Auden […] combined an extraordinary technical skill in traditional forms with an extraordinary feel for the most contemporary of contemporary idiom.
A. ALVAREZ: The New Poetry (1962)
Auden’s poetry, often intellectually demanding, like ‘Epilogue’ from Our Hunting Fathers, is not always easy to comprehend. Such poems might seem unsuitable for song-setting, but there has always been a tradition of setting ‘philosophical’ verse, what the Germans call Gedankenlyrik, to music: for example, Goethe’s ‘Grenzen der Menschheit’ (Schubert, Wolf and Berg) and Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’. Indeed, Britten’s collaboration with Auden bears some comparison to Schubert’s with his friend Johann Mayrhofer, whose poems could also be intellectually challenging. There was, however, also a demotic side to Auden’s poetry, which the ballads printed here illustrate well. Auden remains one of the most composed of mid-twentieth-century poets, and Britten alone set him over twenty times.
Auden’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War, during which he drove ambulances and also wrote propaganda pieces on behalf of the Republican Government, did much to encourage his pacifist stance during the Second World War. His decision to leave England, which was partially due to religious conviction (in October 1940 he resumed the religious belief he had held during his childhood, and described himself as an ‘Anglo-Catholic though not too spiky’), was so controversial that his sojourn in America was debated in the House of Commons on 13 June 1940.
Auden’s involvement with documentary film is an important facet of his genius. He worked in 1935 for six months with the General Post Office Film Unit and produced a song – ‘O lurcher-loving collier’ – for the film Coal Face, which, begun in 1935, was eventually released in 1939. This was possibly the most ambitious of all their film projects, and the commentary was actually sung as recitative rather than spoken. A verse commentary for Night Mail followed in 1936. Auden also played the part of Father Christmas in Calendar of the Year (1936) and wrote commentaries for Beside the Seaside (1937), The Way to the Sea (1937) and The Londoners (1939). Britten, who first met Auden on 4 July 1935, composed music for Coal Face, Night Mail, The Way to the Sea and God’s Chillun.
Their collaboration, of course, was not limited to the cinema – they worked together in the theatre (The Ascent of F6 – see ‘Funeral blues’) and at the BBC (Hadrian’s Wall). Then in 1936 came Our Hunting Fathers, an orchestral song cycle of virtuosic power. Auden considered Britten to be ‘the white hope of music’, while Britten was quite simply in awe of Auden’s towering intellect (cf. a diary entry in January 1936: ‘having a bad inferiority complex in company of brains like Basil Wright, Wystan Auden & William Coldstream […]’). One of the things they shared was an intense compassion for all creatures, both humans and animals – a feeling which illuminates the Auden pieces in Our Hunting Fathers and those by Weelkes and Ravenscroft. 1938 saw the publication of On This Island, Britten’s setting of five Auden poems from a new collection of his verse called Look, Stranger!, a title he changed to On This Island for the American edition. Two of the poems from this volume were dedicated to Britten: ‘Night covers up the rigid land’ and ‘Underneath the abject willow’, which has been interpreted by some critics as an attempt by Auden to persuade Britten to be less timid in affairs of the heart. The Cabaret Songs were written between 1937 and 1939, while their sole operatic collaboration, Paul Bunyan, dates from 1941.
Though poet and composer became good friends, they were ill matched in other ways, and Auden particularly disliked Britten’s need for respectability. This hard-hitting letter that Auden wrote Britten on 31 January 1942 effectively ended their close friendship and artistic collaboration:
[…] There is a lot I want to talk to you about, but I must try and say a little of it by letter. I have been thinking a great deal about you and your work during the past year. As you know I think you [are] the white hope of music; for this very reason I am more critical of you than of anybody else, and I think I know something about the dangers that beset you as a man and as an artist because they are my own.
Goodness and Beauty are the results of a perfect balance between Order and Chaos, Bohemianism and Bourgeois Convention.
Bohemian chaos alone ends in a mad jumble of beautiful scraps; Bourgeois convention alone ends in large unfeeling corpses.
Every artist except the supreme masters has a bias one way or the other. The best pair of opposites I can think of in music are Wagner and Strauss. (Technical skill always comes from the bourgeois side of one’s nature.)
For middle-class Englishmen like you and me, the danger is of course the second. Your attraction to thin-as-a-board-juveniles, i.e. to the sexless and innocent, is a symptom of this. And I am certain too that it is your denial and evasion of the attractions [Auden crosses this word out] demands of disorder that is responsible for your attacks of ill-health, ie sickness is your substitute for the Bohemian.
Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do, e.g. Elisabeth, Peter (Please show this to P to whom all this is also addressed). Up to a certain point this is fine for you, but beware. You see, Bengy dear, you are always tempted to make things too easy for yourself in this way, i.e. to build yourself a warm nest of love (of course when you get it, you find it a little stifling) by playing the lovable talented little boy.
If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have; i.e. you will have to be able to say what you never yet had had the right to say – God, I’m a shit.
This is all expressed very muddle-headedly, but try and not misunderstand it, and believe that it is only my love and admiration for you that makes me say it. […]
The texts printed here are taken from the Faber edition of Auden’s Collected Poems (1976), edited by Edward Mendelson. Auden continued to polish and refine his verse after it had been set by Britten, which explains the occasional differences between set text and published poem. Interpretations of difficult poems can be found in John Fuller’s excellent W. H. Auden: A Commentary (Faber and Faber, 1998). Auden can be heard reciting a number of these poems on CD in the Voice of the Poet series published by Random House.
O lurcher-loving collier, black as night,
Follow your love across the smokeless hill;
Your lamp is out, the cages all are still;
Course2 for her heart and do not miss,
For Sunday soon is past and, Kate, fly not so fast,
For Monday comes when none may kiss:
Be marble to his soot, and to his black be white.
(Berkeley)
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock2, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon her gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms,
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails,
Thro’ Southern Uplands with Northern mails.
Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro’ the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens. The climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands,
Notes from overseas to the Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official or the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s3:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
They are our past and our future; the poles between which our desire unceasingly is discharged.
A desire in which love and hatred so perfectly oppose themselves that we cannot voluntarily move; but await the extraordinary compulsion of the deluge and the earthquake.2
Their finish has inspired the limits of all arts and ascetic movements.
Their affections and indifferences have been a guide to all reformers and tyrants.
Their appearances amid our dreams of machinery have brought a vision of nude and fabulous epochs.
O pride so hostile to our charity.
But what their pride has retained we may by charity more generously recover.
Our hunting fathers told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures,
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features;
Saw in the lion’s intolerant look,
Behind the quarry’s dying glare,
Love raging for the personal glory
That reason’s gift would add,
The liberal appetite and power,
The rightness of a god.
Who nurtured in that fine tradition
Predicted the result,
Guessed love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt,
That human ligaments could so
His southern gestures modify1
And make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours,
To hunger, work illegally,
And be anonymous?
Underneath an abject willow,
Lover, sulk no more:
Act from thought should quickly follow.
What is thinking for?
Your unique and moping station
Proves you cold;
Stand up and fold
Your map of desolation.
Bells that toll across the meadows
From the sombre spire
Toll for these unloving shadows
Love does not require.
All that lives may love; why longer
Bow to loss
With arms across?
Strike and you shall conquer.
Geese in flocks above you flying,
Their direction know,
Icy brooks beneath you flowing,
To their ocean go.
Dark and dull is your distraction:
Walk then, come,
No longer numb
Into your satisfaction.2
When On This Island was premiered by Sophie Wyss and the composer in the Concert Hall of Broadcasting House on 19 November 1937, the audience found the music, according to Britten’s entry in his diary, ‘far too obvious and amenable for contemporary music’. He did not, however, comment on their reaction to Auden’s poems, which, as song texts, are difficult and arcane. Though Britten had already set contemporary poetry – Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves and Auden himself in Our Hunting Fathers (1936) – On This Island represented his first real encounter with ‘New Poetry’. Peter Pears’s description of ‘Let the florid music praise’ is also an apt summation of the whole work: ‘One of Britten’s finest and a salutary challenge to a whole generation of English songs.’ However difficult and disparate the five poems might at first appear, they are all (apart from ‘Seascape’) linked by a common theme: relationships – and Britten’s work is dedicated, significantly, to Christopher Isherwood, Auden’s lover over a period of years.
Let the florid music praise,
The flute and the trumpet,
Beauty’s conquest of your face:
In that land of flesh and bone,
Where from citadels on high
Her imperial standards fly,
Let the hot sun
Shine on, shine on.
O but the unloved have had power,
The weeping and striking,
Always: time will bring their hour;
Their secretive children walk
Through your vigilance of breath
To unpardonable Death,
And my vows break
Before his look.
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse’s flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
Whispering neighbours left and right
Daunt us from our true delight;
Able hands are forced to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.
Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.
Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.
Cold, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
Here at the small field’s ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the sucking surf,
And the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.
Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.
Now through night’s caressing grip
Earth and all her oceans slip,
Capes of China slide away
From her fingers into day
And the Americas incline
Coasts towards her shadow line.
Now the ragged vagrants creep
Into crooked holes to sleep:
Just and unjust, worst and best,
Change their places as they rest:
Awkward lovers lie in fields
Where disdainful beauty yields:
While the splendid and the proud
Naked stand before the crowd
And the losing gambler gains
And the beggar entertains:
May sleep’s healing power extend
Through these hours to our friend.
Unpursued by hostile force,
Traction engine, bull or horse
Calmly till the morning break
Let him lie, then gently wake.
As it is, plenty;
As it’s admitted
The children happy
And the car, the car
That goes so far,
And the wife devoted:
To this as it is,
To the work and the banks
Let his thinning hair
And his hauteur
Give thanks, give thanks.
All that was thought
As like as not, is not;
When nothing was enough
But love, but love,
And the rough future
Of an intransigeant nature,
And the betraying smile,
Betraying, but a smile:
That that is not, is not;
Forget, forget.
Let him not cease to praise,
Then, his lordly days;
Yes, and the success
Let him see in this
The profit larger
And the sin venial2,
Lest he see as it is
The loss as major
And final, final.
To lie flat on the back with the knees flexed
And sunshine on the soft receptive belly,
Or face down, the insolent spine relaxed,
No more compelled to cower or to bully,
Is good; and good to see them passing by
Below on the white sidewalk in the heat,
The dog, the lady with parcels, and the boy:
There is the casual life outside the heart.
Yes, we are out of sight and earshot here.
Are you aware what weapon you are loading,
To what that teasing talk is quietly leading?
Our pulses count but do not judge the hour.
Who are you with, from whom you turn away,
At whom you dare not look? Do you know why?
Fish in the unruffled lakes
Their swarming colours wear,
Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have,
And the great lion walks
Through his innocent grove;
Lion, fish and swan
Act, and are gone
Upon Time’s toppling wave.
We till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Duty’s conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock,
The goodness carefully worn
For atonement or for luck;
We must lose our loves,
On each beast and bird that moves
Turn an envious look.
Sighs for folly done and said
Twist our narrow days;
But I must bless, I must praise
That you, my swan, who have
All gifts that to the swan
Impulsive Nature gave,
The majesty and pride,
Last night should add
Your voluntary love.
Some say that love’s a little boy
And some say he’s a bird,
Some say he makes the world go round
And some say that’s absurd:
But when I asked the man next door
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife was very cross indeed
And said it wouldn’t do.
Does it look like a pair of pyjamas
Or the ham in a temperance hotel,
Does its odour remind one of llamas
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is
Or soft as eiderdown fluff,
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.
[Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
And it’s a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I’ve found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway-guides.
Does it howl like an angry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-class imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.]
I looked inside the summer-house,
It wasn’t ever there,
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead
And Brighton’s bracing air;
I don’t know what the blackbird sang
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn’t in the chicken-run
Or underneath the bed.
Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races
Or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.
Your feelings when you meet it, I
Am told you can’t forget.
I’ve sought it since I was a child
But haven’t found it yet;
I’m getting on for thirty-five,
And still I do not know
What kind of creature it can be
That bothers people so.3
When it comes, will it come without a warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
(Horder, Rorem)
O the valley in the summer where I and my John
Beside the deep river would walk on and on,
While the grass at our feet and the birds up above
Argued so sweetly on reciprocal love,
And I leaned on his shoulder; ‘O Johnny, let’s play’;
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
O that Friday near Christmas as I well recall
When he went to the Charity Matinee Ball,
The floor was so smooth and the band was so loud
And Johnny so handsome I felt so proud;
‘Squeeze me tighter, dear Johnny, let’s dance till it’s day’;
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
Shall I ever forget at the Grand Opera
When music poured out of each wonderful star?
Diamonds and pearls they hung dazzling down
Over each silver or golden silk gown;
‘O John I’m in heaven,’ I whispered to say:
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
O but he was as fair as a garden in flower,
As slender and tall as the great Eiffel Tower,
When the waltz throbbed out on the long promenade
O his eyes and his smile they went straight to my heart;
‘O marry me, Johnny, I’ll love and obey’:
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
O last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover,
You’d the sun on one arm and the moon on the other,
The sea it was blue and the grass it was green,
Every star rattled a round tambourine;
Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay:
But you frowned like thunder and you went away.
Driver drive faster and make a good run
Down the Springfield Line under the shining sun.
Fly like the aeroplane, don’t pull up short
Till you brake for Grand Central Station, New York.
For there in the middle of that waiting-hall
Should be standing the one that I love best of all.
If he’s not there to meet me when I get to town,
I’ll stand on the side-walk with tears rolling down.
For he is the one that I love to look on,
The acme of kindness and perfection.
He presses my hand and he says he loves me
Which I find an admirable peculiarity.
The woods are bright green on both sides of the line;
The trees have their loves though they’re different from mine.
But the poor fat old banker in the sun-parlor car
Has no one to love him except his cigar.
If I were the head of the Church or the State
I’d powder my nose and just tell them to wait.
In a garden shady this holy lady
With reverent cadence and subtle psalm,
Like a black swan as death came on
Poured forth her song in perfect calm:
And by ocean’s margin this innocent virgin
Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer,
And notes tremendous from her great engine
Thundered out on the Roman air.
Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited,
Moved to delight by the melody,
White as an orchid she rode quite naked
In an oyster shell on top of the sea;
At sounds so entrancing the angels dancing
Came out of their trance into time again,
And around the wicked in Hell’s abysses
The huge flame flickered and eased their pain.
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play.
I cannot err;
There is no creature
Whom I belong to,
Whom I could wrong.
I am defeat
When it knows it
Can now do nothing
By suffering.
All you lived through,
Dancing because you
No longer need it
For any deed.
I shall never be
Different. Love me.
O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall,
Calm spaces unafraid of wear or weight,
Where Sorrow is herself, forgetting all
The gaucheness of her adolescent state,
Where Hope within the altogether strange
From every outworn image is released,
And Dread born whole and normal like a beast
Into a world of truths that never change:
Restore our fallen day; O re-arrange.
O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain,
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
O cry created as the bow of sin
Is drawn across our trembling violin.
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain.
O law drummed out by hearts against the still
Long winter of our intellectual will.
That what has been may never be again.
O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath
Of convalescents on the shores of death.
O bless the freedom that you never chose.
O trumpets that unguarded children blow
About the fortress of their inner foe.
O wear your tribulation like a rose.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under the arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
[‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’]
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
[‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.]
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling2 snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
[‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy3 is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.]
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
(Bennett, Holloway)
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.2
The consul banged the table and said:
‘If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially dead’:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread’;
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: ‘They must die’;
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.
Went down to the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
Interviewed for BBC Radio 3 on 16 November 1974 before a recital of his songs by Meriel and Peter Dickinson, Berkeley said:
One has only to think what a composer has to do to a poem: he has to destroy or at best modify its natural rhythm. He cannot possibly adhere to its actual metre. He then has to translate it into another medium. His only excuse for doing such a thing is that he feels he can recreate its atmosphere and feeling in the language of music. And here he can, if he’s a good enough composer, heighten its emotional impact. He may even be able to bring out and stress certain rhymes and assonances that will enhance the actual words, but it remains a risky undertaking on which one hesitates to embark.
Among the leaves the small birds sing;
The crow of the cock commands awaking:
In solitude, for company.
Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal;
Men of their neighbours become sensible:
In solitude, for company.
The crow of the cock commands awaking;
Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding:
In solitude, for company.
Men of their neighbours become sensible;
God bless the Realm, God bless the People:
In solitude, for company.
Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding;
The dripping mill-wheel is again turning:
In solitude, for company.
God bless the Realm, God bless the People;
God bless this green world temporal:
In solitude, for company.
The dripping mill-wheel is again turning;
Among the leaves the small birds sing:
In solitude, for company.
(Mellers)
See above, under Britten.
What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney;
Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life;
Is it making of love or counting of money,
Or raid on the jewels, the plans of a thief?
Open your eyes, my dearest dallier;
Let hunt with your hands for escaping me;
Go through the motions of exploring the familiar;
Stand on the brink of the warm white day.
Rise with the wind, my great big serpent;
Silence the birds and darken the air;
Change me with terror, alive in a moment;
Strike for the heart and have me there.
(Britten, Dickinson)
Eyes look into the well,
Tears run down from the eye;
The tower cracked and fell
From the quiet winter sky.
Under a midnight stone
Love was buried by thieves;
The robbed heart begs for a bone,
The damned rustle like leaves.
Face down in the flooded brook
With nothing more to say,
Lies One the soldiers took,
And spoiled and threw away.
(Britten, Dickinson)
Carry her over the water,
And set her down under the tree,
Where the culvers2 white all day and all night,
And the winds from every quarter,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
Put a gold ring on her finger,
And press her close to your heart,
While the fish in the lake their snapshots take,
And the frog, that sanguine singer,
Sings agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
The streets shall all flock to your marriage,
The houses turn round to look,
The tables and chairs say suitable prayers,
And the horses drawing your carriage
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
(November 22nd, 1963)
Why then, why there,
Why thus, we cry, did he die?
The heavens are silent.
What he was, he was:
What he is fated to become
Depends on us.
When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise,
Sorrow and joy, are one.
Henze comments:
The first song is an elegy for the little cat Lucina. While working on this song I could clearly remember Auden analysing this poem for me, explaining how it followed an Old Icelandic rhyme scheme [an englyn], and as a result it was very easy for me to set. The second is a ballad, the narrative sonnet Rimbaud, in which a vivid picture emerges of the greatness and glamour of the poet of Les Illuminations. The third is a love song, one of Auden’s most beautiful poems. Throughout its four stanzas, the verse form remains the same, but the subject matter shifts and changes as freely as the thoughts of someone lying awake at night. For all three poems I have tried to achieve a musical equivalent for the structures, ideas and images of the verse. The songs were written to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Margaret von Hessen [wife of the Prinz von Hessen].
At peace under this mandarin, sleep, Lucina2,
Blue-eyed Queen of white cats: for you the Ischian wave shall weep
When we who now miss you are American dust, and steep
Epomeo3 in peace and war augustly a grave-watch keep.
The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetorician’s lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.1
Drinks bought him by his weak and lyric friend2
His five wits systematically deranged,3
To all accustomed nonsense put an end;
Till he from lyre and weakness was estranged.
Verse was a special illness of the ear;
Integrity was not enough; that seemed
The hell of childhood: he must try again.
Now, galloping through Africa, he dreamed4
Of a new self, a son, an engineer,
His truth acceptable to lying men.
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
(Berkeley)