Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.
Went down to the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
LENNOX BERKELEY: Five Poems, Op. 53 (1958/1960)
Interviewed for BBC Radio 3 on 16 November 1974 before a recital of his songs by Meriel and Peter Dickinson, Berkeley said:
One has only to think what a composer has to do to a poem: he has to destroy or at best modify its natural rhythm. He cannot possibly adhere to its actual metre. He then has to translate it into another medium. His only excuse for doing such a thing is that he feels he can recreate its atmosphere and feeling in the language of music. And here he can, if he’s a good enough composer, heighten its emotional impact. He may even be able to bring out and stress certain rhymes and assonances that will enhance the actual words, but it remains a risky undertaking on which one hesitates to embark.
Lauds1
Among the leaves the small birds sing;
The crow of the cock commands awaking:
In solitude, for company.
Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal;
Men of their neighbours become sensible:
In solitude, for company.
The crow of the cock commands awaking;
Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding:
In solitude, for company.
Men of their neighbours become sensible;
God bless the Realm, God bless the People:
In solitude, for company.
Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding;
The dripping mill-wheel is again turning:
In solitude, for company.
God bless the Realm, God bless the People;
God bless this green world temporal:
In solitude, for company.
The dripping mill-wheel is again turning;
Among the leaves the small birds sing:
In solitude, for company.
(Mellers)
O lurcher-loving collier
See above, under Britten.
What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney1
What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney;
Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life;
Is it making of love or counting of money,
Or raid on the jewels, the plans of a thief?
Open your eyes, my dearest dallier;
Let hunt with your hands for escaping me;
Go through the motions of exploring the familiar;
Stand on the brink of the warm white day.
Rise with the wind, my great big serpent;
Silence the birds and darken the air;
Change me with terror, alive in a moment;
Strike for the heart and have me there.
(Britten, Dickinson)
Eyes look into the well1
Eyes look into the well,
Tears run down from the eye;
The tower cracked and fell
From the quiet winter sky.
Under a midnight stone
Love was buried by thieves;
The robbed heart begs for a bone,
The damned rustle like leaves.
Face down in the flooded brook
With nothing more to say,
Lies One the soldiers took,
And spoiled and threw away.
(Britten, Dickinson)
Carry her over the water1
Carry her over the water,
And set her down under the tree,
Where the culvers2 white all day and all night,
And the winds from every quarter,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
Put a gold ring on her finger,
And press her close to your heart,
While the fish in the lake their snapshots take,
And the frog, that sanguine singer,
Sings agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
The streets shall all flock to your marriage,
The houses turn round to look,
The tables and chairs say suitable prayers,
And the horses drawing your carriage
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Elegy for J.F.K. (1964)1
(November 22nd, 1963)
Why then, why there,
Why thus, we cry, did he die?
The heavens are silent.
What he was, he was:
What he is fated to become
Depends on us.
Remembering his death,
How we choose to live
Will decide its meaning.
When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise,
Sorrow and joy, are one.
HANS WERNER HENZE: Three Auden Songs (1985)
Henze comments:
The first song is an elegy for the little cat Lucina. While working on this song I could clearly remember Auden analysing this poem for me, explaining how it followed an Old Icelandic rhyme scheme [an englyn], and as a result it was very easy for me to set. The second is a ballad, the narrative sonnet Rimbaud, in which a vivid picture emerges of the greatness and glamour of the poet of Les Illuminations. The third is a love song, one of Auden’s most beautiful poems. Throughout its four stanzas, the verse form remains the same, but the subject matter shifts and changes as freely as the thoughts of someone lying awake at night. For all three poems I have tried to achieve a musical equivalent for the structures, ideas and images of the verse. The songs were written to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Margaret von Hessen [wife of the Prinz von Hessen].
In memoriam L. K.-A. 1950–19521
At peace under this mandarin, sleep, Lucina2,
Blue-eyed Queen of white cats: for you the Ischian wave shall weep
When we who now miss you are American dust, and steep
Epomeo3 in peace and war augustly a grave-watch keep.
Rimbaud
The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetorician’s lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.1
Drinks bought him by his weak and lyric friend2
His five wits systematically deranged,3
To all accustomed nonsense put an end;
Till he from lyre and weakness was estranged.
Verse was a special illness of the ear;
Integrity was not enough; that seemed
The hell of childhood: he must try again.
Now, galloping through Africa, he dreamed4
Of a new self, a son, an engineer,
His truth acceptable to lying men.
Lullaby
[Lay your sleeping head, my love]1
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
(Berkeley)
DYLAN THOMAS
(1914–53)
As soon as I saw him I knew that the only thing to do was to love him. He was nervous, however, chain-smoking the whole time, and he complained of severe gout pains … ‘but I prefer the gout to the cure; I’m not going to let a doctor shove a bayonet into me twice a week’. His face and skin had the colour and swelling of too much drinking. He was a shorter man than I expected from his portraits, not more than five feet five or six, with a large protuberant behind and belly. His nose was a red bulb and his eyes were glazed.
IGOR STRAVINSKY: in ‘Conversations with Igor Stravinsky’, published in Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft (1962)
Despite his name and birthplace (Swansea), Dylan Thomas spoke no Welsh but could, apparently, by the age of three recite numerous Shakespearian soliloquies. Having left Swansea Grammar School, he eked out a living as a journalist, first in Swansea and then in London, where he started to broadcast and make films. He began writing poetry at school and published his first volume of verse, 18 Poems, in 1934. He acquired a reputation in London for exuberance and debauchery, married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937 and finally settled down with her in Wales. Deaths and Entrances (1946) contains some of his best-known poems, such as ‘Fern Hill’, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London’, ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ and ‘Poem in October’ (‘It was my thirtieth year to heaven’). His Collected Poems 1934–1952 (1952) were prepared with his customary meticulous, obsessional care (many of them were reworkings of poems he had written much earlier) and enjoyed great success. Thomas visited Stravinsky in May 1953 to discuss the opera on which they wished to collaborate. ‘ “His” opera’, Stravinsky told Robert Craft, ‘was to be about the rediscovery of our planet following an atomic misadventure. There would be a re-creation of language, only the new one would have no abstractions; there would be only people, objects, and words. He promised to avoid poetic indulgences: “No conceits, I’ll knock them all on the head.” ’ His prose works include Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955) and A Prospect of the Sea (1955). His most popular work remains the radio drama Under Milk Wood, first broadcast by the BBC in 1954. Thomas was still working on the text when he died during his fourth lecture tour of the United States. Despite a recent dip in popularity among academics, Dylan Thomas – pace R. S. Thomas – is still considered, with Wilfred Owen, one of the two greatest Welsh poets of the twentieth century, whose work, characterized by an essential optimism, is conveyed by that Welsh quality of hwyl – high-flown rhetoric – that’s so noticeable in his own readings of his work.
Other settings of Dylan Thomas include the incidental music to Under Milk Wood (1954) by Thomas’s close friend Daniel Jones, who dedicated his Fourth Symphony (1954) to the memory of the poet. There is also a full-length opera, Do Not Go Gentle: The Last Days of Dylan and Caitlin, with music by Robert Manno and libretto by Gwynne Edwards. Manno also set ‘Fern Hill’ (1973) for baritone and chamber ensemble. David Diamond’s ‘I have longed to move away’ was composed in 1968, and there is an attractive cycle of songs by William Mathias, The Fields of Praise. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s When I Woke (2001) for baritone and orchestra was premiered in December 2004 in the Royal Festival Hall by Gerald Finley and Vladimir Jurowsky. The first movement, ‘The Turn of Time’, contains lines from ‘Vision and Prayer’, the second sets the poem ‘When I woke’, and the third is a setting of ‘Lie still, sleep becalmed.’
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Do not go gentle into that good night
[In memoriam Dylan Thomas]1
for tenor, string quartet and 4 trombones
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(Lutyens, McCabe)
ALUN LEWIS
(1915–44)
The common people do not understand poetry, are shy of poetry, and though they have been taught to admire the true poets of the past are loath to admit that the race is not yet extinct. This is why very little work by living poets has a wide circulation except what is comfortably third-hand and third-rate. The people are not to be blamed: their difficulty is that despite all the charlatans, racketeers and incompetents who have disgraced the poetic profession, an aroma of holiness still clings to the title ‘poet’, as it does to the titles ‘saint’ and ‘hero’, both of which are properly reserved for the dead. It is only when death releases the true poet from the embarrassing condition of being at once immortal and alive in the flesh that the people are prepared to honour him; and his spirit as it passes is saluted by a spontaneous display of public emotion. This explains the heavy black headlines in the Press of March 1944: ALUN LEWIS THE POET IS DEAD. Search the back-files and you will find no preparatory announcement: ALUN LEWIS WRITES GREAT POETRY.
ROBERT GRAVES: Foreword to Ha! Ha! among the Trumpets (1945)
Lewis spent his childhood in a Welsh mining village, attended Aberystwyth University, trained as a teacher, then joined the army – despite his pacifist tendencies – in 1940. On 1 July of that same year he wrote to Gweno, his wife: ‘I’m not a pacifist any more. I’ll be sorry to my dying day, but I won’t shirk it. It’s a new world to me, this world where war has entered the dream world of poetry. It’s taken me a long time to admit its necessity. Now I hope to act up to my convictions.’ He enlisted with the Royal Engineers and was sent to India with the South Wales Borderers. From India he wrote a stream of letters to Gweno, describing his daily experiences. Raiders’ Dawn (Allen & Unwin) appeared in 1942, a collection of forty-seven poems, two thirds of which, including ‘The dancer’, were written on active service. ‘Song’ and ‘Compassion’ were published posthumously (1945) in Ha! Ha! among the Trumpets, for which Robert Graves wrote a pe
rceptive Foreword which quotes from a letter Lewis wrote to his wife shortly before he died: ‘And although I’m more engrossed with the single poetic theme of Life and Death, for there doesn’t seem to be any question more directly relevant than this one […], I find myself quite unable to express at once the passion of Love, the coldness of Death (Death is cold), and the fire that beats against resignation, “acceptance”. Acceptance seems so spiritless, protest so vain. In between the two I live.’ The Last Inspection, a book of short stories mostly about army life in England, appeared in 1943, and a collection of Indian stories, together with some letters, were published as In the Green Tree in 1948. He was found shot in the head near the officers’ latrines in Burma, revolver in hand. An army court of inquiry concluded that the shooting had been an accident. Less prolific than his contemporaries Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas, he was a poet of rare intelligence and enormous talent who, had he not been cut off in his approaching prime, might have eclipsed the achievement of both his compatriots. With Keith Douglas he is generally considered to be one of finest Second World War poets to have written in English.
MICHAEL TIPPETT: from The Heart’s Assurance (1950–51/1951)1
Song
Oh journeyman, Oh journeyman,
Before this endless belt began
Its cruel revolutions, you and she
Naked in Eden shook the apple tree.
Oh soldier lad, Oh soldier lad,
Before the soul of things turned bad,
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 73