The authors of this sequence are George Herbert (1593-1633; SD), William\u00a0Shakespeare (1564-1616; TWS & OMM), and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-\u00a01958; text & music).\u00a0The composer\u2019s responsibility for the text can not be mentioned without\u00a0some explanation. Of course he put the words to music and released the\u00a0pieces as a cycle, but his contribution to the wordsequence goes far beyond\u00a0selecting the poems: he did not select them in full, to begin with. But RVW to\u00a0delete lines from these poems, is no matter of reversing the author\u2019s labour\u00a0of adding them, but of completing their job. As one knows : in order to\u00a0maintain quality standards, writing is mainly a matter of deleting.<\/p>\n
And in the case of\u00a0The Willow Song<\/i>\u00a0deleting lines ten to thirteen is the\u00a0obvious thing to do; for dramatic effect – these lines come from the play\u00a0\u2018Othello<\/i>\u2019 – Shakespeare carefully dropped his standards towards the end.\u00a0The meter, for instance, derails rather spectacularly in the second half of line\u00a0nine and again in the first half of line eleven (which is printed a little further\u00a0ahead in this article). Line nine is a natural conclusion to the first part, but\u00a0from a storytellers point of view the remainder cannot be omitted. Therefore\u00a0a song composed on the first nine lines only, is visibly incomplete. It is the\u00a0merit of Ralph Vaughan Williams to have identified\u00a0O Mistress Mine<\/i>\u00a0as the sequel\u2019s\u00a0natural substitution. As a result the original four lines are in the context of\u00a0this cycle superfluous, and that is why he decided to delete them, not the\u00a0difficulty to invent fitting music.<\/p>\n
Sweet Day<\/i>\u00a0is also lacking four lines, and they are, again, superfluous: to\u00a0people unfamiliar with the original it is impossible to notice that one of the\u00a0quatrains is missing. The second one to be precise:<\/p>\n
Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave<\/i> <\/i>In itself this is no bad poetry, but back in place the meter appears to derail\u00a0in the first two lines as spectacular as in\u00a0Willow<\/i>. And this is only the least\u00a0argument to regard this quatrain as all but matching the quality of the other\u00a0ones: Vaughan Williams may have considered himself lucky that it\u00a0contributes nothing significant to the poem – it is very difficult to invent a\u00a0common melody on verses that differ so much in their meters – but it is not\u00a0exactly a compliment to the author to prove a full quarter of his poem\u00a0irrelevant: just try what happens if another quatrain is deleted instead.<\/p>\n Of course it would be an insult to his craftmanship to suggest that Vaughan\u00a0Williams avoided a problem he was incapable to solve: in both this song\u2019s\u00a0concluding verses he deals in a superb way with the irregular meters of the\u00a0first lines. A much better ground to remove this quatrain is presented in Part\u00a0One, dealing with the way in which three stand alone pieces of music were\u00a0combined to a cycle. The usefullness of\u00a0Sweet Day<\/i>\u00a0as an introduction for\u00a0The<\/i>\u00a0Willow Song<\/i>\u00a0depends on renaming it \u2018Reduced Virtue\u2019:\u00a0Virtue<\/i>\u00a0being the title\u00a0under which the unreduced poem was originally published.<\/p>\n —<\/span><\/p>\n —<\/span><\/p>\n go to next chapter<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The authors of this sequence are George Herbert (1593-1633; SD), William\u00a0Shakespeare (1564-1616; TWS & OMM), and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-\u00a01958; text & music).\u00a0The composer\u2019s responsibility for the text can not be mentioned without\u00a0some explanation. Of course he put the words … Continue reading
\nBids the rash gazer wipe his eye:<\/i>
\nThy root is ever in its grave<\/i>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>And thou must die.<\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n