One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!
(The Elephant’s Child)
5
I am the Most Wise Baviaan, saying in most wise tones,
‘Let us melt into the landscape – just us two by our lones.’
People have come – in a carriage – calling. But Mummy is there …
Yes, I can go if you take me – Nurse says she don’t care.
Let’s go up to the pig-styes and sit on the farmyard rails!
Let’s say things to the bunnies, and watch ’em skitter their tails!
Let’s – oh, anything, daddy, so long as it’s you and me,
And going truly exploring, and not being in till tea!
Here’s your boots (I’ve brought ’em), and here’s your cap and stick,
And here’s your pipe and tobacco. Oh, come along out of it – quick!
(How the Leopard Got Its Spots)
12
I’ve never sailed the Amazon,
I’ve never reached Brazil;
But the Don and Magdalena,
They can go there when they will!
Yes, weekly from Southampton,
Great steamers, white and gold,
Go rolling down to Rio
(Roll down – roll down to Rio!).
And I’d like to roll to Rio
Some day before I’m old!
I’ve never seen a Jaguar,
Nor yet an Armadill-
o dilloing in his armour,
And I s’pose I never will,
Unless I go to Rio
These wonders to behold –
Roll down – roll down to Rio –
Roll really down to Rio!
Oh, I’d love to roll to Rio
Some day before I’m old!
(The Beginning of the Armadilloes)
WALTER DAMROSCH1
Danny Deever2
‘What are the bugles blowin’ for?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘To turn you out, to turn you out,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
‘What makes you look so white, so white?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,
The Regiment’s in ’ollow square – they’re hangin’ him to-day;
They’ve taken of his buttons off an’ cut his stripes away,
An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.
‘What makes the rear-rank breathe so ’ard?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘It’s bitter cold, it’s bitter cold,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
‘What makes that front-rank man fall down?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘A touch o’ sun, a touch o’ sun,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
They are hangin’ Danny Deever, they are marchin’ of ’im round,
They ’ave ’alted Danny Deever by ’is coffin on the ground;
An’ ’e’ll swing in ’arf a minute for a sneakin’ shootin’ hound –
O they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’!
‘’Is cot was right-’and cot to mine,’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘’E’s sleepin’ out an’ far to-night,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
‘I’ve drunk ’is beer a score o’ times,’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘’E’s drinkin’ bitter beer alone,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
They are hangin’ Danny Deever, you must mark ’im to ’is place,
For ’e shot a comrade sleepin’ – you must look ’im in the face;
Nine ’undred of ’is country an’ the Regiment’s disgrace,
While they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.
‘What’s that so black agin the sun?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘It’s Danny fightin’ ’ard for life,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
‘What’s that that whimpers over’ead?’ said Files-on-Parade.
‘It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.
For they’ve done with Danny Deever, you can ’ear the quickstep play,
The Regiment’s in column, an’ they’re marchin’ us away;
Ho! the young recruits are shakin’, an’ they’ll want their beer to-day,
After hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’!
(Grainger)
PERCY GRAINGER: from The Jungle Book (1898–1947)1
The Inuit (1902)2
The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow –
They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go.
The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight:
They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their soul to the white.
The People of the Southern ice, they trade with the whaler’s crew;
Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.
But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man’s ken –
Their spears are made of the narwhal horn3, and they are the last of the Men!
W(ILLIAM) B(UTLER) YEATS
(1865–1939)
Perhaps the first impression was that of great personal distinction, and of a physical condition not robust. He was pale; he stooped somewhat; and as his eyes gave him much trouble then, he seemed to peer at me. His black hair was worn in a shock, very long. It came down to his brow and over his collar at the back. He had a characteristic way of tossing it back with a shake of the head. One saw at once that he was unlike anyone else in the world. The short-sighted eyes, peering through pince-nez from under the billow of hair, were full of fun and keen intelligence. The expression on his face, when not remote with speculation, was vivid with wit.
JOHN MASEFIELD: So Long to Learn: Chapters of an Autobiography (1952)
Yeats, unlike James Joyce, was not a talented musician: indeed he was tone-deaf (his own testimony) and employed a censor, whose task was to vet every musical setting of his verse before publication – which meant that Peter Warlock, for example, many of whose songs had been censored, set no more poetry by Yeats after 1922. Other composers, such as Bax, were also frightened off – the reason, perhaps, for the relative infrequency with which Yeats’s highly musical verse has been set. Yet Yeats was far from unmusical, as anyone who has heard his incantatory and inimitable recordings of his own verse will know. At the turn of the century he developed a technique of half speaking and half chanting poetry to the accompaniment of a psaltery. Arnold Dolmetsch even constructed an instrument for him – the intention was to establish a pitch for a group of words to be chanted by plucking a string of the psaltery. Recital tours were made, but the idea did not catch on. Nor did Yeats have any greater success with the music that he organized to accompany his plays. He worked indefatigably with the composers George Antheil and Walter Rummel, but felt that music should play a subsidiary role – the reason, perhaps, why the incidental music by Antheil and Rummel is now rarely heard. Bernard Shaw described the music to Evelyn Innes as ‘a nerve-destroying crooning like the maunderings of an idiot-banshee’.
As with Heinrich Heine, it is almost always Yeats’s early verse that has attracted composers – the melancholy collections, often romantically wistful, that reflected his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, the beautiful and passionate revolutionary. He first met her in January 1889, and later recalled: ‘I had never thought to see in a living woman so great a beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past.’ He proposed to her many times but was always refused – and after the final rebuttal he asked for her daughter Iseult’s hand – with the same result. In 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, which did not prevent him from writing lovelorn letters to Iseult on his honeymoon. The relationship with his wife, however, deepened, in no small measure because of her interest in automatic writing and clairvoyance. The terser and more difficult later poetry, beginning with The Green Hel
met and Other Poems (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), has attracted relatively few composers. Yeats’s own attitude to those who embraced his earlier, more romantic style, is clear from ‘A coat’, a poem he included in Responsibilities:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
Or as he put it in ‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth’ from Autobiographies, written shortly after ‘A coat’: ‘When I had finished The Wanderings of Oisin, dissatisfied with its yellow and its dull green, with all that overcharged colour inherited from the romantic movement, I deliberately reshaped my style, deliberately sought out an impression as of cold light and tumbling clouds.’
The Curlew – Warlock’s music is perhaps the best-known setting of Yeats’s poetry – is a work of two distinct themes. Firstly, the trauma of unrequited and tormented love. Caught between two beautiful women – the nationalistic agitator Maud Gonne and Olivia Shakespear, who was unhappily married to an elderly solicitor, with a daughter who later married Ezra Pound – Yeats expresses his anguish in these searing poems: see the notes to ‘He reproves the curlew’, ‘The lover mourns for the loss of love’ and ‘He hears the cry of the sedge’. The other theme, no less important, is the world of Irish myth. Between The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Wind among the Reeds (1899), Yeats had written The Celtic Twilight (1893), a collection of essays, meditations and stories that did much to revive interest in the literature and culture of the Celtic peoples, and also the Irish language. Since the famine of the middle of the nineteenth century, Anglicization in Ireland had proceeded apace – which eventually gave rise to Irish political nationalism. What Yeats is attempting to achieve in much of the poetry of The Wind among the Reeds, from which three of the Curlew poems are taken, is to hymn and celebrate the Celtic world (landscape, gods, magic, etc.) in much the same way as the Grimm brothers, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, had sought in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–14), the Deutsche Sagen (1816–18) and Deutsche Mythologie (1835) to revive interest in German folklore, folk song, fairy tale and history.
THOMAS DUNHILL
He thinks of those who have spoken evil of his beloved
[Half close your eyelids] (1900)1
Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,
And dream about the great and their pride;
They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children’s children shall say they have lied.
He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
[The cloths of heaven] (1916)
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
(Clarke, Gurney, Harvey, Heininen, Warlock)
IVOR GURNEY
The folly of being comforted (1917/1938)1
One that is ever kind2 said yesterday:
‘Your well-belovèd’s3 hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise4
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.’
Heart cries, ‘No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.’
O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.
MURIEL HERBERT
Born in Sheffield, Muriel Herbert grew up in Liverpool, where her mother was much involved with the church choir. Her eldest brother, Percy, a good musician, encouraged her to play the piano and sing, and she was soon writing down her own songs. Her father died in 1909, and the family experienced dire poverty. A Liverpool Post journalist, Hugh Farrie, hoped to make her into a concert pianist, but she was primarily interested in composition, and began to study the songs of Debussy, Ravel and Richard Strauss. By the time she was sixteen, she had completed settings of Herrick, Blake, Christina Rossetti, Byron, Browning, Bridges and Swinburne. In 1917 she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where her teacher was Charles Stanford. She then taught for a while at Wycombe Abbey School for girls, had her voice trained and gave a few recitals. In the early twenties she met Roger Quilter, with whom she fell unrequitedly in love and to whom she dedicated her setting of Alice Meynell’s ‘Renouncement’. Quilter recommended her songs to Augener, who published five of them in 1922, and she was further encouraged by John Barbirolli, who included two of her violin and piano pieces in a concert that took place in the 1920s. In 1925 she married Émile Delavenay, a French academic, and during her honeymoon in Paris was introduced to James Joyce, who greatly admired her settings of his poems. ‘The music is much too good for the words,’ he said after Herbert had sung to him ‘I hear an army charging’ and ‘Lean out of the window’. He gave her inscribed copies of Chamber Music and Pomes Pennyeach, and permission to publish her settings, two of which have recently been published by BiblioFox Music Publishing (2014). Yeats, always loath to have his poems set, allowed her to publish ‘The lake isle of Innisfree’, one of her most successful songs. Clare Tomalin, Herbert’s daughter, recalls that this only happened after Thomas McGreevy, a friend of Muriel, her husband and Yeats, had written the poet a letter telling him he should! Her manuscripts are in the music archives of the British Library. Thirty-six of her increasingly performed songs have been recorded on a Linn Records CD with Ailish Tynan, James Gilchrist and David Owen Norris.
The lake isle of Innisfree (1928)1
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow2,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
(Griffes, Gurney, Lehmann, Peel)
FRANK BRIDGE
When you are old (1919/1920)1
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
[And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a
crowd of stars.]
(Bullock, Gurney)
PETER WARLOCK: The Curlew, for tenor, flute, cor anglais and string quartet (1915–20; rev. 1922/1924)
Warlock, not Yeats, supplied the title. The first version of The Curlew, premiered in October 1920, comprised five songs: ‘He reproves the Curlew’, ‘The lover mourns for the loss of love’, ‘The Cloths of Heaven’, ‘Wine comes in at the mouth’ and ‘He hears the cry of the sedge’. For the second version, performed by Philip Wilson in November 1922, Warlock replaced ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ and ‘Wine comes in at the mouth’ with a new song, ‘The withering of the boughs’. Three of the poems selected by Warlock for the definitive version of The Curlew come from Yeats’s early The Wind among the Reeds (1899), which also includes ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’; ‘The withering of the boughs’ is from In the Seven Woods (1904). Warlock set some nine poems by Yeats, and was initially charmed by the poet, writing to Cecil Gray: ‘A few nights ago I met W. B. Yeats and his wife […] He talked for several hours about the moon, and the talk was as illuminating and beautiful as the moon of the fourteenth night itself.’ But he later fell foul of the poet over the question of the latter’s musical censorship.
I He reproves the Curlew1
O curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the water in the West;
Because your crying brings to mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.
II The lover mourns for the loss of love
Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend1
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 58