I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.
But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?
How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Mæonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
Strange how one thing leads to another. My wife and I have just returned from Margate where we were house-sitting for her nephew. Strolling down the richly varied Northdown Road in Cliftonville I came across an ancient Penguin edition of James Elroy Flecker's play 'Hassan' which put me in mind of Delius' incidental music for the same (see below). More immediately, I was encouraged to return to the Finzi setting of Flecker's poem 'To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence' which I mentioned briefly in a previous Blog, 'Such the Tenor Man Told'.
I am grateful to Wikipedia for the following:
Herman Elroy Flecker was born on 5 November 1884 in Lewisham, London, to William Herman Flecker, headmaster of Dean Close School, Cheltenham, and his wife Sarah. His much younger brother was the educationalist Henry Lael Oswald Flecker, who became Headmaster of Christ's Hospital.
Flecker later chose to use the first name "James", either because he disliked the name "Herman" or to avoid confusion with his father. "Roy", as his family called him, was educated at Dean Close School, and then at Uppingham. He subsequently studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there under John Addington Symonds, and became a close friend of the classicist and art historian John Beazley.
From 1910 Flecker worked in the consular service in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a ship to Athens he met Helle Skiadaressi, and they were married in 1911.
Flecker died on 3 January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland, and was buried in Bouncer's Lane Cemetery, Cheltenham. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".
Helle Flecker settled in England. She edited Flecker's Letters: Some Letters from Abroad of James Elroy Flecker, published by Heinemann in 1930 "with a few reminiscences by Helle Flecker".In 1935, she was awarded a government pension of £90 a year "in recognition of the services rendered by her husband to poetry".Helle Flecker survived her husband for more than 45 years, dying in Sunbury-on-Thames in October 1961.
Flecker's life and works were the subject of Life of James Elroy Flecker, a biography by Geraldine Hodgson published in 1925, relying on letters and other material provided by Flecker's mother. She summarised his contribution as "singular in our literature". However, this comment and her book received a damning review in The Calendar, which called it "sentimental and prudish... conceited and irrelevant".
Flecker's poem The Golden Journey to Samarkand was published in 1913, but only found its larger context when his play, Hassan, was published.
Hassan (The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How He Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand) is a five-act drama in prose with verse passages. It tells the story of Hassan, a young man from Baghdad who embarks on a journey to Samarkand, a city in Central Asia. Along the way, he encounters various challenges and obstacles, including bandits, treacherous terrain, and political turmoil.
Hassan was published posthumously in 1922 and had not been staged in Flecker’s lifetime. Instead, it premiered in 1923, with instrumental music by Frederick Delius. The production included incidental music, songs, dances, and choral episodes. It caught the fancy of English audiences at the time, perhaps because of the escape implied in its exotic setting and a post-war vogue for oriental imagery, and its wistful ending of death, by execution, and a hoped for reunion and love in the afterlife, a theme that would have resonated for the survivors of the Great War, remembering those who died in the war. Delius's nostalgic music also contributed to the success of the production.
The excerpt from 'Hassan ... the Golden Journey to Samarkand' inscribed on the clock tower of the barracks of the British Army's 22 Special Air Service regiment in Hereford provides an enduring testimony to Flecker's work:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
'To a Poet' is one of the most popular of Flecker's poems, perhaps because he manages to convey genuine affection and respect for the anonymous figure, as yet unborn. It is also the hope that some qualities endure that provides comfort:
But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?
Having said that, the specific reference to 'statues' is somewhat surprising: does Flecker mean all staues? Presumably not. And what is it about statues that moves him more than other visual art? On the other hand, the vagueness of 'foolish thoughts of good and ill' is irritating and indicates a certain sloppiness of thought. As for 'prayers to them who sit above' is he aligning himself with Homer ('old Maeonides') here? Did many English public schoolboys of his generation worship the ancient Greek gods?
But this pedantry is unfair to a poem that I find very moving:
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
These lines combine very effectively echoes of the Parnassian movement with a straightforward English 'manliness' of the type that A.E. Housman so admired. The H.G. Wells like predictions are also noteworthy:
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.
(Even if the third and fourth lines are weak).
Broadly speaking, Flecker is less effective when he strives for that effect:
How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Mæonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.
Conquer what exactly? I am grateful to my erudite young friend Adam Alcock for pointing out that Homer ('old Maeonides the blind') put forward the idea of two different reactions to conflict, force and intellect, with the intellect seen as superior. This certainly helps, but we are no closer to knowing what is to be conquered, and though the simile of a wind falling at evening is lovely, it is, again, inconclusive. By contrast the moving reticence of 'I was a poet, I was young' says all that needs to be said to express a very specific stage of a very particular type of consciousness, and this whole stanza seems to me to be perfection:
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Finzi's setting enhances the poem overall by being faithful to Flecker's intention, when it is clear, tastefully discrete when it is not. Above, I provide links to four notable recordings by baritones Brett Polegato, Roderick Williams, Stephen Roberts and David Wilson-Johnson.
All four performances have admirable elements. Polegato impresses first of all by not being English; he brings a welcome extrovert American dynamic to the proceedings and seems to have the necessary dramatic edge to 'nail' the climactic high 'F' at the end of the phrase 'I send my soul through time and space' but in the event he sounds a shade tenorial. Williams lavishes exquiste beauty of tone on the opening stanza and, throughout, his diction is immaculate, but he seems curiously uninvolved with the grander passions Flecker and Finzi express and his 'F' is feeble. Wilson-Johnson sounds magnificent in his 2001 recording with David Owen-Norris but the tempo they adopt is too slow, so that the song lacks forward momentum and excitement, when this is required, and the 'F' is too well-mannered: the piano part is marked forte and the voice should follow suit. Stephen Roberts, although he had a very fine career, lacked the vocal individuality of a Thomas Allen or John Shirley-Quirk, but his version of 'To a Poet' is the one I prefer: his voice is rich and even throughout the range and his response to the text is impeccable; I have heard more exciting top Fs, but Roberts instincts here are sound and it is only fair to acknowledge that the dipthong on 'space' does not help the singer in this context. This performance is also part of a fabulous CD entitled 'Finzi and his Friends' where Roberts is joined by the great (and I mean great) Ian Partridge, and pianist Clifford Benson. This is essential listening for anyone who cares about 20th century English song.
My thoughts on 'Hassan' and Delius will follow in my next Blog.
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