The Penguin Book of English Song Read online

Musicke more loftly swels

  In speeches nobly placed:

  Beauty as farre excels,

  In action aptly graced:

  A friend each party drawes,

  To countenance his cause:

  Love more affected seemes

  To beautie’s lovely light,

  And wonder more esteemes

  Of Musick’s wondrous might:

  But both to both so bent,

  As both in both are spent.

  Musike doth witnesse call

  The eare, his truth to trie:

  Beauty brings to the hall,

  The judgement of the eye,

  Both in their objects such,

  As no exceptions6 tutch.

  The common sence, which might

  Be Arbiter7 of this,

  To be forsooth upright,

  To both sides partiall is:

  He layes on this chiefe praise,

  Chiefe praise on that he laies.

  The reason, Princesse hy,

  Whose throne is in the mind,

  Which Musicke can in sky

  And hidden beauties find,

  Say whether thou wilt crowne,

  With limitlesse renowne.

  ROBERT DOWLAND: from A Musicall Banquet (1610)

  Ninth song

  [Goe my Flocke, goe get you hence]

  Goe my Flocke, goe get you hence,

  Seeke some other place of feeding,

  Where you may haue some defence

  Fro the stormes in my breast breeding,

  And showers from mine eyes proceeding.

  Leaue a wretch, in whom all woe

  Can abide to keepe no measure,

  Merry flocke such one forgoe,

  Vnto whom Myrth is displeasure,

  Onely rich in measures treasure.

  Yet alas before you goe,

  Heare your wofull Maisters story,

  Which to stones I else would shew,

  Sorrow onely then hath glory

  When tis excellently sorry.

  Stella, fayrest Shepherdesse,

  Fayrest but yet cruelst euer.

  Stella whom the heau’ns still blesse,

  Though against me she perseuer,

  Though I blisse inherit neuer.

  Stella hath refused mee:

  Stella, who more Loue hath proued,

  In this Catiffe hart to be,

  Then can in good to vs be moued

  Towards Lambe-kins best beloued.

  Stella hath refused mee,

  Astrophel, that so wel serued,

  In this pleasant spring must see

  While in pride Flowers be preseru’d

  Himselfe onely Winter-starued.

  Why alas then doth she sweare

  That she loueth mee so deerely,

  Seeing me so long to beare

  Coales of Loue that burn so cleerely,

  And yet leaue me hopelesse merely.

  Is that Loue? forsooth I trow

  If I saw my good Dogge grieued

  And a help for him did know,

  My Loue should not be belieued

  But hee were by mee relieued.

  No, she hates mee (well away)

  Fayning Loue, somewhat to please mee,

  Knowing, if she should display

  All her hate, Death soone would seize me,

  And of hideous torments ease me.

  Then my flocke now adew,

  But alas, if in your straying

  Heauenly Stella meet with you,

  Tell her in your pittious blaying,

  Her poore slaues iust decaying.

  JOHN IRELAND: from Two Songs (1920/1921)

  Charita

  [My true love hath my heart]1

  My true love hath my hart, and I have his,

  By just exchange one for the other giv’ne.

  I holde his deare, and myne he cannot misse2:

  There never was a better bargaine driv’ne.

  His hart in me, keepes me and him in one,

  My hart in him, his thoughtes and senses guides:

  He loves my hart, for once it was his owne;

  I cherish his because in me it bides.

  [His hart his wound3 receaved from my sight4:

  My hart was wounded, with his wounded hart,

  For as from me, on him his hurt did light,

  So still me thought in me his hurt did smart:

  Both equall hurt, in this change5 sought our blisse:

  My true love hath my hart and I have his.]

  (Holst, Hurlstone, Parry, Somervell, Ward)

  ROBERT GREENE

  (1558–92)

  O that a yeare were graunted me to liue,

  And for that yeare my former wits restored:

  What rules of life, what counsell would I giue?

  How should my sinne with sorrow be deplorde!

  But I must die of euery man abhorred.

  Time loosely spent will not againe be wonne;

  My time is loosely spent, and I undone.

  ROBERT GREENE: Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592)

  Born in Norwich, Greene studied at St John’s College, Cambridge, received a degree from Oxford five years later, and spent some time in France and Italy at the insistence (if we are to believe him) of the ‘lewd wags’ (such as Nashe and Peele) who were his university friends. He married in 1585 but soon abandoned his wife for a dissolute life in London, where he eked out a precarious living, writing plays and pamphlets. He was a prolific writer and produced many pastoral romances modelled on Sidney’s Arcadia, the most important of which were, perhaps, Pandosto (1588), the direct source of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Menaphon (1589), which contains the lovely poem ‘Weepe not, my wanton’, set by Benjamin Britten in A Charm of Lullabies. His eight plays, all published posthumously, include Orlando Furioso (1594), Frier Bacon, and Frier Bungay (1594) and James the Fourth (1598). Among his many pamphlets are Greenes Mourning Garment and Greenes Never Too Late (1590). Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte (1592) contains the first reliable reference to Shakespeare, whom he describes as ‘an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey’. This outburst was probably due to the fact that Shakespeare, who had not gone to university like Greene, Nashe, Peele and Marlowe, was considered by Greene to be an outsider. Greene dressed as a Bohemian, lived a life of excess and relished low company. He repented at the end of his life, and his decline and death were described in detail by himself and his contemporaries. His death was allegedly caused by ‘a fatal banquet of Rhenish wine and pickled herring’ – but he probably died of the plague, which was rife in London in 1592.

  BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from A Charm of Lullabies, Op. 41 (1947/1949)1

  Sephestias song to her childe

  [Sephestia’s lullaby]

  Weepe not, my wanton, smile vpon my knee;

  When thou arte old ther’s griefe inough for thee.

  Mothers wagge, pretie boy,

  Fathers sorrow, fathers ioy;

  When thy father first did see

  Such a boy by him and mee,

  He was glad, I was woe;

  Fortune changde made him so,

  When he left his pretie boy,

  Last his sorrowe, first his joy.

  Weepe not, my wanton, smile vpon my knee;

  When thou arte old ther’s griefe inough for thee.

  [Streaming teares that neuer stint,

  Like pearle drops from a flint

  Fell by course from his eyes,

  That one anothers place supplies:

  Thus he grieud in euerie part,

  Teares of bloud fell from his hart,

  When he left his pretie boy,

  Fathers sorrow, fathers joy.]

  Weepe not, my wanton, smile vpon my knee;


  When thou arte old ther’s griefe inough for thee.

  The wanton smilde, father wept:

  Mother cride, babie lept:

  More he crowde, more we cride,

  Nature could not sorowe hide:

  He must goe, he must kisse

  Childe and mother, babie blisse:

  For he left his pretie boy,

  Fathers sorowe, fathers ioy.

  Weepe not, my wanton, smile vpon my knee;

  When thou arte old ther’s griefe inough for thee.

  ST ROBERT SOUTHWELL

  (?1561–95)

  Music, even domestic music, was policed by officialdom with an intensity that shifted from year to year. The ‘Waldegrave’ manuscript [the main source of Southwell’s English poems] comes out of this confused, anxiety-ridden situation, and Southwell’s lyrics embody the same doubled or occluded messages as the public music of William Byrd. Both witness to the difficulties of balancing faith and obedience in late Elizabethan England.

  ANNE SWEENEY: Introduction to St Robert Southwell, Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2007)

  A member of an old Norfolk family, Southwell was brought up abroad. After a Jesuit education in Douai, Paris and Rome, where he took Roman orders, he came to England in 1586 as part of the Jesuit mission with Father Henry Garnet, who was later executed for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. He was welcomed by Catholic families and for six years pursued his priestly task at great personal risk, publishing illegal devotional works from his secret printing press and moving about London by night. He had no pulpit and his scattered congregation had no church, but Southwell was aware that his manuscript poems would be copied and readily passed from Catholic community to Catholic community, avoiding the scrutiny of those officials whose duty it was to monitor the presses. He was arrested in 1592 for celebrating mass, repeatedly racked and tortured and finally executed at Tyburn after three years’ imprisonment. Most of his poems were written in prison, including St Peters Complaint (1595), in which the penitent Peter, narrating the last events in the life of Christ, continually contrasts the spiritual with the material. His shorter poems, mostly devotional, were also published in 1595, in Moeoniae. He was beatified in 1929 and canonized in 1970. Though his poems were destined for the persecuted Catholic minority, they exercised a quiet influence on the development of English poetry and were already popular at the time of his death. His last words on the scaffold were ‘In manus tuas, Domine’, which William Byrd, a fellow Catholic, later set to music.

  BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28, for trebles and harp (1942/1943)

  from New heaven, new warre

  [This little babe]

  [Come to your heaven yowe heavenly quires

  Earth hath the heaven of your desires

  Remove your dwellinge to your god

  A stall is nowe his best aboade

  Sith men their homage doe denye

  Come Angells all their fault supply

  His chilling could1 doth heate require

  Come Seraphins in liew of fire

  This little ark no cover hath

  Let Cherubs winges his body swath

  Come Raphiell this babe must eate

  Provide our little Tobie meate.2

  Let Gabriell be nowe his groome

  That first tooke upp his earthly roome

  Let Michell stande in his defence

  Whom love hath link’d to feeble sence

  Let graces rocke when he doth crye

  And Angells sing his Lullybye

  The same you saw in heavenly seate

  Is he that now suckes Maryes teate

  Agnize3 your kinge a mortall wighte

  His borrowed weede4 letts not your sight

  Come kysse the maunger where he lies

  That is your blisse above the Skyes]

  This little Babe, so fewe daies olde

  Is come to ryfle Satan’s folde

  All hell doth at his presence quake

  Though he himselfe for cold doe shake

  For in this weake unarmed wise

  The gates of hell he will surprise.

  With tears he fightes and wynnes the feild

  His naked breste stands for a Sheilde

  His battering shot are babishe cryes,

  His Arrowes lookes of weepinge eyes

  His Martiall ensignes cold and neede

  And feeble fleshe his warriers steede.

  His Campe is pitched in a stall

  Be His Bulwarke but a broken wall

  The Cribbe his trench, hay stalks his staks5

  Of Shepeherds he his muster6 makes

  And thus as sure his foe to Wounde,

  The Angells Trumpes alarum sounde.

  My soule with Christ joyn thou in fighte

  Sticke to the tents that he hath pight7

  Within his Cribb is surest warde

  This little Babe will be thy garde.

  If thou wilt foyle thy foes with joye

  Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

  New Prince, new pompe

  [In freezing winter night]1

  Behold a sely2 tender babe

  In freesing Winter nighte

  In homely manger trembling lyes

  Alas a pitteous sighte

  The Inns are full no man will yeld

  This little Pilgrime Bedd

  But forc’d he is with sely beasts

  In Crib to shroude his headd.

  [Despise not him for lyinge there

  First what he is enquire

  An orient3 pearle is often founde

  In depth of dirty mire

  Waye not his Crib, his wooden dishe

  Nor beasts that by him feede

  Way not his mothers poore attire

  Nor Josephs simple weede]

  This stable is a Princes Courte

  The Cribb his chaire of state

  The beastes are parcell of his pompe

  The wooden dishe his plate.

  The persons in that poore attire

  His royall livories weare

  The prince himselfe is come from heaven

  This pompe is prized there.

  With joy approach O Christian wighte

  Do homage to thy Kinge

  And highly prise this humble pompe

  Which he from heaven doth bringe.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

  (1564–93)

  But of course Marlowe’s greatest poetical achievement is the two sestiads of his unfinished Hero and Leander. This is a more perfect work than any of his plays, not because their poetry is always inferior to it, but because in it the poetry and the theme are at one. Here, and here only, he found matter to which his genius was entirely adequate. For Marlowe is our great master of the material imagination; he writes best about flesh, gold, gems, stone, fire, clothes, water, snow and air. It is only in such concretes that his imagination can fix itself.

  C. S. LEWIS: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954)

  Son of a Canterbury cobbler, Marlowe worked his way up the social ladder, attending Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he took his BA in 1584 and MA in 1587. While at university he translated parts of Ovid’s Amores and wrote the celebrated poem printed below, and also perhaps Tamburlaine the Great. After Cambridge he moved to London, where he lived off his literary earnings: The Jew of Malta (c.1590), Edward II (1592) and his final, and greatest, play, Dr Faustus (1604). His non-dramatic poetry is best represented by the unfinished Hero and Leander, written in the Italianate tradition of erotic narrative. He lived a short and charmed life. He was deported to the Netherlands for attempting to forge gold coins, seems to have been involved in government service, perhaps as a spy, and was summoned before the Privy Council for alleged sedition and blasphemy. He was stabbed to death, aged twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl in London by one Ingram Frizer over a dispute about the bill – ‘le recknynge’, as the depositions have it. Touchstone refers perhaps to the skirmish when he s
ays in As You Like It (Act III, sc. iii, 9–12): ‘When a mans verses cannot be vnderstood, nor a mans good wit seconded with the forward childe, understanding, it strikes a man more dead then a great reckoning in a little roome.’

  The way in which Marlowe made blank verse a vehicle for serious dramatic expression has assured him an important place in the history of English literature. Had Shakespeare died at the age of twenty-nine, he would be little more than a footnote in literary history: Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors among his plays; and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece – and all these, though probably written before Shakespeare turned thirty, were not published until 1594 at the earliest. Marlowe’s reputation rests on works that he wrote in his twenties, including ‘The passionate Sheepheard to his love’. This famous poem owes much to Polyphemus’ love song to Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13. Like Polyphemus, Marlowe’s shepherd offers the nymph material rather than spiritual wealth, and in the final stanza even hints at the benefits to be enjoyed from social advancement.

  PETER WARLOCK: from Seven Songs of Summer (1928/1929)

  The passionate Sheepheard to his love1

  [The passionate shepherd]

  Come live with mee and be my love,

  And we will all the pleasures prove,

  That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,

  Woods, or steepie mountaine yeeldes.

  And wee will sit upon the Rocks,

  Seeing the Sheepheards feede theyr flocks,

  By shallow Rivers, to whose falls

  Melodious byrds sing Madrigalls.

  And I will make thee beds of Roses

  And a thousand fragrant poesies,

  A cap of flowers, and a kirtle2,

  Imbroydered all with leaves of Mirtle.

  A gowne made of the finest wooll,