago
Murmured and smiled anew.
On the way to Kew,
March had the laugh of May,
The bare boughs looked aglow,
And old, immortal words
Sang in my breast like birds,
Coming up from Richmond
As I used with you.
With the life of Long Ago
Lived my thought of you.
By the river old and gray
Flowing his appointed way
As I watched I knew
What is so good to know –
Not in vain, not in vain,
Shall I look for you again
Coming up from Richmond
On the way to Kew.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(1850–94)
I have now published on 101 small pages The Complete Proof of Mr. R. L. Stevenson’s Incapacity to Write Verse [he refers to A Child’s Garden of Verses], in a series of graduated examples with table of contents. I think I shall issue a companion volume of exercises: ‘Analyse this poem. Collect and comminate the ugly words. Distinguish and condemn the chevilles. State Mr. Stevenson’s faults of taste in regard to the measure. What reasons can you gather from this example for your belief that Mr. S. is unable to write any other measure?’ […] They look ghastly in the cold light of print; but there is something nice in the little ragged regiment for all; the blackguards seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly; not song, if you will, but a child’s voice.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: letter to Edmund Gosse (12 March 1885)
Stevenson’s father and grandfather were lighthouse engineers, and Robert Louis entered Edinburgh University in 1867 to read engineering. He changed to law, however, and became an advocate in 1875. While at university he contributed articles to the Edinburgh University Magazine and fell in love with the literary life. He was intensely musical, as we see from this little quoted letter, dated Edinburgh, 16 September 1873, that he wrote, aged twenty-three, to Mrs Sitwell, describing his admiration of Beethoven’s ‘Adelaide’:
I have tried to write some verses; but I find I have nothing to say that has not been already perfectly said and perfectly sung in Adelaïde. I have so perfect an idea out of that song! The great Alps, a wonder in the starlight – the river, strong from the hills, and turbulent, and loudly audible at night – the country, a scented Frühlingsgarten of orchards and deep wood where the nightingales harbour – a sort of German flavour over all – and this love-drunken man, wandering on by sleeping village and silent town, pours out of his full heart, Einst, O Wunder, einst etc. I wonder if I am wrong about this being the most beautiful and perfect thing in the world – the only marriage of really accordant words and music – both drunk with the same poignant, unutterable sentiment.
Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, once wrote (see the Tusitala Edition of Stevenson’s works) about the inspiration her husband found in music: ‘It is said that when Mr Kipling is heard humming a tune he is supposed to be composing a poem to fit the music. I think my husband must have used something of the same method, for in his library I found […] verses written out to airs that had pleased him.’
It was while on a writers’ retreat in France during 1878 that Stevenson met Mrs Fanny Osborne, an American woman ten years his senior and already married. Friendship turned to infatuation; he left Scotland to be with her and arrived in New York in August 1879. They married in 1880, and it was for her young son, Lloyd (with whom he later collaborated on The Wrong Box), that he began Treasure Island (1883). He left England in 1888 and, having sailed for a while around the Pacific Islands, settled in Samoa in an attempt to cure his illness (tuberculosis) by living in a healthier climate. Incensed at European exploitation of the islands, he gave voice to his disquiet in A Footnote to History (1892), In the South Seas (1896) and in two novellas: The Beach of Falesá (1893) and, most importantly, The Ebb-Tide (1894), a work that condemns colonial exploitation and prefigures Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). His wife was by his side when he died from a cerebral haemorrhage on Samoa, and the day after his death sixty natives cut a path up the steep face of Mount Valima to dig the grave of their beloved Tusitala, the name by which he was known to the Samoan people (‘tusi’ = book, ‘tala’ = writer).
Despite his sickly constitution, Stevenson was an inveterate traveller. A canoe tour of France and Belgium was immortalized in An Inland Voyage (1878), and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes followed in 1879, the year in which he travelled by emigrant ship and train to California – an adventure that was published posthumously in 1895 as The Amateur Emigrant. He returned to England to live by his pen, enjoyed a public debate on literature with Henry James, whose ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) he answered with ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (1884). The two became firm friends. Stevenson’s essays and short stories were collected in a number of volumes, including Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and Memories and Portraits (1887). It was, however, as a novelist that he became best known, and the eighties saw the publication of his most celebrated works: Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow (1888) and The Master of Ballantrae (1889).
All the poems printed here, apart from Songs of Travel, are taken from A Child’s Garden of Verses, written while Stevenson was working on Treasure Island. He dedicated it to
the nurse who cared for him during his sickly childhood, Alison Cunningham (‘Cummy’); and in 1883 he wrote her a touching letter:
I don’t know when it may be ready […] but I hope in the meantime you may like the idea of what is to be; and when the time comes, I shall try to make the dedication as pretty as I can make it. […] This little book, which is all about my childhood, should indeed go to no other person but you, who did so much to make that childhood happy.
Composers to have been drawn to these charming poems include Gurney, Hahn, Ireland, Liza Lehmann, Peel, Quilter, Somervell, Stanford and Williamson.
LIZA LEHMANN: from The Daisy Chain (1902)
Keepsake Mill1
[Over the borders, a sin without pardon,
Breaking the branches and crawling below,
Out through the breach in the wall of the garden,
Down by the banks of the river, we go.]
Here is the mill with the humming of thunder,
Here is the weir with the wonder of foam,
Here is the sluice with the race running under –
Marvellous places, though handy to home!
Sounds of the village grow stiller and stiller,
Stiller the note of the birds on the hill;
Dusty and dim are the eyes of the miller,
Deaf are his ears with the moil of the mill.
Years may go by, and the wheel in the river
Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day,
Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for ever
Long after all of the boys are away.
Home from the Indies, and home from the ocean,
Heroes and soldiers we all shall come home;
Still we shall find the old mill-wheel in motion,
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 51