The songs I had
The songs I had are withered
Or vanished clean,
Yet there are bright tracks
Where I have been,
And there grow flowers
For others’ delight.
Think well, O singer,
Soon comes night.
IVOR GURNEY
The son of a tailor, one of four children, Gurney was educated at the King’s School as a chorister of Gloucester Cathedral. Thanks to a local curate, Alfred Hunter Cheesman, who volunteered to stand godfather at Gurney’s christening, Ivor began to take a keen interest in artistic matters – thus alienating himself somewhat from his basically uncultural family. In 1911 he won an open scholarship of £40 per annum which enabled him to study composition under Charles Stanford at the Royal College of Music. Gurney’s earliest songs date from 1904 but he only began to find his own voice in 1912. At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for army service but was turned down because of poor eyesight. In 1915, however, he joined the 2nd/5th Gloucester Regiment (B Company), and in 1916 was sent to the Front, where, no longer an outsider, he enjoyed the comradeship of his fellow soldiers. He was wounded on Good Friday, 1917, and after a spell at Rouen Hospital fought at the Front once more and was gassed at Passchendaele. He was sent to a number of war hospitals, where, deprived of the friendship of his fellow soldiers, he suffered increasing mood swings. He threatened suicide in June 1918, was discharged from the army a month before the Armistice, and returned to Gloucester.
His first book of poems, Severn and Somme (1917), published during the war, was followed by War’s Embers (1919). While writing poetry, he kept on composing, and published two Housman cycles, Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland, in 1919. Although he continued to study at the Royal College, this time under Vaughan Williams, he became increasingly unsettled: he took on various jobs, slept rough and would several times walk back at night from London to Gloucestershire. His mind soon gave way; his family first committed him, in 1922, to Barnwood House Asylum and then to the City of London Mental Hospital in Dartford. It was there, and in other asylums, that he continued to write poetry, as John Clare had done a century before him. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the City of London Mental Hospital in 1937. Much has been written about Gurney’s mental deterioration, inherited paranoid schizophrenia being frequently cited as the cause for his decline. Present research suggests that he suffered from a bipolar disorder.
Despite his illness, music and poetry of increasing individuality still flowed from his pen. In a letter to Herbert Howells, dated 31 July 1917, he mentions some of the poets he was keen to set ‘après la guerre’: ‘What Names! Brooke, Sorley (I have not read him), Katharine Tynan, Nicholson, Sassoon, Gibson, John Freeman, Laurence Binyon, F. W. Harvey, Masefield, and … (but not for me) Gurney …’ According to Marion Scott, Gurney would carry a poem about with him, either copied into his pocket notebook, or absorbed direct into his memory, and when the time for composition came, he worked almost entirely from memory – see his setting of Masefield’s ‘By a bierside’.
He wrote over 300 songs (roughly a third have been published), and his choice of poets was discriminating and extremely varied – in particular he was drawn to Elizabethans (he called them ‘The Elizas’) such as Campion, Fletcher, Jonson, Nashe, Ralegh and Shakespeare); and contemporaries like de la Mare, Housman, Edward Thomas and Yeats. Finzi, writing to Marion Scott on 30 January 1937, told her how he and Howard Ferguson set about assessing Gurney’s unpublished manuscripts:
The sorting has been even more difficult than I expected, chiefly because there is comparatively little that one can really be sure is bad. Even the late 1925 asylum songs, though they get more and more involved (and at the same time more disintegrated, if you know what I mean) have a curious coherence, which makes it difficult to know if they are really over the border. I think the eventual difficulty in ‘editing’ the later Gurney may be great: a neat mind could smooth away the queernesses – like Rimsky-Korsakov with Mussorgsky – yet time and familiarity will probably show something not so mistaken after all, about the queer and odd things. However, there are some obviously incoherent things and a good many others of which one can say that it would be better for them not to be published.
Writing (in ‘The Springs of Music’, an essay first published in the United States of America in the Musical Quarterly of July 1922) of his war experiences, Gurney seems to suggest that he regarded himself as more composer than poet:
one learnt that the brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse, or mere pleasurable emotion. […] The first breakings of the air of night, the remembrance of the glory not all yet faded; the meeting of the two pageants of day and night so powerfully stir the heart that music alone may assuage its thirst, or satisfy that longing told by Wordsworth in the ‘Prelude’; but that telling and outpouring of his is but the shadow and faint far-off indication of what Music might do – the chief use of Poetry seeming to be, to one, perhaps mistaken, musician, to stir his spirit to the height of music, the maker to create, the listener worthily to receive or remember.
Although Gurney composed too many songs that were flawed (an inconsistency that reflects his own unstable personality), his best songs rank with the finest that English Romantic song has to offer. His Collected Poems, edited and introduced by P. J. Kavanagh, appeared in 1982, and was revised and extended in 2004. ‘Severn meadows’ is the most celebrated setting of his own words – the manuscript is dated ‘Caulaincourt, March 19 1917’, which makes it likely that both words and music were written in the trenches.
Gurney was a prolific poet, writing some 900 poems between 1913 and 1926, a fair number of which were published during his lifetime, including forty-six in Severn and Somme and fifty-eight in War Embers. Most of his songs were composed between 1919, when he was discharged from the Army, and 1922, when he was institutionalized.
Only the wanderer
Knows England’s graces,
Or can anew see clear
Familiar faces.
And who loves joy as he
That dwells in shadows?
Do not forget me quite,
O Severn meadows.
(Finzi, Jeffreys)
Horror follows Horror within me
There is a chill fear
Of the storm that does deafen and din me
And rage horribly near.
What black things had the human
Race in store, what mind could view?
Good guard the hour that is coming,
Mankind safe, honour bring through.
What evil coil of Fate has fastened me
Who cannot move to sight, whose bread is sight,
And in nothing has more bare delight
Than dawn or the violet or the winter tree.
Stuck-in-the-mud – blinkered-up, roped for the Fair.
What use to vessel breath that lengthens pain?
O but the empty joys of wasted air
That blow on Crickley1 and whimper wanting me!