Beautiful Poetry and its Musical Settings

[Sydney Grew]

Alfred Noyes is generally acknowledged to have been England's finest poet since Tennyson. The fashionable trivialities of such dwarflike figures as Auden, Betjeman and Larkin bear no comparison do they. Here is one of the best of his shorter poems:

APES AND IVORY.

APES and ivory, skulls and roses, in junks of old Hong-Kong,
Gliding over a sea of dreams to a haunted shore of song,
Masts of gold and sails of satin, shimmering out of the East,
Oh, Love has little need of you now to make his heart a feast.

Or is it an elephant, white as milk and bearing a severed head
That tatters his broad soft wrinkled flank in tawdry patches of red,
With a negro giant to walk beside and a temple dome above,
Where ruby and emerald shatter the sun,—is it these that should please my love?

Or is it a palace of pomegranates, where ivory-limbed young slaves
Lure a luxury out of the noon in the swooning fountain's waves ;
Or couch like cats and sun themselves on the warm white marble brink?
Oh, Love has little to ask of these, this day in May, I think.

Is it Lebanon cedars or purple fruits of the honeyed southern air,
Spikenard, saffron, roses of Sharon, cinnamon, calamus, myrrh,
A bed of spices, a fountain of waters, or the wild white wings of a dove,
Now, when the winter is over and gone, is it these that should please my love ?

The leaves outburst on the hazel-bough and the hawthorn's heaped wi' flower,
And God has bidden the crisp clouds build my love a lordlier tower,
Taller than Lebanon, whiter than snow, in the fresh blue skies above ;
And the wild rose wakes in the winding lanes of the radiant land I love.

Apes and ivory, skulls and roses, in junks of old Hong-Kong,
Gliding over a sea of dreams to a haunted shore of song,
Masts of gold and sails of satin, shimmering out of the East,
Oh, Love has little need of you now to make his heart a feast.

But of course his attitude to homosexualism was his undoing. Had he had the same passionate experience as Tennyson (we think of In Memoriam do we not) he might well have risen to even greater heights. But it was not to be; here is what Noyes - believing them to be genuine - wrote in 1916 about Roger Casement's diaries: "A foul record of the lowest depths that human degradation has ever touched."

We cannot imagine that coming from Tennyson can we!

This enraged William Yeats - another pinnacle among twentieth-century poets, although certainly no Englishman. Yeats - believing the diaries to be forgeries - responded by writing this:

"Come Alfred Noyes and all the troop
"A dog must have his day
. . .
"The ghost of Roger Casement
"Is beating on the door."

To this Noyes - he too by this time believing that the diaries could be forgeries - responded in 1937 with a public apology; and jolly old Yeats in turn responded like a gentleman by removing Noyes's name from his song.

And even in 1957 poor old Noyes, still brooding upon the question, and still believing the diaries to be forgeries, published an entire book about it: The Accusing Ghost, or, Justice for Casement.

But all of this is quite wrong and perverse - just one example of the perniciousness of demo-cratic mob-rule. The correct attitude we submit would be to acknowledge the diaries as a genuine expression of Casement's enviably joyful and fundamentally harmless experiences - not "foul" or "degraded" at all! To see that such an attitude was possible in that era we need look no further than the delightful poetic productions of the Reverend E. E. Bradford.

Anyway, the primary intention of this thread is to draw particular attention to poetry that has been set to music. It enhances one's experience of music so much when one knows what it is intended to be about does it not! But so often one does not; and one is not told. Sir Edward Elgar did many of Noyes's things - we think of his famous Pageant of Empire of 1924. The texts he set for this work may easily be found on the Inter-Web.

The English critic Miss Drabble writes that Noyes "held violently anti-Modernist views on literature." How wrong-headed of her that is! In fact Noyes, who had the sense to follow the true path of Art, remains to this day the most advanced of anybody in his field.

Here is another little work, short but like most of his poetry strangely moving:

WINNIE AND DAFF.

WINNIE and Daff were making hay.

Was it far away ? Was it long ago ?
For she sits by the fire, and it's sinking low,
And voices are calling her far away ;
She is old and grey, but the whole world seems
Wavering back through a mist of dreams.

Daff and Winnie were making hay :

Winnie drowsed on a warm soft bed
With her smooth brown arms behind her head :
A lazy young kitten she was that day !
And she made poor Daff do all the work,
And she laughed as he did it and called him a Turk ;

For Winnie and Daff were making hay.

And bold young Daff grew shy as a maid :
He'd a down on his lip like the dawning shade
Of a kiss ; but he'd nothing at all to say ;
And Winnie dreamed and forgot to laugh
As she drowsed in the sun and blinked at Daff.

For Daff and Winnie were making hay.

At last he thought she was fast asleep
And tiptoed quietly near to peep :
Oh, her neck-kerchief beside her lay !
He came behind her and looking down
Caught one glimpse of her breast's ripe brown.

Winnie and Daff were making hay.

Then Winnie woke : for she dreamed that her mouth
Was suddenly touched by a breath from the South :
And over her neck it seemed to stray ;
So she boxed Daff's ears, and he couldn't complain ;
For he took his revenge and kissed her again.

Daff and Winnie were making hay.

"One more, Winnie ! " and "Look, Daff, no !
Somebody's coming ! Do let me go ! "
—Was it long ago ? Was it far away ?—
For the room is lit with a low soft light,
As she sits by the dying fire to-night.—

Winnie and Daff were making hay !

Ah, Daff and Winnie, make haste ; one kiss !
Somebody coming ? Indeed there is !
Daff is dead and Winnie is grey !
But she sits by the fire to-night and it seems
The years roll back for her dim old dreams.

Hush! Daff and Winnie are making hay.

[Sorry - the individually indented lines generate a blank line before and after - have not yet worked out how to adjust that unwanted formatting.]

[Lateralthinking1]

Sydney - An interesting and wide-ranging post. It would have been good to see it on the thread for "The Verb". Noyes is an underrated poet. When I was at school, we had to read Tennyson but we were also given the opportunity to compile our own anthologies. I had a poem by Noyes in mine.

I doubt that the outlook of Noyes on personal behaviour or morality was his "undoing" or that the contrast with Tennyson is wholly fair on him. Unlike Tennyson, Noyes lived through an era when there were considerable changes in attitudes towards such matters. He, of course, converted to Roman Catholicism. Arguably he was more of a pacifist and at a time of two world wars. They were, though, both residents of the Isle of Wight!

Could Noyes have risen to greater heights? Certainly he could by now have been a household name but this, as you know, is hardly ever an accurate measure of greatness. One then thinks of the "status" of Poet Laureate but as Ian Hislop's fine television documentary highlighted, many who were given that title were, frankly, abysmal. In many ways, it was Tennyson who rescued the role so that the Poet Laureate was no longer seen as a national laughing stock.

Following Tennyson's departure, the choices were never easy, not least in 1930 when John Masefield emerged surprisingly from a list of names that included Rudyard Kipling. Realistically, if there was to have been a suitable moment for Noyes, this was it. However, Masefield continued in the role until 1967. He was popular and effective, producing poems for the music of Elgar, striking the right note for the nation on important occasions, and showing that he was well-suited for broadcasting as that developed. He proved to be the right man for the job.

On poetry and music, I am not persuaded that appreciation of music improves in every instance with a better understanding of context. Here we are back in the area of the discussion on Platform 3 about Goldsmiths and the Mozart season tests. What I think we concluded was that musical appreciation is different for each person and not necessarily designed for rigid assessment or unequivocal statement. A more open-minded perspective might involve questioning whether in our interpretation of music and poetry there is often too much delineation.

Van Morrison at his most experimental has produced words in music as if they were music or sounds other than words. I am thinking here not only of "Astral Weeks" but of "Summertime in England", "In the Days Before Rock n Roll" and particularly the end of "My Lagan Love". Nina Simone did the same, for example on "Wild is the Wind". And as we heard on "The Verb" last Friday, Hannah Silva is a poet who does something similar with language, albeit with the emphasis on the words. For Hannah, music appears to act just as an enhancing backdrop or as a web or net through which her poetry weaves to produce unusual interconnecting patterns - Lat.

[Chris Newman]

Lateralthinking1
You are observant in citing Masefield as a popular and effective poet. Apes and Ivories by Noyes is clearly influenced by Tradewinds with its long lists of exotica and the Masefield poem was published four years before the Noyes.

Winnie and Daff was published many years later towards the end of Noyes' life. By that time the greatest 20th century English poet had passed on; like Noyes Thomas Hardy was a prolific poet, once he abandoned the novel. Perhaps of that vast pile one hundred or so of his poems stand the test of time along with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Donne, Marvel and Keats. Winnie and Daff tread in Hardy's footprints.

[Simon]

Refreshing to read three consecutive posts of the calibre of the above; insightful and thoughtful. Let's hope we don't get mindless blunderings in of some of our fellows who seem to follow Sydney around with an obvious lack of understanding...

Could Noyes have risen to greater heights?

I suppose every artist may have it within to achieve better and greater, but it's by no means a given as not all do, do they? Musically, Beethoven can be argued to be a case in point. I agree with Chris that the greatest work of Noyes deserves its place in a long line of other greats; and I suppose that had I written, say, his best half dozen, I wouldn't feel the need to do any more... in fact, The Highwayman alone would have done me!

Certainly he could by now have been a household name...

A household name - well he is here and he was in my parents' home! Maybe his poems are better known than his name - like, say, Newbolt and Wolfe (the latter whose successor he surely was in so many ways).

Thanks for a good thread, Syd!

bws to all, Simon

[Chris Newman]

I think some of Noyes output is very fine poetry but it was Thomas Hardy who I meant as being THE greatman of the 20th Century.

[Simon]

Yes, I realised that Chris. Sorry if my post gave a different impression.

[amateur51]

Yes, I realised that Chris. Sorry if my post gave a different impression.

No 'arf!

Bad luck Simon old man

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[Sydney Grew]

Thanks to all those who responded with such informative contributions!

Before we leave Elgar, here is Roden Noel and his Sea Slumber-Song which the composer set as the first of his four Sea Pictures opus thirty-seven. They were first sung in Norwich on the fifth of October 1899 by Clara Butt (for whom they were written) with the composer wielding the bâton.

Incidentally there is another interesting item among Elgar's orchestral songs: his "Song Cycle" opus fifty-nine. Apparently numbers 3, 5, and 6 were performed in 1910, again under Sir Edward's direction, but numbers 1, 2, and 4 were never composed! A curious thing, and those numbers 3, 5, and 6 are among the few works of Elgar I have never heard.

Roden Noel is best known for his Ganymede, with all its thrilling blendings of adjective into adverb. And some years ago I read with mounting excitement his profound treatise "The Philosophy of Immortality." The Sea Slumber-Song is a slighter thing but still challenging; and we might add that his Collected Poems occupy five hundred pages. "Definite vision and intense emotion seem to me to be the first requisites in a poet," he once wrote.

SEA SLUMBER-SONG

SEA-BIRDS are asleep,
The world forgets to weep,
Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song
On the shadowy sand
Of this elfin land ;
"I, the Mother mild,
Hush thee, O my child.
Forget the voices wild !
Isles in elfin light
Dream, the rocks and caves,
Lulled by whispering waves,
Veil their marbles bright,
Foam glimmers faintly white
Upon the shelly sand
Of this elfin land ;
Sea-sound, like violins,
To slumber woos and wins,
I murmur my soft slumber-song,
Leave woes, and wails, and sins,
Ocean's shadowy might
Breathes good-night,
. . . Good-night ! "

(Kynance Cove.)

[mercia]

[/I]" The Sea Slumber-Song is ..... challenging


Isles in elfin light
Dream, the rocks and caves,
Lulled by whispering waves,
Veil their marbles bright,
Foam glimmers faintly white
Upon the shelly sand
Of this elfin land ;
[/INDENT]

TOSH!

[Sydney Grew]

The poet Ernest Dowson, assuredly one of England's greatest, was a popular choice of the second Viennese school when they wished to set something.

As the first of his marvellously intense Four Orchestral Songs Schönberg in 1913 for instance chose Dowson's Seraphita, as translated by jolly old Stefan George.

There is only one commonly published photo-graph of Dowson, but we managed to find another, wherein he is seen with his friend Arthur Moore. The two of them wrote several novels together you know.

SERAPHITA

COME not before me now, O visionary face!
Me tempest-tost, and borne along life's passionate sea;
Troublous and dark and stormy though my passage be;
Not here and now may we commingle or embrace,
Lest the loud anguish of the waters should efface
The bright illumination of thy memory,
Which dominates the night; rest, far away from me,
In the serenity of thine abiding-place!

But when the storm is highest, and the thunders blare,
And sea and sky are riven, O moon of all my night!
Stoop down but once in pity of my great despair,
And let thine hand, though over late to help, alight
But once upon my pale eyes and my drowning hair,
Before the great waves conquer in the last vain fight.