1. baptism.
1. as an angler casts his line.
1. The poem is the tenth in The Fourth Booke of Divine Fancies (1632).
2. resembling an elegy, lugubrious.
1. ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his’ paraphrases a line from the Song of Solomon, and the poet follows the medieval tradition of addressing Christ as a lover; the possible homo-erotic dimensions of the poem will not be lost on the modern reader, however, and Britten’s interest in the poem clearly reflects his own relationship with Peter Pears. The work was written for the Dick Sheppard Memorial Concert and first performed at Central Hall, Westminster, on 1 November 1947.
1. Herbert would almost certainly have known the translation by Sir Philip Sidney, who, in his poetic versions of the Psalms, anticipates the poetry of The Temple.
2. in appropriate attitude.
1. Praised by T. S. Eliot for its ‘masterly simplicity’.
2. celebrate.
1. irrationally.
2. foremost.
3. quintessence (from the language of alchemy).
4. In other words, the common man’s duty to abide by God’s word and accept his humble place in the world.
5. test, as in alchemy.
1. burned to ashes.
2. ‘increased in number by addition or repetition’ (OED).
3. Lines 19–30 form the ‘song’ referred to in line 13. Vaughan Williams treats these lines as a separate song.
1. unnatural. Cf. Hamlet, Act I, sc. ii, 65.
2. food but also flesh, as in the Eucharist.
1. The OED defines ‘Antiphon’ as ‘a composition, in prose or verse, consisting of verses or passages sung alternately by two choirs in worship’.
2. Refers to part-singing in a choir or madrigal consort: the most important part with the highest proportion of sustained notes.
1. Milton’s poem is usually sung to the tune ‘Monkland’, based on the melody of ‘Fahre fort, fahre fort’, first published in Germany in 1704.
2. fierce, ruthless.
3. Red Sea.
4. ‘For only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of giants’ (Deut. iii. 2).
1. ‘The Cheerful Man’.
2. The three-headed dog guarding the entrance to Hades.
3. Adjectival form of Styx, one of the four rivers of Hades.
4. remote, desolate.
5. black.
6. frowning.
7. The Cimmerians were a mythical people who lived in perpetual darkness on the edge of the world.
8. called Euphrosyne (Mirth). She was one of the Graces, sister to Thalia (Festive Beauty) and Aglaia (Youthful Bloom and Vigour).
9. goddess of dawn.
10. celebrating the spring festival of May.
11. lively, happy, pleasant.
12. jests and humorous turns of speech, and light-hearted tricks.
13. bows.
14. goddess of youth and spring.
15. making extravagant movements.
16. unreprovable, therefore innocent.
17. in order to thwart.
18. grey.
19. stately progress.
20. arrayed.
21. counts his sheep.
22. landscape.
23. spotted.
24. having met. Corydon, Thyrsis, Phillis and Thestylis are all stock names in pastoral poetry.
25. dishes.
26. chamber.
27. free from care.
28. cheerful fiddles.
29. queen of fairies.
30. Jack-o’-lantern, will-o’-the-wisp.
31. Robin Goodfellow.
32. clumsy fiend or sprite.
33. ingle-nook’s.
34. garments.
35. public festivities.
36. plenty.
37. the god of marriage.
38. low-heeled shoe worn by comic actors.
39. Lydian is a mode of Greek music associated with relaxation and sweetness, unlike the Phrygian (warlike) and Dorian (simple and solemn). Whereas Aristotle agreed with Plato that ‘relaxed’ harmonies enfeebled the mind (Politics, viii, c.5–7), Cassiodorus approves it as a source of delight (see letter to Boethius).
40. involution.
41. playful.
42. skill.
43. Ovid (Metamorphoses, x, 11–63) tells how Orpheus ‘half regained’ Eurydice by leading her half-way out of Hades but lost her when, ignoring Pluto’s condition, he looked back at her. He had previously won Pluto’s agreement to release her through the power of his music.
1. ‘The Thoughtful Man’.
2. profit.
3. trifles.
4. Originally, specially chosen noblemen; hence, retinue.
5. god of sleep.
6. seriousness, thoughtfulness.
7. suit, agree with.
8. Memnon was the most handsome Prince of Ethiopia.
9. Cassiopeia, wife of Cepheus.
10. Roman goddess of the hearth.
11. Saturn was then believed to be the most distant of the planets, hence solitary.
12. A mountain in Crete, where Kronos (Saturn) dwelt.
13. A black transparent material, worn by mourners.
14. beautiful.
15. dignity.
16. holding intercourse with.
17. with a serious, gloomy and fixed gaze.
18. brought along.
19. the nightingale.
20. Diana, the moon.
21. The moon is traditionally drawn by dragons.
22. songstress.
23. plot.
24. bell rung at nightfall in the Middle Ages, warning people to put out their fires.
25. weather.
26. night-watchman.
27. ‘sit up all night’, since the constellation of the Bear never sets.
28. Thoth, the Egyptian god, was identified with the Greek god Hermes, and was called ‘Trismegistus’ – thrice great.
29. call down the spirit of Plato to reveal where the souls of the dead dwell.
30. and to tell of those Dæmons.
31. agreement.
32. Greek tragedies were normally based on legends about royal families.
33. Both Euripides and Sophocles wrote plays concerning the fall of Troy.
34. Greek actors of tragedy wore a high boot or ‘buskin’.
35. Musæus was a Greek seer and poet.
36. See Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale.
37. cruel, dire.
38. soberly dressed.
39. with curled hair.
40. Cephalus, grandson of Cecrops, King of Athens.
41. drops falling at intervals of a minute.
42. Melancholy.
43. Silvanus was the Roman god of woods and fields.
44. tree deities.
45. local deity.
46. arched.
47. quaintly carved and solid.
48. decorated.
49. shrill, loud.
50. ponder.
1. imagination.
2. rejoicing for salvation.
3. concord.
4. group of musicians.
1. with scythe-like hooks on the hubs.
2. reverent.
3. hushed.
4. halcyons who, according to the Greeks, bred on the calm sea in December during the year’s longest nights and shortest days.
5. tumbling, tossing, rolling, surging.
6. The ancients thought that the moon, planets and stars moved upon nine separate spheres, with earth as their fixed centre, and that each sphere sounded a musical note as it moved. These notes produced a perfect harmony which, according to Pythagoras, could only be heard by wholly virtuous men.
1. The poem was first printed in Aglaura (1637) in Act IV, sc. ii, 14–28. In the play Orsames refers to it as ‘A little foolish counsell (Madam) I gave a friend of mine foure or five yeares agoe’.
1. This poem and the related ‘The Answer’ were first printed in Wit and Drollery
(1656), as ‘A Song by Sir John Suckling’ and ‘The Answer by the Same Author’. The poem is probably based on the proverb ‘After three Days men grow weary of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy.’
1. Anthony à Wood claimed that Lucasta (‘chaste light’) was a ‘gentlewoman of great beauty and fortune named Lucy Sachaverel’. According to Wilkinson, she was a member of the Lucas family – hence the name ‘Lucasta’.
2. A delicious pun is intended: he runs from her arms to embrace the arms of battle.
1. The background of this famous poem, which appears in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, is described by Percy: ‘This excellent sonnet, which possessed a high degree of fame among the old Cavaliers, was written by Colonel Richard Lovelace during his confinement in the Gate-house, Westminster: to which he was committed by the House of Commons, in April 1642, for presenting a petition from the county of Kent, requesting them to restore the king to his rights, and to settle the government. See Wood’s Athenae, vol. ii. p. 228, and Lysons’s Environs of London, vol i. p. 109, where may be seen at large the affecting story of this elegant writer, who, after having been distinguished for every gallant and polite accomplishment, the pattern of his own sex, and the darling of the ladies, died in the lowest wretchedness, obscurity, and want, in 1658.’
2. The MS originally had ‘Birds’.
3. to sport amorously.
1. Browne came across the melody, an anonymous seventeenth-century Allmayne, in Elizabeth Rogers’s Virginal Book, while performing in a production of Milton’s Comus at Cambridge University.
1. Composed for the Choir and Orchestra of Leighton Park School, The Bermudas was written for small orchestra. There is a reduction for piano (four hands), authorized by the composer.
2. The idea of the poem was probably suggested by conversations between Marvell and the Revd John Oxenbridge, in whose house the poet lived for a time at Eton. Oxenbridge, persecuted by Archbishop Laud, had embarked for the Bermudas in 1635.
3. Marvell had a fondness for the colour green – see V. Sackville-West’s Andrew Marvell (1929): ‘but of all colours it was green that enchanted him most; the world of his mind was a glaucous world, as though he lived in a coppice, stippled with sunlight and alive with moving shadows.’
4. Hormuz, on the Persian Gulf.
5. pineapples.
6. a substance with a fragrant musky odour excreted by the sperm whale.
1. The poem occurs towards the end of The Pilgrim’s Progress, when Mr Great-heart and Mr Valiant-for-Truth are nearing the end of their pilgrimage. Having reached the enchanted ground, Mr Valiant-for-Truth introduces the poem with the following words: ‘I believed, and therefore came out, got into the way, fought all that set themselves against me, and, by believing, am come to this place.’
2. The autobiographical nature of this verse is unmistakable: Bunyan is asserting the right to preach his own religion. The Stuart regime (the ‘Gyant’ of ‘He’l with a Gyant Fight’) persecuted Dissenters such as Bunyan, who languished for more than twelve years in gaol – it has been estimated that some 8,000 prisoners died of gaol fever for their faith, before the regime was overthrown by William of Orange in 1688, the year of Bunyan’s death.
3. ‘No goblin nor foul fiend’ (Hymn 293 in Hymns Ancient and Modern). Bunyan’s verse was adapted for inclusion in The English Hymnal (1906) by Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams. They introduced several changes: ‘Who would true Valour see’ becomes ‘He who would valiant be’, and the opening lines of verse three are rendered: ‘Since, Lord, thou dost defend/Us with Thy Spirit’. The melody of ‘Monk’s Gate’, a Sussex folk song, was sung to Vaughan Williams by Mrs Harriet Verrall on 24 April 1904 in Horsham.
1. Dryden and Lee’s tragedy was premiered at Dorset Gardens around 1678/9. Dryden tells us (The Duke of Guise, 1683) that he wrote only the first and third acts, and ‘drew the scenery of the whole play’. Purcell only set the portion of the play written by Dryden. ‘Musick for a while’ is sung in Act III, sc. i.
2. One of the Furies, whose head was covered with serpents and who with her whip chastized men for their misdeeds, breathing vengeance, war and pestilence.
1. The operatic version, with music by the Purcells, was so successful that it immediately replaced the play in the repertory. The manuscript (in the British Museum) of the songs in the Indian Queen was published with the date 1695.
1. Purcell died at the age of thirty-six.
3. Hades and Persephone, King and Queen of the Underworld.
1. Originally written for countertenors, the song was published by Blow in Amphion Anglicus (1700) in a version for sopranos. The poetic scheme of Dryden’s roundelay allows Blow to repeat the sensuous passage that depicts the kiss.
1. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander. Alexander’s mother was Olympias of Epirus.
2. Men of high rank, not equals. Alexander in a letter to Darius once wrote: ‘do not write to me as an equal’ (Arrian, Book 2).
3. Military excellence.
4. Thais was a famous Athenian courtesan who accompanied Alexander on his campaigns through Asia and persuaded him to burn the royal palace of Persepolis.
5. Timotheus, a famous poet and singer, was reputed to have invented choral music, and in Dryden’s poem he is Alexander’s master of music.
6. Olympias was Alexander’s mother, who claimed that he was the son of a supernatural serpent, not of Philip of Macedon – an assertion that encouraged belief in Alexander’s divine origin; he himself demanded that he be worshipped as a god.
7. wonder at.
8. Alexander.
9. takes upon himself the character of the god.
10. Because Alexander was not a god.
11. God of wine and mystic ecstasy.
12. honourable (ironic).
13. oboes.
14. Because Bacchus, according to legend, discovered wine.
15. in his memory.
16. Timotheus.
17. Alexander’s.
18. The subject is Timotheus.
19. King of Persia, defeated by Alexander.
20. deserted by his own followers.
21. turning over in his mind.
22. Timotheus.
23. The sound of love resembles that of mourning.
24. the assembled crowd.
25. Alexander.
26. the pleasurable pain of love.
27. Thais.
28. The Roman Furies are compared with the Greek Erinyes: the violent goddesses, with snakes in their hair and whips in their hands, pursued victims to make them mad.
29. dead Greek heroes.
30. Thais’s desire for vengeance is explained by the fact that Xerxes, whose throne Alexander now occupies, once destroyed the city of her birth.
31. those which provide the wind for organs.
32. organ. Cecilia, a Roman virgin martyr of the third century, was much later in the sixteenth century associated with the invention of the organ, becoming the patron saint of music.
33. one divinely inspired.
34. Because organ notes could be sustained by the blowing of bellows.
35. According to medieval legend St Cecilia is accompanied by a guardian angel.
1. A Platonic doctrine. See also Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ and ‘At a Solemn Musick’.
2. Jubal was the son of Lamech and Adah, the ancestor of all who played the lyre and pipe (Genesis, iv. 21).
1. Adapted from Centuries of Meditation, third century; Med: 1–3.
1. Finzi adapts the first three paragraphs of The First Century.
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 77