GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: Preface to The Autobiography of a Super-tramp (1908)
Born in Newport, the son of a poor Welsh inn-keeper, Davies worked as a casual labourer, before deciding to lead the life of a tramp. Sir John Squire gives a lapidary account of the life that Davies led as an adolescent and young man: ‘Mr. Davies was born in 1871 at Newport, Monmouthshire. He wandered, a young man, across the Atlantic. He set out with a companion for Klondyke, travelling as a stowaway on trains, missed his footing, and lost a leg.’ Davies describes the accident in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), for which G. B. Shaw wrote a preface. On his return to London, Davies lived in doss-houses at sixpence a night and worked at his poems and autobiography. Shaw greatly admired the young poet’s first volume of verse, The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems (1905), and described in his Preface to the Autobiography how Davies had tried to sell his poems on the street: ‘He did not sell a single copy, though he made a house-to-house visitation in the suburbs. Most of the people he called upon were poor. They looked at the poet in amazement when he offered them a printed sheet for threepence. One richer woman, with a servant, gave him a penny, but refused altogether to accept the poems in return. When he reached his doss-house again that evening, he burnt every copy.’ According to Shaw, Davies only began to write poems at the age of thirty-four. He was later awarded a Civil List pension and retired to the country, where, in the last thirty-four years of his life, he published thirty-six volumes, some of which brought him huge success and the respect of many an established poet, such as Edward Thomas. His best poems record his love of the natural world with a directness and simplicity of language that recall John Clare. Young Emma, published posthumously in 1980, describes his courtship of a much younger girl, whom he married in 1923. His Complete Poems appeared in 1963, with an introduction by Osbert Sitwell.
ARTHUR BLISS: Three Songs (1923/1923, rev. 1972)
Thunderstorms
My mind has thunderstorms,
That brood for heavy hours:
Until they rain me words,
My thoughts are drooping flowers
And sulking, silent birds.
Yet come, dark thunderstorms,
And brood your heavy hours;
For when you rain me words,
My thoughts are dancing flowers
And joyful singing birds.
This night
This night, as I sit here alone,
And brood on what is dead and gone,
The owl that’s in this Highgate Wood
Has found his fellow in my mood;
To every star, as it doth rise –
Oh-o-o! Oh-o-o! he shivering cries.
And, looking at the Moon this night,
There’s that dark shadow in her light.
Ah! Life and Death, my fairest one,
Thy lover is a skeleton!
‘And why is that?’ I question – ‘why?’
Oh-o-o! Oh-o-o! the owl doth cry.
Leisure
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep and cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
(Milford)
MICHAEL HEAD: from Songs of the Countryside (1929)
A great time
[Sweet Chance, that led my steps abroad] (1928)
Sweet Chance, that led my steps abroad,
Beyond the town, where wild flowers grow –
A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord,
How rich and great the times are now!
Know, all ye sheep
And cows, that keep
On staring that I stand so long
In grass that’s wet from heavy rain –
A rainbow and a cuckoo’s song
May never come together again;
May never come
This side the tomb.
Money [Money, O!] (1928)
When I had money, money, O!
I knew no joy till I went poor;
For many a false man as a friend
Came knocking all day at my door.
Then felt I like a child that holds
A trumpet that he must not blow
Because a man is dead; I dared
Not speak to let this false world know.
Much have I thought of life, and seen
How poor men’s hearts are ever light;
And how their wives do hum like bees
About their work from morn till night.
So, when I hear these poor ones laugh,
And see the rich ones coldly frown –
Poor men, think I, need not go up
So much as rich men should come down.
[When I had money, money, O!
My many friends proved all untrue;
But now I have no money, O!
My friends are real, though very few.]
SAMUEL BARBER
Love’s caution (1935/1994)
Tell them, when you are home again,
How warm the air was now;
How silent were the birds and leaves,
And of the moon’s full glow;
And how we saw afar
A falling star:
It was a tear of pure delight
Ran down the face of Heaven this happy night.
Our kisses are but love in flower,
Until that greater time
When, gathering strength, those flowers take wing,
And Love can reach his prime.
And now, my heart’s delight,
Good night, good night;
Give me the last sweet kiss –
But do not breathe at home one word of this!
Night wanderers (1935/1994)
They hear the bell of midnight toll,
And shiver in their flesh and soul;
They lie on hard, cold wood or stone,
Iron, and ache in every bone;
They hate the night: they see no eyes
Of loved ones in the starlit skies.
They see the cold, dark water near;
They dare not take long looks for fear
They’ll fall like those poor birds that see
A snake’s eyes staring at their tree.
Some of them laugh, half-mad; and some
All through the chilly night are dumb;
Like poor, weak infants some converse,
And cough like giants, deep and hoarse.
Beggar’s song (1936/1994)1
Good people keep their holy day,
They rest from labour on a Sunday;
But we keep holy every day,
And rest from Monday until Monday.
And yet the noblest work on earth
Is done when beggars do their part:
They work, dear ladies, on the soft
And tender feelings in your heart.
WALTER DE LA MARE
(1873–1956)
The poets from whom he seems to have learned most are the Elizabethan song-writers, Christina Rossetti and, I would rashly guess, Thomas Hardy. Like Christina Rossetti, he is a master of trisyllabic substitution and foot inversion; the reader’s eye is continually excited by rhythmical variations without ever losing a sense of underlying pattern. […] Like Hardy, he is a great inventor of stanzas and in command of every effect which can be obtained from contrasts between lines of different lengths, lines with masculine endings and lines with feminine endings, rhymed and unrhymed lines.
W. H. A
UDEN: Introduction to A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1963)
De la Mare was related through his mother’s family to Robert Browning. At the age of sixteen he started work as a clerk with the Anglo-American Oil Company, but it was not long before he was contributing poems and stories to journals and magazines. Songs of Childhood (1902), his first book, was published under the pseudonym of Walter Ramal. Henry Brocken, a novel (from which Armstrong Gibbs set ‘Lorelei’s song’), followed in 1904, Poems in 1906, Three Royal Monkeys in 1910 and The Listeners and Other Poems in 1912. It was, however, Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes (1913) that proved most popular with composers. Other volumes of verse include Motley and Other Poems (1918), Flora: A Book of Drawings (1919), Down-Adown-Derry (1922), The Veil and Other Poems (1921), Stuff and Nonsense (1927), Come Hither (1928), Poems for Children (1930), The Fleeting (1933), Tom Tiddler’s Ground (1932), Bells and Grass (1941), The Burning Glass (1945) and Winged Chariot (1951). Special mention should be made of his play, Crossings (1919), for which Cecil Armstrong Gibbs wrote a score that included some of his most successful songs. At the age of thirty-six, de la Mare was awarded a Civil List pension, which enabled him to retire to the country and become a full-time writer. He published some fifty volumes, including poetry, a play, short stories, essays, anthologies, novels, and critical works on Rupert Brooke, Lewis Carroll and Christina Rossetti. He was made a Companion of Honour at seventy-five, was awarded the Order of Merit at eighty and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.
According to Gooch and Thatcher (1976), there have been more settings of de la Mare poems than those of any other English poet. Unlike A. E. Housman, who was tone-deaf, de la Mare received a musical education at St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School and had a profound understanding of music that is surprisingly rare in poets. Of Bach’s ‘Have mercy, Lord, on me’, sung to a violin obbligato, he wrote: ‘I love it […] It seems to me to be a flawless revelation of the human heart and spirit.’ Herbert Howells, in a conversation with Christopher Palmer, described the poet as ‘an enchanting man, his gentleness unspoilt by false modesty, a natural, sympathetic friend to poets and composers’ – which explains, perhaps, why so many of the latter have been drawn to his poetry: Bantock, Benjamin, Berkeley, Bliss, Britten, Browne, Burrows, Bush, Carey, Davies, Finzi, Gibbs, Gurney, Head, O’Neill, Rawsthorne, Sykes, but especially Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (thirty songs) and Herbert Howells, who composed over thirty settings and also a passionate string quartet, Threnody for Walter de la Mare, on the poet’s death. Qualities that appealed to composers, apart from the relatively simple syntax, rhythmic variety and musicality of his verse, were his child-like perception of the world, his gentle melancholy and his interest in dreams.
Many of de la Mare’s poems were written with an audience of children in mind; indeed, his collected works contain a whole volume devoted to such verse. W. H. Auden, writing in his Introduction to A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1963), states that ‘as a revelation of the English Language, de la Mare’s poems for children are unrivalled’, and he goes on to make this telling observation:
There is a deplorable tendency in the United States, which I hope and pray has not spread to the United Kingdom, to think that books for children should use a very limited vocabulary, and that verses for them should be written in the simplest and most obvious metres. This is utter nonsense. The surest sign that a child has a feeling for language is that he talks like an affected adult and always uses a polysyllabic word when a monosyllabic one would do.
WILLIAM DENIS BROWNE
Arabia (1914/1919)1
Far are the shades of Arabia,
Where the Princes ride at noon,
’Mid the verdurous vales and thickets,
Under the ghost of the moon;
And so dark is that vaulted purple
Flowers in the forest rise
And toss into blossom ’gainst the phantom stars
Pale in the noonday skies.
Sweet is the music of Arabia
In my heart, when out of dreams
I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn
Descry her gliding streams;
Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
Ring loud with the grief and delight
Of the dim-silked, dark-haired Musicians
In the brooding silence of night.
They haunt me – her lutes and her forests;
No beauty on earth I see
But shadowed with that dream recalls
Her loveliness to me:
Still eyes look coldly upon me,
Cold voices whisper and say –
‘He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
They have stolen his wits away.’
HERBERT HOWELLS: Peacock Pie [Set I], Op. 33 (1919/1923)
1 Tired Tim
Poor tired Tim! It’s sad for him.
He lags the long bright morning through,
Ever so tired of nothing to do;
He moons and mopes the livelong day,
Nothing to think about, nothing to say;
Up to bed with his candle to creep,
Too tired to yawn, too tired to sleep:
Poor tired Tim! It’s sad for him.
2 Alas, alack!
[Alas, alack]
Ann, Ann!
Come! quick as you can!
There’s a fish that talks
In the frying-pan.
Out of the fat,
As clear as glass,
He put up his mouth
And moaned ‘Alas!’
Oh, most mournful,
‘Alas, alack!’
Then turned to his sizzling,
And sank him back.
3 Mrs. MacQueen
[Mrs. MacQueen, or The lollie-shop]
With glass like a bull’s-eye,
And shutters of green,
Down on the cobbles
Lives Mrs. MacQueen.
At six she rises;
At nine you see
Her candle shine out
In the linden tree;
And at half-past nine
Not a sound is nigh,
But the bright moon’s creeping
Across the sky;
Or a far dog baying;
Or a twittering bird
In its drowsy nest,
In the darkness stirred;
Or like the roar
Of a distant sea
A long-drawn S-s-sh!
In the linden tree.
4 The dunce
Why does he still keep ticking?
Why does his round white face
Stare at me over the books and ink,
And mock at my disgrace?
Why does that thrush call, ‘Dunce, dunce, dunce!’?
Why does that bluebottle buzz?
Why does the sun so silent shine? –
And what do I care if it does?
5 Full moon
One night as Dick lay fast asleep,
Into his drowsy eyes
A great still light began to creep
From out the silent skies.
It was the lovely moon’s, for when
He raised his dreamy head,
Her surge of silver filled the pane
And streamed across his bed.
So, for awhile, each gazed at each –
Dick and the solemn moon –
Till, climbing slowly on her way,
She vanished, and was gone.
6 Miss T.
It’s a very odd thing –
As odd as can be –
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.;
Porridge and apples,
Mince, muffins and mutton,
Jam, junket, jumbles –
Not a rap, not a button
It matters; the moment
They’re out of her plate,
Though shared by Miss Butcher
And sour Mr. Bate;
Tiny and ch
eerful,
And neat as can be,
Whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.
(Gibbs)
HERBERT HOWELLS: from Peacock Pie [Set II]
King David (1919/1923)1
King David was a sorrowful man:
No cause for his sorrow had he:
And he called for the music of a hundred harps,
To solace2 his melancholy.
They played till they all fell silent:
Played – and play sweet did they;
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 61