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LYRICS, SOURCES, COMMENTARIES: My Romantics EP, The Shelley Story, Lord Byron and the Greek War
The mountains look on Marathon Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind; Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind. The dead have been awakened – shall I sleep ? The world’s at war with tyrants – shall I crouch ? The harvest’s ripe - and shall I pause to reap ? I slumber not – the thorn is in my couch .... Each day a trumpet soundeth The mountains look on Marathon This song consists of lines from Shelley's final years in Italy, almost all composed in or around Pisa. His house in San Giuliano di Pisa and the canal are still there, set in the fertile Italian landscape (see Pictures) beneath the hill that 'screens Lucca from the Pisan's envious eye'. One of his boating expeditions during the summer of 1821 is described in 'The Boat on the Serchio'. Day has awakened all things that be; Thou paradise of exiles, Italy ! Worlds on worlds are rolling ever Green and azure wanderer The One remains, the many change and pass
The world's great age begins anew Heaven smiles, and faiths and Empires gleam; The loathsome mask has fallen; Women frank and beautiful and kind; I dreamed that as I wandered by the way Let the tyrant rule The world's great age begins anew PARADISE OF EXILESSources: The Boat on the Serchio, Julian and Maddalo Day has awakened all things that be; Thou paradise of exiles, Italy ! Worlds on worlds are rolling ever Green and azure wanderer The One remains, the many change and pass This song consists of lines from Shelley's final years in Italy, almost all composed in or around Pisa. His house in San Giuliano di Pisa and the canal are still there, set in the fertile Italian landscape, looking out on the hill that 'screens Lucca from the Pisan's envious eye'. One of his boating expeditions during the summer of 1821 is described in 'The Boat on the Serchio'. The famous 'paradise of exiles' line comes from Julian and Maddalo, written two years previously in Venice; the line about the heron comes from a piece of prose written during another of Shelley's boat trips. The lines on the earth – 'green and azure wanderer' – owe something to his fluency in Greek: the Greeks called the planets 'wanderers' – the vagabonds of the solar system.. RISE LIKE LIONSSources: Song to the Men of England, The Mask of Anarchy People of England wherefore plough The seeds ye sow another reaps The robes ye weave another wears Wherefore feed and clothe and save Rise like lions after slumber The political situation in Shelley's time was one of deadlock, with the landowning classes monopolising political power and fearful that the slightest reform would usher in violent revolution on the French model. Changing social patterns, with Britain moving from a predominantly agricultural society to an urban industrialising order, meant that there was a new and increasingly literate – but entirely disenfranchised – urban population. The Peterloo massacre led to the beginning of the organised labour movement in Britain. Shelley's lyrics see him trying to bond popular energies into a united force. As the Chartist Circular of 19th October 1839 put it: 'He wrote to teach his injured countrymen the great laws of union, and the strength of the passive resistance'. Shelley sent The Mask of Anarchy to his editor friend Leigh Hunt but he did not publish it until after the Great Reform Bill in 1832. Shelley's other post-Peterloo lyrics, which included his 'Song to the Men of England', were not published during his lifetime. They had to wait till 1839, when Mary published an (almost) complete edition of his work. In Tiananmen Square, before the crushing of the student/worker demonstration for democratic rights in China, a radio reporter talked to a student who was telling of her admiration for Shelley and Byron. These Shelley lyrics provide a template for situations where oligarchies assume power without popular mandate, and demonstrate how Shelley is a poet of global freedom. WILD SPIRITFrom The Ode to the West Wind Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere O wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere Conventionally regarded as a nature lyric, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind again has a political edge to it. The music hints at matchless genius Jimi Hendrix, seeking across history a common theme of purity of inspiration. There's a theme of personal renewal in it too, a refusal to be downed by the forces ranged against him. So at the end his work will 'quicken a new birth'. Elsewhere he wrote: 'the most unfailing herald, companion and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry'. Incidentally, one can trace influences of Italian, Spanish and Greek literature in the Ode – it is an early example of enrichment through multiculturalism. SPIRIT OF DELIGHTFrom an (untitled) Song Rarely, I love all thou lovest I love This lyric is about being in what Shelley called being in an 'interval of inspiration'. Yet it reminds you of the existence of a 'spirit of delight' and its importance, and so achieves a positive emotional effect. 'Spirit of Delight' adds in the introspective side of Shelley's work and shows how he examined emotional states. It's edited down from eight verses to three, with verse one finishing with two lines from verse two. This lyric was probably written a year later than stated, in 1821; even if so it still chimes with Shelley's mood and situation in 1820. HEART OF HEARTSSources: Dante's sonnet for Guido Cavalcanti (translated by PBS), Epipsychidion Lines for Emilia Viviani Ah, my song; I fear but few Amongst enchanted islands of sunlit lawn As one sandalled with plumes of fire The shadow of that idol of my thought I never was attached to that great sect There was a being who my spirit oft The clear brow, the amorous lips Henry Salt, author of Shelley: poet and pioneer, called Epipsychidion 'the despair of the critics' and it doesn't have the cohesion of Shelley's greatest work: it blends courtly love, autobiography, sexual and platonic passion and a philosophy of love. I would defend Epipsychidion though on the grounds that it fulfils the old maxim: 'Know yourself'. Shelley wrote to a friend shortly before his death that he could not now bring himself to look at it, but that 'it will tell you something' about 'what I am and have been'. 'I think one is always in love with something or another', he added; 'the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal'. At the time divorce was virtually impossible and Shelley was expected to 'marry well' for the sake of the family fortunes; his father told him he would provide for as many illegitimate children as he cared to father but would never forgive a 'misalliance'. Husbands had complete control over any financial assets the wife brought to the marriage, and women who had sexual relationships before or outside marriage were written off as fallen women. At a dance in Horsham Shelley had deliberately danced with a girl so regarded. Shelley's championing of free love was really a plea that people should be free to realise themselves in this life with who they loved, rather than be stifled by law and convention. Virginia Woolf wrote: 'Shelley, both as son and as husband, fought for reason and freedom in private life, and his experiments, disastrous as they were in many ways, have helped us to greater sincerity and happiness in our own conflicts'. THE PINE FORESTSources: I arise from dreams of thee We wandered to the pine forest Love's passions will rock thee The final two verses belong to the last months of Shelley's life; Verse 1 was written in Florence in 1819. The lyrics are an example of how the songs are edited together by theme: there are comparatively few settings of Shelley lyrics because composers have attempted to set a whole poem (like the Ode to the West Wind) which is just too long to translate successfully into music. Our approach has often been intuitive rather than technical; matching spirit across nearly two centuries' divide. The pine forest on the coast about 12 miles from Pisa - visible from the air when flying into Pisa - was one of Shelley's writing haunts: verse two commemorates a still day in February 1822 when Shelley, Mary and Jane went walking there. The sea has receded a mile or two since Shelley's time. The final verse begins with four lines from 'When the lamp is shattered'. That late lyric begins unseen with a shining lamp, the radiance of a love relationship. THE TRIUMPH OF LIFEFrom The Triumph of Life Swift as a spirit And heaven above my head Methought I sate beside a public way Was hurrying to and fro Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry Then what is life I cried ...... This song amounts to a bit of creative editing – a poem of 544 lines being edited down to about 14 ! It examines the difficulties of living an ethically ideal existence, or achieving self knowledge, with the poem maintaining that most, even Shelley's admired Plato, fall by the wayside – betrayed by 'the mutiny within'. In the poem Shelley meets the figure of Rousseau who undertakes to explain the vision to him: it's interesting to compare this with World War One poet Wilfred Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting' which uses the same device and has much the same tone as The Triumph of Life. Owen was highly influenced by Shelley's view of the role of the poet; he was reading 'plenty of Shelley' just before his death. IMMORTAL DEITYSources: There is no God; This power arises from within: Whose throne is in the depth of human thought This selection is an indication of how the Triumph of Life might have ended; it tries to make a unity out of Shelley's many comments, over the ten years of his writing life, on God and spirituality. Yet Shelley didn't go the way of the materialist; this late lyric Immortal Deity, together with the extracts from the Defence of Poetry, expresses a tentative sense of a spirituality bound up with human potential – 'what men call God' being a kind of spirit of wisdom/justice/liberty/creativity/poetry that can visit anyone. His earlier poem 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' ploughs the same furrow as this. Shelley took the phrase 'Intellectual Beauty' from Mary Wollstonecraft who'd written that women were primarily valued for their 'soft bewitching beauty' – actually, she wrote, there is something called 'intellectual beauty' as well. The 'Hymn to Intellectual beauty' refers to a time in boyhood when, as Shelley put it, 'thy shadow fell on me'; he added: 'I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine – have I not kept the vow ?' THE FUNERALLyrics by John Webster The quarantine officers stopped me I watched till they disappeared into the haze And when the storm had cleared away But they were nowhere to be seen. (Mary Shelley: with us it was stormy all day Two weeks on I was cantering over I was riding along for miles and for miles I rode back to Lerici Then I built an iron furnace The air seemed to quiver and glisten 'My dear Trelawny' said Byron But not till the evening was on us And Mary is left with his papers, This song, sung by guest vocalist Keith Parker, is a precis in song of Edward Trelawny's account of Shelley's death and his funeral on the beach near Viareggio in his book 'Records of Shelley, Byron and the author'. The Mary Shelley spoken piece over the instrumental is taken from a letter she wrote to her friend Maria Gisborne from Pisa as the funeral was taking place. ADONAISSources: The Ode to the West Wind He was a morning star amongst the living; He hath awakened from the dream of life (The spring does not rebel against the winter - it succeeds it; The One remains, the many change and pass O wind if winter comes can spring be far behind? This song may be the first time that Plato (in verse 1) has ever been put to a backbeat ! It's sung by Ruth Murray, representing Mary Shelley paying tribute to her lost husband. Two epigrams of Plato survive, evidence perhaps of an early desire to be a poet/playwright. His evident failure to succeed may have been why, in book 10 of The Republic, he proposed banishing poets from his ideal state ! His epigram is a soulful tribute to a lost friend, Stella, who 'gives new splendour to the dead'. The second verse, from Adonais, plays on the old philosophical notion that perhaps this life is nothing but a dream. The opening lines of Stanza 40 of Adonais are followed by the two final lines of the poem. Adonais often comes to mind when the young and gifted suffer an untimely death; examples could include Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger read pieces from Adonais at the concert in Hyde Park), River Phoenix, Kirsty MacColl, Stephen Lawrence, or John Lennon. You could see Lennon in Shelleyan terms as an 'unacknowledged legislator' who now 'shines in the heavens like the evening star'. In his poem A Terre (Being the Philosophy of many soldiers) Wilfred Owen referred to Adonais (see stanza 42): 'I shall be one with nature, herb and stone', Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned: The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now. 'Pushing up the daisies is their creed, you know'. So Shelley's lyrics on death match today's largely agnostic attitudes on the existence of the afterlife. What can continue after death though is inspiration and strength for those who remain. The spoken fragment comes from Shelley's notebook from Lerici, and is significant in that it repeats the central idea from the Ode to the West Wind. In other words the grim vision from The Triumph of Life, written at the same time as the fragment, is not (as some say) a final descent into pessimism on Shelley's part, but part of a longer work in which sources for hope in a secular world would have been explored. The third verse is a reprise of the platonic verse from Paradise of exiles, and the final chorus is from the last line of the Ode to the West wind. It brings out the link between the Ode to the West Wind and Adonais: at the beginning of the final stanza Shelley wrote 'The breath whose might I have invoked in song/ Descends on me ….' Shelley called death 'the great mystery' and once apparently, suggested to Jane Williams, when they were in a little dinghy off the beach in Lerici, that they 'solve the great mystery together'. She replied 'no thank you I'd like my dinner first'! THE WORLD'S GREAT AGESources: Prose: Lines written among the Euganean Hills The world's great age begins anew Heaven smiles, and faiths and Empires gleam; The loathsome mask has fallen; Women frank and beautiful and kind; I dreamed that as I wandered by the way Let the tyrant rule Where all shall live The world's great age begins anew This song gathers together Shelley's utopian verses from a variety of sources: as the narration makes clear, Shelley's positive thinking worked over the following century. So this collection of Shelley lyrics ends with the poet in idealistic mode. He understood the value of a vision, but saw its achievement as subject to 'the difficult and unbending realities of actual life'. As he put it to Leigh Hunt in the dark days after the Peterloo massacre: 'You know my principles incite me to take all the good I can get in politics, for ever aspiring to something more. I am one of those whom nothing will fully satisfy, but who is ready to be partially satisfied by all that is practicable'. back to top
Lord Byron and The Greek War- Lyrics and Notes (Adapted from lyrics in a letter dated November 5th 1820; music Dave Eastoe)
When there is no freedom to fight for at home Let one combat for that of ones neighbours; And think of the glory of Greece and of Rome …. And get knocked on the head for ones labours ! This piece of Byronic wit demonstrates how he would build up a noble or heroic theme only to undercut or subvert it. He did this to the great lines ‘The mountains look on Marathon...’ from Don Juan and also when he wrote his tribute to the Ukranian patriot Mazeppa. Both admirers, critics, and those who met him routinely complained that he would never stick to a point of view, but when it came to the point in Greece, he would stand by the cause to the bitter end. back to top
LORD B. IN MOTION (Band 4)
Through the valley of the Arno ‘Lock up your daughters ‘Don’t even look at him darling’ At the head of five coachloads His accountant was coiled like a snake ‘I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all governments’ ‘Gin and water is the source of all my inspiration’ ‘God will not always be a Tory’ He thought that the poet laureate ‘Lock up your daughters
Essentially Byron had been lionised by that society in Britain, which then, after his marriage had imploded, had turned against him - especially scandalised by the suspicion that he had conducted an incestuous affair with his half sister Augusta. And there were undoubted streaks of darkness in his personality, possibly derived from both sides of his family – the Gordons who had strains of deep melancholy and the Byrons who had often displayed a mad form of impetuosity. Add to this his rakish lifestyle, his warfare against the literary establishment of the time and his theological contrariness and one begins to get a feel for the shock he created. But the mother’s fear, of course, was that one glimpse of that ‘pale beautiful face’ would prove her daughter’s undoing. The final verse refers to his ongoing literary warfare with Robert Southey the poet laureate (part of the no-holds-barred literary battle of the time). With his belongings as he travelled to Pisa was a copy of his satire The Vision of Judgement which lampooned Southey’s eulogy to the recently departed George III (and which would lead to the prosecution of their journal The Liberal). Southey, who had supported liberal causes in his youth, had dubbed Shelley and Byron’s impending collaboration in Pisa ‘The Satanic School’, and had called for legal action against them. back to top Marathon (Band 6) Sources: Don Juan Canto III, Stanza 86 Childe Harold Canto III, Stanza 98 Entry in notebook 19th June 1823
The mountains look on Marathon The mountains look on Marathon Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind; Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind. The dead have been awakened – shall I sleep ? The world’s at war with tyrants – shall I crouch ? The harvest’s ripe - and shall I pause to reap ? I slumber not – the thorn is in my couch .... Each day a trumpet soundeth Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind; Yet freedom ! yet thy banner torn but flying Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind. The mountains look on Marathon
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Dialogue 1: (Band 8)
Lady Blessington has been described as ‘shrewd and sympathetic’ and her book ‘Conversations with Lord Byron’, from which these dialogues are largely reconstructed, is generally held to be both fair and accurate. Born in humble circumstances in Ireland and sold by her father to a farmer, she had been rescued by an English officer and then had married Lord Blessington. She came to preside over a literary salon in St James’s Square, London, so had witnessed Byron’s years of fame and ultimate fall from grace in London society. A year younger than Byron, she was ‘entrancingly beautiful’ and was dubbed ‘most gorgeous’ after a portrait of her caused a sensation amongst her peers. back to top
SETTING SAIL FROM GENOA (Band 9)
Setting sail from Genoa It was as if ten long years After twenty days on board Everyone was watching
(Incidentally, Captain Scott had a business disagreement on Cephalonia with another corpulent English Captain; Byron witnessed this and commented they were ‘sputtering at each other like two toasted apples’) When they arrived on Cephalonia Trelawny, impatient with what he saw as Byron’s vacillation, went on ahead to the mainland, where – completely misreading the situation - he immediately joined up with the treacherous warlord Odysseus and was nearly assassinated for his pains. Byron however, waited for hard news from the mainland – perhaps exemplifying the fascinating blend of scepticism and idealism that underlay his expedition. back to top Dialogue 2 (Bands 11 and 13):
Dr James Kennedy, an Edinburgh doctor with ‘gentle manners and a kind heart’, was the physician to the British garrison on Cephalonia. A Methodist, he sought to defend literalist Christianity against Enlightenment ideas – his meetings on Cephalonia, some of which Byron attended, were for this purpose. (Byron quipped that the respectable attendance at these meetings owed something to the beauty of his young wife). He died in Jamaica in 1827 fighting an outbreak of yellow fever, and his widow subsequently oversaw the publication of his book ‘Conversations on the Subject of Religion with Lord Byron’, from which these dialogues, again, are largely reconstructed. back to top
1.Half a Scot by Birth (Band 12)
I am half a Scot by birth You may remember, in a youthful fit I am half a Scot by birth … This childishness of mine Just before Byron embarks for Missolonghi this song takes us back to the scene of his childhood in Aberdeen. To visit the Dee valley (and the Linn of Dee near Braemar he visited as a child) is to understand something about Byron, the grandeur, beauty and wildness of the scenery he encountered in boyhood seeming to have permeated his spirit in some way. The lines about his ‘youthful fit’ refer to his poem ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’, a savage attack on both the Scottish and English literary worlds. The Edinburgh Review, the liberal journal which he would have expected to be supportive, had trashed his first published poem ‘Hours of Idleness’. His first reaction had been complete despair but then, as he recalled later, ‘I drank three bottles of wine and sat down to make a reply’. These lines from Canto X of Don Juan, written in Pisa in September 1822 shortly before moving to Genoa, are perhaps a late public act of reconciliation and a placing on record of his memories of Scotland. back to top
Epitaph (Band 15)
But I have lived, and have not lived in vain My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire; But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and time, and breathe when I expire Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre. In an age when belief in an afterlife is on the wane these lyrics point to an immortality of the spirit which certainly a great poet like Byron can aspire to. What survives of the rest of us is perhaps less measurable, but at best is seen perhaps in a diffused but none the less real contribution to humanity, liberty, and society, that goes on to build up the human story – for all we know, the only self-aware form of life in the universe. back to top
8. So We’ll Go No More a Roving (Band 17)
So we’ll go no more a roving, For the sword outwears its sheath Though the night was made for loving Though the night was made for loving
They had all died freethinkers, unreconciled to orthodox formulations of God; in a sense today’s society, which also finds simple all-explanatory formulas problematic, has only just caught up with them. Romantic poetry has been called ‘a fusion of love, philosophy, exact observation and spiritual vision’ (Grevel Lindrop) which doesn’t seek to express a coherent system of thought but reflects a ‘painfully fragmented existence’ (Richard Cronin). Which is a good cue for a last quotation from Byron: ‘When a man talks of system’, he once wrote, ‘his case is hopeless”.
Further reading:
BYRON The Flawed Angel, by Phyllis Grosskurth.
The Last Attachment, by Iris Origo. The Last Journey, by Harold Nicolson. That Greece Might Still be Free, by William St. Clair. Don Juan, The Curse of Minerva Edward Trelawny: Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author back to top
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