Perhaps the first impression was that of great personal distinction, and of a physical condition not robust. He was pale; he stooped somewhat; and as his eyes gave him much trouble then, he seemed to peer at me. His black hair was worn in a shock, very long. It came down to his brow and over his collar at the back. He had a characteristic way of tossing it back with a shake of the head. One saw at once that he was unlike anyone else in the world. The short-sighted eyes, peering through pince-nez from under the billow of hair, were full of fun and keen intelligence. The expression on his face, when not remote with speculation, was vivid with wit.
JOHN MASEFIELD: So Long to Learn: Chapters of an Autobiography (1952)
Yeats, unlike James Joyce, was not a talented musician: indeed he was tone-deaf (his own testimony) and employed a censor, whose task was to vet every musical setting of his verse before publication – which meant that Peter Warlock, for example, many of whose songs had been censored, set no more poetry by Yeats after 1922. Other composers, such as Bax, were also frightened off – the reason, perhaps, for the relative infrequency with which Yeats’s highly musical verse has been set. Yet Yeats was far from unmusical, as anyone who has heard his incantatory and inimitable recordings of his own verse will know. At the turn of the century he developed a technique of half speaking and half chanting poetry to the accompaniment of a psaltery. Arnold Dolmetsch even constructed an instrument for him – the intention was to establish a pitch for a group of words to be chanted by plucking a string of the psaltery. Recital tours were made, but the idea did not catch on. Nor did Yeats have any greater success with the music that he organized to accompany his plays. He worked indefatigably with the composers George Antheil and Walter Rummel, but felt that music should play a subsidiary role – the reason, perhaps, why the incidental music by Antheil and Rummel is now rarely heard. Bernard Shaw described the music to Evelyn Innes as ‘a nerve-destroying crooning like the maunderings of an idiot-banshee’.
As with Heinrich Heine, it is almost always Yeats’s early verse that has attracted composers – the melancholy collections, often romantically wistful, that reflected his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, the beautiful and passionate revolutionary. He first met her in January 1889, and later recalled: ‘I had never thought to see in a living woman so great a beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past.’ He proposed to her many times but was always refused – and after the final rebuttal he asked for her daughter Iseult’s hand – with the same result. In 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, which did not prevent him from writing lovelorn letters to Iseult on his honeymoon. The relationship with his wife, however, deepened, in no small measure because of her interest in automatic writing and clairvoyance. The terser and more difficult later poetry, beginning with The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), has attracted relatively few composers. Yeats’s own attitude to those who embraced his earlier, more romantic style, is clear from ‘A coat’, a poem he included in Responsibilities:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
Or as he put it in ‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth’ from Autobiographies, written shortly after ‘A coat’: ‘When I had finished The Wanderings of Oisin, dissatisfied with its yellow and its dull green, with all that overcharged colour inherited from the romantic movement, I deliberately reshaped my style, deliberately sought out an impression as of cold light and tumbling clouds.’
The Curlew – Warlock’s music is perhaps the best-known setting of Yeats’s poetry – is a work of two distinct themes. Firstly, the trauma of unrequited and tormented love. Caught between two beautiful women – the nationalistic agitator Maud Gonne and Olivia Shakespear, who was unhappily married to an elderly solicitor, with a daughter who later married Ezra Pound – Yeats expresses his anguish in these searing poems: see the notes to ‘He reproves the curlew’, ‘The lover mourns for the loss of love’ and ‘He hears the cry of the sedge’. The other theme, no less important, is the world of Irish myth. Between The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Wind among the Reeds (1899), Yeats had written The Celtic Twilight (1893), a collection of essays, meditations and stories that did much to revive interest in the literature and culture of the Celtic peoples, and also the Irish language. Since the famine of the middle of the nineteenth century, Anglicization in Ireland had proceeded apace – which eventually gave rise to Irish political nationalism. What Yeats is attempting to achieve in much of the poetry of The Wind among the Reeds, from which three of the Curlew poems are taken, is to hymn and celebrate the Celtic world (landscape, gods, magic, etc.) in much the same way as the Grimm brothers, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, had sought in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–14), the Deutsche Sagen (1816–18) and Deutsche Mythologie (1835) to revive interest in German folklore, folk song, fairy tale and history.
Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,
And dream about the great and their pride;
They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children’s children shall say they have lied.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
(Clarke, Gurney, Harvey, Heininen, Warlock)
One that is ever kind2 said yesterday:
‘Your well-belovèd’s3 hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise4
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.’
Heart cries, ‘No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.’
O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.
Born in Sheffield, Muriel Herbert grew up in Liverpool, where her mother was much involved with the church choir. Her eldest brother, Percy, a good musician, encouraged her to play the piano and sing, and she was soon writing down her own songs. Her father died in 1909, and the family experienced dire poverty. A Liverpool Post journalist, Hugh Farrie, hoped to make her into a concert pianist, but she was primarily interested in composition, and began to study the songs of Debussy, Ravel and Richard Strauss. By the time she was sixteen, she had completed settings of Herrick, Blake, Christina Rossetti, Byron, Browning, Bridges and Swinburne. In 1917 she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where her teacher was Charles Stanford. She then taught for a while at Wycombe Abbey School for girls, had her voice trained and gave a few recitals. In the early twenties she met Roger Quilter, with whom she fell unrequitedly in love and to whom she dedicated her setting of Alice Meynell’s ‘Renouncement’. Quilter recommended her songs to Augener, who published five of them in 1922, and she was further encouraged by John Barbirolli, who included two of her violin and piano pieces in a concert that took place in the 1920s. In 1925 she married Émile Delavenay, a French academic, and during her honeymoon in Paris was introduced to James Joyce, who greatly admired her settings of his poems. ‘The music is much too good for the words,’ he said after Herbert had sung to him ‘I hear an army charging’ and ‘Lean out of the window’. He gave her inscribed copies of Chamber Music and Pomes Pennyeach, and permission to publish her settings, two of which have recently been published by BiblioFox Music Publishing (2014). Yeats, always loath to have his poems set, allowed her to publish ‘The lake isle of Innisfree’, one of her most successful songs. Clare Tomalin, Herbert’s daughter, recalls that this only happened after Thomas McGreevy, a friend of Muriel, her husband and Yeats, had written the poet a letter telling him he should! Her manuscripts are in the music archives of the British Library. Thirty-six of her increasingly performed songs have been recorded on a Linn Records CD with Ailish Tynan, James Gilchrist and David Owen Norris.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow2,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
(Griffes, Gurney, Lehmann, Peel)
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
[And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.]
(Bullock, Gurney)
Warlock, not Yeats, supplied the title. The first version of The Curlew, premiered in October 1920, comprised five songs: ‘He reproves the Curlew’, ‘The lover mourns for the loss of love’, ‘The Cloths of Heaven’, ‘Wine comes in at the mouth’ and ‘He hears the cry of the sedge’. For the second version, performed by Philip Wilson in November 1922, Warlock replaced ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ and ‘Wine comes in at the mouth’ with a new song, ‘The withering of the boughs’. Three of the poems selected by Warlock for the definitive version of The Curlew come from Yeats’s early The Wind among the Reeds (1899), which also includes ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’; ‘The withering of the boughs’ is from In the Seven Woods (1904). Warlock set some nine poems by Yeats, and was initially charmed by the poet, writing to Cecil Gray: ‘A few nights ago I met W. B. Yeats and his wife […] He talked for several hours about the moon, and the talk was as illuminating and beautiful as the moon of the fourteenth night itself.’ But he later fell foul of the poet over the question of the latter’s musical censorship.
O curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the water in the West;
Because your crying brings to mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.
Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend1
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away.
I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:
‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,
I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,
For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.’
The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,
And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge1 of streams.
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
I know of the leafy paths that the witches take
Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,
And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake;
I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan2 kind
Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool
On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round
Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.
A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound
Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind
With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;
I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
I wander by the edge
Of this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge:
Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round,
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and West,
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep.
Britten’s approach to folk song differed significantly from that of the doyen of English folk music collectors, Cecil Sharp, who had died in 1924. Whereas Sharp wished to interest children in the songs of their ancestors by arranging them to simple and regularly barred accompaniments, Britten’s aim was to create from folk songs a type of art song. His method, according to Peter Pears, for whom he first started to arrange folk songs when they gave concerts together in America during the war, was to take the tune as though he had written it himself and ‘think himself back as to how he would turn it into a song’. The melody of ‘Down by the salley gardens’ is ‘The maids of Mourne Shorne’ – see The Complete Collection of Irish Music, collected by George Petrie, edited by C. V. Stanford. Britten later made an arrangement for harp (recorded by Pears and Osian Ellis in 1976), a setting he soon transcribed for high voice and string orchestra. He also composed a version for voice and fuller orchestra in 1955.
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
(Bullock, Clarke, Hughes, Ireland, Jeffreys, Plumstead, Shaw)
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’3 song
After great cathedral gong4;
A starlit or a moonlit dome5 disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth6
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough7,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin’s7 mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.8
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post.
Our master Caesar is in the tent1
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream2
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt3
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.