1. The poem probably dates from August or September 1850, the year in which Tennyson’s In Memoriam was published. During the summer of that year, the father of Arnold’s future wife, Frances Lucy Wightman, had refused to accept the couple’s engagement, and they were only able to renew their correspondence at the end of the year.

1. Bridge’s song for medium voice, viola and piano sets only three verses from Arnold’s ‘Parting’, a long poem of ninety lines from his Switzerland sequence which deals with the breakdown of his relationship with ‘Marguerite’.

1. Written in August 1850, ‘The river’ was abbreviated by Arnold in 1852, and this extract is from the later version. It forms part of a sequence of five poems, Faded Leaves, that was inspired by a crisis in Arnold’s relationship with Frances Lucy Wightman, whose father, Justice Wightman, feeling that Arnold could not support a wife, forbade any meeting between the lovers. Arnold first met her in late 1849 and married her on 10 June 1851. A letter from A. H. Clough to Tom Arnold, dated 23 July 1850, refers to the affair: ‘Matt comes to Switzerland in a month, after your sister’s wedding. He is himself deep in a flirtation with Miss Wightman, the d[aughter] of the Judge. It is thought it will come to something, for he has actually been to Church to meet her’ (Correspondence of A. H. Clough). Wightman finally agreed to the liaison a week after Lord Lansdowne, for whom Arnold worked as secretary, appointed him an inspector of schools.

1. Bridge sets only the thirty-fourth and last stanza of Arnold’s long philosophical poem, which was much admired by Swinburne. The ‘her’ in line 5 refers not to a person but an artistic ideal.

1. The poem is a companion piece to ‘East London’.

1. Soon after completing ‘Dover beach’, Barber gave an impromptu private performance of the work (in which he sang and also played the piano) at Bryn Mawr College, near Philadelphia. Vaughan Williams, who was in the audience, congratulated the young composer, saying: ‘I myself once set “Dover beach”, but you really got it!’ Barber never forgot the compliment, and later recalled: ‘Enthusiasm for my music was rather uncommon at that time. Coming from a composer of the stature of Vaughan Williams, I found it especially gratifying.’ Vaughan Williams’s setting has not survived. Barber sang ‘Dover beach’ in a recording with the Curtis String Quartet on New World Records.

2. Cf. Sophocles, Antigone, 583–91, where the curse on a house is compared to a storm lashing the shore with breakers.

3. Cf. Thucydides’ description of the Battle of Epipolae (413 BC) in History of the Peloponnesian War, vii, ch. 44: ‘The Athenians were getting into a state of […] great confusion and perplexity […] in a battle by night […] how could anyone know anything clearly? […] And so finally, when once they had been thrown into confusion, coming into collision with their own comrades in many different parts of the army […] they not only became panic-stricken but came to blows with one another […]’