The Eternal Breakfast Debate in a New Place

[Master Jacques]

Yes well you’ve just mentioned 3 of my favourite 19th century poems. Clearly your “poetic soul” is

“Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.”

Now that’s an elegy that leaves most in the Stygian shade.

I think Arnold appeals greatly to the adolescent mentality. It’s a tiny bit borderline feeling sorry for yourself isn’t it ? I think a lot are put off Arnold by the tedathon that is Sohrab and Rustum - encountered at my grammar school at about age 13.

To twist a familiar phrase, if you want to feel sorry for others, you have to feel sorry for yourself first!

Perhaps no poet does sympathy - as opposed to empathy - better than Arnold. Certainly no poet is better at understanding what it is to be truly alone in the world, as ultimately we all are.

I know what you mean about Sohrab and Rustum, though there are more than enough magnificent gold nuggets to justify the leaden parts of the journey. The same's true of Empedocles on Etna, though (sadly) not Merope. Even I draw the line there.

[smittims]

As I don't usually post in the evening I've come late to the 'folk definition' discussion.

I think it's clear we're talking ,at the most, of a loose definition, not the sort of precision the 20th-century taught us to expect. I've always felt that anonymity is a first requirement for a folk song, as is the feeling that it's been crafted and altered bit by bit as it was handed down from one singer to another , and this of course implies an oral rather than a written tradition. I think this is one of the reasons RVW loved folk tunes so much, their quality of being 'ownerless' and rooted in England and innumerable people; it suited his democratic views on life.

Musically, I think modality and a lack of 'classical harmony' modulation is another key feature. Once you have an implied underlying bass or harmony it sounds to me like a song composed by one man, which takes it out of the 'folk ' category in my opinion. Hence, I'm surprised by the use of the term 'folk-song arrangements' by Benjamin Britten and his publishers, who must have known that many of those songs were not true folk songs. 'Sweet Polly Oliver', 'The Foggy , Foggy Dew' and 'The Ploughboy' are clearly theatre songs of the Vauxhall Gardens type, the music of the latter not far from Haydn's English Canzonets.