The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

  She offered you so modestly

  A shining apple from the tree.

  Oh lonely wife, Oh lonely wife,

  Before your lover left this life

  He took you in his gentle arms.

  How trivial then were Life’s alarms.

  And though Death taps down every street

  Familiar as the postman on his beat,

  Remember this, Remember this

  That Life has trembled in a kiss

  From Genesis to Genesis,

  And what’s transfigured will live on

  Long after Death has come and gone.

  Compassion

  She in the hurling night

  With lucid simple hands

  Stroked away his fright

  Loosed his bloodsoaked bands

  And seriously aware

  Of the terror she caressed

  Drew his matted hair

  Gladly to her breast.

  And he who babbled Death

  Shivered and grew still

  In the meadows of her breath

  Restoring his dark will.

  Nor did she ever stir

  In the storm’s calm centre

  To feel the tail, hooves, fur

  Of the god-faced centaur.

  (Maw)

  The dancer

  ‘He’s in his grave and on his head

  I dance,’ the lovely dancer said,

  ‘My feet like fireflies illume

  The choking blackness of his tomb.’

  ‘Had he not died we would have wed,

  And still I’d dance,’ the dancer said,

  ‘To keep the creeping sterile doom

  Out of the darkness of my womb.’

  ‘Our love was always ringed with dread

  Of death,’ the lovely dancer said,

  ‘And so I danced for his delight

  And scorched the blackened core of night

  With passion bright,’ the dancer said –

  ‘And now I dance to earn my bread.’

  SIDNEY KEYES

  (1922–43)

  I cannot remember the first encounter, but Sidney’s looks and manner are ever present. His was a grave countenance for one so young. He had fine hazel eyes, a longish nose and pointed ears. His mouth, although he liked to laugh, exuded sadness, and his sallow skin was echoed by the camel hair coat in which he seemed to shelter even when spring was round the corner. He would come up the stairs to my studio swinging his walking stick (was it an heirloom? – an unusual accessory at that time) and, shuddering, would exclaim ‘I’m all shrivelled up with cold.’ He was, I think, essentially alone, but curiously keen to be sociable; he loved parties, at which he might be found immersed in leafing through the host’s books or, indeed, writing.

  MILEIN COSMAN: ‘Memoir’, in Sidney Keyes, Collected Poems (2002)

  Keyes’s mother died of peritonitis a few weeks after he was born, and his father, an army officer, entrusted his son’s education to his grandfather, to whom several of the poems are dedicated. Sidney was frail and sickly and spent most of the time away from other children, in the company of his nurse. He did not go to school until he was nine. When his grandfather married for the third time, the new Mrs Keyes sent Sidney to Dartford Grammar School, from where he passed his Common Entrance to Tonbridge School, as his father had done. There he continued his isolated life, withdrew into himself and was encouraged in his efforts to write poetry by his form master, Tom Staveley, himself a poet. In October 1940 he won a history scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he met John Heath-Stubbs, who opened his eyes to the importance of poetic technique. At Oxford he formed his own dramatic society, edited The Cherwell and was awarded a First in the first half of the wartime history schools. The Iron Laurel, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1942, the year in which he joined the army. The Cruel Solstice was published in 1943. He was captured in the last days of the Tunisian campaign and died ‘from unknown causes’ on 29 April 1943. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize posthumously in 1944. Minos of Crete, a play he had written at Tonbridge, appeared along with other plays and short stories in 1948, edited by Michael Meyer. His Collected Poems, edited with a ‘Memoir’ by Meyer, were published in 1945.

  MICHAEL TIPPETT: from The Heart’s Assurance (1950–51/1951)1

  Song: The heart’s assurance

  [The heart’s assurance]

  O never trust the heart’s assurance –

  Trust only the heart’s fear:

  And what I’m saying is, Go back, my lovely –

  Though you will never hear.

  O never trust your pride of movement –

  Trust only pride’s distress:

  The only holy limbs are the broken fingers

  Still raised to praise and bless.

  For the careless heart is bound with chains

  And terribly cast down:

  The beast of pride is hunted out

  And baited through the town.

  Remember your lovers1

  Young men walking the open streets

  Of death’s republic, remember your lovers.

  When you foresaw with vision prescient

  The planet pain rising across your sky

  We fused your sight in our soft burning beauty:

  We laid you down in meadows drunk with cowslips

  And led you in the ways of our bright city.

  Young men who wander death’s vague meadows,

  Remember your lovers who gave you more than flowers.

  [When truth came prying like a surgeon’s knife

  Among the delicate movements of your brain

  We called your spirit from its narrow den

  And kissed your courage back to meet the blade –

  Our anaesthetic beauty saved you then.

  Young men whose sickness death has cured at last,

  Remember your lovers and covet their disease.]

  When you woke grave-chilled at midnight

  To pace the pavement of your bitter dream

  We brought you back to bed and brought you home

  From the dark antechamber of desire

  Into our lust as warm as candle-flame.

  Young men who lie in the carven beds of death,

  Remember your lovers who gave you more than dreams.

  From the sun sheltering your careless head

  Or from the painted devil your quick eye,

  We led you out of terror tenderly

  And fooled you into peace with our soft words

  And gave you all we had and let you die.

  Young men drunk with death’s unquenchable wisdom,

  Remember your lovers who gave you more than love.

  Select Bibliography

  Aitken, W. R. (ed.): Poems of William Soutar. A New Selection (1988)

  Albright, Daniel (ed.): W. B. Yeats, The Poems (1992)

  Allott, Kenneth (ed.): The Poems of Matthew Arnold (1965)

  Arnold, Matthew: Essays in Criticism. Second Series (1888)

  Ashton, Thomas L. (ed.): Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (1972)

  Auden, W.H. (ed.): The Poet’s Tongue (1935)

  —: The Dyer’s Hand (1948)

  —: ’Introduction’ to A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse (1963)

  — (ed.): Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets (1966)

  —: Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

  Banfield, Stephen: Sensibility and English Song (1985)

  Bate, Jonathan: John Clare, Selected Poems (2003)

  Benson, A. C.: Introduction to Brontë Poems (1915)

  Bentham, Raymond: The Poetical Works of Burns (1974)

  Betjeman, John (ed.): ‘Preface’ to John Masefield: Selected Poems (1978)

  Betjeman, John: Sweet Songs of Zion (2007)

  Bradley, Ian: The Daily Telegraph Book of Hymns (2005)

  Bradshaw, Michael (ed.): Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Death’s Jest-Book (2003)

  Bragg, Melvyn: The Adventure of English (2003)

  Br
idcut, John: Britten’s Children (2006)

  Bridges, Robert (ed.): Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1930)

  Brooks-Davies, Douglas (ed.): Edmund Spenser. Selected Shorter Poems (1995)

  Burnet, Archie (ed.): The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997)

  Butler, Samuel: Note-Books (1912)

  Cain, Tom (ed.): The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (2013)

  Calder, Agnes (ed.): Robert Louis Stevenson. Selected Poems (1998)

  Capell, Richard: Review of Britten’s Spring Symphony (Daily Telegraph, 10 March 1950)

  Cardus, Neville: The Delights of Music (1966)

  Chernaik, Judith: The Lyrics of Shelley (1972)

  Cibber, Colley: An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740)

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Table Talk (1836)

  Connolly, Ruth (ed.): The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (2013)

  Cooke, Mervyn (ed.): Letters from a Life. The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vols. 4–6 (2008-2012)

  Cosman, Milein (ed.): Sidney Keyes, Collected Poems.

  Davis, Walter R. (ed.): The Works of Thomas Campion (1969)

  De la Mare, Walter: ‘Foreword’ to the Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (1965)

  De Sola Pinto, Vivian (ed.): Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1953)

  Deutsch, Otto Erich: Schubert: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (1964)

  Dickinson, Patric (ed.): Selected Poems of Henry Newbolt (1981)

  Dickson, Donald R. (ed.): John Donne’s Poetry (2007)

  Dietrich, Albert: Recollections of Johannes Brahms (1899)

  Donaldson, Ian (ed.): Ben Jonson (1985)

  Drabble, Margaret (ed.): The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985)

  Dryden, John: ‘Dedication’ to Henry Purcell, The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of The Prophetess, or The History of Dioclesian (1690)

  Duffin, Ross: Shakespeare’s Songbook (2004)

  Eliot, T. S.: The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

  Eliot, T. S. (ed.): A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941)

  Fenby, Eric: Delius (1971)

  Fitch, Donald: Blake set to Music (1989)

  Flowers, Betty S (ed.): Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems (2001)

  Fuller, John: W. H. Auden: A Commentary (1998)

  Galsworthy, John (ed.): ‘Foreword’ to W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago (1925)

  Gezari, Janet (ed.): Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems (1992)

  Gooch, Bryan, Gooch, N. S., and Thatcher, David (ed.): Musical settings of Late Victorian and Modern British Literature (1976)

  —: Musical settings of early and mid-Victorian literature (1979)

  —: Musical settings of British Romantic literature (1982)

  —: A Shakespeare Music Catalogue (1991)

  Gosse, Edmund: The Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (????)

  Graves, Robert (ed.): Alun Lewis: Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (1945)

  Greene, Harry Plunket: Charles Villiers Stanford (1935)

  Grigson, Geoffrey: Poems and Poets (1969)

  Hammond, Gerald (ed.): Richard Lovelace, Selected Poems (1987)

  Hardy, Florence Emily: The Life of Thomas Hardy (1962)

  Heaney, Seamus (ed.): ‘Introduction’ to Francis Ledwidge, Selected Poems (1992)

  Hold, Trevor: Parry to Finzi. Twenty English Song-Composers (2002)

  Housman, A. E.: Swinburne (????)

  Housman, Lawrence: My Brother, A. E. Housman (1937)

  Hunt, Leigh: Autobiography (1850)

  —: Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828)

  Jackson, Holbrook (ed.): The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (1947)

  Johnson, Graham: Britten, Voice and Piano (2003)

  Johnson, Samuel: Lives of the English Poets (1781)

  Jones, Daniel (ed.): Dylan Thomas, The Poems (1971)

  Kavanagh, P. J (ed.): Ivor Gurney, Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2004)

  Latham, Agnes (ed.): The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh (1951)

  Leavis, F.R.: New Bearings in English Poetry (1932)

  Lehmann, Liza: The Life of Liza Lehmann by Herself (1919)

  Lewis, C.S: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954)

  Longley, Edna (ed.): Edward Thomas, Poems and Last Poems (1973)

  MacCarthy, Fiona: Byron: Life and Legend (2002)

  Macdonald, Hugh (ed.): Andrew Marvell (1952)

  Marchand, Leslie A. (ed.): Byron’s Letters and Journals (1982)

  Markel, Michael H.: Hilaire Belloc (1982)

  Marr, Andrew: We British (2015)

  Marsh, Edward (ed.): Rupert Brooke, The Collected Poems (1942)

  Medcalf, Stephen: Poems for all Purposes: The Selected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (1994)

  Miles, Alfred (ed.): Poets and Poetry of the Century (1892)

  Moore, Gerald: Singer and Accompanist: The Performance of 50 Songs (1953)

  Motion, Andrew: Keats (1997)

  Newman, Cardinal: The Idea of a University Defined (1873)

  Nicholson, Norman (ed.): A Choice of Cowper’s Verse (1975)

  Opie, Iona and Peter: The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951)

  Ousby, Ian (ed.): The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1988)

  Pafford J. H. P. (ed.): Isaac Watts, Divine Songs (1971)

  Palgrave, Francis Turner (ed.): Herrick’s Lyrical Poems (1892)

  Palmer, Christopher: Herbert Howells: A Study (1978)

  — (ed.): The Britten Companion (1984)

  Peacock, Thomas Love: Nightmare Abbey (1818)

  Percy, Thomas: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)

  Pilkington, Michael: Gurney, Ireland, Quilter and Warlock (1989)

  Pinion, F. B.: A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy (1976)

  Priestley, J. B.: Literature and Western Man (1962)

  Reed, Philip, Cooke, Mervyn, and Mitchell, Donald (eds.): Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Vols. 1–6 (1991–2012)

  Ricks, Christopher (ed.): The Poems of Tennyson (1969)

  Roper, Daniel (ed.): Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1805 (1976)

  Rossetti, William M.: The Poetical Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1891)

  Rossetti, William M.: Some Reminiscences (1906)

  Sackville-West, Vita: Andrew Marvell (1929)

  Scatterwood, John (ed.): John Skelton, The Complete English Poems (1983)

  Scotland, Tony: Lennox & Freda (2010)

  Shaw, George Bernard: ‘Preface’ to W. H. Davis, The Autobiography of a Supertramp (1908)

  Sidney, Sir Philip: The Defense of Poesy (1579–80)

  Sitwell, Edith: Collected Poems (1957)

  —: A Poet’s Notebook (1943)

  —: Alexander Pope (1930)

  Sitwell, Osbert: Laughter in the Next Room (1949)

  Squire, Sir John (ed.): The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker (1941)

  Stallworthy, Jon (ed.): Wilfred Owen. The War Poems (1994)

  Stevenson, Robert Louis: Memories and Portraits (1887)

  Stevenson, W. H. (ed.): William Blake, The Complete Poems (1971)

  Sweeney, Anne (ed.): St Robert Southwell, Collected Poems (2007)

  Swinnerton, Frank: The Georgian Literary Scene 1910–1935 (1935)

  Symons, Arthur: The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1909)

  Taplin, Gardner B.: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1957)

  Tennyson, Charles: Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897)

  Terry, Richard (ed.): James Thompson, Essays for the Tercentenary (2000)

  Thomas, Helen: As It Was (1926)

  —: World Without End (1931)

  Tobin, John (ed.): George Herbert, The Complete English Poems (1991)

  Trevor-Roper, Hugh: The Romantic Movement and the Study of History (1969)

  Vieth, David M (ed.): The Works of the Earl of Rochester (1968)

  Walton, Izaak: The Life of Dr. John Donne (1640)

  —: The Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670)


  Warner, Ferdinando: The History of Ireland (1763)

  Watson, Derek: The Wordsworth Dictionary of Musical Quotations (1991)

  Whistler, Therese (ed.): The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (1954)

  White, Maude Valérie: Friends and Memories (1914)

  —: My Indian Summer (1932)

  Winny, James (ed.): The General Prologue to the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (1966)

  Acknowledgements

  Of the books listed in the Bibliography, I am especially indebted to Professor Stephen Banfield’s Sensibility and English Song (Cambridge University Press, 1985). This encyclopedic survey of English song from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth ends with the song lists of fifty-four composers and over 5,000 songs – invaluable information for anyone interested in the development of English song – and I should like to thank Professor Banfield for allowing me to make use of his research into the dating of these songs. When two dates appear in brackets after the title of a song, roman denotes date of composition or completion, italics refer to the year of publication.

  Many people have helped in the preparation of The Penguin Book of English Song. Graham Johnson, as always, has been generous with his time, knowledge and library; with Iain Burnside I had fruitful discussions about contemporary English song. Judith Chernaik, Lucasta Miller, Roy Foster, David Gilmour, Steven Curran and Philip Reed advised me on the chapters devoted to Shelley, Emily Brontë, Yeats, Kipling, Joyce and Auden; Gavin Griffiths and Jonathan Keates read the typescript with an eagle eye and made many valuable suggestions; Jonathan Katz supplied translations from Greek and Latin; Kathy Adamson and her staff at the Royal Academy of Music have been tireless in their search for elusive books and scores. Finally, I should like to thank my family for their patience with my technological incompetence; and Carola Lotzenburger and Gina Thomas for their timely belief in the book.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  W. H. Auden: from Collected Poems, copyright © 1976, Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., Curtis Brown, Ltd.