The Penguin Book of English Song

by Richard Stokes

3. Captain Richard Keats, commanding officer of the seventy-four-gun battleship HMS Superb, which, despite its poor condition, sailed day and night across the Atlantic to engage the French fleet at Trafalgar.

  4. ‘a sail set beyond the leeches of any of the principal sails during a fair wind’ (OED).

  1. Walter Damrosch (1862–1950), conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society, composed the song especially for the baritone David Bispham, who sang it with great success on his tours throughout America.

  2. The story is true. Having recorded a number of Barrack-Room Ballads (including ‘Danny Deever’, ‘Boots’, ‘On the road to Mandelay’ and ‘Gunga Din’) for EMI, Owen Brannigan received from a listener the official records from the Museum of the Royal Leicester Regiment, and wrote in the liner notes: ‘The man Kipling called “Danny Deever” was No. 2638 Private [name supplied], who was hanged at 8.15 a.m. on January 19th, 1887, with all the rights and horrors of a military execution – facing his regiment and dying on the scaffold at Lucknow, Bengal, East India, for his wilful murder of Lance Sergeant William Carmody.’

  1. Grainger’s cycle consists of eleven movements, five for choir alone, while the remaining six have instrumental accompaniment. The Jungle Book has also inspired music by Charles Koechlin, whose symphonic poem occupied him from 1899 to 1950, and who set three Kipling poems in his Op. 18; and also by Miklós Rózsa, who wrote the music for Alexander Korda’s 1942 film of The Jungle Book.

  2. ‘The Inuit’ is Grainger’s own title (Kipling’s poem had none) and he wrote of this song: ‘The urge behind this poem is the very strongest and most pronounced root emotion of my life: the love of savagery, the belief that savages are sweeter and more peaceable and artistic than civilised people, the belief that primitiveness is purity and civilisation filthy corruption, the agony of seeing civilisation advance and pass its blighting hand over the world.’

  3. an Arctic whale.

  1. Dunhill’s ‘Half close your eyelids’ was first published in the 1900 issue of The Dome: An Illustrated Magazine and Review of Literature, Music, Architecture and the Graphic Arts, which, with the slightly later The Vocalist, contributed greatly to the renaissance of English song at the turn of the century. This is the earliest known setting of a poem by Yeats.

  1. ‘I have 3 Poems, and O – a new song for mezzo soprano. One of my best, madam; that being a setting of those wistful, magical words of Yeats – “The Folly of Being Comforted”. There is one passage “O she had not these ways/When all the wild summer was in her gaze”, which will raise your hair’ (Gurney in a letter to Marion Scott, 31 October 1917, written from the Edinburgh War Hospital, Bangour, where he was recovering from gassing). The poem, for Gurney, was associated with his attachment to Nurse Annie Drummond at the hospital. Gurney hoped for a permanent relationship but she was not as serious, and it all finished sometime during 1918.

  2. Lady Gregory, perhaps.

  3. Maud Gonne.

  4. easier not to be dazzled by Maud Gonne’s beauty.

  1. ‘I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball on its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem “Innisfree”, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written that first line with its conventional archaism – “Arise and go” – nor the inversion in the last stanza’ (Autobiographies). The poem was written in December 1888 and published in 1890. Its success later embarrassed Yeats.

  2. Yeats explained in a wireless broadcast that this phrase referred to the reflection of heather in the water – ‘Innisfree’ means ‘heather island’.

  1. The inspiration for this celebrated poem is Pierre de Ronsard’s sonnet ‘Quand vous serez bien vieille’.

  1. The Wind among the Reeds was published in 1899, the same year as Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, dedicated to Yeats. Several of Yeats’s own poems in this collection also breathe a Symbolist atmosphere of suggestion and evocation; and they reflect his increasingly tormented relationship with Maud Gonne. Indeed, the title of the volume appears in a prose sketch of an unwritten poem about Maud Gonne: ‘I / hear the cry of the birds/& the cry of the deer/& I hear the wind among the/reeds, but I put my hands/over my ears for were not/they my beloved whispering to/me’.

  1. The poem explores Yeats’s relationship to his lover, Olivia Shakespear, and Maud Gonne, his unattainable beloved. ‘a beautiful friend’ refers to Olivia, ‘your image’ (line 6) to Maud. This tallies with Yeats’s own account of breaking off relations with Olivia: ‘Then Maud Gonne wrote to me […] And at last one morning instead of reading much love poetry, as my way was to bring the right mood round, I wrote letters. My friend [Olivia] found my mood did not answer hers and burst into tears. “There is someone else in your heart,” she said’ (Memoirs, p. 89).

  1. Slieve Echtge, a mountain in County Galway.

  2. The gods of ancient Ireland, the Tuatha de Danaan, who dwelt in Tír na nÓg, the Country of the Young.

  1. The poem reflects the agony caused by Yeats’s break-up with Olivia Shakespear. On p. 125 of his Memoirs, Yeats tells how, for seven celibate years after their relationship had finished, he experienced such sexual stress that he felt like screaming aloud.

  1. willow. Cf. Desdemona’s cry of ‘Salce’ in Verdi and Boïto’s Otello.

  2. ‘Down by the salley gardens’, first published in Crossways (1889), has since achieved folk song status. Forty-eight years later Yeats said in a radio broadcast: ‘When I was a young man poetry had become eloquent and elaborate. Swinburne was the reigning influence and he was very eloquent. A generation came that wanted to be simple, I think I wanted that more than anybody else. I went from cottage to cottage listening to stories, to old songs; sometimes the songs were in English, sometimes they were in Gaelic – then I would get somebody to translate. Some of my best known poems were made in that way. “Down by the Salley Gardens”, for example, is an elaboration of two lines in English somebody sang to me at Ballysadare, County Sligo’ (Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. II, p. 495, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, 1975).

  1. ‘In Yeats’s jargon’, Tippett writes in Those Twentieth Century Blues, ‘an artefact is a work of art that is entirely separated from its creator – where the personal emotion has disappeared into the magnificence of the craft.’ Many commentators consider that Yeats’s late poem ‘Byzantium’ (1930) epitomizes such an aesthetic apotheosis.

  2. Yeats wrote a prose draft of his poem in his 1930 diary: ‘Describe Byzantium as it is in the system [of A Vision] towards the end of the first Christian millennium. A walking mummy. Flames at the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour [dolphins], offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to Paradise.’

  3. prostitutes.

  4. Yeats, recalling the way Maud Gonne reverberated throughout his life after their first meeting, wrote in his Memoirs, p. 40: ‘it seems to me that she brought into my life in those days […] a sound as of a Burmese gong, an overpowering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes.’

  5. The dome referred to here is that of Hagia Sofia (Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople.

  6. The mummy resembles a spool on which its temporal life is rolled.

  7. In Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Sibyl counsels Aeneas to acquire a golden bough to assist his descent into the underworld.

  7. Dolphins in Neoplatonic mythology carry the souls of the newly dead to the Isles of the Blest.

  8. This wonderful phrase
describes the warring impulses of sexuality (dolphins) and spirituality.

  1. Julius Caesar, who extended the Roman Empire in his wars against the Gauls.

  2. Cf. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria VII: ‘Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it […] This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.’ Yeats’s poem shows how greatness in life and art can begin almost imperceptiby in a silent, improvisatory manner.

  3. Cf. Marlowe, Dr Faustus, Act V, sc. I, 94–5: ‘Was this the face that lancht a thousand shippes? /And burnt the toplesse Towres of Ilium?’ The reference is to Helen of Troy, whose beauty led to the burning of Troy’s ‘topless towers’.

  1. Eric Fenby writes about Cynara in Delius (Faber and Faber, 1971): ‘His [Delius’s] two most persuasive supporters in England now made their appearance separately at Grez to persuade him to agree to a festival of his music which one of them, Sir Thomas Beecham, planned to celebrate in the autumn of 1929. The other, Philip Heseltine, was given the preliminary task of sounding Delius on the project. […] Later Sir Thomas wrote to Delius asking if he had an unpublished work for voice and orchestra to include as a novelty in the programmes. Piles of faded pencil sketches (all in full score) had accumulated from a lifetime’s work. Along with the sketches of Songs of Sunset was one I could not place. On playing it over to Delius he recognized it immediately as a setting for baritone and orchestra of Dowson’s best-known poem Cynara which he had abandoned, indeed quite forgotten, after judging its inclusion inappropriate in the scheme of Songs of Sunset for which it was intended initially. It was complete in every detail up to the words “Then falls thy shadow, Cynara”, at which there was a blank. Delius decided to fill it, and, after some painful and frustrating hours of work, managed to complete the remaining bars. I shall never forget my thrill when I took down the telling chord on the trombones on the final word “Cynara”!’

  2. ‘I am not as I was under the reign of good Cynara’ (Horace, Odes, 4. 1).

  1. ‘About to die’. Delius omits the title of each poem.

  1. ‘While the Fates allow us, let us sate our eyes with love’.

  1. ‘O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that liveth at peace in his possessions’.

  1. The poem resembles Verlaine’s ‘Spleen’ from Romances sans paroles (1874).

  1. ‘Life’s brief span forbids our entertaining far-reaching hopes’ (Horace, Odes, 1.4).

  1. A play by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, premiered in 1893, with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Paula.

  1. Lehmann states that ‘Henry King’ should be ‘sung in a snivelling manner; much overcome’.

  1. Halnaker (= half naked) Windmill – Ha’nacker reflects the correct pronunciation – is a tower mill north-east of Chichester, the neglect of which symbolizes the decay of morality. In 1907 Belloc bought King’s Land in Shipley (Sussex), an estate of five acres with a working windmill. He lived there for the rest of his life, and wrote ‘Ha’nacker Hill’ while on holiday in France. He composed his own music for the poem and was persuaded by friends to record it in 1933. His wispy voice, recorded at the age of sixty-three, can be heard on the internet.

  2. the sails of a windmill.

  1. From Belloc’s The Four Men.

  1. Originally for soprano and strings, the song was revised in 1934 for voice and piano and, dedicated to Britten’s mother, was performed at her funeral and his sister’s wedding.

  2. ‘Thou hast created them, O Lord’.

  1. ‘the action of spreading out or scattering (new-mown grass) to be dried by the sun and wind’ (OED).

  1. Though not published in Barber’s lifetime, this song received numerous performances during the thirties. With mock solemnity is the crucial marking.

  1. This, Browne’s last song, seems to have been the first de la Mare poem set to music.

  1. ‘I’m prouder to have written “King David” than almost anything else of mine’ (quoted in Christopher Palmer, Herbert Howells – A Study (1978).

  2. ease (Howells).

  1. Musicians who play and sing carols in the street, for gratuities, at Christmas and New Year.

  1. curdles.

  1. ‘in a direction contrary to the apparent course of the sun (considered as unlucky or causing disaster)’ (OED).

  1. ‘a border of drapery hanging round the canopy of a bed’ (OED).

  1. Land covered with stiff grass, reeds, etc.

  1. Black Stitchel is the name of a hill in Hepple, Northumberland.

  1. Gibson probably refers to the River Rede near the confluence of the Otter Burn in the Cheviot Hills some sixteen miles from the Scottish border.

  1. Masefield disapproved of the setting because of its slow tempo, but Ireland, though he hated being known as ‘the composer of “Sea Fever”, told Gerald Moore that he considered it his finest song (Singer and Accompanist, 1953). The poem, from Salt-Water Ballads, was inspired by Masefield’s love of Jersey. According to a poll carried out in the 1930s by the BBC, it was the most popular song of any description heard on the wireless. Masefield loathed it, despite the royalties it earned him, because of the dirge-like performances it received. Marked Lento, it is characterized by the sort of rich chordal accompaniment that Ireland loved. The melody of ‘Sea Fever’ arches across the top of his memorial window in London’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre – the musicians’ church.

  2. The word ‘go’, present in Ballads and Poems (Elkin Matthews, 1910), Selected Poems (William Heinemann, 1922) and Poems (William Heinemann, 1946), is omitted in an early edition of 1902 and also from Collected Poems (William Heinemann, 1923). Questioned in 1927 about the opening line of the poem, Masefield replied: ‘I notice that in the early edition, 1902, I print the line “I must down”. That was as I wrote the line in the first instance. Somehow the word “go” seems to have crept in. When I am reciting the poem I usually insert the word “go” [as he does in the recordings made in 1941 and 1960]. When the poem is spoken I feel the need of the word but in print “go” is unnecessary and looks ill’ (see Journal of the John Masefield Society, Vol. 2 (John Masefield Society, 1993), pp. 11–14). The working manuscript of the poem in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, features the line both with and without ‘go’.

  1. possibly a mythical seaport, possibly the area around Cádiz, which is flanked by the ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other, with the town of El Puerto de Santa María at the far side of the bay.

  2. bringing luck or good fortune, attractive to look at. The word derives from the Gaelic ‘sonas’, meaning ‘good fortune’.

  3. to tug, pull.

  1. It is known that Ivor Gurney composed five songs in the trenches during the First World War, and ‘By a bierside’ is dated Laventie, August 1916. The text is a setting of the words of the Chief Centurions from Masefield’s play Pompey the Great (1910). In September 1916 Gurney wrote to Marion Scott: ‘That setting of Masefield was written in two sittings, almost without effort.’ He also observed that the accompaniment ‘is really orchestral’, and the song was indeed soon to be orchestrated by Herbert Howells. Particularly memorable is the unusual sequence of chords that punctuate the vocal line at ‘Death makes the lovely soul to wander’. Gurney, while setting the poem from memory in the trenches, misremembered some fourteen of Masefield’s words.

  1. Masefield thought little of this poem and in a letter, dated 19 November 1901, wrote to his sister, Norah, that he wished he could burn it. ‘It is a limp attempt’, he wrote, ‘and the last stanza is hateful to me. The “sough” in “soughing” rhymes with the feminine of “boar”. Is pronounced the same […] It derives from a Norse word signifying to murmur.’

  1. Composed, according to H
erbert’s note, while she was still at college.

  1. containers made from animal skin and holding liquid.

  2. ‘small ropes fastened to the edges of sails to truss them up before furling’ (OED).

  1. The ‘Mydath’ of the title has stumped all the critics, and Masefield himself wrote with some obfuscation to John D. Gordon around March 1953: ‘Mydath was the name of a place in an early poem: it was supposed to be near the sea somewhere: but is now mercifully just about extinct.’ It could perhaps be a rendering of ‘My Death’.

  2. sea spray blown along the surface of the water.

  1. This was the only song of Warlock’s to be recorded during his lifetime – by Peter Dawson and Gerald Moore.

  2. Welsh pirate captain (c.1635–88) who was later Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica.

  3. tea.

  4. a large cask for liquids.