The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

A good boy

  I woke before the morning, I was happy all the day,

  I never said an ugly word, but smiled and stuck to play.

  And now at last the sun is going down behind the wood,

  And I am very happy, for I know that I’ve been good.

  My bed is waiting cool and fresh, with linen smooth and fair,

  And I must off to sleepsin-by, and not forget my prayer.

  I know that, till tomorrow I shall see the sun arise,

  No ugly dream shall fright my mind, no ugly sight my eyes.

  But slumber hold me tightly till I waken in the dawn,

  And hear the thrushes singing in the lilacs round the lawn.

  (Quilter, Williamson)

  OSCAR WILDE

  (1854–1900)

  My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous.

  W. B. YEATS: Autobiographies (1955)

  Wilde’s first literary success was gained at Oxford, where in 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna’. While at Oxford he caused a stir by publicly despising athleticism, dressing as a dandy and glorifying the Aesthetic Movement – mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience (1881). His first volume of poems was published in 1881; he toured the United States in 1882, lecturing across the country. He married in 1884 and in 1888 published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, fairy stories written for his two sons. The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in 1890. Two years later he enjoyed his first great theatrical success with Lady Windermere’s Fan, which was followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Salome, written in French, was published in 1894, translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. It was not a success and Wilde later wrote of ‘the schoolboy faults of your attempted translation’. Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) had begun in the summer of 1891, when Wilde was thirty-seven and Bosie twenty-one. Wilde showered his lover with telegrams and gifts – more than £5,000 in three years. Bosie was sexually more experienced and introduced Wilde to the demi-monde of the ‘renter’ or male prostitute. His father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who already suspected his eldest son, Viscount Drumlanrig, of conducting a homosexual relationship with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, was determined to thwart Bosie’s affair with Wilde, and left his card, on which he had written: ‘For Oscar Wilde posing somdomite [sic]’ at Wilde’s club. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, Queensberry trawled London’s homosexual underworld for evidence, and the trial of Wilde versus Queensberry began at the Old Bailey on 3 April 1895. Wilde was eventually convicted of gross indecency on 25 May 1895 and sentenced to two years’ hard labour for ‘homosexual acts’. He was released in 1897 and spent the rest of his life in Paris as ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, the surname deriving from the hero of Charles Maturin’s novel Melmoth the Wanderer. Maturin, incidentally, was Wilde’s great-uncle by marriage. Broken by his experience in gaol, he died in Paris three years after his release. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published in 1898, and his embittered letter of reproach to Bosie appeared, incomplete, in 1905 as De Profundis.

  Settings of Wilde’s poems include Francis George Scott’s ‘Idyll’ (‘In the forest’) and Granville Bantock’s cycle of twelve songs for bass or contralto and orchestra, The Sphinx. Wilde’s fiction inspired Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg (to a libretto by Georg Klaren after the story ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ and Eine florentinische Tragödie, based on A Florentine Tragedy, which was also seriously considered by Puccini as operatic material. Franz Schreker composed a dance pantomime for chamber orchestra entitled Der Geburtstag der Infantin (1908), and Heinrich Sutermeister’s Das Gespenst von Canterville (1964) was based on ‘The Canterville Ghost’. The Picture of Dorian Gray has inspired at least two operas, by Hans Leger (1939) and Hans Schaeuble (1947). Richard Strauss’s Salome (libretto by Hedwig Lachmann) was based on Wilde’s play of the same name. Liza Lehmann composed incidental music to ‘The Selfish Giant’ (1911).

  CHARLES GRIFFES

  Symphony in yellow (c.1912/1915)

  An omnibus across the bridge

  Crawls like a yellow butterfly,

  And, here and there, a passer-by

  Shows like a little restless midge.

  Big barges full of yellow hay

  Are moved against the shadowy wharf,

  And, like a yellow silken scarf,

  The thick fog hangs along the quay.

  The yellow leaves begin to fade

  And flutter from the Temple elms,

  And at my feet the pale green Thames

  Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

  (Blyton)

  GEORGE BUTTERWORTH: from Two Songs

  Requiescat (1911/1920)1

  Tread lightly, she is near

  Under the snow,

  Speak gently, she can hear

  The daisies grow.

  All her bright golden hair

  Tarnished with rust,

  She that was young and fair

  Fallen to dust.

  Lily-like, white as snow,

  She hardly knew

  She was a woman, so

  Sweetly she grew.

  Coffin-board, heavy stone,

  Lie on her breast,

  I vex my heart alone,

  She is at rest.

  Peace, peace, she cannot hear

  Lyre or sonnet,

  All my life’s buried here,

  Heap earth upon it.

  (Dallapiccola, Schulhoff)

  A(LFRED) E(DWARD) HOUSMAN

  (1859–1936)

  A. E. Housman

  No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame

  (Blame if you like the human situation):

  Heart-injured in North London,1 he became

  The Latin Scholar of his generation.

  Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,

  Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;

  Food was his public love,2 his private lust

  Something to do with violence and the poor.

  In savage foot-notes on unjust editions

  He timidly attacked the life he led,

  And put the money of his feelings on

  The uncritical relations of the dead,

  Where only geographical divisions

  Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.

  W. H. AUDEN

  Alfred Edward Housman was educated at Bromsgrove School, read Greats at Oxford but inexplicably failed his finals. For the next ten years he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in London, retaining his sanity by publishing articles on Propertius, Ovid, Juvenal and other favourite classical authors. In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Latin at London University, and produced his definitive edition of Manilius, which appeared in five volumes between 1903 and 1930; in January 1911 Housman was appointed Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge and elected a Fellow of Trinity College. His daily routine was predictable. He lectured twice a week, enjoyed solitary walks after lunch for as long as two hours, relished good food and wine in moderation, often travelled to London to dine with male friends such as William Rothenstein or Grant Richards, and went on to a music hall. He usually holidayed abroad, preferring France, where he could eat well (he occasionally dined at the Tour d’Argent) and visit cathedrals. After A Shropshire Lad had been published in 1896, Housman continued to write verse into his notebooks, and his Last Poems were published in 1922. Praefanda, a collection of bawdy and obscene passages from Latin authors, was published in 1931 with a learned preface of solemn irony. More Poems appeared in 1936, and eighteen further poems were printed in Laurence Housman’s Memoir of his brother (1937). The Collected Poems appeared in 1939.

  It was at Oxford that Housman fell in love, unrequitedly, with Moses Jackson, a fellow student at St John’s College. Shortly after coming to London, Housman shared
lodgings for almost two years with Moses and his brother, Adalbert, in Bayswater. They seemed to live in harmony, until one day Housman inexplicably disappeared. We can only guess what happened. Housman may have opened his heart to Moses, who must have been profoundly shocked, especially as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made homosexuality, in any form, illegal, had just been passed. Housman reappeared, took lodgings briefly in Northumberland Place and then in Highgate with a landlady named Mrs Hunter at Byron Cottage, 17 North Road. Moses Jackson’s influence on Housman’s poetry is clear from a letter (whereabouts unknown) that the poet wrote, much later, to his friend: ‘You are largely responsible for my writing poetry and you ought to take the consequences.’ Moses, a brilliant scientist and athlete, became Principal of Sind College, Karachi, at the end of 1887. He returned on leave to England in 1889, when he married a young widow, Rosa Chambers. Housman was not only not invited to the wedding but was also kept in the dark. At Housman’s instigation, Moses was elected a Fellow of University College London in January 1894. Housman also supported Moses’ application to become headmaster of University College School – to no avail. By 1898 there had been a reconciliation between the two men, and in 1900 Moses asked Housman to become godfather to his fourth son. In 1903, Housman published a dedicatory poem in Latin to Jackson in the first volume of his Manilius. Moses Jackson died of stomach cancer on 14 January 1923.

  Towards the end of his life, on 5 February 1933, Housman replied to a questionnaire that had been sent him by Maurice Pollet, a teacher of English Literature at the Lycée d’Oran in Algeria. As it reveals much of his character, it is printed here in full:

  Dear M. Pollet

  As some of the questions which you ask in your flattering curiosity may be asked by future generations, and as many of them can only be answered by me, I make this reply.

  I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time. My father’s family was Lancashire and my mother’s Cornish. I had a sentimental feeling for Shropshire because its hills were our western horizon. I know Ludlow and Wenlock, but my topographical details – Hughley, Abdon under Clee – are sometimes quite wrong. Remember that Tyrtaeus was not a Spartan. [He was the national poet of Sparta in the seventh century BC; but according to tradition an Athenian.]

  I took an interest in astronomy almost as early as I can remember; the cause, I think, was a little book we had in the house.

  I was brought up in the Church of England and in the High Church party, which is much the best religion I have ever come across. But Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, which fell into my hands when I was eight, attached my affections to paganism. I became a deist at thirteen and an atheist at twenty-one.

  I never had any scientific education.

  I wrote verse at eight or earlier, but very little until I was thirty-five.

  Oxford had not much effect on me, except that I there met my greatest friend.

  When I was at the Patent Office I read a great deal of Greek and Latin at the British Museum of an evening.

  While at University College, which is not residential, I lived alone in lodgings in the environs of London. A Shropshire Lad was written at Byron Cottage, 17 North Road, Highgate, where I lived from 1886 to 1905.

  A Shropshire Lad was offered to Macmillan, and declined by them on the advice, I am told, of John Morley, who was their reader. Then a friend introduced me to Kegan Paul; but the book was published at my own expense.

  The Shropshire Lad is an imaginary figure, with something of my temper and view of life. Very little in the book is biographical. [Housman is being disingenuous here: several of the poems seem to be inspired by his unrequited love for Moses Jackson.]

  ‘Reader of the Greek Anthology’ is not a good name for me. Of course I have read it, or as much of it as is worth reading, but with no special heed; and my favourite Greek poet is Aeschylus. No doubt I have been unconsciously influenced by the Greeks and Latins, but I was surprised when critics spoke of my poetry as ‘classical’. Its chief sources of which I am conscious are Shakespeare’s songs, the Scottish Border ballads and Heine.

  ‘Oh stay at home’ [Last Poems 38] was written years before the Great War, and expresses no change of opinion, only a different mood. The Great War cannot have made much change in the opinions of any man of imagination.

  I have never had any such thing as a ‘crisis of pessimism’. In the first place, I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that is owing to my observation of the world, not to personal circumstances. [A pejorist is one who believes that the world is becoming worse.] Secondly, I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over; and my poetry, as far as I could make out, sprang chiefly from physical conditions, such as a relaxed sore throat during my most prolific period, the first five months of 1895.

  I respect the Epicureans more than the Stoics, but I am myself a Cyrenaic [i.e. belonging to the school of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus of Cyrene, whose doctrine was one of practical hedonism]. Pascal and Leopardi I have studied with great admiration; Villon and Verlaine very little, Calderon and German philosophers not at all. For Hardy I felt affection, and high admiration for some of his novels and a few of his poems.

  I am yours very truly

         A. E. Housman

  Refused by Macmillan, the sixty-three poems of A Shropshire Lad were finally published in 1896 by Kegan Paul. Several had been written during Oscar Wilde’s trial for homosexual acts, and it is quite possible that some of the obliquely gay poems were included as a conscious or subconscious reaction to the inhumanity of that trial. During Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Gaol, one of his closest friends, Robert Ross, learnt a number of the Shropshire Lad poems by heart and recited them during a visit to Wilde in prison. A mere 500 copies were printed and Housman had to pay £30 – then a considerable sum – towards the volume’s publication. Many of these poems are spoken by, or addressed to, a farm boy or a soldier. Housman, in his letter to M. Pollet, cited Heinrich Heine as a formative influence on his own poetry, and Matthew Arnold, in his essay on Heinrich Heine, described the German poet in words that refer with equal validity to Housman: ‘The magic of Heine’s poetical form is incomparable; he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fullness, pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry.’ Very few consecutive poems in A Shropshire Lad have the same metrical character; and like Horace in the Odes, Housman was adept at orchestrating his poems into sequences full of contrasts, both in theme and form: longer poems (rarely chosen by composers), for example, are often followed by shorter ones. A Shropshire Lad initially met with little success. By the end of 1898 only 494 copies had been sold; and seven years after its publication a mere 1,475 copies. From 1906 to 1911, however, A Shropshire Lad sold on average 13,500 a year. It has never once been out of print, and Housman didn’t take a royalty until 1922, when he discovered that Grant Richards, who had taken over the publishing of A Shropshire Lad from Kegan Paul, had often spent and squandered the money from the royalties.

  Though many poems in A Shropshire Lad deal with soldiers and war, it must be remembered that they were written before the Boer War and the First World War. Housman’s interest in soldiery had been awaked by a childhood visit to London to see the Guards, and this fascination was intensified when his brother Herbert enlisted in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and was sent to fight in the Boer War, which broke out in 1899. In response to his brother’s vivid description of the appalling conditions the soldiers had to suffer, Housman wrote a series of poems that can indeed be defined as war poetry: ‘Illic jacet’, ‘Grenadier’, ‘Lancer’ and others were all published in Last Poems. Herbert was killed in action on 30 October 1901 at the Battle of Bakenlaagte.

  Housman’s poems have been set to music more often than those of any other English poet with the possible except
ion of Shakespeare and de la Mare. ‘I always give my consent to all composers in the hope of becoming immortal somehow,’ Housman once joked. Yet he could lose his temper when composers distorted his poetry. When Vaughan Williams omitted two verses from ‘Is my team ploughing?’ in his setting for On Wenlock Edge, Housman retorted: ‘I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music’ (letter to Grant Richards, 20 December 1920). On another occasion he declared that ‘neither illustrators nor composers care tuppence about words and generally do not understand them’. Housman’s taste in music was low-brow; he liked popular music and could make little of the art-song settings of his verse. He once said as much to Herbert Howells over dinner, whereupon the composer allegedly destroyed all his Housman settings. Before On Wenlock Edge was recorded in 1916 by Gervase Elwes, Vaughan Williams asked Housman’s permission, and Housman confided to Richards: ‘They can make their record if they like: all I want is not to have to write letters.’ The recording turned out to be a great success, and in 1923 Housman profited from it financially: ‘Boosey have suddenly enriched me with £6 for gramophone rights, Vaughan Williams, I think.’ Housman, however, was not impressed; for when his friend Percy Withers played him four of the songs from this recording, Housman showed ‘alarming signs of mental agitation’, Withers recalled in A. E. Housman – Personal Recollections. And when the eighteen-year-old Gurney, having composed ‘Loveliest of trees’ and ‘Is my team ploughing?’ (they were not published till 1926 as part of the Housman cycle The Western Playland), wrote a letter to Housman, it provoked this response on 16 May 1908 to Grant Richards:

  Mr. I. B. Gurney (who resides in Gloucester Cathedral along with St. Peter and Almighty God) must not print the words of my poems in full on concert programmes (a course which I am sure his fellow-lodgers would disapprove of); but he is quite welcome to set them to music, and to have them sung, and to print their titles on programmes when they are sung.