The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 65
IVOR GURNEY: Lights Out (1918–25/1926)1
The penny whistle (1918)2
The new moon hangs like an ivory bugle
In the naked frosty blue;
And the ghylls3 of the forest, already blackened
By Winter, are blackened anew.
The brooks that cut up and increase the forest,
As if they had never known
The sun, are roaring with black hollow voices
Betwixt rage and a moan.
But still the caravan-hut by the hollies
Like a kingfisher gleams between:
Round the mossed old hearths of the charcoal-burners4
First primroses ask to be seen.
The charcoal-burners are black, but their linen
Blows white on the line;
And white the letter the girl is reading
Under that crescent fine;
And her brother who hides apart in a thicket,
Slowly and surely playing
On a whistle an old nursery melody,
Says far more than I am saying.
Digging
[Scents] (1920)1
Today I think
Only with scents, – scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot’s seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed2,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke’s smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
Bright clouds (1920)1
Bright clouds of may
Shade half the pond.
Beyond,
All but one bay
Of emerald
Tall reeds
Like criss-cross bayonets2
Where a bird once called,
Lies bright as the sun.
No one heeds.
The light wind frets
And drifts the scum
Of may-blossom.
Till the moorhen calls
Again
Naught’s to be done
By birds or men.
Still the may falls.
Lights out (1919/1924)1
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
[Many a road and track
That since the dawn’s first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.]
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends, in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.
[The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.]
(Holloway)
Will you come? (1922)1
Will you come?
Will you come?
Will you ride
So late
At my side?
O, will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come
If the night
Has a moon,
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
If the noon
Gave light,
Not the moon?
Beautiful, would you come?
Would you have come?
Would you have come
Without scorning,
Had it been
Still morning?
Beloved, would you have come?
If you come
Haste and come.
Owls have cried;
It grows dark
To ride.
Beloved, beautiful, come.
(Holloway)
The trumpet (1925)1
Rise up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Rise up and scatter
The dew that covers
The print of last night’s lovers –
Scatter it, scatter it!
While you are listening
To the clear horn,
Forget, men, everything
On this earth new-born,
Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night:
Up with the light,
To the old wars;
Arise, arise!
IVOR GURNEY
Snow (1921/1952)1
In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying: ‘Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast!’
And still it fell through that dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.
COLIN MATTHEWS
Out in the dark (2008/2008)1
Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow2 fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.
Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when the lamp goes3, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;
And star and I and wind and deer,
Are in the dark together, – near,
Yet far, – and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.
How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.
(Gurney, Holloway)
JAMES JOYCE
(1882–1941)
The poems in Chamber Music have all that a musician looks for in a poet’s arrangement of words – syllables that can be articulated, range of expression within little compass, situation, contrast; and, above all, the charm that is in a spontaneous rendering of some stirring mood – a charm which, being akin to melody, musicians readily feel.
PADRAIG COLUM: ‘James Joyce as Poet’, in The Joyce Book (1933)
James Joyce, though celebrated for prose works such as Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), began and ended his literary career with poetry: at the age of nine he wrote a poem (only a fragment survives) in honour of Charles Stewart Parnell, and his final poetic achievement was the tribute to Anna Livia Plurabelle that closes Finnegans Wake. For his earliest volume of verse, Joyce gathered in the mid-1890s many of his schoolboy pieces, called the collection Moods, and later incorporated some of the poems into his next volume, Shine and Dark (c.1900), t
he title used by Aribert Reimann for his cycle for baritone and piano (left hand), composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
Like Milton, Joyce suffered from poor eyesight throughout his life, as we read in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which records the humiliation he felt when he broke his glasses and was unable to do his lessons. He possessed a fine tenor voice, and his knowledge of Italian opera and opera singers was legendary. Many composers have been drawn to Joyce’s verse, attracted by his use of repetition, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia and a penchant for open vowels – as we see in his best-known collection, Chamber Music (1907), which comprises thirty-six poems that chart, obliquely, the development of a relationship in a manner that harks back to Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, Müller’s Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise, and Stefan George’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. And just as these poems inspired wonderful music by Schumann, Schubert and Schoenberg, so James’s verse has proved a catalyst for composers such as Barber, Bax, Bliss, Bridge, van Dieren, Head, Muriel Herbert, Howells, Ireland, Moeran, Palmer, Reimann, Reutter, Roussel, Warlock and many others. The poems deal with the poet’s love for a young woman, his rising passion, his seduction of her (‘Lean out of the window,/Goldenhair’), the fading of desire and, eventually, loss. Only one of the poems, the final ‘I hear an army charging upon the land’, depicts any anguish, and nor do they linger much on the beloved’s beauty. The poems are highly stylized and the language throughout is surprisingly unadventurous, with a predominance of adjectives such as ‘sweet’ and ‘soft’, with musical imagery that is reminiscent of Elizabethan poems of courtly love – Joyce had a deep love of Elizabethan music.
Yeats noted that the poems of Chamber Music read as the work of ‘a young man who is practising his instrument, taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops’, and Joyce later reacted violently against the work, calling it a ‘young man’s book’. His enthusiasm for the volume had waned as early as 1906, and it was his brother Stanislaus who was chiefly responsible for the order of the thirty-six poems, expressing the hope that it would ‘suggest a closed episode of youth and love’. Joyce gave no titles to his Chamber Music poems – composers chose their own. The poems were published in 1907, thanks to the enthusiasm of Arthur Symonds, and though the volume earned Joyce no royalties, it gained him a place, alongside Eliot and Pound, in the Imagist Anthology. ‘Words for Music, Perhaps’, the title that Yeats gave for some of his own poems, is also an apt description of Joyce’s Chamber Music.
The prose poems of Giacomo Joyce, written in Trieste at the time when he was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and beginning Ulysses, could not be more different, and reflect Joyce’s erotic feelings for a girl pupil to whom he was teaching English in Trieste. Anthony Burgess called Giacomo Joyce an ‘essay in private onanism’. Gone are the gallant, gentle gestures of Chamber Music, and instead we experience a sensuality summed up by a single paragraph: ‘Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost! – Nora! –’ There is no evidence that Joyce ever wished to publish this erotic journal, and the manuscript, saved from oblivion by his brother Stanislaus, was finally published by Faber and Faber in 1968 in an edition by Richard Ellmann.
The thirteen poems of Pomes Penyeach appeared in 1927 and display a sharper tone and more adventurous sense of rhythm than the earlier Chamber Music. They were written in Trieste between 1913 and 1915 at a time of emotional turmoil, as we see in ‘She weeps over Rahoon’. It was not long before the idea of The Joyce Book (1933) was born. Each of the collection’s poems was to be set to music by a different composer. Moeran, Bax, Roussel, Herbert Hughes, Ireland, Roger Sessions, Bliss, Howells, George Antheil, Edgardo Carducci, Goossens, C. W. Orr and van Dieren were the composers involved – Holst, Lambert, Walton and Warlock were invited but failed to contribute. Herbert Hughes, who co-ordinated the tribute to Joyce, explained in the Introduction to The Joyce Book that the idea of a collaborative song book arose during a conversation with Arthur Bliss in Paris. He wrote that ‘the subjective association of chamber music – that is, of intimate music – with the poetry of Joyce was to us like the association of wind and wave, of light and heat’. The Joyce Book also contained a portrait by Augustus John, an essay by Padraic Colum and an appreciation by Arthur Symons.
FRANK BRIDGE
Chamber Music V
[Goldenhair] (1925/1925)
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I heard you singing
A merry air.
My book is closed;
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.
I have left my book:
I have left my room:
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom,
Singing and singing
A merry air.
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.
(Hart, Head, Herbert, Reutter, Szymanowski)
E. J. MOERAN: Seven Poems of James Joyce (1929/1930)
Though Moeran selects a mere seven of the thirty-six poems from Chamber Music, he does not alter the order of the poems, and retains the outline of a love affair that burgeons in the first five songs, falters in the sixth and fades in the seventh.
Chamber Music I
[Strings in the earth and air]
Strings in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.
There’s music along the river
For Love wanders there,
Pale flowers on his mantle,
Dark leaves on his hair.
All softly playing,
With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
Upon an instrument.
(Berio, Burrows, Reutter)
Chamber Music VIII
[The merry greenwood]
Who goes amid the green wood
With springtide all adorning her?
Who goes amid the merry green wood
To make it merrier?
Who passes in the sunlight
By ways that know the light footfall?
Who passes in the sweet sunlight
With mien so virginal?
The ways of all the woodland
Gleam with a soft and golden fire –
For whom does all the sunny woodland
Carry so brave attire?
O, it is for my true love
The woods their rich apparel wear –
O, it is for my own true love,
That is so young and fair.
Chamber Music X
[Bright cap]
Bright cap and streamers,
He sings in the hollow:
Come follow, come follow,
All you that love.
Leave dreams to the dreamers
That will not after,
That song and laughter
Do nothing move.
With ribbons streaming
He sings the bolder;
In troop at his shoulder
The wild bees hum.
And the time of dreaming
Dreams is over –
As lover to lover,
Sweetheart, I come.
Chamber Music XVI
[The pleasant valley]
O cool is the valley now
And there, love, will we go
For many a choir is singing now
Where Love did sometime go.
And hear you not the thrushes calling,
Calling us away?
O cool and pleasant is the valley
And there, love, will we stay.
(Goossens)
Chamber Music XXXI
[Donnycarney]1
O, it was out by Donnycarney
When the bat fle
w from tree to tree
My love and I did walk together
And sweet were the words she said to me.
Along with us the summer wind
Went murmuring – O, happily! –
But softer than the breath of summer
Was the kiss she gave to me.
Chamber Music XXXII
[Rain has fallen]
Rain has fallen all the day
O come among the laden trees
The leaves lie thick upon the way
Of memories.
Staying a little by the way
Of memories shall we depart.
Come, my beloved, where I may
Speak to your heart.
(Barber)
Chamber Music XXXIII
[Now, O now, in this brown land]
Now, O now, in this brown land
Where Love did so sweet music make
We two shall wander, hand in hand,
Forbearing for old friendship’ sake
Nor grieve because our love was gay
Which now is ended in this way.
A rogue in red and yellow dress
Is knocking, knocking at the tree
And all around our loneliness
The wind is whistling merrily.
The leaves – they do not sigh at all
When the year takes them in the fall.