The Penguin Book of English Song
Page 69
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.
Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill,
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.
But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor,
And pastures poor with greedy weeds,
Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.
‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,’ Auden wrote of Yeats (‘In memory of W. B. Yeats’), and the same might be said of Ledwidge in several of his best poems. Having survived Gallipoli and the blizzards of Serbia, he was killed in action in Belgium at the age of twenty-nine. His distinctive poetry, though narrow in range, has experienced something of a revival since Seamus Heaney wrote his fine elegy ‘In memoriam Francis Ledwidge’.
IVOR GURNEY
Desire in spring (1918/1920)1
I love the cradle songs the mothers sing
In lonely places when the twilight drops,
The slow, endearing melodies that bring
Sleep to the weeping lids; and, when she stops,
I love the roadside birds upon the tops
Of dusty hedges in a world of Spring.
And when the sunny rain drips from the edge
Of midday wind, and meadows lean one way,
And a long whisper passes through the sedge,
Beside the broken water let me stay,
While these old airs upon my memory play,
And silent changes colour up the hedge.
MICHAEL HEAD: Over the Rim of the Moon (1918/1919)
The ships of Arcady
[Ships of Arcady]1
Thro’ the faintest filigree
Over the dim waters go
Little ships of Arcady
When the morning moon is low.
I can hear the sailors’ song
From the blue edge of the sea,
Passing like the lights along
Thro’ the dusky filigree.
Then where moon and waters meet
Sail by sail they pass away,
With little friendly winds replete
Blowing from the breaking day.
And when the little ships have flown,
Dreaming still of Arcady
I look across the waves, alone
In the misty filigree.
To one dead
[A blackbird singing]1
A blackbird singing
On a moss upholstered stone,
Bluebells swinging,
Shadows wildly blown,
A song in the wood,
A ship on the sea,
The song was for you
And the ship was for me.
A blackbird singing
I hear in my troubled mind,
Bluebells swinging
I see in a distant wind.
But sorrow and silence
Are the wood’s threnody,
The silence for you
And the sorrow for me.
Song [Beloved]
Nothing but sweet music wakes
My Beloved, my Beloved.
Sleeping by the blue lakes,
My own Beloved!
Song of the lark and song of the thrush,
My Beloved! my Beloved!
Sing in morning’s rosy bush,
My own Beloved!
When your eyes dawn blue and clear,
My Beloved! my Beloved!
You will find me waiting here,
My own Beloved!
Nocturne1
The rim of the moon
Is over the corn.
The beetle’s drone
Is above the thorn.
Grey days come soon
And I am alone;
Can you hear my moan
Where you rest, Aroon?
When the wild tree bore
The deep blue cherry,
In night’s deep hall
Our love kissed merry.
But you come no more
Where its woodlands call,
And the grey days fall
On my grief, Astore.
WILFRED OWEN
(1893–1918)
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
(If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives – survives Prussia – my ambition and those names will have achieved fresher fields than Flanders …)
WILFRED OWEN: draft Preface (?May 1918) for a collection of war poems that he hoped to publish in 1919
The most formative influence in Owen’s youth was the discovery of Keats (possibly as early as 1903) and the Bible. His mother, Susan Owen, was a devout Evangelical Christian, and when the family moved to Shrewsbury, where his father had been appointed Assistant Superintendent of the Joint Railways, Wilfred would read each day a passage from the Bible – appointed by the Scripture Union – and on Sundays would sometimes rearrange his parents’ sitting room so that it represented a church. His mother made him a surplice out of linen and a cardboard mitre, and he would summon the family to an evening service and deliver a sermon. The breadth of his religious knowledge can be seen in the biblical references in his poetry. He left school in 1911, and when he failed to win a scholarship to the University of London that would have helped with the fees, he took up an unpaid position as lay assistant to the Revd Herbert Wigan, Vicar of Dunsden, a village not far from Reading. Wigan gave him free board and lodging, and Owen, as well as providing practical help to the poor of the parish, studied English and Botany at University College, Reading. Once again he failed the scholarship exam and, as the study of English became increasingly important in his life, he took up a part-time post, teaching English at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux. This two-year love affair with French life, language, literature and culture was shattered on 4 August 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium.
Owen enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles on 21 October 1915, spent seven and a half months training at Hare Hall Camp in Essex, was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment, crossed the Channel on 29 December and in the second week of January 1917 led his platoon into battle. Letters to his mother describe his experiences. He was hospitalized for a fortnight, having fallen down a shell hole, where he spent three days with only a candle as company; he was treated for sickness, but rejoined his battalion and experienced fierce fighting; on one occasion he was blown out of a trench during an artillery bombardment. Suffering from shell shock, he was invalided back to England, and then to Craiglockhart War Hospital on the outskirts of Edinburgh. His doctor, Captain Arthur Brock, RAMC, sought to heal Owen by means of a work-cure and set him a long poem to write – which became ‘The Wrestlers’. It was at Craiglockhart that Owen met Siegfried Sassoon, whose The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, recently published, had a huge effect on Owen, especially the ‘trench sketches’. Sassoon’s influence on Owen can be seen from the final manuscript draft of ‘Anthem for doomed youth’, which contains a number of the older poet’s suggestions and cancellations written in pencil. Sassoon not only supplied the title but made several telling contributions: ‘The shrill disconsolate choirs of wailing shells’ becomes ‘The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells’; ‘And bugles calling sad across the shires’ becomes ‘And bugles calling for them from sad shires’; and ‘Their flowers the tendernes
s of silent minds’ becomes ‘Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds’. The older poet gave Owen advice on how to channel nightmarish experiences into poems, and introduced him to Robert Graves, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, as well as to Robert Ross, who, like Sassoon, was gay. Though Owen shared their sexual orientation, his relationship with them probably remained platonic. Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991) gives a masterly reconstruction of Sassoon’s and Owen’s relationship at Craiglockhart.
When Sassoon was posted overseas to France, Owen was transferred to another camp, at Ripon, where he wrote or revised many of his most celebrated poems, such as ‘Strange meeting’ and ‘Futility’. Owen returned to France at the end of August 1918. He was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the assault on Germany’s Beaurevoir–Fonsomme Line, but did not live to wear it: he was killed on 4 November, helping his platoon assemble a pontoon bridge to cross the Sambre and Oise Canal.
ARTHUR BLISS: from Morning Heroes, Op. 48, symphony for orator, chorus and orchestra (1930)
Spring offensive1
Halted against the shade of a last hill
They fed, and eased of pack-loads, were at ease;
And leaning on the nearest chest or knees
Carelessly slept.
But many there stood still
To face the stark blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge;
And though the summer oozed into their veins
Like an injected drug for their bodies’ pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent ridge of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.
Hour after hour they ponder the warm field
And the far valley behind, where buttercups
Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up;
When even the little brambles would not yield
But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing arms.
They breathe like trees unstirred.
Till like a cold gust thrills the little word
At which each body and its soul begird
And tighten them for battle. No alarms
Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste, –
Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced
The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done.
O larger shone that smile against the sun, –
Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.
So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; earth set sudden cups
In thousands for their blood; and the green slope
Chasmed and deepened sheer to infinite space.
Of them who running on that last high place2
Breasted the surf of bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,
Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.
But what say such as from existence’ brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink,
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames –
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder –
Why speak not they of comrades that went under?
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Nocturne, Op. 60, for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and string orchestra (1958/1959)
The kind ghosts1
She2 sleeps on soft, last breaths; but no ghost looms
Out of the stillness of her palace wall,
Her wall of boys on boys and dooms on dooms.
She dreams of golden gardens and sweet glooms,
Not marvelling why her roses never fall
Nor what red mouths were torn to make their blooms.
The shades keep down which well might roam her hall.
Quiet their blood lies in her crimson rooms
And she is not afraid of their footfall.
They move not from her tapestries, their pall,
Nor pace her terraces, their hecatombs3,
Lest aught she be disturbed, or grieved at all.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from War Requiem, Op. 66, for soprano, tenor and baritone solos, chorus and boys’ choir, orchestra, chamber orchestra and organ (1961/1962)1
Anthem for doomed youth
What passing-bells2 for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.3
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient4 minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
But I was looking at the permanent stars
[Voices]
Bugles sang, saddening the evening air,
And bugles answered, sorrowful to hear.
Voices of boys were by the river-side.
Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad.
The shadow of the morrow weighed on men.
Voices of old despondency resigned,
Bowed by the shadow of the morrow, slept. […]
The next war
War’s a joke for me and you,
While we know such dreams are true.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON.1
Out there, we walked quite friendly up to Death, –
Sat down and ate beside him, cool and bland, –
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath, –
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorused if he sang aloft;
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, – knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags
He fights on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
Sonnet
On Seeing a Piece of Our Heavy Artillery
Brought into Action
Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great Gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse;
[Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!]
Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse;
[Spend our resentment, cannon, – yea, disburse
Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.
Yet, for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison1
Must wither innocent of enmity,
Be not withdrawn, dark arm, thy spoilure done,
Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.]
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!
Futility
Move him into the sun –
&nbs
p; Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.