And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away.
III The withering of the boughs
I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:
‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,
I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,
For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.’
The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,
And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge1 of streams.
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
I know of the leafy paths that the witches take
Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,
And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake;
I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan2 kind
Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool
On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round
Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.
A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound
Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind
With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;
I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
IV He hears the cry of the sedge1
I wander by the edge
Of this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge:
Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round,
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and West,
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Folk Song Arrangements, Vol. I: British Isles (1943/1943)
Britten’s approach to folk song differed significantly from that of the doyen of English folk music collectors, Cecil Sharp, who had died in 1924. Whereas Sharp wished to interest children in the songs of their ancestors by arranging them to simple and regularly barred accompaniments, Britten’s aim was to create from folk songs a type of art song. His method, according to Peter Pears, for whom he first started to arrange folk songs when they gave concerts together in America during the war, was to take the tune as though he had written it himself and ‘think himself back as to how he would turn it into a song’. The melody of ‘Down by the salley gardens’ is ‘The maids of Mourne Shorne’ – see The Complete Collection of Irish Music, collected by George Petrie, edited by C. V. Stanford. Britten later made an arrangement for harp (recorded by Pears and Osian Ellis in 1976), a setting he soon transcribed for high voice and string orchestra. He also composed a version for voice and fuller orchestra in 1955.
Down by the salley1 gardens2
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
(Bullock, Clarke, Hughes, Ireland, Jeffreys, Plumstead, Shaw)
MICHAEL TIPPETT1
Byzantium
for soprano and orchestra (1988–90/1991)2
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’3 song
After great cathedral gong4;
A starlit or a moonlit dome5 disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth6
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough7,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin’s7 mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.8
GEORGE BENJAMIN
Long-legged fly
[Upon silence]
for mezzo-soprano and five viols (1990)
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post.
Our master Caesar is in the tent1
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream2
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt3
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
ERNEST DOWSON
(1867–1900)
I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at the Rhymers’, or through some chance meeting at Johnson’s [Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)]. I was indolent and procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to dine, or taking some other step towards better knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the autopsy after his death, was discovered never to have grown, except in the brain, after his fifteenth year, he was full of sexu
al desire. […] I began to hear now in some detail of the restaurant-keeper’s daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter, and of the weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a share of Dowson’s emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was said, but, drunk, desired whatever woman chance brought, clean or dirty.
W. B. YEATS: Autobiographies (1955)
Born at Belmont Hill in Kent, Dowson came from a wealthy, respectable family who owned a small dock in Limehouse. His father suffered from severe tuberculosis and died of an overdose of chloral hydrate; his mother, also a consumptive, hanged herself in February 1895. On his father’s death, he inherited a fortune which, like Baudelaire, he squandered. Having left Oxford without a degree, he entered the London society that gathered round Beardsley and Wilde. He contributed poems to the Yellow Book and The Savoy, frequented the Café Royal, the drawing rooms of the social and literary glitterati, and indulged his need for alcohol in the taverns of the capital. He joined the Rhymers’ Club, a group of poets that met in the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street to read poetry. Its members included Yeats, Ernest Rhys and Arthur Symonds, and they published two collections of verse in 1892 and 1894. Yeats reminisces about the Rhymers’ Club in his Autobiographies, and describes Dowson as ‘gentle, affectionate, drifting’. His father, because of delicate health, had spent much of his time in the South of France, and his love of the country rubbed off on his son. Dowson’s publisher gave him an allowance to live in France and provide translations of French poetry (his versions of Verlaine’s ‘Il pleure dans mon cœur’, ‘Colloque sentimental’, ‘Spleen’ and ‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit’ are particularly fine). It was during his wanderings in France that he met Guy de Maupassant and read Baudelaire. Towards the end of his life he spent an increasing amount of time in Paris and Brittany, before returning to England, where he died of tuberculosis, aged thirty-two.
His poetry is characterized by a world-weariness, exacerbated by his unrequited love for Adelaide Foltinowicz and the suicide in 1895 of his parents. Adelaide, the daughter of a Soho restaurant owner, was only eleven when Dowson met her; he courted her for two years and made her a proposal of marriage, but she rejected him, and married a waiter when she was nineteen. Dowson published two volumes of poetry, Verses (1896) and Decorations (1899), and two novels, A Comedy of Masks (1893) and Adrian Rome (1899), written in collaboration with Arthur Moore. His one-act verse play The Pierrot of the Minute was published in 1897, and Dilemmas, a collection of stories, appeared in 1895. His poetry, which shows great variety in rhythm and stanza form, was admired by Yeats, Wilde and Stefan George, and George published translations of three of Dowson’s poems (including ‘Serafita’) in a volume that also contained German versions of Rossetti, Swinburne, Jacobsen and Verhaeren. Margaret Mitchell greatly admired his ‘Cynara’, and from the opening line of its third stanza chose the phrase ‘gone with the wind’ as the title of her famous novel, because it suggested the ‘far away, faintly sad sound I wanted’. A biography of Dowson by Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine, was published in 2000.
FREDERICK DELIUS1
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae2 [Cynara]
for baritone and orchestra (1907, completed 1929/1931)
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
FREDERICK DELIUS: Songs of Sunset, for mezzo-soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra (1906–7/1911)
Moritura1
A song of the setting sun!
The sky in the west is red,
And the day is all but done:
While yonder up overhead,
All too soon,
There rises, so cold, the cynic moon.
A song of a winter day!
The wind of the north doth blow,
From a sky that’s chill and gray,
On fields where no crops now grow,
Fields long shorn
Of bearded barley and golden corn.
[A song of an old, old man!
His hairs are white and his gaze,
Long bleared in his visage wan,
With its weight of yesterdays,
Joylessly
He stands and mumbles and looks at me.]
A song of a faded flower!
’Twas plucked in the tender bud,
And fair and fresh for an hour,
In a lady’s hair it stood.
Now, ah, now,
Faded it lies in the dust and low.
Cease smiling, Dear
Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus Amore1
PROPERTIUS
Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad,
Here in the silence, under the wan moon;
Sweet are thine eyes, but how can I be glad,
Knowing they change so soon?
[For Love’s sake, Dear, be silent! Cover me
In the deep darkness of thy falling hair:
Fear is upon me and the memory
Of what is all men’s share.]
O could this moment be perpetuate!
Must we grow old, and leaden-eyed and gray,
And taste no more the wild and passionate
Love sorrows of to-day?
[Grown old, and faded, Sweet! and past desire,
Let memory die, lest there be too much ruth,
Remembering the old, extinguished fire
Of our divine, lost youth.]
O red pomegranate of thy perfect mouth!
My lips’ life-fruitage, might I taste and die
Here in thy garden, where the scented south
Wind chastens agony;
Reap death from thy live lips in one long kiss,
And look my last into thine eyes and rest:
What sweets had life to me sweeter than this
Swift dying on thy breast?
Or, if that may not be, for Love’s sake, Dear!
Keep silence still, and dream that we shall lie,
Red mouth to mouth, entwined, and always hear
The south wind’s melody,
Here in thy garden, through the singing boughs,
Beyond the reach of time and chance and change,
And bitter life and death, and broken vows,
That sadden and estrange.
Autumnal
Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
Seems little, dear! on days like these!
Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow
and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time’s deceit.
Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.
[Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
Beneath the drear November trees.]
(C. Scott)
O mors! Quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis1
Exceeding sorrow
Consumeth my sad heart!
Because to-morrow
We must depart,
Now is exceeding sorrow
All my part!
Give over playing,
Cast thy viol away:
Merely laying
Thine head my way:
Prithee, give over playing,
Grave or gay.
Be no word spoken;
Weep nothing: let a pale
Silence, unbroken
Silence prevail!
Prithee, be no word spoken,
Lest I fail!
Forget to-morrow!
Weep nothing: only lay
In silent sorrow
Thine head my way:
Let us forget to-morrow,
This one day!
Exile
By the sad waters of separation
Where we have wandered by divers ways,
I have but the shadow and imitation
Of the old memorial days.
In music I have no consolation,
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 59