The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

  1. There are conflicting accounts of the poem’s genesis. According to Medwin it was written for Jane Williams; Sophia Stacey’s son, however, C. S. Catty, asserts that it was written for Sophia in November 1819, when she was visiting Shelley and Mary in Florence.

  2. Magnolia champaca – a large evergreen tree renowned for its intensely fragrant white or yellow flowers.

  1. Lines 7–24 were published by Medwin in The Athenæum (17 November 1832) as ‘An Ariette for Music. To a Lady Singing to Her Accompaniment on the Guitar’.

  1. Quilter left the song unfinished.

  1. The song is sung by Archy, the court fool, in Shelley’s posthumously published Charles the First.

  1. Hindemith conflates both poems into one song. Shelley wrote these two gem-like fragments at harvest-time in 1820 when the moon would have loomed large over Monte Pisano above the Pisan plain.

  1. Richard Capell wrote the following review in the Daily Telegraph (10 March 1950), following the UK premiere on 9 March: ‘This so-called symphony is rather a garland of spring flowers – including plenty of prickly blackthorn. The text is a little anthology of spring poems, principally of the 16th and 17th centuries. The one lapse from consistency is a poem by Auden, which brings in thoughts inappropriate to the rest; but even so, the admirable music (the slow movement of the “symphony”) remains consistent enough. More than ever in this dazzling score, the style of which is fundamentally diatonic, coloured by audacious dissonance, Britten is deft, light-handed, inventive and infallible in bringing off his puckish intentions. The boys’ choir (which is also called upon to whistle) is one of his telling resources. A duet, “Fair and Fair”, culminating in a spirited canon, is among the brilliant things Britten produces like a conjurer.’

  2. Clare’s poem forms part of the ‘May’ section of The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827).

  3. Britten was an expert whistler, as John Bridcut explains in Britten’s Children (Faber and Faber, 2006): ‘When Britten also required the boys to whistle the tune in unison, and to end with a wolf whistle, the Wandsworth lads were in their element. That was something Britten himself enjoyed, because (although this is not widely known) he was second to none in the knack of whistling. A friend of mine was astonished to see him hail a taxi in Sydney in April 1970 by putting two fingers in his mouth and effecting the shrillest whistle he had ever heard. Wulff Scherchen remembers the same thing in London before the war. “It was a very fierce whistle – I was quite ashamed of it. He made such a racket in the middle of a London street – and a taxi did appear too. I just thought it was wrong of him, as a composer of some standing, to behave like a schoolboy!” ’

  1. The songs were written, at their request, for Wilfred Brown and John Williams.

  1. pied wagtail.

  2. puddle.

  1. Num. xx. 7–11.

  1. to move quickly or convulsively.

  2. rises up, struts.

  1. Cf. Pope’s ‘The dying Christian to his soul’ (p. 221).

  2. The 57-year-old contralto Clara Butt can be heard on YouTube singing the version by Samuel Liddle (1868–1935).

  1. Whatever the literary sources of this celebrated poem, and however one interprets it, many commentators associate the pale knight with the dying poet, and the ‘belle dame’ with Fanny. For a more detailed interpretation, see Keats by Andrew Motion (Faber and Faber, 1997).

  2. a belt or girdle of flowers.

  3. In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, in which he included ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, Keats wrote: ‘Why four kisses, you will say? Why, four because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my muse – she would have fain said “score” without hurting the rhyme, but we must temper the imagination, as the critics say, with judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play: and to speak truly I think two-a-piece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven; there would have been three and a half a-piece – a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.’

  1. The first version of this famous sonnet probably dates from October 1819; Keats later revised it, substituting ‘Cheek-pillowed on my Love’s white ripening breast’ with the less sensuous ‘Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast’. Fanny Brawne inscribed the poem in her own hand on the fly-leaf of Dante’s Inferno, which Keats had acquired for her and which they would read together. That Fanny is the subject of this famous sonnet is suggested by a letter Keats wrote to her on Sunday, 25 July 1819, which ends: ‘I will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen. Yours ever, fair star, John Keats.’ Although Keats is writing about the North Star in his poem, and not Venus, the way ‘fair star’ at the end of the letter echoes the vocative ‘Bright star’ at the start of the poem is perhaps not entirely coincidental. A year later, when Keats was sailing to Italy on board the Maria Crowther, the captain allowed his passengers ashore at Studland Bay and, possibly, Lulworth Cove. Having resumed the journey, Severn claims that, seeing his friend scribbling down ‘Bright star!’ in pencil, he asked Keats to copy it out in pen on ‘a blank leaf in a folio volume of Shakespeare’s Poems, which had been given him by a friend, and which he gave to me in memory of the voyage’. It should be remembered, however, that the poem had actually been written the previous autumn.

  1. Bridge’s song was originally published, along with ‘Go not, happy day’, in The Vocalist in 1905.

  2. Written on 21 March 1818, the poem was sent by Keats in a letter to Haydon, with the following remark: ‘Here’s some doggrel for you – Perhaps you would like a bit of B…hrell’ (‘Bitchrell’ was a word that Keats coined from ‘doggerel’). The rhythm of the poem is based on that of a song by Chatterton (‘As Elynour bie the greene lesselle was syttynge’), to whom Keats originally dedicated Endymion.

  1. This is the last of six short pieces, dated 1818 by Woodhouse, who transcribed them under the general title of Extracts from an Opera. In a letter to George and Tom Keats in February 1818, Keats told his brothers: ‘I have been writing at intervals many songs and Sonnets’. It was Charles Brown, whose opera Narensky, or The Road to Yaroslaff was first performed at Drury Lane on 11 January 1814, who encouraged Keats to write the libretto for an opera. Bridge also composed a version with orchestra.

  1. The work was commissioned for the Leeds Triennial Festival, and Holst chose the texts from a volume of Keats poetry which his daughter Imogen had given him. For the introduction and first movement he selected stanzas from the chorus of shepherds in Endymion and also from the Roundelay in Book IV of the poem; the second movement sets the whole of ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’; the third movement, a scherzo, uses most of Keats’s ‘Fancy’ and ‘Folly’s Song’; and the finale includes the lines ‘Spirit here that reignest’, and also extracts from the ‘Hymn to Apollo’ and ‘Bards of passion and of mirth’.

  2. Tempe was a valley in Thessaly which was celebrated, like Arcadia, for its pastoral beauty and the happiness of its inhabitants.

  3. ‘applied by the poets to things that show or suggest interweaving of colours […]’ (OED).

  1. Britten sets the first eighteen lines of this 405-line poem.

  1. The poem was written at either the end of December 1818 or the start of January 1819, and first published in 1848. Keats copied it for George and Georgina Keats on 2 January 1819, calling it ‘a little thing I wrote off to some Music as it was playing’ (Letters, II, 27). This little poem, the work perhaps of a few minutes, reflects Keats’s grief at the death from tuberculosis of his brother Tom, who had died in December 1818.

  1. water-lily.

  2. chimneys.

  3. weight.

  4. Mount Paladore is the British name for Shaftesbury, deriving from the Welsh ‘paladr’, which denotes the shaft of a spear.

  5. exert themselves.

  1. Vaughan Williams’s setting of ‘Linden Lea’ (‘My orcha’d in Linden Lea’ in the original) appeared in the first issue of The Vocalist (1902), a monthly periodical that contributed sign
ificantly to the renaissance of English song, and earned him more money than any other of his works. The song was arranged by the composer in 1942–3 for oboe, clarinet and bassoon with the title ‘Fantasia on Linden Lea’.

  2. the stump of a tree.

  1. The refrain is a fine example of the cynghanedd, a technique used in Welsh verse, and in many poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, where there is a repetition of consonantal sounds in the two parts of a line, divided by a caesura. In Barnes’s refrain the cynghanedd consonants are: DLNDNL/NLNDNL.

  1. Dykes’s tune, Lux benigna, came to him as he was walking along the Strand past Charing Cross station. Newman always attributed the hymn’s popularity to Dykes’s music.

  2. Newman’s poem, a favourite of Queen Victoria’s, was read to her as she lay dying in Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in January 1901. It was also sung on board the Titanic at the final service on board the stricken liner.

  3. Newman always refused to explain the meaning of the final couplet, but did say of his verses that they echoed ‘the voice of one in darkness asking for help from our Lord’. ‘Lost awhile’ is usually taken to refer to his Anglican friends.

  1. From Wisdom and Innocence, the sermon preached by Newman on 19 February 1843 in Littlemore. Pärt’s Littlemore Tractus was commissioned by the Reverend Bernhard Schünemann to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Newman’s birth.

  1. By the summer of 1838 Elizabeth’s health had become so poor that her physician, William Frederick Chambers, fearing that she might fall ill with consumption, recommended her to move to a sunnier climate. Torquay was the suggested destination, and at the end of August she went by ship from London to Plymouth, and from there by packet boat to Torquay. She later wrote: ‘The worst – what people call the worst – was apprehended for me at that time.’ This is the background to ‘A sabbath morning at sea’, as she describes dawn breaking on her first Sunday at sea. The poem was published that autumn in Thomas Kibble’s The Amaranth.

  1. Greek poet (c.308–c.240 BC) of bucolic idylls from Syracuse, Sicily.

  1. Both Elizabeth and Robert kept their wonderfully learned and witty letters, which were auctioned along with the contents of Casa Guidi after Pen Browning’s death.

  1. Muslims.

  2. Non-Muslims – a term of contempt used by Turks.

  3. The Cyclops and cannibal from the Odyssey, IX.

  1. Written in 1889, one year before Stanford’s setting, as Tennyson was crossing the Solent. Hallam, Lord Tennyson reminisces: ‘When he repeated it to me in the evening, I said, “That is the crown of your life’s work.” He answered, “It came in a moment”.’ Tennyson insisted that ‘Crossing the bar’ should be printed at the end of all editions of my poems’.

  2. The ‘bar’ is the sandbank across the harbour mouth.

  1. The place where the hero’s father committed suicide: he had been ruined in a business speculation with his fraudulent partner, who, now a millionaire, owns the nearby Hall. It is this partner’s daughter, Maud, with whom the hero falls in love. The partner’s lack of humanity leads the hero to rage against commerce and greed.

  1. War is seen by the hero as a cure for his emotional turmoil. This, ‘O let the solid ground’ and ‘Go not, happy day’ are the only poems of Tennyson’s cycle that Somervell set entire.

  1. Omitted from the published version, this poem was reinstated in the 1907 edition.

  1. While the brother is away on a business trip in London, the hero fantasizes about Maud accepting his proposal.

  1. J. H. Mangles wrote in 1871 that he heard Tennyson declare that: ‘ “Come into the garden, Maud” had, & was intended to have, a taint of madness’; Mangles also reported that Tennyson ‘hated the valse to which “Come into the garden, Maud” was made to dance. Nothing fit for it but the human voice.’

  1. Tennyson’s poem explains how the hero has fled abroad, having killed Maud’s brother, who, led on by the rival suitor, had discovered their tryst in the garden after the Hall ball. ‘The fault was mine’ was uttered by the dying brother, as he urged the hero to flee. The hero, however, recognizes his own guilt, and imagines Maud lamenting her brother’s death.

  1. Song 11 conflates two poems from Part II, Canto 5 of Maud, which contains eleven poems and 105 lines of verse – all of which, according to Tennyson, ‘were written in 20 minutes’ (Knowles). And in his Memoirs (I, 398), Tennyson claimed: ‘About the mad-scene one of the best-known doctors for the insane wrote that it was “the most faithful representation of madness since Shakespeare”.’ The hero in his madness believes he is dead and buried insufficiently deep. It was passages like this that caused such critics as J. H. Buckley (The Victorian Temper, 1952) to link Tennyson with the ‘Spasmodics’, a term coined by William Aytoun to mock the poetic and thematic extravagancies of writers such as James Bailey, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith.

  1. The poem begins Part III of Maud, and Tennyson describes his state thus: ‘Sane, but shattered. Written when the cannon was heard booming from the battleships in the Solent before the Crimean War.’

  1. Existing between two stages of existence – the first usage recorded in the OED.

  1. Anniversary of Arthur Hallam’s death (15 September).

  1. the Severn.

  2. Clevedon church. Tennyson remarked: ‘I myself did not see Clevedon till years after the burial of A.H.H.’

  1. nightingale.

  2. quickset thorn – ‘live slips or cuttings of plants, set in the ground to grow’ (OED).

  1. Tennyson comments: ‘Water can be brought below freezing-point and not turn into ice – if it be kept still; but if it be moved suddenly it turns into ice and may break the vase.’

  1. One of the giants, son of Tartarus and Terra.

  1. sun and moon.

  1. From The Princess. Quilter made an orchestral version and also a later version for piano and voice (1946), in which he incorporated changes suggested by the singer Mark Raphael.

  1. The Queen reflects on the love she has lost – King Philip II of Spain – and the loss of Calais.

  1. From The Princess. Tennyson noted that the poem was ‘written after hearing the echoes at Killarney in 1848’.

  1. A mythical sea-monster of enormous size, allegedly seen at times off the coast of Norway.

  1. The Latin title of poem, which expresses the pain felt by Browning at the death of his wife, translates as ‘Look forward’. It was published in Dramatis Personae (1864), a volume in which Elizabeth’s death triggered a grief in the poet that is comparable to Hardy’s in ‘Poems of 1912–13’, published in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914).

  1. These lines occur at the beginning of Browning’s ‘In a Gondola’.

  1. The fifteenth stanza of ‘A lovers’ quarrel’, a poem of twenty-two verses written by Browning in Casa Guidi shortly after his marriage to Elizabeth. After breakfasting each morning on fruit and coffee, Browning would ask Elizabeth to wish him ‘good-fortune’; he would then spend the morning writing in the small sitting room, while she worked away at her novel-poem Aurora Leigh in the drawing room. Liza Lehmann, in The Life of Liza Lehmann by Herself (T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd, 1919), describes Browning, a regular visitor to her father’s studio, as ‘one of the simplest men – the very opposite of a poseur’.

  1. Image of a marriage on the rocks.

  1. A chamfrain or chamfron is the ‘frontlet of a barded or armed horse’ (OED).

  1. Dartle = ‘to dart or shoot forth repeatedly’ (OED).

  1. The poem is from Pippa Passes, a drama set in Asolo, which Browning visited in 1838. It expresses Pippa’s rapture as she enjoys the freedom of her only day off in the year. She is a poor, young silk-worker who resolves on her annual holiday to ‘pass’ ‘Asolo’s Four Happiest Ones’: Ottima and her lover Sebald (representing carnal love), the sculptor Jules and his bride (married love), the young patriot Luigi and his mother (filial love), and the good bishop (love of God). Each life turns out to be different from the way Pippa had ima
gined, full of corruption and dissent. As she ‘passes’ by each of the four main scenes, she sings a song, whose innocence and beauty effect a moral revolution in the characters concerned.