5. ‘There came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind’ (Acts ii, 2).
6. Because St Paul’s had no permanent gallery, wooden stands were built to accommodate the thousands of children.
1. ‘Weep, weep’ (‘Sweep’), the cry of the little chimney sweepers as they looked for work, is also a pathetic pun.
2. The poem originally started at this point; the implication is that the parents do not understand youthful joy.
3. The Church is seen to condone the cruelty inflicted on the chimney sweepers.
4. The second part of Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera (1950) is an ‘opera’ entitled ‘The Little Sweep’, which has a libretto by Eric Crozier, based on Blake’s poem.
1. The contrary poem to ‘The Lamb’ in the Songs of Innocence. No two interpretations of this great poem agree. How to reconcile good with evil seems to be the theme, but it is perhaps best to resist the temptation of explaining the symbolism, and let the poetry speak for itself. There are three versions of the poem, two in manuscript and the one printed here from the etched plate.
2. create.
1. The uneven lines of the poem dart to and fro like the flickering flight of an insect.
2. lack.
1. Britten uses lines 1–4 and 119–132 of Blake’s poem.
1. The first typographical edition of the Songs (1839) omitted this poem, presumably because it was considered to be too subversive of authority.
2. treatment.
3. The implication is that a schoolmistress, or perhaps mother, has left the child in the lurch, failing to love her children.
4. A typical symptom of rickets, caused by lack of sunlight.
5. A note on Blake’s punctuation. He tends to omit possessive apostrophes and uses commas, full stops, colons and semi-colons is a rather arbitrary fashion – they often seem to function as pauses rather than as guides to the structure of a sentence. He also was capitals for each word of a title.
1. First published in the second volume of Johnson’s Museum, the poem was written ‘out of compliment to a Mrs McLachlan, whose husband is an officer in the East Indies’.
1. Burns refers to Bonnie Prince Charlie, Schumann to himself! Though Burns had scant sympathy for the Catholic Church, as a Scotsman he was deeply affected by the British troops’ defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden Moor in 1746.
2. sore.
3. every.
1. not so.
2. kine.
3. ewes.
4. knolls.
5. wool.
6. sorely.
7. pick of the clan.
1. Albert Dietrich, in Recollections of Johannes Brahms (Alfred Lengnick & Co. Ltd., 1899), writes that Brahms told him how, when composing, ‘he liked to think of the words of folk-songs, these seeming to suggest musical themes to his mind. Thus, in the finale of his Sonata in C major, the words “My heart’s in the Highlands” had been in his mind.’
2. flat land by a river.
1. lullaby.
2. finely.
3. blessings on thy pretty throat.
4. pony.
5. prosper.
6. harry the varlets.
7. lowlands.
8. then.
1. handsome.
2. And he gave me two silken bandeaux.
3. and Spring will clothe the birch-wood.
4. The narrator is none other than Jean Armour, who in the winter of 1788 had been driven from the family home by her parents, when they discovered that she had resumed her relationship with Burns, who had made her pregnant. She in fact gave birth to twins, who died after a few days.
5. Burns did indeed return to Jean, arranging for food and shelter.
1. The ballad is traditionally assigned to 1788, immediately after Burns’s marriage to Jean Armour.
2. blows.
1. An amalgam of several old ballads, skilfully reworked by Burns
1. go your way.
2. you shall not.
3. indeed I must!
4. if.
1. This is a very much sanitized version of a bawdy ballad of the same name that Burns included in The Merry Muses of Caledonia.
2. sweetheart.
3. smooth.
4. bald.
5. pate.
6. jolly.
1. slopes.
2. every.
1. Written in honour of the famous fiddler Niel Gow (1727–1807), whom Burns met during his northern tour in 1787. Burns described him as ‘a short, stout-built Highland figure, with his greyish hair shed on his honest social brow – an interesting face, marking strong common sense, kind openheartedness mixed with unmistrusting simplicity’.
2. rang.
3. knocked her upside down.
4. our ears grow apprehensive.
5. the hungry crowd fidgeted and fussed.
6. sad.
7. King James I was imprisoned from 1406 to 1424.
1. ‘O, wert thou in the cauld blast’, written by Burns as he lay dying, commemorates Jessie Lewars, after she had played ‘The wren’ to him on the piano. She was the sister of John Lewars, a fellow exciseman, who nursed Burns through his final illness and took care of his four sons for some time after his death. Significantly, Shostakovich dedicated the song to his wife, Nina, during his final illness. Mendelssohn set the poem twice to a translation by Ferdinand Freiligrath, once as a solo song and once as a duet – both are intensely moving.
2. quarter, direction.
3. shelter.
1. Composed by Britten, for voice and harp, at the express wish of HM The Queen for her mother’s seventy-fifth birthday, 4 August 1975.
2. John Maxwell was a Dumfries joiner who became wealthy enough to buy back the family estate of Terraughty, which had been sold because of financial difficulties. He celebrated his seventy-first birthday on 7 February 1791.
3. proof.
4. every.
5. lease.
6. youngsters.
7. brimstone dust.
8. may comfortable Fortune, kind and frugal.
9. fellow.
10. and then the devil dare not touch thee.
11. if next to my heart I did not wear thee.
1. Jean Cruickshank was only twelve years old when Burns wrote this poem to her. She was the daughter of William Cruickshank, Latin master at the High School of Edinburgh; despite her young age she was musically mature enough to sing Burns’s songs to her own accompaniment.
2. footpath.
3. awake.
4. guards.
1. According to James Johnson, this nursery jingle is not by Burns, but merely revised by him.
2. shirt and necktie.
1. The poem, according to Dr Walker, Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh (1791), is based on a traditional ballad, sung by an old lady in Liddesdale.
2. if my lamb dies.
3. vain.
4. We watched the fold throughout the night.
5. We heard nothing but the roaring waterfall.
6. Among the scrubby slopes.
7. owl.
8. snipe.
9. fox.
10. a strange dog.
11. almost.
1. Burns sent the poem to Mrs Dunlop with the comment: ‘There is a small river, Afton, that falls into the Nith, near New Cumnock, which has some charming wild, romantic scenery on its banks …’
2. slopes.
3. cottage.
4. birch.
5. wash.
6. It seems likely that Burns used the name ‘Mary’ for the sake of euphony. There is no connection with Margaret Campbell, the ‘Highland Mary’ of many of his poems.
1. These two stanzas, much revised by Burns, come from a longer traditional ballad about the Irish highwayman Johnson who was hanged in 1750 for armed robbery – Burns omitted the two stanzas referring to the incident.
1. This fragment, not by Burns, was collected by him and sent to James Johnson to be included in his Scots Musical Museum.
&n
bsp; 1. Burns wrote to Mrs Dunlop on 7 December 1788: ‘Light be the turf on the breast of the heaven-inspired Poet who composed this glorious Fragment’; and in a note to George Thomson of 1793 he describes the poem as ‘the old song of the olden times […] which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man’s singing’. Thomson, in Scottish Airs, wrote that Burns claimed such things ‘merely in a playful humour’. Whether ‘Auld lang syne’ was written by Burns or was a reworking of a traditional ballad has exercised scholars for many years.
2. old long ago.
3. And surely ye’ll pay for your pint.
4. hillsides.
5. And pulled the fine daisies.
6. dinner-time.
7. broad.
8. companion.
9. good-will drink.
10. The folk melody was quoted by the English composer William Shield in his opera Rosina, and the song is sung at midnight on New Year’s Eve not only in Scotland (Hogmanay) and throughout the United Kingdom, but also in many other countries where English is spoken. Since the 1970s the melody has been very popular in Italian football, being adopted by many clubs and adapted to fit their teams’ chants.
1. The poem, written in April 1801, was first published without a title in Poems in Two Volumes (1807).
2. Wordsworth is probably recalling his visit to Germany, 1798–9.
3. The five so-called ‘Lucy Poems’ were written between 1798 and 1801, and all except ‘I travelled among unknown men’ were written in Germany and published during 1800 in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Although many modern anthologies publish them as a sequence, Wordsworth did not plan them as a group. The identity of Lucy remains a mystery: some scholars cite his sister Dorothy, but she is almost certainly a construct, enabling the poet to express his homesickness for England.
1. Ives’s subtitle is ‘So may it be!’ Wordsworth’s poem, written on 26 March 1802, was published in 1807.
1. Frederick Kelly (1881–1916) was an Australian composer who published a mere eight songs during his lifetime from an extant total of about twenty.
2. Wordsworth took as his source his sister Dorothy’s prose description in her Grasmere Journal, written on 15 April 1802: ‘I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones, about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as upon a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.’ Wordsworth’s poem dates from 1804.
1. Wordsworth refers in The Prelude to two trees that had deep significance for him in his youth: the ‘tall ash’ opposite his bedroom window at Hawkshead and the ‘single tree’ in the college groves at Cambridge.
1. This passage from The Prelude (Book X, lines 63–77) suggests that Wordsworth arrived in Paris on 29 October, the day on which Louvet accused Robespierre of having ‘perverted the Jacobin Club and exercised a despotism of opinion’. ‘These bloody men’, he said, ‘wished to satiate their cruel eyes with the spectacle of 28,000 bodies sacrificed to their fury. I accuse you of having dispersed and persecuted the Legislative Assembly, of having aimed at supreme power; and in this accusation your own conduct will speak more strongly than words.’ (Report in Morning Chronicle, 3–6 Nov.)
2. On 25 July 1792, the Duke of Brunswick signed a manifesto to the effect that the Allies would avenge any violence done to the King, by taking military action in Paris. The manifesto, which was designed to terrorize Paris, merely strengthened the hands of the more violent citizens: Danton decided to depose the King and hold him as hostage. The Tuileries was stormed by the mob on 9 August, and the King imprisoned on 10 August ‘for his own security’. Just over a week later, on 19 August, the Allied forces entered France and took Longwy (24 August) and Verdun (1 September). In retaliation the committee of the Commune, led by Marat, Danton and Robespierre, organized the September Massacres (2, 3 and 4 September), during which 3,000 Royalist suspects were dragged from prison and slaughtered.
3. Cf. As You Like It, Act I, sc. i, 13: ‘His horses are bred better: … they are taught their mannage.’
4. Cf. Macbeth, Act II, sc. ii, 35.
1. A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table was commissioned for the 1962 City of London Music Festival. The six poems, chosen by Christopher Hassall, depict various scenes and aspects of London. The work was first performed by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Gerald Moore in July of that year.
2. Collins’s ‘Ode on the death of Thomson’ was the last poem that he published.
1. Corp’s cycle comprises songs to poems on London by William Dunbar, Lord Byron, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Henry Carey.
1. In Note XXI to The Lady of the Lake Scott writes: ‘The connoisseurs in pipe-music affect to discover in a well-composed pibroch the imitative sounds of march, conflict, fight, pursuit, and all the “current of a heady fight”. To this opinion Dr Beattie has given his suffrage, in the following elegant passage: “A pibroch is a species of tune, peculiar, I think, to the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. It is performed on a bagpipe, and differs totally from all other music. Its rhythm is so irregular, and its notes, especially in the quick movement, so mixed and huddled together, that a stranger finds it impossible to reconcile his ear to it, so as to perceive its modulation. Some of these pibrochs, being intended to represent a battle, begin with a grave motion resembling a march; then gradually quicken into the onset; run off with noisy confusion, and turbulent rapidity, to imitate the conflict and pursuit; then swell into a few flourishes of triumphant joy; and perhaps close with the wild and slow wailings of a funeral procession.” ’
1. The song is sung by Malcolm Graeme as he languishes, a prisoner of the King of Scotland, in one of the castle turrets. Imprisoned he may be, but his spirit remains unbroken: he longs to be reunited with his beloved Ellen Douglas, who, on a mission to Stirling Castle, hears the song of her imprisoned lover. The King eventually pardons Graeme and Ellen’s father.
1. The song is sung by Norman, heir of Armandave, as he leaves his young bride, Mary, to join his clansmen in battle, having received a summons from Roderick Dhu, chief of the Clan-Alpine.
1. The opening phrase and the rhythm of Scott’s poem were adapted by Albert Gamse when he wrote the lyrics for ‘Hail to the Chief’, the official Presidential Anthem of the United States of America.
2. Roderick the Black, son of Alpine, suitor of Ellen Douglas.
1. ‘The Coronach of the Highlanders, like the Ululatus of the Romans, and the Ululoo of the Irish, was a wild expression of lamentation, poured forth by the mourners over the body of a departed friend. When the words of it were articulate, they expressed the praises of the deceased, and the loss the clan would sustain by his death. […] The coronach has for some years past been superseded at funerals by the use of the bagpipe; and that also is, like many other Highland peculiarities, falling into disuse, unless in remote districts’ (Scott’s note).
2. Duncan was one of Roderick Dhu’s bravest soldiers. In Schubert’s song he is mourned by all the women and girls.
3. a hollow in the side of a hill, where game can be found.
4. trouble, distress.
1. The novel concerns Clement Cleveland, a pirate who has been shipwrecked on the Shetland coast. As Robert Louis Stevenson puts it in Memories and Portraits: ‘The figure of Cleveland – cast up by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness – moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple islanders – singing the serenade under the windows of his Shetland mistress – is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention.’
2. Ulla Troil or Norna of the Fitful-head, so called because of the sea-cliff where she dwells as a recluse, claims to possess supernatural powers, and turns out to be the mother of Cleveland.
3. Victim of a curse, Norna is permitted to give vent to her suffering for only one hour each yea
r.
4. The daughters of Magnus Troil, Brenda and Minna, both suffer from nightmares in which they hear ‘some wild runic rhyme, resembling those sung by the heathen priests of old, when the victim (too often human) was bound to the fatal altar of Odin or of Thor’.
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 79