Poetry and music have been associated with each other from the very beginning. Short poems are still called lyrics, even though they are now not usually sung to a lyre; Virgil’s Aeneid begins: ‘Arma virumque cano’ – ‘I sing [not tell] of arms and man’; a sonnet, though rarely sung, derives its name from the word ‘song’; many poems from the Elizabethan age to the present have been called ‘Song’, with no musical setting; and music, for many of us, is an integral part of poetry. The Penguin Book of English Song contains a great variety of poems from the fourteenth to the twentieth century that have reached a wider audience through the magic of music. As John Dryden wrote in the dedication of Purcell’s The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of The Prophetess, or The History of Dioclesian (1690):
Musick and Poetry have ever been acknowledg’d Sisters, which walking hand in hand, support each other; As Poetry is the harmony of Words, so Musick is that of Notes: and as Poetry is a Rise above Prose and Oratory, so is Musick the exaltation of Poetry. Both of them may excel apart, but sure are most excellent when they are join’d, because nothing is then wanting to either of their Perfections: for thus they appear like Wit and Beauty in the same Person.
There are many books available in English that introduce the reader to the world of French, German, Italian and Spanish song, among them A French Song Companion (OUP), The Book of Lieder (Faber and Faber), Italian Art Song (Indiana University Press) and The Spanish Song Companion (Scarecrow Press). There is no equivalent book on English song, no book that provides an anthology of English verse with commentaries on poets, composers and, when textual explanations are needed, poems. Each of the 100 chapters of The Penguin Book of English Song, arranged chronologically from Chaucer to Auden, opens with information about the poet’s life, work and, often, approach to music. This is followed by a choice of poems that have inspired musical settings, arranged chronologically by composer. Piano-accompanied song predominates, but not exclusively. Benjamin Britten, for example, is represented not only by such works as Winter Words (Hardy) for voice and piano, but also his Spring Symphony (Spenser, Clare, Milton, Herrick); Nocturne (Shelley, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Owen, Keats, Shakespeare) for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and string orchestra; A Ceremony of Carols (Southwell) for trebles and harp; Serenade (Tennyson, Blake, Jonson, Keats) for tenor, horn and strings; Five Flower Songs (Herrick, Crabbe, Clare) for unaccompanied chorus; ‘Canticle III’ (Sitwell) for tenor, horn and piano; and Peter Grimes (Crabbe) – reminding us that Britten was one of the very few composers who were equally at home in opera and song.
Many of these English poems have also inspired songs – in German translation – by the great Lieder composers, which explains the presence within these pages of Beethoven, Haydn, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, Wolf and so on. The bulk of the book comprises verse of undisputed literary pedigree – a rich anthology of English poetry (including Irish, Scots and Welsh writers) from Chaucer to Auden, with very few of the great poets omitted. American verse has been excluded for lack of space, though American composers such as Argento, Barber, Beach, Chanler, Hoiby, Rorem etc. feature regularly in the selected list of composers printed in parenthesis at the end of a poem.
The volume, despite the presence of many composers of different nationalities, remains quintessentially English, and includes pieces that have a firm place in our national consciousness: ‘Rule, Britannia!’ (James Thomson), sung each year at the Last Night of the Proms; ‘Abide with me’ (Henry Francis Lyte), bawled each year at the Cup Final; ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ (Jane Taylor), cooed by every child in its pram; ‘Tom Bowling’ (Charles Dibdin), caressed each year by the BBC Orchestra’s first cello at the Last Night of the Proms; ‘Auld lang syne’ (Robert Burns), intoned, not just by the Scots, each Hogmanay; ‘Jerusalem’ (William Blake), the official hymn of the England and Wales Cricket Board; and ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Cecil Frances Alexander), whose first verse is sung by a lone treble each year at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge. Patriotic poems include ‘For those at sea’ (William Whiting), known to every English-speaking sailor the world over; ‘Our God, our help in ages past’ (Isaac Watts), sung at Winston Churchill’s funeral and every Remembrance Day; and the National Anthem.
W. H. Auden wrote in The Poet’s Tongue (1935) that ‘we do not want to read “great” poetry all the time, and a good anthology should contain poems for every mood’. He also pointed out (Introduction to 19th Century British Minor Poets, 1966), in an attempt to define ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poets, that it was not simply ‘a matter of the pleasure the poet gives an individual reader: I cannot enjoy one poem by Shelley and am delighted by every line of William Barnes, but I know perfectly well that Shelley is a major poet and Barnes a minor one.’ The Penguin Book of English Song includes many so-called minor poets: William Allingham, the friend of Tennyson, who wrote one indestructible poem; Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the haunted poet of ‘Dream-pedlary’; Colley Cibber, the poet of ‘The blind boy’, immortalized by Franz Schubert; George Crabbe, whose ‘Peter Grimes’ from The Borough is now celebrated the world over through the music of Benjamin Britten; tragic Ernest Dowson, one of Delius’s favourite poets; Francis Ledwidge, much admired by Seamus Heaney; Sidney Keyes, who died aged twenty in the Second World War; Alun Lewis, another war victim, for whom Robert Graves predicted a shining future; Walter de la Mare, who penned some of the most magical poems in the English language; and many more.
The texts printed here are those of the original poems, even when composers have tweaked the text to suit their settings; and the title of each poem is the one used by the poet. Gurney’s ‘By a bierside’ is therefore titled ‘The Chief Centurions’, and the poem is printed as it originally appeared in Masefield’s Pompey the Great – Gurney, when setting the poem from memory in the trenches, misremembered fourteen words. Square brackets after the title of a poem denote the composer’s title, and square brackets within the poem indicate verses that the composer has omitted.
Francis Turner Palgrave, in his Introduction to a volume of poems by Robert Herrick (Macmillan and Co., 1877), writes perceptively that ‘the poet’s own spelling and punctuation bear, or may bear, a gleam of his personality’ – and it is for this reason that the poems in The Penguin Book of English Song are printed with their original orthography and punctuation. This also enables us to trace the development of the English language as the book progresses. Modernizing the spelling of Chaucer’s language affects both the sound, sight, rhythm and flavour of the poem. Compare Chaucer’s original opening of ‘The General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales with Geoffrey Dyson’s modern version of the same lines and the difference is at once apparent:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour
Of which vertu engendered is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodie,
That slepen al the night with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages […]
When that April with his showers sweet
The drought of March hath piercèd to the root,
And bathèd every vein in such moisture
Of which virtue engendered is the flower;
When Zephyr eke with his sweet breath
Inspirèd hath in every holt and heath
The tender branches, and the young sun
Hath in Ram’s sign his half course run,
And small birds make melody
That sleep all night with open eye, –
So worketh nature in their hearts, –
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage […]
John Skelton’s zaniness is diminished by tampering with his spelling and punctuation (just as Mussorgsky’s raw individuality is smoothed out in Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Boris Godunov). It’s only by reading the poems of Robert Southwell in their original form that we can involve ourselves in the experiences of the poet entangled in the turmoil of post-Reformation Europe – to change the orthography in Britten’s settings of ‘This little babe’ (‘This little Babe, so fewe daies olde’) and ‘In freezing winter night’ (‘In freesing Winter nighte’) is to deny the reader the experience of appreciating the poems exactly as they appeared, clandestinely and illicitly, from the printing presses of the period. And by reproducing the authentic spelling of Traherne’s Centuries (see Finzi’s Dies Natalis), we become aware that the poet’s use of capitals frequently gives emphasis to certain words.
The orthography of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers is not difficult if the words are read aloud and a few basic peculiarities are borne in mind: apostrophes are often used to indicate elision, as in John Donne; many possessive apostrophes are omitted; the ending -ed is usually pronounced; ‘then’ and ‘than’ and ‘thorough’ and ‘through’ are often interchangeable; ‘to’ is occasionally printed for ‘too’. Although it is sometimes difficult to detect a consistent principle governing the erratic spelling of the Elizabethan period, during which a word can appear spelt several different ways within the same poem, and although it must be borne in mind that the orthography and punctuation of a poem were often decided by the printer – especially when the poem was an extract from a play – to read a poem in its original orthography is part of our aesthetic response to poetry.
Later writers also had their orthographical idiosyncrasies. William Blake’s ‘Illuminated Books’ are a case in point. The spelling and punctuation of the fifty-four plates that Blake made for the Songs of Innocence and of Experience should not be tampered with, since the simplicity of these poems is harmed when editors impose an over-sophisticated punctuation. The use of ampersands, the absence of commas, apostrophes, capital letters and full stops never interferes with the sense and should be honoured – even though it has not been possible to reproduce Blake’s ‘long s’. The erratic spelling, irregular grammar and virtual absence of punctuation of John Clare’s poetry allow us an insight into his madness that is denied us when editors meddle with his verse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, like Blake, preferred ampersands to ‘and’s, tended to use two rather than three ellipses (. .) and often used equal signs (=) for dashes in her manuscripts – see the British Library manuscript notebook of Sonnets from the Portuguese; to change her orthography would be as ill-advised and perverse as altering Emily Dickinson’s idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation, although we have not replicated typographically Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s exclamation marks which lack the point. When vocal scores have modernized a poet’s spelling and punctuation, we have reinstated the original version.
Footnotes provide information about the more recondite classical and learned references, difficult syntax and first performances, and give biographical details relevant to either composer or poet. Biography – pace the deconstructionists – enables singer, pianist and listener to engage more fully with a poem and its musical setting. Information about Thomas Hardy’s relationships, for example with Elizabeth Bishop, Emma Gifford, Louisa Harding, Florence Henniker, Fanny Hurden and Julia Martin, can only deepen a performer’s interpretation of Hardy songs by Ireland, Finzi and others. Or as D. H. Lawrence put it, referring to his own poetry in his introductory Note to The Collected Poems (1928): ‘It seems to me that no poetry, not even the best, should be judged as if it existed in the absolute, in the vacuum of the absolute. Even the best poetry, when it is at all personal, needs the penumbra of its own time and place and circumstance to make it full and whole. If we knew a little more of Shakespeare’s self and circumstance how much more complete the Sonnets would be to us, how their strange, torn edges would be softened and merged into a whole body!’ The Penguin Book of English Song gathers together in a single volume a huge amount of information about English Song that will assist musicians in performing these works and enlighten all those enthusiasts who delight in the fusion of words and music, which has produced countless moments of incandescent magic.
Richard Stokes, London 2016