[46] Popular song
For Constant Lambert
Lily O’Grady,
Silly and shady,
Longing to be
A lazy lady,
Walked by the cupolas, gables in the
Lake’s Georgian stables,
In a fairy tale like the heat intense,
And the mist in the woods when across the fence
The children gathering strawberries
Are changed by the heat into Negresses,
Though their fair hair
Shines there
Like gold-haired planets, Calliope, Io,
Pomona, Antiope, Echo, and Clio.1
Then Lily O’Grady,
Silly and shady,
Sauntered along like a
Lazy lady:
Beside the waves’ haycocks her gown with tucks
Was of satin the colour of shining green ducks,
And her fol-de-rol
Parasol
Was a great gold sun o’er the haycocks shining,
But she was a Negress black as the shade
That time on the brightest lady laid.
Then a satyr, dog-haired as trunks of trees,
Began to flatter, began to tease,
And she ran like the nymphs with golden foot
That trampled the strawberry, buttercup root,
In the thick gold dew as bright as the mesh
Of dead Panope’s2 golden flesh,
Made from the music whence were born
Memphis and Thebes in the first hot morn,
– And ran, to wake
In the lake,
Where the water-ripples seem hay to rake.
And Adeline,
Charlottine,
Round rose-bubbling Victorine,
And the other fish
Express a wish
For mastic mantles and gowns with a swish;
And bright and slight as the posies
Of buttercups and of roses,
And buds of the wild wood-lilies
They chase her, as frisky as fillies.
The red retriever-haired satyr
Can whine and tease and flatter,
But Lily O’Grady,
Silly and shady,
In the deep shade is a lazy lady;
Now Pompey’s dead, Homer’s read,
Heliogabalus3 lost his head,
And shade is on the brightest wing,
And dust forbids the bird to sing.
WILLIAM WALTON: Three Songs (1932/1932)
Composed originally as Bucolic Comedies (1924) for orchestra, but revised as Three Songs (1932) and dedicated to Dora and Hubert Foss. The monotone of the original Façade songs is replaced by a true vocal line, and a more orthodox accompaniment was fashioned out of the original sextet. Hubert Foss was head of the music department at OUP and Dora a professional singer. The first song to be finished was ‘Through gilded trellises’; a month later Walton sent them ‘Old Sir Faulk’ with a note saying: ‘I am not sure you will approve of this one […] It ought to evoke a touch of lunacy in any programme.’ ‘Daphne’, the last to be composed, was sent to the dedicatees, accompanied by a postcard with the lapidary statement: ‘It is not fit to be seen.’ ‘Daphne’ and ‘Through gilded trellises’ originally formed part of Sitwell’s The Sleeping Beauty (1924), an extended poem in twenty-six cantos dedicated to Osbert Sitwell. ‘Old Sir Faulk’ originally appeared in Façade (1922).
from Canto 18 of The Sleeping Beauty
[Daphne]
The Soldan1 (sings)
When green as a river was the barley,
Green as a river the rye,
I waded deep and began to parley
With a youth whom I heard sigh.
‘I seek’, said he, ‘a lovely lady,
A nymph as bright as a queen,
Like a tree that drips with pearls her shady
Locks of hair were seen;
And all the rivers became her flocks
Though their wool you cannot shear,
Because of the love of her flowing locks.
The kingly sun like a swain
Came strong, unheeding of her scorn,
Wading in deeps where she has lain,
Sleeping upon her river lawn
And chasing her starry satyr train.
She fled, and changed into a tree, –
That lovely fair-haired lady …
And now I see through the sere summer
Where no trees are shady!’
Canto 19 from The Sleeping Beauty
[Through gilded trellises]
[Now from the silk pavilions of the seas
The nymphs sing, gold and cold as orange-trees.]
Through gilded trellises
Of the heat, Dolores,
Inez, Manuccia,
Isabel, Lucia,
Mock Time that flies.
‘Lovely bird, will you stay and sing,
Flirting your sheenèd wing, –
Peck with your beak, and cling
To our balconies?’
They flirt their fans, flaunting –
‘O silence, enchanting
As music!’ then slanting
Their eyes
Like gilded or emerald grapes,
They take mantillas, capes,
Hiding their simian shapes.
Sighs
Each lady, ‘Our spadille1
Is done’ … ‘Dance the quadrille
From Hell’s towers to Seville;
Surprise
Their Siesta,’ Dolores
Said. Through gilded trellises
Of the heat, spangles
Pelt down through the tangles
Of bell-flowers; each dangles
Her castanets, shutters
Fall while the heat mutters,
With sounds like a mandoline
Or tinkled tambourine …
Ladies, Time dies!
[And petals of the foam, like perfumed orange-blossom,
Pelt the nymphs singing in their bowers – cold as their bosom.]
Old Sir Faulk
Old
Sir
Faulk,
Tall as a stork,
Before the honeyed fruits of dawn were ripe, would walk,
And stalk with a gun
The reynard-coloured sun,
Among the pheasant-feathered corn the unicorn has torn, forlorn the
Smock-faced sheep
Sit
And
Sleep,
Periwigged as William and Mary, weep …
‘Sally, Mary, Mattie, what’s the matter, why cry?’
The huntsman and the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh;
‘Oh, the nursery-maid Meg
With a leg like a peg
Chased the feathered dreams like hens, and when they laid an egg
In the sheepskin
Meadows
Where
The serene King James would steer
Horse and hounds, then he
From the shade of a tree
Picked it up as spoil to boil for nursery tea,’ said the mourners. In the
Corn, towers strain,
Feathered tall as a crane,
And whistling down the feathered rain, old Noah goes again –
An old dull mome
With a head like a pome,
Seeing the world as a bare egg,
Laid by the feathered air; Meg
Would beg three of these
For the nursery teas
Of Japhet, Shem, and Ham;1 she gave it
Underneath the trees,
Where the boiling
Water
Hissed
Like the goose-king’s feathered daughter – kissed
Pot and pan and copper kettle
Put upon their proper mettle,
Lest the Flood – the Flood – the Flood begin again through these!
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain, Op. 5
5, for tenor, horn and piano (1954/1956)1
The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn.
Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter’s Field2, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us –
On Dives and on Lazarus3:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
Still falls the Rain –
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds, – those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart4, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear, –
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh … the tears of the hunted hare.5
Still falls the Rain –
Then – O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune –6
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, – dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.
Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain –
‘Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.’
IVOR GURNEY
(1890–1937)
The songs I had
The songs I had are withered
Or vanished clean,
Yet there are bright tracks
Where I have been,
And there grow flowers
For others’ delight.
Think well, O singer,
Soon comes night.
IVOR GURNEY
The son of a tailor, one of four children, Gurney was educated at the King’s School as a chorister of Gloucester Cathedral. Thanks to a local curate, Alfred Hunter Cheesman, who volunteered to stand godfather at Gurney’s christening, Ivor began to take a keen interest in artistic matters – thus alienating himself somewhat from his basically uncultural family. In 1911 he won an open scholarship of £40 per annum which enabled him to study composition under Charles Stanford at the Royal College of Music. Gurney’s earliest songs date from 1904 but he only began to find his own voice in 1912. At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for army service but was turned down because of poor eyesight. In 1915, however, he joined the 2nd/5th Gloucester Regiment (B Company), and in 1916 was sent to the Front, where, no longer an outsider, he enjoyed the comradeship of his fellow soldiers. He was wounded on Good Friday, 1917, and after a spell at Rouen Hospital fought at the Front once more and was gassed at Passchendaele. He was sent to a number of war hospitals, where, deprived of the friendship of his fellow soldiers, he suffered increasing mood swings. He threatened suicide in June 1918, was discharged from the army a month before the Armistice, and returned to Gloucester.
His first book of poems, Severn and Somme (1917), published during the war, was followed by War’s Embers (1919). While writing poetry, he kept on composing, and published two Housman cycles, Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland, in 1919. Although he continued to study at the Royal College, this time under Vaughan Williams, he became increasingly unsettled: he took on various jobs, slept rough and would several times walk back at night from London to Gloucestershire. His mind soon gave way; his family first committed him, in 1922, to Barnwood House Asylum and then to the City of London Mental Hospital in Dartford. It was there, and in other asylums, that he continued to write poetry, as John Clare had done a century before him. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the City of London Mental Hospital in 1937. Much has been written about Gurney’s mental deterioration, inherited paranoid schizophrenia being frequently cited as the cause for his decline. Present research suggests that he suffered from a bipolar disorder.
Despite his illness, music and poetry of increasing individuality still flowed from his pen. In a letter to Herbert Howells, dated 31 July 1917, he mentions some of the poets he was keen to set ‘après la guerre’: ‘What Names! Brooke, Sorley (I have not read him), Katharine Tynan, Nicholson, Sassoon, Gibson, John Freeman, Laurence Binyon, F. W. Harvey, Masefield, and … (but not for me) Gurney …’ According to Marion Scott, Gurney would carry a poem about with him, either copied into his pocket notebook, or absorbed direct into his memory, and when the time for composition came, he worked almost entirely from memory – see his setting of Masefield’s ‘By a bierside’.
He wrote over 300 songs (roughly a third have been published), and his choice of poets was discriminating and extremely varied – in particular he was drawn to Elizabethans (he called them ‘The Elizas’) such as Campion, Fletcher, Jonson, Nashe, Ralegh and Shakespeare); and contemporaries like de la Mare, Housman, Edward Thomas and Yeats. Finzi, writing to Marion Scott on 30 January 1937, told her how he and Howard Ferguson set about assessing Gurney’s unpublished manuscripts:
The sorting has been even more difficult than I expected, chiefly because there is comparatively little that one can really be sure is bad. Even the late 1925 asylum songs, though they get more and more involved (and at the same time more disintegrated, if you know what I mean) have a curious coherence, which makes it difficult to know if they are really over the border. I think the eventual difficulty in ‘editing’ the later Gurney may be great: a neat mind could smooth away the queernesses – like Rimsky-Korsakov with Mussorgsky – yet time and familiarity will probably show something not so mistaken after all, about the queer and odd things. However, there are some obviously incoherent things and a good many others of which one can say that it would be better for them not to be published.
Writing (in ‘The Springs of Music’, an essay first published in the United States of America in the Musical Quarterly of July 1922) of his war experiences, Gurney seems to suggest that he regarded himself as more composer than poet:
one learnt that the brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse, or mere pleasurable emotion. […] The first breakings of the air of night, the remembrance of the glory not all yet faded; the meeting of the two pageants of day and night so powerfully stir the heart that music alone may assuage its thirst, or satisfy that longing told by Wordsworth in the ‘Prelude’; but that telling and outpouring of his is but the shadow and faint far-off indication of what Music might do – the chief use of Poetry seeming to be, to one, perhaps mistaken, musician, to stir his spirit to the height of music, the maker to create, the listener worthily to receive or remember.
Although Gurney composed too many songs that were flawed (an inconsistency that reflects his own unstable personality), his best songs rank with the finest that English Romantic song has to offer. His Collected Poems, edited and introduced by P. J. Kavanagh, appeared in 1982, and was revised and extended in 2004. ‘Severn meadows’ is the most celebrated setting of his own words – the manuscript is dated ‘Caulaincourt, March 19 1917’, which makes it likely that both words and music were written in the trenches.
Gurney was a prolific poet, writing some 900 poems between 1913 and 1926, a fair number of which were published during his lifetime, including forty-six in Severn and Somme and fifty-eight in War Embers. Most of his songs were composed between 1919, when he was discharged from the Army, and 1922, whe
n he was institutionalized.
IVOR GURNEY
Song
[Severn meadows]1(1917/1927)
Only the wanderer
Knows England’s graces,
Or can anew see clear
Familiar faces.
And who loves joy as he
That dwells in shadows?
Do not forget me quite,
O Severn meadows.
(Finzi, Jeffreys)
JOHN JEFFREYS
Poem
[Horror follows Horror] (1964)
Horror follows Horror within me
There is a chill fear
Of the storm that does deafen and din me
And rage horribly near.
What black things had the human
Race in store, what mind could view?
Good guard the hour that is coming,
Mankind safe, honour bring through.
What evil coil (1964)
What evil coil of Fate has fastened me
Who cannot move to sight, whose bread is sight,
And in nothing has more bare delight
Than dawn or the violet or the winter tree.
Stuck-in-the-mud – blinkered-up, roped for the Fair.
What use to vessel breath that lengthens pain?
O but the empty joys of wasted air
That blow on Crickley1 and whimper wanting me!
FRANCIS LEDWIDGE
(1891–1917)
He very deliberately chose not to bury his head in the local sand and, as a consequence, faced the choices and moral challenges of his time with solitude, honesty and rare courage. This integrity, and its ultimately gratifying effects upon his poetry, should command the renewed interest and respect of Irish people at the present time […].
SEAMUS HEANEY: Introduction to Francis Ledwidge – Selected Poems (New Island Books, 1992)
Ledwidge was born of humble Irish stock in Slane, Co. Meath, and raised in a cottage that now serves as a museum to his life and work. His father, an evicted tenant-farmer, died when he was four, and his mother worked tirelessly in the fields and cleaned houses to support her family. Frank was sent by her to work as a grocer’s apprentice in Rathfarnham, where he wrote his first poem, ‘Behind the closed eye’, an expression of his longing for home. Ledwidge was fortunate to have in Lord Dunsany a patron of perception and influence who introduced him to the Dublin Literary Circle and wrote introductions to his three volumes of verse: Songs of the Fields (1916), Songs of the Peace (1917) and Last Songs (1918). Edward Marsh also published him in his Georgian Poetry volumes. Much of Ledwidge’s verse deals with the countryside and his love for Ellie Vaughey (‘To one dead’), the daughter of a landowner who eventually married a man of her own social station. The conflict that Ledwidge, the Irish nationalist, experienced in joining the British Army to fight in France during the First World War, instead of joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood, is reflected in several of his poems. As he himself put it: ‘I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilization and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions.’ Another reason for joining up was possibly the opportunity it gave him of banishing Ellie from his mind. It was in a military hospital that the wounded poet heard the news of the Easter Uprising and the subsequent executions – events which gave rise to his best-known poem about the Dublin rising’s fallen leader, the poet Thomas McDonagh:
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 68