He returned to England in June 1914. Commissioned into the Royal Naval Division, he experienced his first taste of war in an abortive expedition to Antwerp, which he described with vivid realism to Cathleen Nesbitt in a letter dated 17 October 1914. It was while on leave in December that Brooke wrote the five ‘War Sonnets’. Although they were ecstatically reviewed when they first appeared in 1915, Brooke himself said of them: ‘God, they’re in the rough, these five camp-children – 4 and 5 [‘The dead’ (‘These hearts were woven of human joys and cares’) and ‘The soldier’] are good enough, and there are phrases in the rest.’ After their publication in New Numbers, Brooke was sent to the Dardanelles but died en route of blood poisoning, caused by an infected bite on his lip on board the Grantully Castle off Gallipoli, and was buried on Skyros. An account of the burial was recorded by Brooke’s friend, the composer William Denis Browne, who was on board the same ship and died at Gallipoli on 4 June.
Inspired by patriotic hysteria, Dean Inge quoted Brooke’s ‘If I should die’ in his Easter sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1915; and Winston Churchill penned the following valediction that appeared in The Times:
The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.
Brooke’s reputation soared with the posthumous publication of 1914 and Other Poems (1915): it has been estimated that this volume and his Collected Poems sold 300,000 copies over the next decade. Today, however, the bitter, stark, realistic verse of poets such as Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon is generally preferred by critics and readers. Brooke is criticized in some quarters for not responding to the horrors of war – unfairly, since had he lived to experience the trenches of the Western Front, he would almost certainly have written as realistically as Wilfred Owen. The letter to Cathleen Nesbitt mentioned above contains descriptions of war that are just as gory as those by Sassoon and Owen in their poems. And it is often conveniently forgotten that in 1914 (a year before Brooke’s death), Owen had written ‘The women and the slain’, which contain these Brooke-like lines:
O meet it is and passing sweet
To live in peace with others,
But sweeter still and far more meet,
To die in war for brothers.
JOHN IRELAND: from Two Songs
The soldier (1917/1917)
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field1
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Song
[Spring sorrow] (1918/1918)
All suddenly the wind comes soft,
And Spring is here again;
And the hawthorn quickens with buds of green,
And my heart with buds of pain.
My heart all Winter lay so numb,
The earth so dead and frore,
That I never thought the Spring would come,
Or my heart wake any more.
But Winter’s broken and earth has woken,
And the small birds cry again;
And the hawthorn hedge puts forth its buds,
And my heart puts forth its pain.
FRANK BRIDGE
The Dead
[Blow out, you bugles]
for tenor and orchestra (1918/1919)
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
(Ireland)
CHARLES IVES
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
[Grantchester] (1920)1
[…] would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! –
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: …
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester … […]
DAME EDITH SITWELL
(1887–1964)
The poems in Façade are abstract poems – that is, they are patterns in sound. They are, too, in many cases, virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music.
EDITH SITWELL: ‘Some Notes on My Own Poetry’, in Collected Poems (1957)
Not blessed with conventional good looks, and with no interest in fashionable frivolities, Edith Sitwell spent a largely unhappy childhood at Renishaw Hall. Her two younger brothers, Osbert (1892–1969) and Sacheverell (1897–1988), were both celebrated literary figures, and she often collaborated with them. Her relationship with her parents, on the other hand, was distant, partly because her father compelled her to undergo a ‘cure’ for her alleged spinal deformation. Her loneliness is reflected in her long poem The Sleeping Beauty, which describes the neglect she endured, except from well-disposed servants. Her governess, Helen Rootham (they later lived together in Bayswater and Paris), was a translator of Rimbaud, and she aroused Sitwell’s interest in the poetry of the French Symbolists. She was especially taken with the idea of synaesthesia – and would have almost certainly known the celebrated Rimbaud sonnet ‘Voyelles’ (‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu […]’). She never disguised her scorn for much of the verse written by the so-called Georgian poets, represented in The Penguin Book of English Song by Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Ledwidge, Masefield, Gibson and de la Mare. Like Rimbaud, who despised the Parnassian poetry of his immediate predecessors, Sitwell attempted to break away from convention. From 1916 to 1921 she edited the anti-Georgian magazine Wheels, which first published Wilfred Owen; and in her own volumes of poetry, such as The Mother and Other Poems (1915), Façade (1922) and Gold Coast Customs (1929), she experimented with rhythm and rhyme in a way that disconcerted ‘those custodians of the purity of our language’, as
she called them in her account of the premiere of Façade.
During the Second World War she published Street Songs (1942), Green Song (1944) and Song of the Cold (1945), all of which express her horror at the inhumanity of modern warfare, her love of nature and, ultimately, her belief in God. Her prose works include English Eccentrics (1933) and her only novel, I Live under a Black Sun (1937), which was poorly received. Her study of Alexander Pope (1930) helped to rehabilitate the great poet who had been virtually ignored by academe during her lifetime. Sitwell herself became a revered celebrity, who dressed in a highly theatrical manner; and after her father’s death in 1943 she undertook triumphant lecture tours in America, together with her brothers. She made two recordings of Façade, the first with Constant Lambert as co-narrator, the second with Peter Pears. After the end of the war, she returned to Renishaw Hall, where she lived with Osbert and his lover, David Horner. Her last years were spent in a wheelchair, and she died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 9 December 1964, aged seventy-seven.
She was painted many times. Sargent’s group portrait, with the three children presided over by Sir George and Lady Ida, gives some idea of the strained family atmosphere; Roger Fry painted her (1918) in gentle and reflective mood; Alvaro Guevara’s portrait (1916) shows her in her apartment at 22 Pembridge Mansions, where she lived with Helen Rootham; and there is a touching, albeit austere, portrait by Pavel Tchelitchew, the Russian painter whom she so admired. Topolski painted her in 1959, but she loathed the picture, describing it as ‘unspeakable caricature’.
Façade has a complicated compositional history. Walton originally set sixteen poems, providing them with an Overture and Interlude. The work was scored for flute, piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet, cello and percussion, and the performance took place in the first-floor drawing room of the Sitwell home at 2 Carlyle Square on 24 January 1922. Influenced by the Satie/Cocteau/Diaghilev Parade, for which Picasso designed a front drop, it was decided that the performer should be concealed behind a curtain, through which a Sengerphone protruded, because, according to Edith, ‘it was obviously impossible for the speaker’s voice, unaided, to be heard above the sounds of the instruments’; she also stated that the Sengerphone would ‘deprive the work of any personal quality (apart from the personality inherent in the poems and music)’. The Sengerphone had been invented by Herr Senger to amplify the voice of Fafner in Wagner’s Siegfried. Although not published till nearly thirty years later (1951), this Façade Entertainment, as it came to be called, met with such success that composer and poet decided to expand and revise the work: four numbers were discarded and a further sixteen added, and this new version – with the addition of an alto saxophone – was performed at the Aeolian Hall on 12 June 1923. The next performance took place three years later at the New Chenil Galleries on 27 April 1926, when seven new numbers were heard, and another three at the repeat performance on 29 June. Another two numbers (the final two) were first heard at the ISCM Festival in Siena in 1928.
Osbert Sitwell, writing in Laughter in the Next Room (1949), stated:
I must emphasise that [Façade’s] primary objects were to exalt the speaking voice to the level of the instruments supporting it, to obtain an absolute balance between the volume of the music and the volume of the sound of the words – neither music nor words were to be treated or taken as a separate entity –, and thus to be able to reach for once that unattainable land which, in the finest songs, always lies looming mysteriously beyond, a land full of meanings and of nuances, analogies and images, hitherto only fragmentarily glimpsed, and wherein parallel sound and sense, which here never meet, can be seen, even from this distance, to merge and run into one broad line on the horizon. Another chief, equally difficult, aim to achieve was the elimination of the personality of the reciter, and also – though this is of lesser consequence – of the musicians, and the abolition, as a result, of the constricting self-consciousness engendered by it and sufficient to prevent any traveller from reaching the lunar landscapes I have sought to indicate above. Toward our purpose, the instrumentalists were seated behind a painted curtain.
WILLIAM WALTON: from Façade, for flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, cello and percussion (1921–8/1951)
[8] Madam Mouse trots1
Madame Mouse trots,
Grey in the black night!
Madame Mouse trots:
Furred is the light.
The elephant-trunks
Trumpet from the sea …
Grey in the black night
The mouse trots free.
Hoarse as a dog’s bark
The heavy leaves are furled …
The cat’s in his cradle,
All’s well with the world!
[10] Aubade1
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;
Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane, come down the stair.
Each dull blunt wooden stalactite
Of rain creaks, hardened by the light,
Sounding like an overtone
From some lonely world unknown.
But the creaking empty light
Will never harden into sight,
Will never penetrate your brain
With overtones like the blunt rain.
The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden,
Cockscomb flowers that none will pluck,
And wooden flowers that ’gin to cluck.
In the kitchen you must light
Flames as staring, red and white,
As carrots or as turnips, shining
Where the cold dawn light lies whining.
Cockscomb hair on the cold wind
Hangs limp, turns the milk’s weak mind …
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again!
[19] Sir Beelzebub
When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,
(Rocking and shocking the barmaid).
Nobody comes to give him his rum but the
Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum
Enhances the chances to bless with a benison
Alfred Lord Tennyson crossing the bar1 laid
With cold vegetation from pale deputations
Of temperance workers (all signed In Memoriam)
Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate’s feet,
(Moving in classical metres) …
Like Balaclava2, the lava came down from the
Roof, and the sea’s blue wooden gendarmerie
Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum.
… None of them come!
[29] By the lake1
Across the flat and pastel snow
Two people go … ‘And do you remember
When last we wandered this shore?’ … ‘Ah no!
For it is cold-hearted December.’
‘Dead, the leaves that like asses’ ears hung on the trees
When last we wandered and squandered joy here;
Now Midas your husband will listen for these
Whispers – these tears for joy’s bier.’
And as they walk, they seem tall pagodas;
And all the ropes let down from the cloud
Ring the hard cold bell-buds upon the trees – codas
Of overtones, ecstasies, grown for love’s shroud.
[40] Scotch rhapsody
‘Do not take a bath in Jordan,
Gordon,
On the holy Sabbath, on the peaceful day!’
Said the huntsman, playing on his old bagpipe,
Boring to death the pheasant and the snipe –
Boring the ptarmigan and grouse for fun –
Boring them worse than a nine-bore gun.
Till the flaxen leaves where the prunes are ripe
Heard the tartan wind a-droning in the pipe,
And they heard MacPherson say:
‘Where do the waves go? What hotels
Hide their bustles and their gay ombrelles?
And would there be room? – Would there be room?
Would there be room for me?’
There is a hotel at Ostend
Cold as the wind, without an end,
Haunted by ghostly poor relations
Of Bostonian conversations
(Bagpipes rotting through the walls).
And there the pearl-ropes fall like shawls
With a noise like marine waterfalls.
And ‘Another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm’
Pierces through the Sabbatical calm.
And that is the place for me!
So do not take a bath in Jordan,
Gordon,
Only on the holy Sabbath, on the peaceful day –
Or you’ll never go to heaven, Gordon MacPherson,
And speaking purely as a private person
That is the place – that is the place – that is the place for me!
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 67