The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 56
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
‘Who’ll beyond the hills away?’
Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon2, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart with all.
Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
Loveliest of trees
See above, under Somervell.
Golden friends
See above, under Vaughan Williams (‘With rue my heart is laden’).
Twice a week
See above, under Ireland (‘Goal and wicket’).
The aspens
See above, under Vaughan Williams (‘Along the field’).
Is my team ploughing
See above, under Vaughan Williams.
The far country
See above, under Somervell (‘Into my heart’).
March (1921) (ASL 10)
The Sun at noon to higher air,
Unharnessing the silver Pair1
That late before his chariot swam,
Rides on the gold wool of the Ram.
So braver notes the storm-cock2 sings
To start the rusted wheel of things,
And brutes in field and brutes in pen
Leap that the world goes round again.
The boys are up the woods with day
To fetch the daffodils away,
And home at noonday from the hills
They bring no dearth of daffodils.
Afield for palms the girls repair,
And sure enough the palms are there,
And each will find by hedge or pond
Her waving silver-tufted wand.
In farm and field through all the shire
The eye beholds the heart’s desire;
Ah, let not only mine be vain,
For lovers should be loved again.
CHARLES WILFRED ORR: from Cycle of Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1934)
This still underrated composer set no fewer than twenty Housman poems to music. Orr’s obsession with Housman resembles Schubert’s with Goethe and Wolf’s with Mörike, as this unpublished letter to Eric Sams (quoted in Banfield’s Sensibility and English Song) makes clear:
My first acquaintance with him came, like I dare say so many other people’s did, through Graham Peel’s ‘In summertime on Bredon’ … I still have the pocket edition of A Shropshire Lad which came out in 1914, and which I carried about with me everywhere, learning almost all of the poems by heart, and hoping against hope that one day I might be able to set some of them in a way that Wolf or Schubert might have approved. (The vanity and ignorance of youth!)
Farewell to barn and stack and tree (1927) (ASL 8)
‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
Farewell to Severn shore.
Terence1, look your last at me,
For I come home no more.
‘The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood is dried;
And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.
‘My mother thinks us long away;
’Tis time the field were mown.
She had two sons at rising day,
Tonight she’ll be alone.
‘And here’s a bloody hand to shake,
And oh, man, here’s good-bye;
We’ll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
My bloody hands and I.
‘I wish you strength to bring you pride,
And a love to keep you clean,
And I wish you luck, come Lammastide2,
At racing on the green.
‘Long for me the rick will wait,
And long will wait the fold,
And long will stand the empty plate,
And dinner will be cold.’
(Moeran)
LENNOX BERKELEY: Five Housman Songs, Op. 14/3 (1940/1983)
Berkeley first met Britten in 1936, and a long and intimate friendship developed. Britten’s diary entries of 29 and 30 July 1936 make interesting reading. The two composers were holidaying together in Cornwall, and Britten writes on 29 July: ‘After dinner – much walk & talk with Lennox & then we drive into Newquay with Miss N. [Ursula Nettleship] & pick up some friends of hers (mother, aunt, child) from a concert-hall – and we afterwards till 12.0 odd have tea with them. Long talks before sleep – it is extraordinary how intimate one becomes when the lights are out!’ And a day later he records: ‘In spite of his avowed sexual weakness for young men of my age & form – he is considerate & open, & we have come to an agreement on that subject.’ They were later to live together at Britten’s home in Snape, the Old Mill, and they worked together on a joint orchestral suite, Mont Juic. Berkeley’s Five Housman Songs were written after Pears and Britten had departed for America in 1939, and the choice of poems about Housman’s unrequited relationship with Moses Jackson, such as ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’, ‘He would not stay for me’ and ‘Because I liked you better’, suggests that, though Berkeley’s relationship with Britten probably remained essentially platonic, there was no lack of sexual attraction as far as Berkeley was concerned. The Britten–Berkeley relationship is brilliantly discussed in Tony Scotland’s Lennox & Freda (Michael Russell, 2010).
The half-moon westers low
See above, under Vaughan Williams.
The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread
See above, under Somervell.
He would not stay for me (AP 7)1
He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.
Look not in my eyes
See above, under Butterworth.
Because I liked you better (MP 31)1
Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.
To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
‘Good-bye,’ said you, ‘forget me.’
‘I will, no fear,’ said I.
If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts2 in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.
MARY COLERIDGE
(1861–1907)
Both diction and rhythm are often just what an experienced writer would avoid […] [yet] they really do contain that rare and strange quality called poetry, though it is not of a lofty kind, it is on the other hand distinctly original.
ROBERT BRIDGES: from a letter to Violet Hodgkin (17 October 1894)
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was the great-great-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her father, Arthur Duke Coleridge, a lawyer with a great love of music, had a fine tenor voice, and twice sang with Jenny Lind at her request. His home in South Kensington – 12 Cromwell Place – was a meeting place for painters and poets, frequented by such figures as Millais, Holman Hunt, Ruskin, Fanny Kemble, Charles Stanford, William Cory, Tennyson and Browning. Much of her education took place at home. Her father taught her Hebrew, and Mary wrote to her friend Henry Newbolt: ‘for the 1st 22 years of my life I was an ardent Jew, never read the New Testament except on compulsion, and said the Song of Deborah by heart every Sunday night before going to sleep’ (letter t
o Newbolt, 1893). By the age of nineteen she was proficient and well read in German, French and Italian, and later studied Greek, first on her own initiative and then with the help of William Cory. And when she was not attending art galleries, theatres and concerts with friends, Scott’s novels were read aloud at home in the evenings. She began writing verse as a child and published her first volume, Fancy’s Following, in 1896. Encouraged by Bridges’ support, she published a sequel, Fancy’s Guerdon, the following year, which Laurence Binyon helped through the press. Both appeared under the pseudonym Anodos (‘Wanderer’). Bridges was not the only celebrated writer to recognize her talent: Newbolt, Binyon, Edward Thomas and de la Mare all encouraged her, while Robert Louis Stevenson praised her first novel, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (1893), a fantastical romance; she published several others, including The King with Two Faces (1897), a historical romance about Gustavus III of Sweden, which ran into several editions within a few months and earned her over £900 in royalties. The Fiery Dawn (1901) and The Lady on the Drawing-Room Floor (1906) were not so successful. Poems Old and New appeared in 1907, and Gathered Leaves was published posthumously in 1910. A collection of ironic essays, Non Sequitur, appeared in 1900. She died as a result of acute appendicitis in 1907, before her forty-sixth birthday.
CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD: Op. 119, No. 3 (1910)
L’oiseau bleu
[The blue bird] for a cappella choir1
The lake lay blue below the hill.
O’er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.
The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.
(Busch)
FRANK BRIDGE: Two Songs (1914/1916)
Hush
[Where she lies asleep]
She sleeps so lightly, that in trembling fear
Beside her, where she lies asleep, I kneel,
The rush of thought and supplication staying,
Lest by some inward sense she see and hear,
If I too clearly think, too loudly feel,
And break her rest by praying.
In spring
[Love went a-riding]
Love went a-riding over the earth,
On Pegasus1 he rode.
The flowers before him sprang to birth,
And the frozen rivers flowed.
Then all the youths and the maidens cried,
‘Stay here with us, King of Kings!’
But Love said, ‘No! for the horse I ride,
For the horse I ride has wings.’
FRANK BRIDGE
Song
[Thy hand in mine] (1918/1918)1
Thy hand in mine, thy hand in mine,
And through the world we two will go,
With love before us for a sign,
Our faces set to every foe,
Thy hand in mine, thy hand in mine.
My heart in thine, my heart in thine,
Through life, through happy days the same.
We two will kneel before the shrine,
And keep alight the sacred flame.
My heart in thine, my heart in thine.
(Ireland)
ROGER QUILTER: Two September Songs, Op. 18/5 and 6 (1916/1916)
Chillingham, I
[Through the sunny garden]
Through the sunny garden
The humming bees are still;
The fir climbs the heather,
The heather climbs the hill.
The low clouds have riven
A little rift through.
The hill climbs to heaven,
Far away and blue.
Chillingham, II [The valley and the hill]
O the high valley, the little low hill,
And the cornfield over the sea,
The wind that rages and then lies still,
And the clouds that rest and flee!
O the gray island in the rainbow haze,
And the long thin spits of land,
The roughening pastures and the stony ways,
And the golden flash of the sand!
[O the red heather on the moss-wrought rock,
And the fir-tree stiff and straight,
The shaggy old sheep-dog barking at the flock,
And the rotten old five-barred gate!]
O the brown bracken, the blackberry bough,
The scent of the gorse in the air!
I shall love them ever as I love them now,
I shall weary in Heaven to be there!
A(RTHUR) C(HRISTOPHER) BENSON
(1862–1925)
I will try & write you […] a finale on the lines you indicate – though the metre is a hard one – if you could string together a few nonsense words just to show me how you would wish them to run, I would construct it, following the air closely.
A. C. BENSON: letter to Edward Elgar, who had requested the poet to write a poem to fit the Pomp and Circumstance Trio tune (Hereford and Worcester County Record Office)
The eldest son of E. W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, he became Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, encouraged Thomas Hardy at a crucial period in the novelist’s career and made a name for himself in the literary world by publishing a number of biographies and volumes of criticism. But it was ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ that ensured his fame, composed by Elgar because Clara Butt – not King Edward VII, as is often claimed – was so taken with the melody of the Trio section from Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 that she asked him ‘to write something like it for me’, after which Elgar replied: ‘You shall have that one my dear’ (undated letter at the Elgar birthplace). Benson was approached to provide the poem, the ‘Coronation ode’, the middle section of which has for many years been sung at the Last Night of the Proms. The premiere was to have been given at Covent Garden during Coronation Week, but the King succumbed to appendicitis and the concert took place in Sheffield a few months later in October 1902, when it was sung by Dame Clara Butt. For the piano version which followed later, Benson’s words were considerably rearranged. Elgar also arranged it for piano and cello as a ‘Duet for two nice people by another (nice) person, Op X’. Elgar later expressed dissatisfaction with Benson’s words and asked the poet to write new ones – which never caught on.1
The London premiere in October, under Henry Wood, which Elgar missed, was a huge success. Wood wrote in My Life of Music:
The people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again – with the same result; in fact, they refused to let me go on with the programme. After considerable delay, while the audience roared its applause, I went off and fetched Harry Dearth who was to sing Hiawatha’s Vision (Coleridge-Taylor); but they would not listen. Merely to restore order, I played the march a third time. And that, I may say, was the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore.
The phenomenal popularity of this music encouraged the publishers, Booseys, to look for a success to follow ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Elgar did his best to oblige, and set two new songs to poems by Benson: ‘The song’ (‘Speak, music’) and ‘In the dawn’ – the first of which turned out to be a masterpiece, the finest of Elgar’s ninety or so songs. Boosey paid twenty-five guineas for each of them and a royalty. Both songs appear in Benson’s The Professor (1900), a sequence of thirty-one poems that, like Stevenson’s Songs of Travel, Browning’s James Lee’s Wife and Meredith’s Modern Love, chart the disintegration of a relationship. Benson, however, has none of Meredith’s bitterness. The professor of the title is a scientist, as we learn from the fifth poem, ‘At the laboratory window’. He lives a life of emotional loneliness with ‘tubes and phials’ and ‘lancets keen and bright’. He eventually meets the woman of his dreams but the relationship does not prosper. There is a hint in ‘After the interview’ (16) that she took pity on him
, and ‘Perplexity’ (22) suggests that she remains a virgin. They share moments of epiphany, however, before they part, and in ‘The letter’ (29) he expresses the hope that she will one day marry and have children, and that he will be permitted to visit her happy family. Abandoned by her, he turns in ‘Amen’ (31) to religion. The two poems set by Elgar appear as numbers 14 (‘Song’) and 17 (‘In the dawn’). Elgar renamed the former ‘Speak, music’ – an apostrophe to music to supply the ‘rest’ that is so lacking in his life, now that Hope has fled. Three poems later, however, he has met the woman, and ‘In the dawn’ expresses his joy that her soul ‘Is knit with mine’, and also his fear that she will one day leave him.
Benson was a prolific writer. The Life of his father appeared in 1899, as did Fasti Etonenses, a history of Eton. The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1904) show his skill as a writer of short stories. His critical biographies include Rossetti (1904), Fitzgerald (1905) and Ruskin (1911). Among his books of essays, mention should be made of From a College Window (1906) and Escape (1915). Between 1897 and 1925 he kept a diary that ran to 180 manuscript volumes, a selection of which was published in 1926, edited by Percy Lubbock. Because of the highly personal nature of these diaries, they only became available for inspection in 1975, when David Newsome studied them prior to writing his biographical study of Benson, which was published in 1980 as On the Edge of Paradise. With the second Viscount Esher, Benson edited three volumes of Selections from the Correspondence of Queen Victoria (1907).