The ‘Lent Lily’ is blooming by the roads between Christmas and Easter

Daffodils blooming on Sunday morning on the road east of Castletown Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019; click on image for full-screen view)

Patrick Comerford

The daffodils are early this year. is a bright, sunny flower. They are growing along the sides of the road on the ditches and the banks, and already early daffodils are on sale in the supermarkets in this part of West Limerick.

It is all about three or four weeks too early, for daffodils normally do not arrive in the supermarkets until the first week in February. It is only a few years since I enjoyed heading out to see fields of fresh daffodils near Gormanston and Julianstown in Co Meath in late March or even early April.

Daffodils like to flower before the leaves grow on the trees, and this way they can get plenty of sunlight, but this is very early. They begin to flower in early spring, and usually grow in groups.

On Sunday morning [13 January 2019], it seemed the banks lining the road from Castletown Church east to Pallaskenry were alive with riots of daffodils on the north side of the road, taking advantage of the little sunshine that comes with the lengthening of days and the promise of winter turning to spring.

They grow in most places – along roadsides, in hedgerows, meadows and waste ground – and there are at least 50 different species of daffodil. From about the 16th century, they have also been known as ‘daffadown dilly’ or ‘daffydowndilly.’ But the daffodil has also been as the ‘Lent lily.’

In western countries the daffodil is also associated with spring festivals such as Lent and Easter. In Germany, the wild narcissus is known as the Osterglocke or ‘Easter bell.’ In England, the daffodil is sometimes referred to as the Lenten lily.

Perhaps because of its association with Lent, the daffodil became the national flower of Wales, associated with Saint David’s Day (1 March). Yet it is too early to start thinking of Lent, which arrives quite late this year.

I was surprised to learn yesterday that the daffodil is a form of narcissus. In Greek mythology, Narcissus (Νάρκισσος, Nárkissos) was a hunter from Thespiae known for his beauty. He loved everything beautiful, but he was so proud that he disdained all who loved him, causing some to end their lives by suicide to prove their unrelenting devotion to his striking beauty.

The word narcissus has come to be used for the daffodil, but is the flower named after the myth, or the myth after the flower? Or if there is any true connection at all? Although there is no clear evidence that the flower's name derives directly from the Greek myth, this link between the flower and the myth became firmly part of western culture.

The daffodil is prized as an ornamental flower, but some people consider narcissi unlucky, because they hang their heads implying misfortune. White narcissi are especially associated with death, and have been called grave flowers. In ancient Greece, narcissi were planted near tombs, and Robert Herrick describes them as portents of death, an association that also appears in the myth of Persephone and the underworld.

The daffodil or narcissus is the most loved of all Irish and English plants, and appears frequently in English literature. No flower has received more poetic description in English except the rose and the lily, with poems by writers from John Gower, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.

Frequently the poems deal with self-love because of the association of the daffodil with Narcissus, and the flower that sprang from the youth’s death. Spenser announces the coming of the ‘Daffodil in Aprill’ in his Shepheardes Calender (1579).

Shakespeare refers to daffodils twice in The Winter’s Tale and in The Two Noble Kinsmen. In a number of poems, Robert Herrick associates the daffodil with death. Keats refers to daffodils as bringing ‘joy for ever.’

William Wordsworth’s poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1804) provides many people with their main literary image of the flower. But Wordsworth refers to the daffodil in many.

AE Housman is referring to the daffodil when he writes about ‘The Lent Lily’ in A Shropshire Lad, describing the traditional Easter death of the daffodil.

Narcissi first started to appear in western art in the late middle ages, in panel paintings, particularly those depicting crucifixion, symbolising not only death but also hope in the resurrection, because they are perennial and bloom at Easter.

So perhaps there is a link in these daffodils appearing on the roadside near Castletown Church that helps to prepare the link between Epiphany and Good Friday, between Christmas and Easter, between birth and death, between the Incarnation and the Resurrection.

The skies after sunset at the Rectory in Askeaton, Co Limerick, last night (Photograph; Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (18): On Wenlock Edge, 6, ‘Clun’

Upper Clun valley, a little way out of Whitcott Keysett, the view towards Newcastle and the hills beyond. A light shower of rain drifts across the hills near Upper Spoad (Photograph: Geoff Cryer, CC BY-SA 2.0 creative commons licenses via Wikimedia Commons)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions during Lent this year, each day I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Throughout this week, I am listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

This morning [7 March 2015], I am listening to ‘Clun,’ the sixth and final six setting by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in 1896.

Perhaps the moment most characteristic of Vaughan Williams’s attitude to life comes at the end of this cycle, when his evocation of the calm of death inspires a vision of the Celestial City – something that was to come again and again in his later works.

Although this may be at odds with Housman’s grief and bitterness, Vaughan Williams’s mood of acceptance and fulfilment raises this cycle to a level of exceptional spiritual awareness.

On Wednesday, while I was reflecting on the third of these songs, ‘Is my team ploughing,’ I recalled how Vaughan Williams omitted the two football stanzas in that poem, to the great annoyance pf Housman, who wrote to his publisher, Grant Richards asking: “I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music?”

But in arranging his setting for this sixth poem, ‘Clun,’ Vaughan Williams also deleted Housman’s superscription to his fiftieth poem (L):

Clunton and Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.

The Clun Valley, view eastwards from under the bridge across the valley to May Hill and Saddle Hill (Photograph: Trevor Rickard, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons)

Housman was from Worcestershire and at first knew little of Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun in south Shropshire, to the west of Wenlock Edge. The settings in this poem welled up from his imagination, and he wrote most of the poems in A Shropshire Lad while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting this part of Shropshire, although it is only about 30 miles from his boyhood home.

He presents Shropshire in an idealised pastoral light, as his “land of lost content,” and Housman creates a mythical, idealised Shropshire, similar to the Wessex of the novels of Thomas Hardy. He became so intimately associated with south Shropshire that when he died in Cambridge in1936 he was buried just outside Saint Laurence’s Church in the market town of Ludlow, which stands on a cliff above the River Teme.

Housman’s “Famous Four” in the beautiful Clun Valley can be reached in one long day’s walk along the Shropshire lanes and their verges. They sit in the beautiful Clun Valley in the Clun Forest, although visitors may be confused, for the Clun Forest has few trees and the name “Forest” refers to the area’s mediaeval use as a Royal Hunting Forest.

Clun is surrounded by the Shropshire Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, close to the 1200-year-old Offa’s Dyke and the Offa’s Dyke Path, a 177-mile long National Trail. Clun Castle overlooking the town is said to have inspired Sir Water Scott when he was writing The Betrothed.

The town is divided in two by the 15th century Packhorse Bridge, which has alcoves so people crossing on foot can avoid being trampled by the horses. The ancient part of Clun stands on the south side and the newer Norman town on the north, all set in the idyllic Clun Valley.

Saint George’s Church overlooks the river and the castle. The playwright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, 1956), who lived nearby, was buried in the churchyard in 1994. The Trinity Hospital and Almshouses are Jacobean, built by the Earl of Northampton in 1614 in two quadrangles, to provide “charitable accommodation to 12 men of good character.”

Near Clunton, the fort on Bury Ditches Hill, with its ramparts and ditches towering above the slopes, has been described as one of the finest hill forts in Britain.

Neighbouring Clunbury celebrated the centenary of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad in 1996 with an 1896 weekend. As part of the programme, Christopher Train of Holland House, Clunbury, spoke in Saint Swithin’s Church on Clunbury at the time Housman wrote this poem.

Housman described these neat and quiet Shropshire villages as “the quietest places under the sun.” By 1896 this was certainly true for Clunbury, which had lost its pub – The Raven or Pig and Whistle, which is now Dutch Cottage with its thatched roof – after the last tenant, James Harding, died in 1879.

In his lecture, Christopher Train noted that the parishioner who wrote of the Clunbury entry in the Clun Valley parochial magazine at the end of the 19th century regularly laments the fact that he has nothing of significance to report. For example: “There are no stirring events to record as having happened in Clunbury last month. It has always had the name of being ‘one of the quietest under the sun.’ A stranger passing the other day on the road to Clun and looking down upon our little village enquired of the driver of the conveyance what happy looking, peaceful sunshiny place it was.”

He notes that the Revd William Jellicorse retired as Vicar of Clunbury in August 1896 after 40 years. That year, Matins were said daily in the Parish Church at 10 a.m., there were two or three services each Sunday, and one of the highlights of life in Clunbury was the annual entertainment of the choir and bell-ringers.

Clungunford in south Shropshire is near the border with Herefordshire. Saint Cuthbert’s is the village parish church and the Rocke Cottage, formerly the Bird on the Rock, was named by the UK Tea Guild as Britain’s top tea place in 2011.

Knighton, which also features in this poem, is a small market town about seven miles south of Clun. It stands on the River Teme, straddling the border between England and Wales, so that the main part of the town is in Powys, within the historic county boundaries of Radnorshire, while a small part of the town is in Shropshire.

Knighton-on-Teme is a village in the Malvern Hills District in Worcestershire, about 14 miles east of Ludlow. It too stands on the banks of the River Teme.



6, Clun

Clunton and Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun,
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.

In valleys of springs and rivers,
By Ony and Teme and Clun,
The country for easy livers
The quietest under the sun,

We still had sorrows to lighten,
One could not always be glad,
And lads knew trouble at Knighton
When I was a Knighton lad.

By bridges that Thames runs under,
In London, the town built ill,
’Tis sure small matter for wonder
If sorrow is with one still.

And if as a lad grows older
The troubles he bears are more,
He carries his griefs on a shoulder
That handselled them long before.

Where shall one halt to deliver
This luggage I’d lief set down?
Not Thames, not Teme is the river,
Nor London nor Knighton the town:

’Tis a long way further than Knighton,
A quieter place than Clun
Where doomsday may thunder and lighten
And little ’twill matter to one.

Tomorrow: ‘The Lark Ascending’

Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (17): On Wenlock Edge, 5, ‘Bredon Hill’

‘The bells they sound on Bredon, / And still the steeples hum’ ... Parson’s Folly on Bredon Hill (Photograph: Stephen Dawson, Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions during Lent this year, each day I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Throughout this week, I am listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

This morning [6 March 2015], I am listening to ‘Bredon Hill,’ the fifth of the six settings by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in 1896.

Vaughan Williams composed On Wenlock Edge in 1909, a year after spending three months studying in Paris under Maurice Ravel, the French composer. The French influence on Vaughan Williams can be heard particularly in ‘Bredon Hill,’ and the accompaniment is redolent of ‘La Vallée des Cloches’ from Ravel’s Miroirs for piano (1905).

Vaughan William’s use of the piano quintet as the accompanying ensemble was an innovation in English music. Before he composed On Wenlock Edge, the string quartet alone had been used as an accompaniment to song by Henry Walford Davies in 1894 (Prospice).

Although it was used later by other composers, including Vaughan Williams, its use remained limited even though English musicians had started to rediscover the Golden Age of the Elizabethan period, and the quartet might have become the natural successor to the viol consort. Perhaps the introduction of the piano into the ensemble by Vaughan Williams was inspired by Ravel’s teacher, Gabriel Fauré. His Paul Verlaine cycle, La Bonne Chanson, was composed in 1892-1894 with piano accompaniment, and in 1898, Fauré arranged it for piano and string quintet.

In addition, the bell-like accompaniment of ‘Bredon Hill’ paints a picture of great dramatic intensity.

A limestone wall on Bredon Hill (Photograph: Stephen Dawson, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Bredon Hill in Worcestershire is a hill south-west of Evesham in the Vale of Evesham, with its summit in the parish of Kemerton. The hill is part of the Cotswolds, but millions of years of erosion have left it isolated, standing in the Vale of Evesham.

Bredon Hill has a number of ancient standing stones, the Bambury (or Banbury) and the Queen and King. Local legend says that those passing between the King and Queen stones will be cured of illness. The tradition of going to kiss the Bambury Stone for good luck on Good Friday is one shared with many other stones around England.

What about the bells that sound so clear on Bredon Hill, “in steeples far and near,” calling all to church? A number of interesting churches are dotted about the villages surrounding Bredon Hill. Saint Giles in Bredon village was built in late 12th to mid-13th century. The church has a memorial to Bishop Prideaux, who was chaplain to King James I and King Charles I, magnificent stained glass windows, detached shafts of Purbeck marble supporting the Mitton Chapel, and mediaeval tiles in the sanctuary. Saint Mary’s in Elmley Castle, 7 or 8 km to the north-east, dates from the end of the 11th century and contains grand monuments to Thomas Coventry, 1st Earl of Coventry, who died in 1699, and 17th century effigies of members of the Savage family.

Roman coins and artefacts have been found at Little Comberton, on the north side of Bredon Hill, where the 12th century church is thought to stand on the site of a Roman temple.

There are views of Tewkesbury Abbey about 5 km to the south-west. When Worcester Cathedral was damaged in the English civil war, it was repaired using stone brought from Bredon.

Bredon Hill is crowned by Parson’s Folly, or the Banbury Stone Tower built in the mid-18th century for John Parsons (1732–1805), MP, of Kemerton Court, as a summer house with a view across the surrounding countryside.

A local rhyme reflects folklore about the way Bredon Hill controls the local weather:

When Bredon Hill puts on his hat
Ye men of the Vale beware of that.
When Bredon Hill does clear appear
Ye men of the Vale have nothing to fear.

Bredon Hill features in the works of many composers, poets, writers and artists, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, George Butterworth and Herbert Howells; John Masefield and Cecil Day-Lewis; and Arthur Quiller-Couch. Bredon Hill is the birthplace of Fred Archer (1915–1999), who describes life on the farms and in the villages in the early 20th century. John Moore describes life at Bredon Hill in the early 20th century in The Brensham Trilogy.

But the hill is best known because of Poem 21 in AE Housman’s anthology A Shropshire Lad (1896). Although Housman names Tewkesbury and Bredon Hill in A Shropshire Lad, neither place is in Shropshire.



5, Bredon Hill

In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.

The bells would ring to call her
In valleys miles away;
“Come all to church, good people;
Good people come and pray.”
But here my love would stay.

And I would turn and answer
Among the springing thyme,
“Oh, peal upon our wedding,
And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time.”

But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.

They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.

The bells they sound on Bredon,
And still the steeples hum,
“Come all to church, good people.”
O noisy bells, be dumb;
I hear you, I will come.

Tomorrow: 6, Clun

Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (16): On Wenlock Edge, 4, ‘Oh, when I was in love with you’

The memorial plaque commemorating Ralph Vaughan Williams in the Ante-Chapel of Trinity College Cambridge … Vaughan Williams was an undergraduate here and AE Housman was a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions during Lent this year, each day I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Throughout this week, I am listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

This morning [5 March 2015], I am listening to ‘Oh, when I was in love with you,’ the fourth of the six settings by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in 1896.

In reacting to the Boer War, in which his brother Herbert was killed, Housman powerfully anticipated the horror and futility of World War I, and his poems would find fresh relevance of with the outbreak of World War I.

His landscape is a mythical, idealised Shropshire, similar to the Wessex of the novels of Thomas Hardy. His dominant themes are love, and a post-industrial pastoral nostalgia, infused with expressions of disillusionment at the sacrifice of the young soldiers going to war, never to return.

Vaughan Williams composed On Wenlock Edge – a cycle of six songs for tenor, piano and string quartet – in 1909, a year after he had spent three months in Paris studying under Maurice Ravel, a composer three years younger than him. The first performance took place in the Aeolian Hall, London, later that year.

In the 1920s, Vaughan Williams made an arrangement of On Wenlock Edge for full orchestra that was first performed on 24 January 1924 by John Booth, with the composer conducting. Vaughan Williams preferred this version to his original.

The fourth of these songs, ‘Oh, when I was in love with you,’ is lighter than the others in tone and is epigrammatic in its brevity.

This song acts as a much-needed respite between Songs 3 and 5, ‘Is my team ploughing,’ and ‘Bredon Hill.’ With its melodic lines and modal harmonies, the melody sounds like an authentic English folksong.



4, Oh, when I was in love with you

Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well I did behave.

And now the fancy passes by,
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.

Tomorrow: 5, ‘Bredon Hill’

Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (15): On Wenlock Edge, 3, ‘Is my team ploughing’

Trinity College Cambridge … Vaughan Williams was an undergraduate here and AE Housman a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions during Lent this year, each day I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Throughout this week, I am listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

This morning [4 March 2015], I am listening to ‘Is my team ploughing,’ the third of the six settings by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in 1896.

In reacting to the Boer War, in which his brother Herbert was killed, Housman powerfully anticipated the horror and futility of World War I, and his poems would find fresh relevance of with the outbreak of World War I.

His landscape is a mythical, idealised Shropshire, similar to the Wessex of the novels of Thomas Hardy. His dominant themes are love, and a post-industrial pastoral nostalgia, infused with expressions of disillusionment at the sacrifice of the young soldiers going to war, never to return.

Vaughan Williams composed On Wenlock Edge – a cycle of six songs for tenor, piano and string quartet – in 1909, a year after he had spent three months in Paris studying under Maurice Ravel, a composer three years younger than him. The first performance took place in the Aeolian Hall, London, later that year.

In the 1920s, Vaughan Williams made an arrangement of On Wenlock Edge for full orchestra that was first performed on 24 January 1924 by John Booth, with the composer conducting. Vaughan Williams preferred this version to his original.

The third of these songs, ‘Is my team ploughing,’ is a conversation between a dead man and his still living friend. Towards the end of the poem it is implied that his friend is now with the girl he left behind when he died.

While writing the poem, Housman borrows from the simple style of traditional folk ballads, featuring a question-and-answer format in a conversation.

The dead man asks first about his animals, then about football, but his girlfriend comes last. The text, along with other poems from A Shropshire Lad, has been set to score by several English composers, including George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney, as well as Vaughan Williams.

Vaughan Williams leaves out these two football stanzas, which Gurney and Butterworth retained in their settings:

‘Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?’

Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.

Vaughan Williams omitted the third and fourth stanzas, to Housman’s annoyance, and wrote to his publisher, Grant Richards asking: “I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music?”

Years later, Vaughan Williams said he felt “a composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense” of it. He added: “I also feel that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as: “‘The goal stands up, the Keeper / Stands up to keep the Goal’.”

Vaughan Williams’s setting is superb, but the stanza does count, and he appears not to have grasped that here we have a coded reference to what is happening in the dead man’s sweetheart’s bed.

The music critic Ernest Newman of The Sunday Times claimed the omission of these two stanzas by Vaughan Williams destroys Housman’s effect of “a gradual, almost casual, transition from the ghost’s questions about the common things of life to the question about his sweetheart.” But Vaughan Williams was aiming at solemnity and sublimity in this composition, and decided to omit these stanzas so he could achieve this effect.



3, ‘Is my team ploughing’

‘Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?’

Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.

‘Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?’

Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.

‘Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?’

Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies down not to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still my lad, and sleep.

‘Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?’

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.

Tomorrow: 4, Oh, when I was in love with you

Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (14): On Wenlock Edge, 2, ‘From far, from eve and morning’

Trinity Street, Cambridge, on a quiet Sunday afternoon … Vaughan Williams was an undergraduate and AE Housman a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions during Lent this year, each day I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Throughout this week, I am listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

I was recalling yesterday [2 March 2015] that I was first introduced to the music of Vaughan Williams when I was a 19-year-old and I was staying in Wilderhope Manor on Wenlock Edge in Shropshire in what became my first memorable introduction to the great English composers.

I spent some time on Wenlock Edge and in the neighbouring villages before hitch-hiking back to Lichfield – a journey of about 50 miles. Back in Lichfield, I experienced a self-defining moment in the chapel of Saint John’s Hospital, and was invited for the first time to the Folk Masses in the Dominican Retreat Centre at Spode House, near Rugeley, about six miles north of Lichfield.

Ever since, the music of Vaughan Williams, especially his setting in On Welock Edge, have been associated with my understanding of spiritual growth and development.

This morning [3 March 2015], I am listening to ‘From far, from eve and morning,’ the second of the six settings by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in 1896.

In reacting to the Boer War, in which his brother Herbert was killed, Housman powerfully anticipated the horror and futility of World War I, and his poems would find fresh relevance of with the outbreak of World War I.

His landscape is a mythical, idealised Shropshire, similar to the Wessex of the novels of Thomas Hardy. His dominant themes are love, and a post-industrial pastoral nostalgia, infused with expressions of disillusionment at the sacrifice of the young soldiers going to war, never to return.

Vaughan Williams composed On Wenlock Edge – a cycle of six songs for tenor, piano and string quartet – in 1909, a year after he had spent three months in Paris studying under Maurice Ravel, a composer three years younger than him. The first performance took place in the Aeolian Hall, London, later that year.

In the 1920s, Vaughan Williams made an arrangement of On Wenlock Edge for full orchestra that was first performed on 24 January 1924 by John Booth, with the composer conducting. Vaughan Williams preferred this version to his original.

The second of these songs, ‘From far, from eve and morning,’ is No 32 in Housman’s original sequence. The late Trevor Hold of Leicester University (Parry to Finzi: Twenty English Song-composers, 2002) describes this song as one of Vaughan Williams’s “finest achievements.”

Here, after the elaborate accompaniment of the opening song, ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ Vaughan Williams turns to what he describes as “utmost simplicity: wide-spreading piano chords underpin a vocal line that never strays far from its home note (B natural) …”



2, From far, from eve and morning

From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.

Now – for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart –
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What you have in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.

Tomorrow: 3, ‘Is my team ploughing’

Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (13): On Wenlock Edge, 1, ‘On Wenlock Edge’

Wilderhope Manor, on Wenlock Edge, Shropshire … here I was first introduced to the music of Vaughan Williams (Photograph: Graham Taylor. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions during Lent this year, each day I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

For the rest of this week, I intend listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

I wrote over the past few days that I was first introduced to the music of Vaughan Williams when I was a 19-year-old and while I was spending some days in Shropshire.

I was staying in Wilderhope Manor, a 16th-century Elizabethan manor house on Wenlock Edge, seven miles south-west of Much Wenlock, seven miles east of Church Stretton. Wilderhope Manor was built in 1585 for Francis Smallman. The house was in a poor state and uninhabited when it was bought in 1936 by the WA Cadbury Trust and opened as a youth hostel in 1937. Many of the original features, including the oaken stairways, oak spiral stairs and plaster ceilings have survived.

In the early 1970s, although I had little musical education and no musical background, I was interested in English folk music, and I was enjoying the way it was being interpreted by folk rock bands such as I was enjoying the music of English folk rock bands such as Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Lindisfarne and Jethro Thull.

That interest drew the suggestion while I was staying in Wilderhope Manor that I should listen to the music of Vaughan Williams, and, as I was staying on Wenlock Edge in rural Shropshire, that I should listen to On Wenlock Edge and read Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

This became my first memorable introduction to the great English composers. I spent some time on Wenlock Edge and visiting the neighbouring villages before hitch-hiking back to Lichfield – a journey of about 50 miles.

Back in Lichfield, I experienced a self-defining moment in the chapel of Saint John’s Hospital, and was invited for the first time to the Folk Masses in the Dominican Retreat Centre at Spode House, near Rugeley, about six miles north of Lichfield.

Ever since, I have associated the music of Vaughan Williams, especially his setting of On Wenlock Edge, with my understanding of my own spiritual growth and development.

This morning [2 March 2015], I am listening to ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ the first of the six settings by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in March 1896.

Alfred Edward Housman was born at Fockbury, near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, on 26 March 1859, the eldest child of Sarah and Edward Housman. His mother died on his twelfth birthday, and the anguished created by this cruel coincidence, led to strong questioning of his Christian faith, although he did not abandon the idea of a God.

Housman studied Classics at Saint John’s College, Oxford, and was Professor of Greek and Latin, University College, London (1892), Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge (1911), and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where Vaughan Williams had been an undergraduate from 1892 to 1895. He died on 30 April 1936.

In reacting to the Boer War, in which his brother Herbert was killed, Housman also anticipated the horror and futility of World War I, and his poems would find fresh relevance of with the outbreak of World War I.

His landscape is a mythical, idealised Shropshire, similar to the Wessex of the novels of Thomas Hardy. His dominant themes are love, and a post-industrial pastoral nostalgia, infused with expressions of disillusionment at the sacrifice of the young soldiers going to war, never to return.

A younger brother, the author and playwright Laurence Housman (1865-1959), first worked as a book illustrator, and the first authors he illustrated included the poet Christina Rossetti. Laurence Housman also wrote and published several volumes of poetry, a number of hymns and carols, and socialist and pacifist pamphlets, and he edited his brother’s poems which were published posthumously.

In 1945, Laurence Housman opened Housman’s Bookshop in Shaftesbury Avenue, London, founded in his honour by the Peace Pledge Union, of which he was a sponsor. In 1959, shortly after his death, the shop moved to 5 Caledonian Road, London. I was first introduced to Housman’s in 1976 by its co-founder and manager, Harry Mister, after meeting him with Bruce Kent at the Hayes Conference Centre in Swanwick that year. Housman’s Bookshop remains a prime source of publications on pacifism and other radical values.

Vaughan Williams composed On Wenlock Edge – a cycle of six songs for tenor, piano and string quartet – in 1909, a year after he had spent three months in Paris studying under Maurice Ravel, the French composer, who was three years younger than him. The first performance took place in the Aeolian Hall in London on 15 November 1909.

After a performance of the cycle in May 1920, Ivor Gurney wrote: “The French mannerisms must be forgotten in the strong Englishness of the prevailing mood – in the unmistakable spirit of the time of creation. England is the spring of emotion, the centre of power, and the pictures of her, the breath of her earth and growing things are continually felt through the lovely sound.”

Housman, who only heard the first two songs, wrote to his publisher in December 1920: “I am told that composers in some cases have mutilated my poems – that Vaughan Williams cut two verses out of ‘Is my team ploughing?’ I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music.”

When he was asked about this after Housman’s death in 1936, Vaughan Williams showed no remorse, claiming “the composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense … I also feel that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as ‘The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal’.”

In the 1920s, Vaughan Williams made an arrangement of On Wenlock Edge for full orchestra that was first performed on 24 January 1924 by John Booth, with the composer conducting. Vaughan Williams preferred this version to his original.

In the accompaniment of the first song, ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ the strings are flaring and quivering in powerful simulation of the gales that trouble Wenlock’s woods, and the emotional gales that have troubled the life of humanity since time began.

Vaughan Williams’ approach to the text works on two levels – that of word-painting, and that of bringing out the meanings inherent in phrases or in an entire text. In this first song, for example, he paints words like “high” and “gale,” and depicts the sense of foreboding in phrases like “the wood’s in trouble” and “His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves” in the accompaniment.



1, On Wenlock Edge

On Wenlock Edge the world’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it piles the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

’Twould blow like this through hot and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it piles the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

Tomorrow: 2, From far, from eve and morning