The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

  2. farmyard.

  3. deep hollow, valley.

  1. Hardy’s original title in the first edition had been ‘The century’s end, 1900’, and the poem was first printed, entitled ‘By the century’s deathbed’, in The Graphic on 29 December 1900, although Hardy at the end of the poem gives the date as 31 December 1900. Hardy’s ‘darkling’ echoes Arnold’s use of the same word in ‘Dover beach’ (‘And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight’), a poem that deals with loss of faith – see p. 502.

  2. dried-out stem of bindweed.

  3. stretched out.

  4. Neville Cardus, in The Delights of Music (1966), wrote that ‘Kreisler plays as the thrush sings in Thomas Hardy’s poem, hardly conscious of his own lovely significance’.

  1. The text chosen by Tippett expresses Hudson’s empathy with nature, which stands out all the more powerfully for coming after a passage that describes the unimaginable stench of the Saladero, the killing-grounds where cattle, horses and sheep were slaughtered in their thousands every day. Tippett’s model for Boyhood’s End was Purcell’s ‘Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation’, a work he greatly admired.

  2. Shams ud-din Muhammad (d. c.1390), Persian poet and philosopher, whose Divan contains ghasels that sing of love, flowers, wine and nightingales.

  3. Popular name for the Great Kiskadee, Pitangus sulphuratus, so called because of its exuberant BEE-tee-WEE call. ‘Bien te veo’ = ‘I see you well’ in Spanish. The bird can be found from southern Texas and Mexico to Uruguay and central Argentina.

  4. A wading bird of South and Central America: Aramus guarana.

  5. aquatic plant.

  6. The Allamanda flower, also known as Yellow Bell, Golden Trumpet and Buttercup Flower is native to South and Central America, and derives its name from Dr Frédéric-Louis Allamand (1735–1803), a Swiss botanist.

  1. This wonderful song can be regarded as a symbolic farewell to Gurney’s creative life, before his family committed him a year later to the Barnwood House Asylum.

  1. Finzi subtitled In terra pax ‘Christmas Scene’ and introduced after verse two St Luke’s account of the angel bringing the news of Christ’s birth to the shepherds (‘And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields […] Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.’ An agnostic, he wrote about one of the Newbury String Players concerts: ‘I did rejoice to think that agnostics, R.C’s, Anglo-C’s, Jews, Chapel and C of E were all gathered together, seeing a beautiful sight, listening to decent music and with all their ludicrous differences dropped for at least an hour.’

  2. ‘Peace be to people of good will’ or ‘Peace, good will towards men’.

  1. ‘Since we loved’, dated 28 August 1956, was the last song that Finzi completed. Bridges’ poem occurs in New Poems and has no title.

  1. Ad majorem Dei gloriam, ‘To the greater glory of God’, was the motto of the Jesuit order, of which Hopkins was a member. Britten withdrew the seven Hopkins settings of A.M.D.G., which was never performed in his lifetime. The original intention had been to have the songs performed by Pears’s ‘Round Table Singers’. The work was premiered in 1984 and finally published in 1989.

  2. ‘I mean foil in its sense of leaf or tinsel […] Shaken goldfoil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning and also, and this is true of nothing else, owing to its zigzag dints and creasings and network of small many cornered facets, a sort of fork lightning too’ (Letters, I, pp. 168–9).

  3. Refers perhaps to the crushing of olives.

  4. take note of.

  1. The poem, written on 7 September 1880 while Hopkins was walking back from saying Mass at Rose Hill, a country house in Lydiate, north of Liverpool, was sent to Robert Bridges in a letter with the comment: ‘I enclose a little piece composed since I began this letter, not founded on real incident.’ It is likely, therefore, that the poem was not inspired by the ‘Margaret’ of the first line, but rather gives voice to his own melancholy mood.

  2. An adverb. Cf. ‘piecemeal’: the suggestion is that the leaves fall one by one, then rot to create pale fragments.

  3. The fall of the leaf is connected with the Fall of Man.

  1. The song thrush builds its nest low in the hedge, and the eggs are greeny-blue in colour.

  1. Hopkins wrote to Bridges on 16 July 1878: ‘The Hurrahing sonnet was the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the Elwy.’

  1. Quilter based the opening phrase on a blackbird’s song he had heard.

  1. Love Blows as the Wind Blows, originally composed as a song cycle for baritone and string quartet, was arranged c.1914 for voice and small orchestra, omitting ‘Fill a glass with golden wine’.

  1. Mrs Katharine de Mattos, one of Stevenson’s favourite cousins.

  1. As a child, Stevenson used to visit his grandfather in Colinton, where he was minister. The manse garden and the surrounding woodland were RLS’s playground, from where he could hear the thrum of nearby Kirkland Mill – the inspiration for Keepsake Mill.

  1. Steuart Bedford recalls Benjamin Britten saying that this was one of his favourite songs. There used to be ‘Daisy Chain’ parties when Britten was a boy, in which the whole cycle would be sung, and it is quite possible that Britten heard his mother perform ‘The swing’. Songs by Liza Lehmann were often programmed in the early days of the Aldeburgh Festival, sung by Peter Pears.

  1. Vaughan Williams’s title.

  1. The Master sings lines from this song in The Master of Ballantrae.

  1. Wilde’s numb little poem expresses his grief at the death of his younger sister, Isola, to whom he had been deeply attached. Following a fever, she had been sent to recuperate at the house of an aunt, but suffered a sudden relapse and died shortly after. The doctor who tried to save her described Isola as ‘the most gifted and lovable child’ he had ever known; he also remembered Oscar as ‘an affectionate, gentle, retiring, dreamy boy whose lonely and inconsolable grief found solace in long and frequent visits to his sister’s grave in the village cemetery and in touching, boyish, poetic effusions’. ‘Requiescat’ was written later in her memory. Wilde kept a lock of her hair in an envelope on which he inscribed their interlinked initials.

  1. Refers to Housman’s love for Moses Jackson.

  2. Housman was a self-confessed gastronome.

  1. The gardens at Perry Hall, Housman’s home till the age of about fourteen, contained a cherry tree that was celebrated for miles around; and the avenue of cherry trees at Trinity College, Cambridge, was planted at Housman’s instigation, while he was a Fellow at the College.

  1. In a letter dated 30 September 1930 (Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania), Housman states that this was the only poem in ASL that was not written at Byron Cottage, Highgate.

  2. ‘a piece of lead or other metal attached to a line, and used for sounding or measuring the depth of water’ (OED). Cf. The Tempest, III. iii. 101: ‘I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded’.

  3. heal.

  1. ‘There is no Bredon Hill in Shropshire, only Breidden Hills’ (Housman to an unnamed correspondent in a letter dated 14 July 1927). ‘Bredon is the Worcestershire hill […]. The poem is one of the earliest, written before I knew the book would be Shropshire’ (Housman to H. E. Butler, 3 January 1930).

  2. Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.

  3. The adjective was arrived at with some difficulty, as Laurence Housman describes in My Brother, A. E. Housman: ‘I asked him once whether, as a rule, his so happily-chosen adjectives had come to him spontaneously or after labour and with difficulty; and I gave as an instance “coloured counties”, a phrase which has become famous. “Now, that you should have picked that out”, he said, “is interesting. When I wrote the poem I put down, just to fill up for the time, a quite ordinary adjective, which didn’t satisfy me; others followed. Then with my poem in my head, I went to bed and dreamed, and in my dream I hit on the word ‘
painted’; when I woke up I saw that ‘painted’ wouldn’t do, but it gave me ‘coloured’ as the right word.” This is confirmed in the first draft of the poem which I found in one of his note-books, where the alternatives run: sunny, pleasant, checkered, patterned; “painted” is left out, it was not necessary for that to be written down – it had suggested the right word.’

  1. The poem was printed, with Housman’s permission, on one of The Times Broadsheets for the trenches. Housman’s attitude to soldiers and war is complex. He admired their courage and self-sacrifice, and envied perhaps those who died young and with honour.

  2. a soldier in the British Army.

  1. The poem was printed, with Housman’s permission, on one of The Times Broadsheets for the trenches.

  2. In 1 Henry IV, Act IV, sc. ii, 64–7, Falstaff refers to the ‘pitiful rascals’ about to fight at the Battle of Shrewsbury as ‘food for powder’.

  3. The inference is that man’s life is of short duration. Cf. Job xiv, 1: ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.’

  1. pale.

  1. One of the most poignant expressions in A Shropshire Lad of Housman’s longing for the innocent land of childhood and the countryside west of Bromsgrove where he would roam as a young boy. Cf. ‘Far in a western brookland’ (p. 670).

  1. a hill town at the confluence of the Rivers Corve and Teme, some twenty-five miles south of Shrewsbury. The annual fair was held on 1 May.

  2. tillage, ploughing.

  1. The poem was printed, with Housman’s permission, on one of The Times Broadsheets for the trenches.

  2. Wenlock Edge is a fifteen-mile-long and 1,000-feet-high limestone escarpment near Much Wenlock in Shropshire.

  3. The Wrekin (from the Roman Vr-ikon – ‘City of Iconium’) is an extinct volcano near Shrewsbury, some 1,335 feet high.

  4. wood and hillside thicket.

  5. Viriconium was an ancient Roman city near Wroxeter, south-east of Shrewsbury.

  1. A reference to the ‘twelve quarters’ from which the wind can blow.

  2. ‘to form out of parts compacted’ (OED).

  3. A play on words: ‘quickly’ and ‘quick, alive’.

  1. ‘I could not say that I have a favourite among my poems. Thomas Hardy’s was no. XXVII in A Shropshire Lad, and I think it may be the best, though it is not the most perfect’ (Housman to Houston Martin, 28 March 1933 and 27 September 1935).

  1. The prefatory quatrain is traditional, and the proper names are all small Shropshire villages.

  2. a corruption of ‘Onny’. The East Onny and West Onny rivers join at Eaton, flow south-east as the River Onny to join the River Teme at Bromfield. The River Clun rises below the Black Mountain and flows past the four villages mentioned in the quatrain with which the poem opens.

  3. a town on the Teme, now in Powys.

  4. ‘To handsel’ = ‘to be the first to test, try, prove’ (OED).

  1. The opening two lines are a direct translation of the traditional French song ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois’, set to music by J.-B. Weckerlin.

  1. detect, discover, decipher.

  1. ‘ “Fancy’s Knell” was chosen with intent, as my Shropshire, like the Cambridge of Lycidas, is not exactly a real place, and the topography and customs of Abdon do not correspond to fact’ (letter to Gerald Bullett, 20 April 1933).

  2. village to the west of Brown Clee Hill some eight miles north-east of Ludlow.

  3. darkened.

  4. one of three Iron Age hill forts on Brown Clee near Abdon in Shropshire.

  1. Housman uses the Ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, the ‘Grecian lad’ punished for rejecting lovers (including the nymph Echo) by being made to fall in love with his own image. Narcissus saw his image reflected in a pool, fell in love with it, tried in vain to approach it, grew desperate and finally killed himself. His blood was changed into a flower which now bears his name.

  2. a species of narcissus, with long leaves and spikes of fragrant white and yellow flowers.

  1. on the point of stripping.

  1. the wild daffodil that blooms in Lent.

  2. the wood anemone (Anemone nemorosa) or any plant of the genus Anemone.

  3. gathering flowers in May.

  1. ‘sincere, single-minded’ (OED).

  1. The River Teme flows through Ludlow.

  1. Refers almost certainly to Fockbury, where Housman was born.

  1. Much Wenlock.

  2. blossoms of the hawthorn.

  1. is strewn upon.

  2. promontories shine like a beacon.

  1. Pisces.

  2. mistle-thrush.

  1. The Poems of Terence Hearsay had been Housman’s original title, which he changed on the advice of A. W. Pollard to A Shropshire Lad.

  2. the harvest festival celebrated on 1 August.

  1. A clear reference to Housman’s break with Moses Jackson.

  1. The poem, written a year after the event, describes Housman’s parting from Moses Jackson, his close university friend, who in 1887 had fallen in love with a young widow, Mrs Rosa Chambers. Jackson resigned from the Patent Office where he was working and took up the headmastership of a prestigious school in Karachi. When Jackson married Rosa, Housman was kept in the dark and not invited to the church service in Paddington.

  2. shoots up.

  1. Vaughan Williams dedicated the score of ‘Silence and Music’ (1953) ‘To the memory of Charles Villiers Stanford, and his Blue Bird’. Vaughan Williams wrote of Stanford’s music: ‘the sense of style, the sense of beauty, the feeling of a great tradition is never absent. His music is in the best sense of the word Victorian, that is to say it is the musical counterpart of the art of Tennyson, Watts and Matthew Arnold.’ Stanford’s Op. 119 includes seven other part songs to poems by Mary Coleridge.

  1. when Perseus cut off the Medusa’s head, a winged horse leapt from her blood. Hesiod derives the name from the Greek word for ‘spring’ or ‘well’ – the ‘pegai’ of Okeanos, where he was born.

  1. Also known as ‘The sacred flame’.

  1. Dear Land of Hope, our helm of pride

  Upon thy brow is set.

  Thy keen-eyed navies span the tide;

  Be strong, be patient yet!

  Then let thy thunders’ rolling smoke

  O’er echoing seas be borne,

  To shatter with their lightning stroke

  The braggart sons of scorn.

  Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the free,

  How shall we uphold thee, who are born of thee!

  Gird thee well for battle, bid thy hosts increase,

  Stand for faith and honour, strike for truth and peace.

  1. Realizing that ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ would be a box-office hit, Boosey’s requested author and composer to revise it as a solo song for separate publication.

  1. Newbolt wrote the poem on 5 December 1895. A few weeks later, in January 1896, Kaiser Wilhelm made ‘a threatening move’ at sea; the Royal Navy responded by launching a Special Service Squadron to oppose the Kaiser, and Newbolt felt it appropriate to send his poem to Sidney Low, editor of the St James’s Gazette. Low published it on 15 January, having reversed the order of the first two verses, and changed some of the dialect spelling – without consulting the poet.

  2. Nombre dc Dios Bay in Panama was attacked by Drake on three occasions, the last of which was in August 1595. Drake fell ill, died on 29 January 1596 and was buried at sea in the harbour, wrapped in a hammock with a cannonball at his head and feet. The drum was brought home and can now be seen in Buckland Abbey.

  3. promontory.

  4. Drake Island in Plymouth Sound.

  5. Spaniards.

  1. ‘I was quite overcome with admiration of old Charles Stanford’s genius,’ Newbolt wrote in 1929, having heard a recording of ‘The Old Superb’. ‘I had only one thing to say, and that a quotation – “What genius we had in those days!” I wrote that “Old Superb” all in one piece and next day he set it in one
morning. Could one enjoy life more gloriously?’

  2. ‘a mast or portion of a mast, (OED).