Edward Elgar and His World (64 page)

Amid the thunder of the guns,
The lightnings of the lance and sword Your hope,
your dread, your throbbing pride,
Your infinite passion is outpoured

From hearts that are as one high heart
Withholding naught from doom and bale
Burningly offered up,—to bleed,
To bear, to break, but not to fail!

Movement III
(Solenne)
XI.
For the Fallen
⁴⁸
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
⁴⁹

[Stanza written by Binyon especially for Elgar:]
They fought, they were terrible, nought could tame them
,
Hunger, nor legions, nor shattering cannonade
.
They laughed, they sang their melodies of England,
They fell open-eyed and unafraid
.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
⁵⁰
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Elgar took his title for
The Spirit of England
from the opening stanza of “The Fourth of August,” the first of the three poems he selected from Binyon's book. In this he was probably influenced by the publication of
The Spirit of Man
, a popular anthology of poetry and philosophy compiled by Robert Bridges (1844–1930), who had been made poet laureate in 1913 following Kipling's refusal of the post. In his preface, Bridges stated the intention of his volume—to uphold and nourish spirituality among the Allies in the face of “the miseries, the insensate and interminable slaughter, the hate and filth” brought on by the “evil” of Prussian materialism, militarism, and conscious criminality.
⁵¹
In “The Fourth of August” Binyon associates the “Spirit of England” with qualities such as mettle, courage, ardor, and steadfastness, which, he implies, define the English as individuals, as an army, and as a nation with a noble destiny. Other meanings are also brought into play, however, which remove the poem from its immediate time and place to the realms of the metaphysical and the eschatological: among those who make up the “Spirit of England” are the “glorious dead” who in the battle for freedom have already “gone before” (in both senses of the phrase). Here, as in the Ruskin extract Colvin cited for Elgar, war is presented not only as a fight for good against evil, but as a purgation of the spirit of the English, from whom self-sacrifice is required to secure the cleansing, revivification, and salvation of Europe. Binyon encapsulates this in his image of the winnowing-fan, a tool from which crops are thrown up into the air as the fertile grain is sorted from the lightweight chaff. That this was an attractive metaphor for Elgar is evident in his decision to reprise the opening stanza at the end of the first movement, thereby bringing
purged
(seventh stanza) and
purified
(first stanza) into a direct relationship with each other through juxtaposition and reinforcing the interpretation of
spirit
as
soul
, that is, along eschatological lines. At its first appearance the word
purified
falls on a weak beat but is accented, and in its final iteration is given musical expression with a movement sharpwards in the harmonies.

Example 1a. “Novissima hora est” motif,
The Dream of Gerontius
, Part I, rehearsal no. 66.

Example 1b. “Endure, O Earth!”
The Spirit of England
, first movement, “The Fourth of August,” rehearsal no. 13.

More significant are the motivic links Elgar establishes between this movement and
The Dream of Gerontius
, connections that confirm a bond between these two works in his imagination. For the phrase “Endure, O Earth!” (seventh stanza), Elgar quotes his setting of the phrase “Novissima hora est” (“This is the final hour”) from
Gerontius
(compare
Examples 1a
and
1b
), probably prompted by the phrase “hour of peril” in the fourth line of the first stanza, but again focusing attention on the afterlife: this poignant phrase is sung by Gerontius in the final agonies of corporeal death (
Part I
, rehearsal no. 66), on encountering God (
Part II
, at “Take me away,” two measures after rehearsal no. 120), and by the Angel of the Agony pleading with Christ for deliverance of the Souls in Purgatory (
Part II
, at “that glorious home,” five measures before rehearsal no. 113—“Hasten, Lord, their hour, and bid them come to Thee, / To that glorious Home, where they shall ever gaze on Thee”).
⁵²
Elgar's reuse of this distinctive motif here also gives musical utterance to Binyon's implied parallel between the “Spirit of England” and the figure of Christ in the lines that follow (“O wronged, untameable, unshaken / Soul of divinely suffering man”), for in
Gerontius
, as Moore points out, the “novissima hora est” motif takes its shape from those associated both with Christ's peace (“Thou art calling me”) and with the agony of the crucifixion (“in Thine own agony”) (compare
Example 1a
with
2a
and
2b
).
⁵³
For the closing lines of the seventh stanza, as he did in the opening of
Part II
of
The Dream of Gerontius
, Elgar seems to suspend time, delivering the direct address in a hushed, unaccompanied chorale, marked
piú lento
and
espressivo
:

Example 2a. “Christ's Peace” motif,
The Dream of Gerontius
,
Part I
, five measures after rehearsal no. 22.

Example 2b. “Christ's Agony” motif,
The Dream of Gerontius
, five measures after rehearsal no. 62.

Example 3.
The Spirit of England
, first movement, “The Fourth of August,” rehearsal no. 14.

The “Novissima hora est” motif also resurfaces in the second movement, “To Women,” where it is heard (over the “Spirit of England” theme from the first movement) in the solo part and taken up by the chorus at “but not to fail!” (
Example 4
).54 For added emphasis, the melody used for “this dreadful winnowing-fan” in the previous movement is alluded to in the violins in the measure before rehearsal no. 11, where the chorus reenters with “to bleed, to bear, to break.” Once again the connections with Christ are significant, emphasizing both divine sacrifice and endurance, for the text of this movement can be interpreted as a latter-day Stabat Mater Dolorosa. As mothers, but also wives and lovers, women of England witness in spirit the corporeal suffering and death of their men on the battlefield, just as Mary stood weeping for her Son at the foot of the Cross on Golgotha. Binyon's choice of language seems to echo the opening verses of the thirteenth-Century Latin hymn, particularly in his fifth and sixth stanzas that refer to the “infinite passion,” seemingly anachronistically to “lance and sword,” and to the scourging of Christ with the phrase “to bleed, to bear, to break.” (Here Elgar links the motif of endurance with immortality by anticipating in the orchestra the climax of the third movement, the ghostly legion “moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,” as well as “Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit” and “There is music in the midst of desolation.”)
⁵⁵
The connection is lost for us, however, in his association of “passion” with “throbbing pride.” Elgar's biographer Basil Maine heard further echoes of
The Dream of Gerontius
in this movement:

At more than one point in this deeply moving music but especially in the brief orchestral passage at the end, the spirit that pervaded the “Angel of the Agony” episode in “Gerontius” is perceptibly at work.
⁵⁶