EDWARD ELGAR: from Coronation ode
[Land of hope and glory]
Op. 44, for SATB, chorus, orchestra (1901–2; rev. 1911)1
Solo
Land of hope and glory, Mother of the free,
How may we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Truth and Right and Freedom, each a holy gem,
Stars of solemn brightness, weave thy diadem.
Chorus
Tho’ thy way be darkened, still in splendour drest,
As the star that trembles o’er the liquid West.
Throned amid the billows, throned inviolate,
Thou hast reigned victorious, thou hast smiled at fate.
Soloists and Chorus
Land of hope and glory, Fortress of the free,
How may we extol thee, praise thee, honour thee?
Hark, a mighty nation maketh glad reply;
Lo, our lips are thankful, lo, our hearts are high!
Hearts in hope uplifted, loyal lips that sing:
Strong in faith and freedom, we have crowned our King!
The song
[Speak, music] (1901/1902)
Speak, speak, music, and bring to me
Fancies too fleet for me,
Sweetness too sweet for me,
Wake, wake, voices, and sing to me,
Sing to me tenderly; bid me rest.
Rest, Rest! ah, I am fain of it!
Die, Hope! small was my gain of it!
Song, take thy parable,
Whisper that all is well,
Say that there tarrieth
Something more true than death,
Waiting to smile for me; bright and blest.
Thrill, string: echo and play for me
All that the poet, the priest cannot say for me;
Soar, voice, heavenwards, and pray for me,
Wondering, wandering; bid me rest.
In the dawn (1901/1901)
Some souls have quickened, eye to eye,
And heart to heart, and hand in hand;
The swift fire leaps, and instantly
They understand.
Henceforth they can be cold no more;
Woes there may be, – ay, tears and blood,
But not the numbness, as before
They understood.
Henceforth, he saith, though ages roll
Across wild wastes of sand and brine,
Whate’er betide, one human soul
Is knit with mine.
Whatever joy be dearly bought,
Whatever hope my bosom stirs,
The straitest cell of secret thought
Is wholly hers.
Ay, were I parted, life would be
A helpless, heartless flight along
Blind tracks in vales of misery
And sloughs of wrong.
Nay, God forgive me! Life would roll
Like some dim moon through cloudy bars;
But to have loved her sets my soul
Among the stars.
SIR HENRY NEWBOLT
(1862–1938)
‘You have said many wise and true and beautiful things in rhyme. Yours is patriotism of the fine sort – patriotism that lays burdens on a man, and not the patriotism that takes burdens off.’
W. B. YEATS (1902)
Barrister and man of letters, Newbolt is now chiefly remembered for his nautical ballads – ‘Drake’s drum’ appeared in Admirals All and Other Verses (1897), published on 21 October, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. The volume was an instantaneous success and launched Newbolt’s career. Four more editions appeared within a fortnight. The songs were sung and recited across Britain and the Empire, schoolchildren learned them by heart, MPs quoted them in the House of Commons and bishops referred to them in the pulpit. The patriotic nature of these poems continued the tradition started by Henley’s Lyra Heroica (1891) and Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). As Quiller-Couch observed, the poems exuded a Roman stoicism and a sense of service suffused with Christianity – the sort of values promulgated in the British public schools of the time. The rather sentimental way in which Newbolt expressed such themes in poems like ‘Vitaï Lampada’, with its refrain of ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’, is now hardly acceptable to modern sensibilities, yet his ability to write skilfully crafted poetry drew approbation from no lesser figures than Hardy, Bridges, Yeats and Sassoon. Newbolt’s ambition to write a new sort of poetry, which might reflect his private rather than public spirit, foundered. What he was trying to do is evident from two of the five poems (‘The linnet’s nest’ and ‘The nightjar’) that he included in the anthology New Paths on Helicon (1927), which published verse by thirty-eight different poets, with a critical commentary on each. While editor of the Monthly Review, from 1900 to 1904, he introduced the reading public to the work of Walter de la Mare. He was knighted in 1915 and made a CH in 1922. His autobiography, My World as in My Time, appeared in 1932.
Other composers who have set Newbolt’s verse include Baines, Bantock, Burrows, Davies, Fould, Ireland and Parry.
CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD: from Songs of the Sea, Op. 91, for baritone, optional male chorus and orchestra (1904/1904)
Drake’s drum1
Drake he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,2
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe3.
Yarnder lumes the Island4, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’,
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.
Drake he was a Devon man, an’ rüled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Rovin’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
‘Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons5 sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.’
Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin arl the time of Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’
They shall find him ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago.
(Bantock, Coleridge-Taylor)
The Old Superb1
The wind was rising easterly, the morning sky was blue,
The Straits before us opened wide and free;
We looked towards the Admiral, where high the Peter flew,
And all our hearts were dancing like the sea.
‘The French are gone to Martinique with four-and-twenty sail!
The Old Superb is old and foul and slow,
But the French are gone to Martinique, and Nelson’s on the trail,
And where he goes the Old Superb must go!’
So Westward ho! for Trinidad and Eastward ho! for Spain,
And ‘Ship ahoy!’ a hundred times a day;
Round the world if need be, and round the world again,
With a lame duck lagging all the way!
The Old Superb was barnacled and green as grass below,
Her sticks2 were only fit for stirring grog;
The pride of all her midshipmen was silent long ago,
And long ago they ceased to heave the log.
Four year out from home she was, and ne’er a week in port,
And nothing save the guns aboard her bright;
But Captain Keats3 he knew the game, and swore to share
the sport,
For he never yet came in too late to fight.
So Westward ho! for Trinidad and Eastward ho! for Spain,
And ‘Ship ahoy!’ a hundred times a day;
Round the world if need be, and round the world again,
With a lame duck lagging all the way!
‘Now up, my lads!’ the Captain cried, ‘for sure the case were hard
If longest out were first to fall behind;
Aloft, aloft with studding sails4, and lash them on the yard,
For night and day the Trades are driving blind!’
So all day long and all day long behind the fleet we crept,
And how we fretted none but Nelson guessed;
But every night the Old Superb she sailed when others slept,
Till we ran the French to earth with all the rest!
Oh, ’twas Westward ho! for Trinidad and Eastward ho! for Spain,
And ‘Ship ahoy!’ a hundred times a day;
Round the world if need be, and round the world again,
With a lame duck lagging all the way!
HERBERT HOWELLS
Gavotte (1919/1927)
(Old French)
Memories long in music sleeping,
No more sleeping,
No more dumb;
Delicate phantoms softly creeping
Softly back from the old-world come.
Faintest odours around them straying,
Suddenly straying
In chambers dim;
Whispering silks in order swaying,
Glimmering gems on shoulders slim:
Courage advancing strong and tender,
Grace untender
Fanning desire;
Suppliant conquest, proud surrender,
Courtesy cold of hearts on fire –
Willowy billowy now they’re bending,
Low they’re bending
Down-dropt eyes;
Stately measure and stately ending,
Music sobbing, and a dream that dies.
RUDYARD KIPLING
(1865–1936)
There are several reasons for our not knowing Kipling’s poems so well as we think we do. When a man is primarily known as a writer of prose fiction we are inclined – and usually, I think, justly – to regard his verse as a by-product. I am, I confess, always doubtful whether any man can so divide himself as to be able to make the most of two such very different forms of expression as poetry and imaginative prose. I am willing to pay due respect, for instance, to the poetry of George Meredith, of Thomas Hardy, of D. H. Lawrence as part of their œuvre, without conceding that it is as good as it might have been [sic!] had they chosen to dedicate their whole lives to that form of art. If I make an exception in the case of Kipling, it is not because I think he succeeded in making the division successfully, but because I think that, for reasons which it will be partly the purpose of this essay to put forward, his verse and his prose are inseparable; that we must finally judge him, not separately as a poet and as a writer of prose fiction, but as the inventor of a mixed form.
T. S. ELIOT: from A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1941)
Kipling was born in India, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, author and illustrator of Beast and Man in India (1891), and Alice Kipling, the sister-in-law of Burne-Jones. After an unhappy childhood in England (cf. the short story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’), he attended the United Services College, Westward Ho!, and then worked from 1882 to 1889 as a journalist in India, where many of his early poems and stories first appeared in local newspapers. He came to London in 1889; following the publication of many of his most famous Barrack-Room Ballads in Henley’s Scots Observer, he became a celebrity overnight. After a spell in Vermont, America (he had married Caroline Balestier, sister of his American agent), he returned to England, lived in Rottingdean for five years, then settled during 1902 in Sussex at ‘Bateman’s’, the country house now owned by the National Trust. He visited South Africa during the Boer War, experiencing warfare at first hand. The death of his 18-year-old son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915 left an indelible mark on the poet, who expressed his grief in ‘My boy Jack’, one of his most moving poems. As his reputation grew (he was widely regarded as the unofficial poet laureate), he was offered many honours and became the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. Though greatly admired by T. S. Eliot, who published A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, James and Yeats, Kipling has never quite shaken off the charge of jingoism by anti-imperialists and others, although such later stories as ‘Mary Postgate’, ‘The Gardener’, ‘The Wish House’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ have nothing to do with Empire. Perhaps his greatest success were the poems and tales he wrote for children.
The Just So Stories are a case in point. There is an eyewitness account by his cousin of the gestation of these delightful works: ‘The Just So Stories’, she writes, ‘are a poor thing in print compared with the fun of hearing them told in Cousin Ruddy’s deep unhesitating voice. There was an inimitable cadence, an emphasis of certain words, an exaggeration of certain phrases, a kind of intoning here and there which made his telling unforgettable.’ And Kipling’s wife tells us in her diaries that her husband would ask her to find a hymn tune, whereupon he would drum it out on his fingers, hum it over until he found the words to match. Rhythm was a key, as T. S. Eliot remarked in a discussion of ‘Danny Deever’, printed in his Introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse:
One of the most interesting exercises in the combination of heavy beat and variation of pace is found in ‘Danny Deever’, a poem which is technically (as well as in content) remarkable. The regular recurrence of the same end-words, which gain immensely by imperfect rhyme (parade and said) gives the feeling of marching feet and the movement of men in disciplined formation – in a unity of movement which enhances the horror of the occasion and the sickness which seizes the men as individuals; and the slightly quickened pace of the final lines marks the change in movement and in music.
EDWARD GERMAN: from The Just So Song Book (1903)
This collection of twelve poems from Kipling’s Just So Stories was composed by Sir Edward German in 1903, one year after the stories had been chosen as the ‘Children’s Book of the Year’. Later in his life, German agreed to have the work arranged for full chorus and orchestra – and this was eventually completed by Dr Gordon Jacob in 1947.
1
When the cabin port-holes are dark and green
Because of the seas outside;
When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between)
And the steward falls into the soup-tureen,
And the trunks begin to slide;
When Nursey lies on the floor in a heap,
And Mummy tells you to let her sleep,
And you aren’t waked or washed or dressed,
Why, then you will know (if you haven’t guessed)
You’re ‘Fifty North and Forty West!’
(How the Whale Got Its Throat)
2
The Camel’s hump is an ugly lump
Which well you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do.
Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we haven’t enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump –
Cameelious hump –
The hump that is black and blue!
We climb out of bed with a frouzly head
And a snarly-yarly voice.
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl
At our bath and our boots and our toys;
And there ought to be a corner for me
(And I know there is one for you)
When we get the hump –
Cameelious hump –
The hump that is black and blue!
The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire;
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
&n
bsp; And dig till you gently perspire;
And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump –
The horrible hump –
The hump that is black and blue!
I get it as well as you-oo-oo –
If I haven’t enough to do-oo-oo!
We all get hump –
Cameelious hump –
Kiddies and grown-ups too!
(How the Camel Got Its Hump)
4
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.
I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views.
I know a person small –
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends ’em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes –
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 57