5. a great quantity of.
1. Martin Shaw (1875–1958) was a prolific composer of ballads – see E. Routley’s Martin Shaw: A Centenary Appreciation, published in 1975.
1. The passage comes from the last page of ‘The Seal Man’, a supernatural story from the collection A Mainsail Haul (1905). The tale is told by an old woman who looks back on her life by the sea. Her father attended the wake of an O’Donnell, a bad man. During the wake O’Donnell’s corpse ‘got up with the sheet knotted on it’, and went down to the sea, where it was welcomed by ‘all the seals, and all the merrows [mermaids], and all them that’s under the tides […] They called out to the corpse and laughed; and the corpse laughed back, and fell on to the sand. My father and the other men saw the wraith pass from it […]’ O’Donnell’s wraith turned into a bull seal, who fell in love with young Norah O’Hara. They had a little son who became a seal-man, and he fell in love with young Kate O’Keefe. They loved one another passionately, and to protect Kate from the supernatural seal-man, ‘they shut her up at home, to keep her from seeing him’. Masefield’s narrative, chosen by Rebecca Clarke, finishes the story.
1. Of the eighty different poets set by Gurney, Edward Thomas, with nineteen settings, was numerically the most important.
2. Written at Steep on 5 January 1915.
3. ‘a deep rocky cleft or ravine, usually wooded and forming the course of a stream’ (OED). Originally written ‘gill’, its spelling was romanticized by Wordsworth in several poems.
4. Thomas admired de la Mare’s Peacock Pie (1913), which contained a poem called ‘The Pigs and the Charcoal-Burner’. De la Mare’s poem resembles ‘The penny whistle’ in stanza-form and rhyme-scheme.
1. Written at Steep on 4 April 1915.
2. Aegopodium podagraria.
1. Written at Hare Hall on 4 and 5 June 1916.
2. The image derives perhaps from Thomas’s imminent entry into the war. It was written while he was at a training camp.
1. Written at Trowbridge in November 1916. Thomas wrote to Eleanor Farjeon on 6 November 1916: ‘Now I have actually done still another piece which I call “Lights Out”. It sums up what I have often thought at that call. I wish it were as brief – 2 pairs of long notes. I wonder is it nearly as good as it might be.’ Helen Thomas worried that ‘Lights out’ might be read as a suicide note, given her husband’s suicidal tendencies. Myfanwy, their younger daughter, wrote at a much later date: ‘Mother was absolutely certain that the poem is initially about going to sleep, that my father would never have used a euphemism for Death or anything else.’
1. Written at Steep on 25 March 1915, this poem refers to Thomas’s wife, Helen, who, after his death, wrote in a touching farewell: ‘Beloved, there have been many weeks and now I have come to today. The way has been very difficult for me, but even through darkness and despair and just nothingness and fear, just as ever when these things came before, all has been well at last because of our love.’
1. Written in September 1916 when Thomas spent nearly two months at a firing camp in Trowbridge as an officer cadet with the Royal Artillery. Two letters to Eleanor Farjeon refer to ‘The trumpet’. ‘We are in tents and so we see the night sky. The trumpet blows for everything and I like that too, though the trumpeter is not excellent. We have had our costume criticised a good deal and have had to buy gloves and so on. But it is not so bad as it was painted … I hope you like some of the verses’ (24 September 1916). ‘However you can see I have some ease, because I have written some verses suggested by the trumpet calls which go all day. They are not well done and the trumpet is cracked, but the Reveille pleases me (more than it does most sleepers). Here is the result. You see I have written it with only capitals to mark lines, because people are all around me and I don’t want them to know’ (Wednesday, n.d.).
1. Cf. the ‘December: Christmass’ section of John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar. Thomas’s child is his younger daughter, Myfanwy.
1. The poem, written at High Beech in Epping Forest during the Christmas leave that preceded Thomas’s fateful departure for France, depicts the poet’s anxiety that was so prevalent at this time – beautifully described by Helen Thomas in World Without End. Thomas’s admiration for Hardy is well documented – less known is the fact that Hardy’s ‘The fallow deer at the lonely house’ was almost certainly influenced by Thomas’s ‘Out in the dark’. Thomas sent ‘Out in the dark’ to Eleanor Farjeon and remarked that ‘It is really Baba who speaks, not I. Something she felt put me on to it.’
2. fallow deer, so called because of their reddish yellow colour. In a letter, dated 19 October 1916, to Robert Frost describing High Beech, the cottage where ‘Out in the dark’ was written, Thomas wrote: ‘It is right alone in the forest among beech trees & fern & deer …’
3. An echo (subconscious?) of Edward Grey’s celebrated remark on the eve of the First World War that ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe’.
1. A Northside suburb of Dublin.
1. ‘Tilly’ means the thirteenth in a baker’s dozen – Joyce’s original title was ‘Cabra’, the name of the district where his family lived. Writing to his brother Stanislaus on 18 October 1906, Joyce asks him if he thought ‘Cabra’ should be included in Chamber Music: ‘Can I use it here or must I publish it in a book by itself as, of course, my dancing days are over.’
1. A needleboat is a racing shell, and Joyce had seen his brother take part in a needleboat race at San Sabba, near Trieste. He recalls that, as the scullers approached the shore, they had begun to sing an aria from the last act of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West: ‘Aspetterà ch’io torni […]’ Joyce enclosed the poem in a letter to Stanislaus, dated 9 September 1913, writing: ‘I present the enclosed lines to your young friends of the Rowing Club if they want them for a dinner programme or some such thing – with the rheumatic chamber poet’s (or pot’s) compliments.’
1. The poem recalls an incident recorded in Giacomo Joyce: ‘A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-veined child.’
1. The poem was written by Joyce in 1913 soon after he and his wife had visited the grave of her former lover Michael Bodkin at Rahoon in Galway City. In his notes to Exiles, Joyce writes: ‘Moon: Shelley’s grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond. She weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin’s grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley’s is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him […] She weeps over Rahoon too, over him whom her love has killed, the dark boy whom, as the earth, she embraces in death and disintegration. He is her buried life, her past […] She is Magdalen who weeps remembering the loves she could not return.’ The poem recalls the final section of ‘The Dead’, from Dubliners, in which Michael Furey is the fictional counterpart of Michael Bodkin. Moeran’s setting – his final solo song – dates from about 1946 and was dedicated to Kathleen Ferrier, who first performed it in a BBC Third Programme broadcast on 3 November 1947.
1. The phrase ‘Tutto è sciolto’ (‘All is lost/undone!’) is sung in Bellini’s La Sonnambula (libretto by Felice Romani) by Elvino, who believes that his fiancée, Amina, has been unfaithful. The phrase also occurs several times in Ulysses, most memorably when Bloom says to himself: ‘Lovely air. In sleep she went to him […] Yes: all is lost.’
1. Joyce wrote about his son, George, in one of his Trieste notebooks: ‘I held him in the sea at the baths of Fontana and felt with humble love the trembling of his frail shoulder […]’
1. The refrain is from a popular Italian song (‘O beautiful blonde,/You are like the waves’), and the child mentioned in the poem is Lucia, Joyce’s daughter. Joyce wrote the following letter to Bliss, thanking him for ‘Simples’: ‘Dear Bliss, I like your song better than any other in the book. It’s rich and ample and melodious, delightfully balanced in its movements. You have
done my little song great honour. Please accept my warm thanks.’
1. A possible reference to Amalia Popper or other schoolgirls taught by Joyce in Trieste.
1. The poem is based on a scene in Giacomo Joyce: ‘Tawny gloom in the vast gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning: quia frigus erat [because it was cold]. Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from Hosea. Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulatione sua mane consurgent ad me. Venite et revertamur ad Dominum [‘Thus saith the Lord: In their affliction they will rise early to Me: Come, and let us return to the Lord’] … She stands beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches, cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep. Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!’
1. The poem was inspired by Joyce’s involvement with a group of amateur actors in Zurich, the English Players.
1. The poem, written in Zurich in 1918, refers to the attack of glaucoma that Joyce suffered in Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse in August 1917.
1. Written in Paris in 1924, the poem was the first that Joyce had written in six years. It was sent to Valery Larbaud on 22 May 1924.
1. Referring to this poem, Joyce wrote to the Irish composer G. Molyneux Palmer: ‘ “Sleep Now” is in its place at the end of the diminuendo movement and the two last songs are intended to represent the awakening of the mind.’
1. These reflections on death by the daughter, Nuvoletta-Isabel-Issy, teem with neologisms, double entendres and puns that are typical of Joyce’s multi-layered language. Barber, interviewed by Phillip Ramey, confessed that he did not entirely understand the text: ‘What can you do when you get lines like “Nuvoletta reflected for the last time on her little long life, and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy, cloudy cry”, except to set them instinctively, as abstract music, almost as a vocalise?’
1. The text of Barber’s ‘Solitary hotel’ occurs in Part III of Ulysses, towards the end of the work. The sobriety of Joyce’s prose (often erroneously printed as a poem) is mirrored by Barber’s declamatory music.
1. Finzi buried a copy of this song under the porch of his home at Ashmansworth.
2. Homer, because he was allegedly born in Maeonia.
1. The summit of a hill on the Greek island of Skyros where he was buried. A statue of Brooke, paid for by English, French and Dutch admirers, was erected on the island after the war. Lascelles Abercrombie gave the oration at the dedication ceremony.
1. Part of a longer poem, written in the Café des Westens, Berlin, in May 1912. Having obtained a Second in the Classical Tripos in the summer of 1909, Brooke went to live at a house in Grantchester called ‘The Orchard’, within easy distance of Cambridge, before moving into ‘The Old Vicarage’. Edward Marsh, in his Memoir of the poet, describes the house: ‘The Old Vicarage, which was his home in 1911, is a long, low, ramshackle, tumble-down one-storied house, with attics in a high roof, and a verandah. It has a profuse, overgrown, sweet-smelling, “most individual and bewildering” garden, with random trees and long grass, and here and there odd relics of the eighteenth century, a sundial sticking out from the dried-up basin of a round pond, and an imitation ruin in a corner. Towards the end of the year it is a little melancholy. “The garden”, he [Brooke] wrote in September, “is immeasurably autumnal, sad, mysterious, august. I walk in it feeling like a fly crawling on the score of the Fifth Symphony”; and in December he called it a House of Usher. But in summer it’s a paradise of scent and colour. “You’ll find me quite wild with reading and the country,” he wrote in an invitation. “Come prepared for bathing, and clad in primitive clothes. Bring books also: one talks eight hours, reads eight, and sleeps eight.” ’
1. Sitwell prefaced the poem with these words from Verlaine: ‘Dame Souris trotte grise dans le noir’, from the opening stanza of ‘Impression fausse’ from Parallèlement (1889), set to music by, among others, Gustave Charpentier and Poldowski.
1. Sitwell wrote to a correspondent in 1937 that ‘the poem was written like this; it was about a year after I had emerged from a longish period of poverty in London […] (I am the poor member of a rich family) […] the whole experience was mine and the servant’s, but seen through my mind.’ Unlike the other poems printed here, which were published in Sitwell’s Façade, ‘Aubade’ first appeared in Bucolic Comedies.
1. See p. 440.
2. Reference to the Charge of the Light Brigade, led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces at the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854. Tennyson can be heard on the internet reading his poem, recorded on a wax cylinder in 1890.
1. The poem echoes many lines of Verlaine’s ‘Colloque sentimental’ from Fêtes galantes (1869).
1. Calliope, one of the Muses, presided over eloquence and heroic poetry; Io, priestess of Juno at Argos, was seduced by Jupiter and subsequently persecuted by Juno; Pomona was a Roman nymph who presided over gardens and fruit trees; Antiope, daughter of the King of Thebes, was beloved by Jupiter and gave birth to his twins; Echo was one of Juno’s attendants and Jupiter’s confidante in amorous matters. Juno deprived her of the power of speech and she was only permitted to answer questions that were put to her; Clio, the first of the Muses, presided over history.
2. Panope was one of the Nereides, whom sailors invoked during storms.
3. Heliogabalus was a Roman emperor, assassinated by decapitation.
1. ‘the supreme ruler of one or other of the great Muslim powers or countries of the Middle Ages’ (OED).
1. ace of spades – card game.
1. the sons of Noah.
1. Sitwell was so moved by Britten’s setting of ‘Still falls the Rain’ that she wrote to the composer on 26 April 1955: ‘I am so haunted and so alone with that wonderful music and its wonderful performance that I was incapable of writing before now. I had no sleep at all on the night of the performance. And I can think of nothing else. It was certainly one of the greatest experiences in all my life as an artist […] I can never begin to thank you for the glory you have given my poem.’ Britten, delighted with Sitwell’s response, wrote her a letter explaining how her poetry had not only inspired him but had also contributed to his development as a composer: ‘[…] writing this work has helped me so much in my development as a composer […] I feel with this work & The Turn of the Screw […] that I am on the threshold of a new musical world (for me, I am not pretentious about it!) […] But your great poem has dragged something from me that was latent there, & shown me what lies before me.’
2. See Acts i: xix. In Aramaic, Akeldama – the ground was previously known as the Potter’s Field, a site that used to provide potter’s clay and was used for burials.
3. See Luke xvi. xix–xxxi. Dives (Lat. ‘rich man’) ignored the plight of Lazarus, the beggar who appeared at his gate. At their deaths, Lazarus went to Abraham’s bosom, Dives to Hades. The story illustrates the theme of how wealth blinds men to the need of their fellows.
4. Britten, not Sitwell, must have had in mind Noel Mewton-Wood, to whom the work is dedicated. This prodigiously talented pianist (he can be heard on LP accompanying Peter Pears in Tippett’s Boyhood’s End and The Heart’s Assurance) committed suicide in Wigmore Street at the age of thirty-one, devastated by the death of his older lover.
5. Britten’s repugnance towards bloodsports and his hatred of cruelty to animals can also be seen in Tit for Tat, Our Hunting Fathers and Who are These Children?
6. The quote is from the end of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
1. ‘Of all significant things the most striking, poignant, passioning, is the sight of a great valley at the end of the day – such as the Severn Valley which lies hushed and dark, infinitely full of meaning, while yet the far Welsh hills are touch
ed with living and ecstatic gold’ (Gurney, ‘The Springs of Music’, July 1922).
1. Crickley Hill is a site of great natural, geological and archaeological interest on the Cotswold scarp approximately six miles east of Gloucester.
1. Gurney wished to change the title to ‘Twilight song’, but his publisher – this was the first Gurney song to be published (in Harold Monro’s The Chapbook) – insisted on Ledwidge’s title. The poem, one of Ledwidge’s earliest, was written before he joined the army in 1914.
1. One of Head’s first songs, composed in 1919, just before he entered the Royal Academy of Music.
1. Hubert Dunn in The Minstrel Boy maintains that this poem was written in camp at Basingstoke. In Lord Dunsany’s edition of Songs of Peace it appears in the section headed ‘In Hospital in Egypt’. Whatever the truth, it seems that it was inspired by the death of Ellie Vaughey. She had been Ledwidge’s first great love, and he received news of her death in June 1915. Having married John O’Neill on 25 November 1914, she had moved to Manchester, where she died in childbirth. Ledwidge’s grief at her death was intensified when he learnt how unhappy she had been in Manchester.
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 86