The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 66
Now, O now, we hear no more
The villanelle and roundelay!
Yet we will kiss, sweetheart, before
We take sad leave at close of day.
Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything –
The year, the year is gathering.
(Goossens)
THE JOYCE BOOK (1933)
E. J. MOERAN
Tilly (c.1931)1
He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.
The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.
Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!
ARNOLD BAX
Watching the needleboats at San Sabba (c.1931)1
I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
No more, return no more!
O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return.
ALBERT ROUSSEL
A flower given to my daughter (c.1931)1
Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.
Rosefrail and fair – yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.
(Dallapiccola, Moeran)
HERBERT HUGHES
She weeps over Rahoon (c.1931)1
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,
Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.
Love, hear thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.
Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould
And muttering rain.
(Herbert, Moeran)
JOHN IRELAND
Tutto è sciolto (c.1931)1
A birdless heaven, seadusk, one lone star
Piercing the west,
As thou, fond heart, love’s time, so faint, so far,
Rememberest.
The clear young eyes’ soft look, the candid brow,
The fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk of the air.
Why then, remembering those shy
Sweet lures, repine
When the dear love she yielded with a sigh
Was all but thine?
ROGER SESSIONS
On the beach at Fontana (c.1931)1
Wind whines and whines the shingle,
The crazy pierstakes groan;
A senile sea numbers each single
Slimesilvered stone.
From whining wind and colder
Grey sea I wrap him warm
And touch his trembling fineboned shoulder
And boyish arm.
Around us fear, descending
Darkness of fear above
And in my heart how deep unending
Ache of love!
ARTHUR BLISS
Simples (c.1931)1
O bella bionda,
Sei come l’onda!
O cool sweet dew and radiance mild
The moon a web of silence weaves
In the still garden where a child
Gathers the simple salad leaves.
A moondew stars her hanging hair
And moonlight kisses her young brow
And, gathering, she sings an air:
Fair as the wave is, fair, art thou!
Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear
To shield me from her childish croon
And mine a shielded heart for her
Who gathers simples of the moon.
HERBERT HOWELLS
Flood (c.1931)
Goldbrown upon the sated flood
The rockvine clusters lift and sway.
Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.
A waste of waters ruthlessly
Sways and uplifts its weedy mane
Where brooding day stares down upon the sea
In dull disdain.
Uplift and sway, O golden vine,
Your clustered fruits to love’s full flood,1
Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine
Incertitude!
GEORGE ANTHEIL
Nightpiece (c.1931)1
Gaunt in gloom,
The pale stars their torches,
Enshrouded, wave.
Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume,
Arches on soaring arches,
Night’s sindark nave.
Seraphim,
The lost hosts awaken
To service till
In moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim,
Raised when she has and shaken
Her thurible.
And long and loud,
To night’s nave upsoaring,
A starknell tolls
As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,
Voidward from the adoring
Waste of souls.
(Reimann)
EDGARDO CARDUCCI
Alone (c.1931)
The moon’s greygolden meshes make
All night a veil,
The shorelamps in the sleeping lake
Laburnum tendrils trail.
The sly reeds whisper to the night
A name – her name –
And all my soul is a delight,
A swoon of shame.
EUGENE GOOSSENS: from Two songs, Op. 49
A memory of the players in a mirror at midnight (1930)1
They mouth love’s language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love’s breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat’s breath,
Harsh of tongue.
This grey that stares
Lies not, stark skin and bone.
Leave greasy lips their kissing. None
Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.
Dire hunger holds his hour.
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears.
Pluck and devour!
C. W. ORR
Bahnhofstrasse (c.1931)1
The eyes that mock me sign the way
Whereto I pass at eve of day,
Grey way whose violet signals are
The trysting and the twining star.
Ah star of evil! star of pain!
Highhearted youth comes not again
Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go.
BERNARD VAN DIEREN
A prayer (1930)1
Again!
Come, give, yield all your strength to me!
From far a low word breathes on the breaking brain
Its cruel calm, submission’s misery,
Gentling her awe as to a soul predestined.
Cease, silent love! My doom!
Blind me with your dark nearness, O have mercy, beloved enemy of my will!
I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread.
Draw from me still
My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,
Him who is, him who was!
Again!
Together, folded by the night, they lay on earth. I hear
From far her low word breathe on my breaking brain.
Come! I yield. Bend deeper upon me! I am here.
Subduer, do not leave me! Only joy, only anguish,
Take me, save me, soothe me, O spare me!
SAMUEL BARBER: Three Songs, Op. 10 (1935–6/1939)
1 Chamber Music XXXII
[Rain has fallen]
See above, under Moeran.
2 Chamber Music XXXIV
[Sleep now]1
Sleep now, O sleep now,
O you unquiet heart!
A voice crying ‘Sleep now’
Is heard in my heart.
The voice of the winter
Is heard at the door.
O sleep for the winter
Is crying ‘Sleep no more!’
My kiss will give peace now
And quiet to your heart –
Sleep on in peace now,
O you unquiet heart!
(Reutter, Szymanowski)
3 Chamber Music XXXVI
[I hear an army]
I hear an army charging upon the land
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees.
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
They cry unto the night their battlename:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
They come shaking in triumph their long green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
(Goossens, Herbert)
SAMUEL BARBER: Nuvoletta, Op. 25 (1947/1952)
from Finnegans Wake1
Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could. […] She was alone. All her nubied companions were asleeping with the squirrels. […] She tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her. She tossed her sfumastelliacinous hair like la princesse de la Petite Bretagne and she rounded her mignons arms like Mrs Cornwallis-West and she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus. But, sweet madonine, she might fair as well have carried her daisy’s worth to Florida. […]
Oh, how it was duusk! From Vallee Maraia to Grasyaplaina, dormimust echo! Ah dew! It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by three and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them. O! O! O! Par la pluie! […]
Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy, cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone.
SAMUEL BARBER: from Despite and Still, Op. 41/4 (1968/1969)
from Ulysses
[Solitary hotel]1
Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary.
What?
In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen’s hotel, Queen’s hotel Queen’s Ho …
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
(1884–1915)
The Parnassian School was a classical reaction against the perfervid sentimentality and extravagance of some French Romantics. The Romantics in France, as in England, had done their powerful work and infinitely widened the scope and enriched the language of poetry. It remained for the Parnassians to raise the technique of their art to a height which should enable them to express the subtlest ideas in powerful and simple verse. But the real meaning of the term Parnassian may be best understood from considering what is definitely not Parnassian. To be didactic like Wordsworth, to write dull poems of unwieldy length, to bury like Tennyson or Browning poetry of exquisite beauty in monstrous realms of vulgar, feeble, or obscure versifying, to overlay fine work with gross and irrelevant egoism like Victor Hugo, would be abhorrent, and rightly so, to members of this school. On the other hand, the finest work of many great English poets, especially Milton, Keats, Matthew Arnold, and Tennyson, is written in the same tradition as the work of the great French school: and one can but wish that the two latter poets had had something of a definite theory to guide them in self-criticism. Tennyson would never have published ‘Locksley Hall’ and Arnold might have refrained from spoiling his finest sonnets by astonishing cacophonies.
JAMES ELROY FLECKER: Preface to The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913).
He was baptized Herman Elroy Flecker, but changed his first name to James. Known as ‘Roy’ to his family, he was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where his father was headmaster, Uppingham School, Trinity College, Oxford, and Caius College, Cambridge, at which universities he studied oriental languages in preparation for a consular career. He held minor posts in Constantinople, Smyrna and Beirut, but was forced to take frequent leaves of absence because of poor health – tuberculosis had been diagnosed in 1910. He was treated at a number of sanatoria in Switzerland, and died in Davos on 3 January 1915. He was buried in Cheltenham at the foot of the Cotswolds, the granite cross on his grave bearing these words from one of his poems: ‘O Lord, restore his realm to the dreamer’. He published several volumes of poetry: The Bridge of Fire (1907), Thirty-Six Poems (1910), Forty-Two Poems (1911), The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) and The Old Ships (1915). His Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 1916. His prose works include The Grecians (1910), a dialogue on education, and an experimental novel, The King of Alsander (1914). He is best remembered for his verse play Hassan, which was produced after his death, in 1923, with music by Delius and choreography by Fokine. Although some of his verse was included in Georgian Poetry, he was most influenced by the French Parnassians and espoused their view that a poet’s purpose is not to teach but to aim at beauty of phrase and perfection of form. Some of his best poems are characterized by an intense exoticism and patriotism.
GERALD FINZI: from To a Poet (1965)
To a poet a thousand years hence (?1920s, rev. c.1940)1
I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.
But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?
How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind2
Said it three thousand years ago.
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To g
reet you. You will understand.
RUPERT BROOKE
(1887–1915)
He flung himself into the world […] as a wasp pounces into a cakeshop, Hotspur into the fighting.
WALTER DE LA MARE: Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination (1919)
One of three brothers (his father was a housemaster at Rugby School), Brooke grew up in a comfortable home that was dedicated to learning. He fell in love with poetry at the age of nine through a chance encounter with the works of Robert Browning, and by the time he entered Rugby School in 1901 was already a voracious reader of verse. He won the school poetry prize in 1905, and although he adopted the pose of a decadent aesthete, he also excelled at sport, playing in both the cricket XI and the rugby XV. Nearly six feet tall, with a mane of red-gold hair, he was strikingly handsome and popular with his contemporaries. At King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a scholar, he formed friendships with E. M. Forster, Frances Cornford and Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), and gained a second-class degree in the Cambridge Classical Tripos, after which he began a dissertation on Webster and the Elizabethan dramatists. Following a traumatic love affair with Katharine Cox, he sought release by travelling through France and Germany. On returning to England, he was elected to a Fellowship at King’s and, encouraged by Edward Marsh, met a number of poets in London, including Wilfrid Gibson and John Drinkwater. Having fallen in love with Cathleen Nesbitt, he sailed for America to ponder his future. The Westminster Gazette commissioned him to write a series of articles, and he sent back some dozen dispatches, and also dashed off a flurry of letters to his friends. From Lake George in Canada he wrote to Cathleen Nesbitt on 3 August 1913 a prophetic letter: ‘Today I’m 26 years old – and I’ve done so little. I’m very ashamed. By God, I am going to make things hum though – but that’s all so far away.’ By Christmas 1913 he had reached New Zealand, via Hawaii and Fiji, and by early 1914 he was relaxing in Tahiti, where he started a relationship with a girl called Taatamata.