I will try & write you […] a finale on the lines you indicate – though the metre is a hard one – if you could string together a few nonsense words just to show me how you would wish them to run, I would construct it, following the air closely.
A. C. BENSON: letter to Edward Elgar, who had requested the poet to write a poem to fit the Pomp and Circumstance Trio tune (Hereford and Worcester County Record Office)
The eldest son of E. W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, he became Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, encouraged Thomas Hardy at a crucial period in the novelist’s career and made a name for himself in the literary world by publishing a number of biographies and volumes of criticism. But it was ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ that ensured his fame, composed by Elgar because Clara Butt – not King Edward VII, as is often claimed – was so taken with the melody of the Trio section from Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 that she asked him ‘to write something like it for me’, after which Elgar replied: ‘You shall have that one my dear’ (undated letter at the Elgar birthplace). Benson was approached to provide the poem, the ‘Coronation ode’, the middle section of which has for many years been sung at the Last Night of the Proms. The premiere was to have been given at Covent Garden during Coronation Week, but the King succumbed to appendicitis and the concert took place in Sheffield a few months later in October 1902, when it was sung by Dame Clara Butt. For the piano version which followed later, Benson’s words were considerably rearranged. Elgar also arranged it for piano and cello as a ‘Duet for two nice people by another (nice) person, Op X’. Elgar later expressed dissatisfaction with Benson’s words and asked the poet to write new ones – which never caught on.1
The London premiere in October, under Henry Wood, which Elgar missed, was a huge success. Wood wrote in My Life of Music:
The people simply rose and yelled. I had to play it again – with the same result; in fact, they refused to let me go on with the programme. After considerable delay, while the audience roared its applause, I went off and fetched Harry Dearth who was to sing Hiawatha’s Vision (Coleridge-Taylor); but they would not listen. Merely to restore order, I played the march a third time. And that, I may say, was the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore.
The phenomenal popularity of this music encouraged the publishers, Booseys, to look for a success to follow ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Elgar did his best to oblige, and set two new songs to poems by Benson: ‘The song’ (‘Speak, music’) and ‘In the dawn’ – the first of which turned out to be a masterpiece, the finest of Elgar’s ninety or so songs. Boosey paid twenty-five guineas for each of them and a royalty. Both songs appear in Benson’s The Professor (1900), a sequence of thirty-one poems that, like Stevenson’s Songs of Travel, Browning’s James Lee’s Wife and Meredith’s Modern Love, chart the disintegration of a relationship. Benson, however, has none of Meredith’s bitterness. The professor of the title is a scientist, as we learn from the fifth poem, ‘At the laboratory window’. He lives a life of emotional loneliness with ‘tubes and phials’ and ‘lancets keen and bright’. He eventually meets the woman of his dreams but the relationship does not prosper. There is a hint in ‘After the interview’ (16) that she took pity on him, and ‘Perplexity’ (22) suggests that she remains a virgin. They share moments of epiphany, however, before they part, and in ‘The letter’ (29) he expresses the hope that she will one day marry and have children, and that he will be permitted to visit her happy family. Abandoned by her, he turns in ‘Amen’ (31) to religion. The two poems set by Elgar appear as numbers 14 (‘Song’) and 17 (‘In the dawn’). Elgar renamed the former ‘Speak, music’ – an apostrophe to music to supply the ‘rest’ that is so lacking in his life, now that Hope has fled. Three poems later, however, he has met the woman, and ‘In the dawn’ expresses his joy that her soul ‘Is knit with mine’, and also his fear that she will one day leave him.
Benson was a prolific writer. The Life of his father appeared in 1899, as did Fasti Etonenses, a history of Eton. The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1904) show his skill as a writer of short stories. His critical biographies include Rossetti (1904), Fitzgerald (1905) and Ruskin (1911). Among his books of essays, mention should be made of From a College Window (1906) and Escape (1915). Between 1897 and 1925 he kept a diary that ran to 180 manuscript volumes, a selection of which was published in 1926, edited by Percy Lubbock. Because of the highly personal nature of these diaries, they only became available for inspection in 1975, when David Newsome studied them prior to writing his biographical study of Benson, which was published in 1980 as On the Edge of Paradise. With the second Viscount Esher, Benson edited three volumes of Selections from the Correspondence of Queen Victoria (1907).
Land of hope and glory, Mother of the free,
How may we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Truth and Right and Freedom, each a holy gem,
Stars of solemn brightness, weave thy diadem.
Tho’ thy way be darkened, still in splendour drest,
As the star that trembles o’er the liquid West.
Throned amid the billows, throned inviolate,
Thou hast reigned victorious, thou hast smiled at fate.
Land of hope and glory, Fortress of the free,
How may we extol thee, praise thee, honour thee?
Hark, a mighty nation maketh glad reply;
Lo, our lips are thankful, lo, our hearts are high!
Hearts in hope uplifted, loyal lips that sing:
Strong in faith and freedom, we have crowned our King!
Speak, speak, music, and bring to me
Fancies too fleet for me,
Sweetness too sweet for me,
Wake, wake, voices, and sing to me,
Sing to me tenderly; bid me rest.
Rest, Rest! ah, I am fain of it!
Die, Hope! small was my gain of it!
Song, take thy parable,
Whisper that all is well,
Say that there tarrieth
Something more true than death,
Waiting to smile for me; bright and blest.
Thrill, string: echo and play for me
All that the poet, the priest cannot say for me;
Soar, voice, heavenwards, and pray for me,
Wondering, wandering; bid me rest.
Some souls have quickened, eye to eye,
And heart to heart, and hand in hand;
The swift fire leaps, and instantly
They understand.
Henceforth they can be cold no more;
Woes there may be, – ay, tears and blood,
But not the numbness, as before
They understood.
Henceforth, he saith, though ages roll
Across wild wastes of sand and brine,
Whate’er betide, one human soul
Is knit with mine.
Whatever joy be dearly bought,
Whatever hope my bosom stirs,
The straitest cell of secret thought
Is wholly hers.
Ay, were I parted, life would be
A helpless, heartless flight along
Blind tracks in vales of misery
And sloughs of wrong.
Nay, God forgive me! Life would roll
Like some dim moon through cloudy bars;
But to have loved her sets my soul
Among the stars.