2.10 The Lark Ascending

...being an investigation into the poetic origins of a fine piece of music, and some contemplation on its composer.

My favourite photograph of Ralph Vaughan Williams shows him sitting at a desk in front of a bookcase, writing in a very large book with a fountain pen. Now that I am old, I fancy myself as an imposing figure like that. A learned, serious minded man who has a large body of internationally well received work behind him, and who still devotes his time to creating more. I have always liked to imagine that the photograph shows him in his study, adding the final touches to the orchestration for the Lark Ascending, deep in thought, with the music playing in his head, putting it down on paper, almost oblivious to the world going on around him. I then like to imagine his wife shouting from the bottom of the stairs, asking him how long he is going to be stuck up there in his room, because there is washing to hang up, a garden to weed and that loose cupboard door that she has been asking him to do something about for weeks¹.

“But I’m busy, I’m orchestrating the Lark Ascending, dear”

“Never mind the ruddy Lark Ascending, It’s about time you ascended your arse off that chair and started to do a few jobs around the house” You were exactly the same with those Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. I hardly saw hide nor hair of you for months. I sometimes wonder why you married me at all. you would have been better off paying for a housekeeper.”

Of course, I have it all wrong. The photo is of Vaughan Williams signing the guest book at Yale University on his American tour of 1954, when he was 82 years old, forty years after he had written his music about the lark. He probably already had a housekeeper by those days, if he hadn’t had one for the best part of his life already. He was posh enough to pronounce Ralph in the Old English² way after all. The Ralph in the photograph had recently married his second wife, Ursula, who was a good 43 years younger than him. His first wife, Adeline, had died in 1951, before then he had lived for several years with both women together.

Ursula was a poet, she had even written a poem about Saint Cecilia -

Sing for the morning's joy, Cecilia, sing,
in words of youth and praises of the Spring,
walk the bright colonnades by fountains' spray,
and sing as sunlight fills the waking day;
till angels, voyaging in upper air,
pause on a wing and gather the clear sound
into celestial joy, wound and unwound,
a silver chain, or golden as your hair.

                                   From Spirit of Cecilia, by Ursula Vaughan Williams

It is not surprising that Vaughan Williams would eventually marry a poet. He loved poetry and had used it as inspiration for lots of his music. In addition to his settings for the poetry of A.E. Houseman, he was inspired by the works of Chaucer, Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson and Walt Whitman.

The Lark Ascending was inspired by a poem written by George Meredith, and has eclipsed the written version so fully, that most of those who love the music have no idea that it was ever a piece of poetry. Vaughan Williams wrote it in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War One, exactly the time that Edward Thomas wrote Adlestrop. Perhaps his composition shares as many features with that poem as it does with Meredith’s. It features the same natural setting, the same zooming out for a wider view, the same chorus of birdsong, and the same sense of capturing a moment in time, soon to be obliterated by devastating international events.

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

                                    From Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

Meredith was perhaps more famous as a novelist than a poet³, but has fallen out of fashion today, despite being responsible for the wonderful title The Shaving of Shagpat which sounds like a seedy under the counter VHS film. Another novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) actually caused some outrage because of its frank approach to the subject of sex, almost seventy years before Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was made into a television series in the 1960s, presumably by then the BBC had caught up with Meredith’s sensibilities.

His Lark Ascending poem was first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1881, and was featured in his collection, Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, a couple of years later.

The poem does actually speak of the joy of Earth. The joy that we find in nature, in natural surroundings, in a clear sky, and in birdsong. It is a fairly long poem, over 100 lines. In case you are put off reading the whole thing, here are a couple of highlights..

I like this bit where you can see the effect on the faces of people looking up to see the source of the lark’s song…

...every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,

And this part which shows how we are brought together in awe of music that expresses joy in a way that is beyond our human capabilities.

Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink

In the final analysis though, Meredith’s words can only point the way to that feeling, Vaughan Williams manages somehow to give expression to it, and without using any words at all, he somehow manages to link all those who drink in his remarkable piece of music.

Whilst you read the poem listen to this version of The Lark Ascending downloaded from the internet archive. It features the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim with Pinchas Zukerman on the violin. (it has to be played quite loud if you want to hear the opening)

The Lark Ascending - George Meredith

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discern’d
An ecstasy to music turn’d,
Impell’d by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine;
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flush’d to white with shivers wet;
And such the water-spirit’s chime
On mountain heights in morning’s prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine
He is, the hills, the human line,
The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labor in the town;
He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
And eye of violets while they breathe;
All these the circling song will wreathe,
And you shall hear the herb and tree,
The better heart of men shall see,
Shall feel celestially, as long
As you crave nothing save the song.
Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink:
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.

Yet men have we, whom we revere,
Now names, and men still housing here,
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
For song our highest heaven to greet:
Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
From firmest base to farthest leap,
Because their love of Earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve and pass reward,
So touching purest and so heard
In the brain’s reflex of yon bird;
Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
Through self-forgetfulness divine,
In them, that song aloft maintains,
To fill the sky and thrill the plains
With showerings drawn from human stores,
As he to silence nearer soars,
Extends the world at wings and dome,
More spacious making more our home,
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

1. I am influenced in this train of thought by Philip Larkin’s Self’s the Man

2. Ralph pronounced his name Rayfe with no L, this way of saying it comes from thirteenth century variations of names such as Radulfus, Raulf and Rolf, which became Radufus, Raffe and Rauf. Imagine a popular artist called Rafe Harris.

3. Another of Meredith’s claims to fame was that he posed as the artist’s model for the Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Death of Chatterton (Henry Wallace 1856). The painting depicts the tragic end of the 17 year old poet Thomas Chatterton 1752-70, who committed suicide by drinking Arsenic. A.E. Houseman would have no doubt loved that painting. It was referred to (with an empty bed) on the cover of the excellent book Deaths of The Poets by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley