English Composers and A.E. Housman
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Few poets captured the imaginations of English composers in the early years of the twentieth century like A.E. Housman (1859-1936). Settings of his collection A Shropshire Lad (1896) have come to represent the epitome of pastoralism in song. Arthur Somervell, Vaughan Williams, C.W. Orr, Ivor Gurney and John Ireland were among the composers who set Housman’s poetry (mainly from A Shropshire Lad, though also from his Last Songs). The advent and aftermath of the First World War engendered an atmosphere in which ‘nostalgia and fatalism, a preoccupation with the transience of beauty and the inevitability of death’ could strike a chord with many.(1) Critics have often located the poems’ popularity both in the sentiments expressed and in their aptness for musical setting: they were the perfect conduit between the developing ruralist literary tradition and a revitalised English music, even if, ironically, Housman himself was antipathetic towards the setting of his poetry.

In the search for a ‘national music’ at the turn of the century, Housman settings are significant. Here was a poet writing in a deliberately anti-modernist idiom, with words ‘of genuine English derivation’,(2) depicting a highly specific and familiar landscape. With composers’ discovery of folksong at around the same time, the desire to set these words evocative of a pre-industrial age to music consciously inspired by rural folk music must have been overwhelming. It was not, however, until Butterworth’s songs that Housman’s words found a truly English counterpart in music. Somervell’s A Shropshire Lad displays its heritage in the German lied, while Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge hints strongly at French impressionism (the composer wrote the work upon returning from his studies with Ravel), and seems, as a number of writers have argued, rather too operatic to express subtly the Lad’s yearning.

It is important to recognise that while A Shropshire Lad inspired a large number of composers, we must be careful not to understand this as universal appeal. It is problematic to claim Housman songs for the nation, for the poetry played an important role in the construction of an image of rural England and the folk, an image which cannot be said to be representative. As Ernest Newman wrote in 1918,

These poems are English, in the sense that only in England, perhaps only in Shropshire, would a lad look out upon the world with such eyes and find such words in which to express himself; but the poems are not national, because English people of other heredities and in other environments would see life from quite another angle, and express what they saw in quite other ways.(3)

Housman’s Shropshire is a male-dominated world, and settings of the poems have invariably been written by male composers for male voice. As Trevor Hold points out, ‘songwriters admitted access to the poems were inevitably entering an exclusive Male Country Club with male concerns and frequently male-dominated sentiments’.(4) Can one perceive a subconscious anxiety towards increased women’s rights in male composers’ enthusiasm to set the Lad’s thoughts and exploits to music in the second decade of the twentieth century?What is certainly true is that ‘the verses brought home to the guts of thousands of British people not only the loss of the old rural England, but also the tie-up between that loss and a bleak awareness of impermanence in a godless and faithless world’.(5)

It is important to recognise the length of time between the first significant setting of Housman, Arthur Somervell’s A Shropshire Lad, and those written in the 1920s. C.W. Orr was still writing Housman settings in 1940, while Vaughan Williams’s Along the Field, though written in 1927 was not published until 1954. It would seem sensible to distinguish between those written before the First World War, with Somervell’s cycle (1904), Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge (1909) and Butterworth’s two collections, Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1911) and ‘Bredon Hill’ and other songs (1912) representing the key Housman settings of this period, and those written after the war, such as Gurney’s Ludlow and Teme (1922) and The Western Playland (1926), Ireland’s The Land of Lost Content (1921), Vaughan Williams’s return to Housman in Along the Field and the many songs by Orr written between 1922 and 1940. Even composers not normally linked with pastoralism were attracted to Housman, with settings existing by Bax, Berkeley and Bliss. Gavin Meredith notes that Finzi, a composer often associated with rural nostalgia, began nine different Housman settings in the 1920s, although none was ever published.(6)

Although Somervell was the first composer of significance to set words from A Shropshire Lad, his cycle cannot really be described as influential, except perhaps in pointing Vaughan Williams towards the source (Vaughan Williams was present at the first performance of A Shropshire Lad on 3 February 1905.(7)) Somervell’s conservative musical style distances him from most later composers: it is ‘rooted in the nineteenth century in a way Housman’s verse never is’.(8) On the other hand the songs’ simplicity, being often strophic in form, foreshadows Butterworth in particular, yet ‘though his vocal lines capture the outward mood of the poems, they do not […] express the hidden meaning behind the poet’s thought, the unspoken “words-between-the-lines”’.(9) One would not expect a late-Victorian composer to deal with the homoerotic overtones of some of the poems. Compare, for example, Somervell’s celebratory setting of ‘The Street sounds to the Soldiers’ tread’ (Ex. 1) with the anguished, atonal Ireland (‘The Encounter’ in The Land of Lost Content).

Ex. 1 – Somervell, A Shropshire Lad, ‘The Street Sounds to the Soldiers’ Tread’ (bars 1-9).


Ireland appears to parody Somervell’s stock bass line with an incessant ostinato spanning a tritone, F-B, far removed from traditional march-like tonic-dominant stability (Ex. 2 ).

Ex. 2 – Ireland, The Land of Lost Content, ‘The Encounter’ (bars 1-6).

A comparison of the settings by Somervell and Butterworth (in Six Songs…) of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (the second poem of Housman’s collection, but the first song in each cycle) should suffice to show the limitations of Somervell’s style.Somervell’s strophic verse form fails to respond to the change of mood in the central stanza; melody and accompaniment are duplicated exactly, and while a little chromaticism in bars 6-7 (repeated in each verse) disrupts tonal stability briefly, there is little suggestion of discontent in the music. Butterworth’s is a more sophisticated reading of the poem, taking into account the conflicting elements (cherry/white, spring/snow) in Housman’s imagery which articulate the transience of beauty and the inevitability of winter and death,(10) a reading enhanced by the composer’s stark, brittle texture. Thus the opening melody (echoing the piano introduction and entering wistfully at a 7th above its lingering final note) descends gradually a minor 10th reflecting, perhaps, the falling of blossom even as the Lad admires it (Ex. 3). Butterworth highlights the ominous word ‘hung’ in both first and final stanzas with an octave leap in the melody, while its first appearance is accompanied by a yearning 9-8 suspension. The fanfare-like celebration at the word ‘Eastertide’ is cut short by a moment’s silence and the expected E major chord is replaced by a gloomier C# minor one.

Ex. 3 – Butterworth, ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (bars 1-4).

That said, Somervell does achieve a certain poignancy in the cycle as a whole by the selection of poems used and their ordering in the cycle. As Banfield states, while in Housman’s collection ‘narrative possibilities are perpetually just out of reach; Somervell draws some strands gently together’.(11) The main strand running through the second half of Somervell’s cycle is a soldier’s tale, beginning with ‘The Street sounds to the Soldiers’ tread’ and concluding with the haunting ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ (is the Lad dying?), followed by ‘The Lads in their hundreds’, in which the young soldier has died. ‘The sentiment inspired by thoughts of soldiers languishing or dying in foreign fields was particularly dear to the late Victorians’.(12) This was a sentiment which spawned Rupert Brooke’s most famous sonnet, The Soldier, and in many ways Housman’s poetry is similarly idealistic. Yet the horrific reality of war discredited the idealism of Brooke’s generation. To what, then, can one attribute Housman’s post-war popularity, and is this problematic?

Orwell wrote:

What was left of the war generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the slogans of 1914 […] it was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance against God…(13)

Housman was not a ‘war poet’; he describes the tragedy of war for those left at home. If anything, his poems are anti-patriotic – the first in A Shropshire Lad, ‘1887’, gently mocks those who pray to God to ‘save the Queen’ in time of war. Somervell’s was an overwhelmingly Victorian response to a text that seemed to express rather prematurely the anxieties of post-war England. His A Shropshire Lad is more comfortable than nostalgic: Somervell was living in a ‘Golden Age’ himself, so there is little sense of yearning for a golden-age past, and no sign of the bitterness and irony that later composers located in this poetry.

It has often been remarked that Housman was an unusual choice of poet for Vaughan Williams to set, for the composer’s optimistic temperament seemed at odds with the pessimism of the words. However, in his choice of poem there is, as Michael Kennedy has written, ‘nothing here of “soldiers marching, all to die” and the hangman’s noose’.(14) Indeed, the best description of On Wenlock Edge is that it is ‘not a rueful comment upon the nature of things but a frenetic ghost story’.(15) This renders all the more suggestive Wilfrid Mellers’s comment that in its scoring for tenor, piano and string quartet ‘the composer seems to enclose the cycle in the comfort of an Edwardian parlour’.(16) The implication is that On Wenlock Edge is indulgently colouristic, lacking sympathy with the sentiments expressed in the poems. One could point to the hysterical conclusion to ‘Is my team ploughing’ where Vaughan Williams has the living friend ‘hurl’ the line “I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart” at the ghost.(17)

It is not the nostalgia or fatalism of the poetry that Vaughan Williams chooses to emphasise in On Wenlock Edge but the supernatural and mystical elements, which his own temperament and, here at least, his impressionistic musical language is more ideally suited to. Interestingly, in Along the Field an entirely different instrumental combination – solo voice and violin – gives rise to a texture starker than Butterworth’s, underlining the pessimism of each poem. Hold remarks that ‘in place of port-and-brandy of On Wenlock Edge, we have cold spring water’.(18) In his selection of poetry, taken from both A Shropshire Lad, and the collection of Last Poems, Vaughan Williams highlights Housman’s fatalistic outlook throughout, from the first line ‘We’ll to the woods no more’ to the last, ‘In fields where roses fade’. The Lad’s passion, so powerfully expressed in On Wenlock Edge is no longer to the fore.

Amongst the most pessimistic Housman settings are those of John Ireland, whose chosen poems ‘display a grimmer fortitude than anything approached so far’ in his output of songs.(19) Ireland was perhaps the composer most likely to respond to the homoerotic undertones of poems such as ‘Look not in my eyes’ (‘Ladslove’) and ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’ (‘The Encounter’), and Geoffrey Bush regards The Land of Lost Content as the cycle of settings ‘closest to the poet’s spirit’.(20) The poems selected are representative, exploring most of the main themes of the collection: transience, ‘vain desire’ and loss. ‘The Lent Lily’ is, like ‘Loveliest of Trees’ a pictorial description of spring yet reflective of the transience of beauty: the fifth lines of stanzas 2, 3 and 4 (‘And dies on Easter day’, ‘But not the daffodil’, ‘That dies on Easter day’) have the effect of a bitter afterthought, introducing an irregularity to the rhyme scheme (ABABB) and the melodic phrases, an effect heightened by the reduced texture of the accompaniment each time. Hold complains that Ireland forces upon this song the fatalistic mood of the others,(21) but Housman’s allusion to the death of the daffodil at Easter – a reversal of usual paschal associations – is a refrain; its recurrence at the end of each stanza justifies Ireland’s melancholy reading of the poem.

Ireland’s setting of ‘Look not in my eyes’ (‘Ladslove’) is more chromatic than Butterworth’s, so the latter’s restlessness of metre (it is mainly in 5/4) is replaced by a restlessness of tonality. Hold remarks upon the unusual cadence points in Ireland’s piece, where the voice yearns upwards (see Ex. 3 and also bars 29-30).(22) The effect is rather more poignant than Butterworth’s rounded phrases, especially given its upward resolution for the beginning of the next stanza (where Butterworth repeats his opening melody a tone higher). Both composers use the stock device of a descending 5th in the melody on the word ‘perish’, but Butterworth’s is reached from an upward leap of a 9th: a dramatic moment in an otherwise tranquil, lilting setting. The high tessitura of ‘Ladslove’ (with a tenor’s top Ab reached in the first bar) gives the melody a tenderness that the earlier composer did not achieve.

Ex. 4 – Ireland, The Land of Lost Content, ‘Ladslove’ (bars 9-13).

Ivor Gurney followed Vaughan Williams in the scoring of his two cycles Ludlow and Teme (1922) and The Western Playland (1926) for voice, piano and string quartet, but Davenport argues that Gurney’s music ‘owes much more to the Schubert – Schumann – Brahms – Stanford lineage than to the influence of the English folksong movement’.(23) Likewise, Hold describes the songs as of ‘the old-fashioned, dreamy, solemn-sided, romantic, backward-looking Gurney’.(24) The first two poems in Ludlow and Teme are predominantly in the past tense: ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’ creates a hazy, dream-like atmosphere by tremoloed strings, highly evocative of the title song in Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, while the second song, ‘Far in a Western Brookland’ epitomises pastoral nostalgia. Here the Lad is in London, recalling his home in the country. It is an idyllic picture the Lad paints. He sees himself as born of the land (‘That bred me long ago’), while it is clear that the country is his spiritual home too (‘My soul that lingers/About the glimmering weirs’). These two ideas were essential to pastoralism: that the country bred one sort of person and the town another; the pastoral idyll as a spiritual place as much as a geographical locality (this will be explored in the following chapter). Gurney’s music here is rich in texture but static, matching the scene it describes, with some very long sustained notes in the melody (the six syllables of the final line, ‘How soft the poplars sigh’, are spread across 6 bars).

NOTES

(1) Trevor Hold, ‘“Flowers to Fair”: A Shropshire Lad’s Legacy of Song’, in A.W. Holden and J.R. Birch (eds.), A.E. Housman: A Reassessment (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 108.
(2) Edwin Evans, ‘English Song and “On Wenlock Edge”’, Musical Times, 59 (1918), 247.
(3) Ernest Newman, ‘Concerning “A Shropshire Lad” and other matters’, Musical Times, 59 (1918), 394.
(4) Hold, ‘“Flowers to Fair”: A Shropshire Lad’s Legacy of Song’, 109.
(5) Wilfrid Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1989), 33.
(6) G. Meredith, Discernible Poetic and Philosophical Influences in the Works of Gerald Finzi, accessed 26/8/02, 7.
(7) Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd edn (London: OUP, 1980), 62.
(8) Hold, ‘“Flowers to Fair”: A Shropshire Lad’s Legacy of Song’, 115.
(9) Trevor Hold, Parry to Finzi, Twenty English Song-Composers (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 93.
(10) See Paul Leitch, ‘Lad Culture. Butterworth’s Housman re-assessed’, Musical Times, 140 (1999), 18-19.
(11) Stephen Banfield,Sensibility and English Song, 52.
(12) Ibid., 53.
(13) Repr. in George Orwell, Selected Essays (Penguin, 1957), 20-24.
(14) Michael Kennedy, Liner note to Ralph Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge/Ten Blake Songs etc, Ian Partridge, Music Group of London (EMI Classics, 7243 5 65589 2 2), 4.
(15) Henry Raynor, ‘Influence and Achievement – some thoughts on Twentieth Century English Song’, The Chesterian, Vol. 30, No. 185, Winter 1956, 68; quoted in Dennis Davenport, A.E. Housman and English Song (MPhil Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1974), 51.
(16) Wilfrid Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, 33.
(17) Newman, ‘Concerning “A Shropshire Lad” and other matters’, 397.
(18) Trevor Hold, Parry to Finzi, Twenty English Song-Composers, 119.
(19) Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song, 172.
(20) Geoffrey Bush, ‘Foreword’ in John Ireland: The Complete Works for Voice and Piano (London: 1981).
(21) Trevor Hold, Parry to Finzi, Twenty English Song-Composers, 200.
(22) Ibid.
(23) Dennis Davenport, A.E.Housman and English Song, 82.
(24) Trevor Hold, Parry to Finzi, Twenty English Song-Composers, 294.

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