Sea Pictures

On 5 October 1899 attendees at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival heard the first performance of Edward Elgar's Sea Pictures, with Elgar conducting and Clara Butt singing, dressed as a mermaid.  The five songs were each based on a nineteenth century poem.

'Sea Slumber Song' by Roden Noel

Sea-birds are asleep,
The world forgets to weep,
Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song
On the shadowy sand
Of this elfin land...

Roden Noel (1834-94) was a poet attracted to sublime landscape: he called an 1885 collection Songs of the Heights and Deeps. One of these poems is 'Suspiria' - a word that for the modern reader recalls De Quncey's Suspiria de Profundis and the Dario Argento films it has inspired.  Like the film Suspiria, it is full of colour and drama. 'Do you remember the billowy roar of tumultuous ocean? / Darkling, emerald, eager under vaults of the cave, / Shattered to simmer of foam on a boulder of delicate lilac, / Disenchantless youth of the clear, immortal wave?' (and so on).  A posthumous collection was called My Sea and Other Poems and its editor praised Noel's nature poetry: 'numerous are the poets, still living, who will babble to you of brooks and flowers, but few or none who care to fathom the deeper mysteries of nature'.  It was the sea, above all, that 'had an overmastering fascination for him' and his poems inspired by it ring with a 'grand yet subtle music'.

In Haven (Capri) by Caroline Alice Elgar

... Closely cling, for waves beat fast,
Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast ...

The second 'Sea Picture' uses text by the composer's wife, who had also written 'The Wind at Dawn', a poem she gave Elgar on their engagement and that he had set to music in 1888.  'The Wind at Dawn' gives a dramatic description of a day beginning: 'The wind went out to meet with the sun / At the dawn when the night was done, / And he racked the clouds in lofty disdain / As they flocked in his airy train...'  C. Alice Roberts was actually a published novelist before she met Elgar.  In his book about the composer, Jerrold Northrop Moore notes the landscape symbolism in her book Marchcroft Manor (1882), where 'the feminine presence of Nature is recognised as the initiator of insight.'  In it she describes the beauty of autumn days when 'the lights and shades which we see varying and changing in the sunlight, enter into and work strange changes in the lives of some of us as well as play over the surface of the waters and hills.'

Sabbath Morning at Sea by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The ship went on with solemn face:
    To meet the darkness on the deep.
        The solemn ship went onward...

This one can't be called a seascape poem. Harper's Magazine for some reason reprinted it a few years ago and explained that 'for a modern audience, this may still be one of the less approachable of her major poems. It seems a typical example of Victorian religious sentimentality – the theme is the approach of death, and on All Saints Day, the narrator finds herself on a ship at sea.'  Of more interest to readers of this blog would be 'A Sea-side Walk', published three years earlier in 1836.  Again, the mood of the landscape affects the thoughts of those walking through it: 'For though we never spoke / Of the grey water and the shaded rock, / Dark wave and stone unconsciously were fused / Into the plaintive speaking that we used / Of absent friends and memories unforsook...'

Where Corals Lie by Richard Garnett

The deeps have music soft and low
When winds awake the airy spry,
It lures me, lures me on to go
And see the land where corals lie.

Richard Garnett was a biographer employed by the British Museum - Constance Garnett, translator of the Russian classics was his daughter-in-law and Bloomsbury writer David Garnett was his grandson.  His poems are (perhaps deservedly) seldom read these days.  Looking through the contents list of his collection Io in Egypt a few titles look promising, but they are marred by stale and out-dated language. 'Summer Moonlight', for example, begins with clouds leaving the moon 'half pillaged' of her light, until suddenly she is revealed and lights up a cascade.  Then, in an effect quite hard to imagine, the 'lustrous foam' melts 'into the rosy fires that made / The brown demureness of the rocks superb.' Another poem, 'Fading leaf and Fallen-leaf', sounds almost Japanese in its theme, but I couldn't get beyond the opening lines: 'Said Fading-leaf to Fallen-leaf, / "I toss alone on a forsaken tree..."'

The Swimmer by Adam Lindsay Gordon

With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid,
   To southward far as the sight can roam;
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
   The seas that climb and the surfs that comb...

The final poem is by an Australian poet whose reputation has fluctuated over the years - Bernard Shaw mocked him but he is the only Australian in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.  The Queen (praised for her coronavirus speech yesterday) actually quoted him in her 1992 annus mirabilis Christmas message.  'The Swimmer' appeared in Gordon's second collection Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, published a day before his suicide in 1870.  The phrase 'galloping rhymes' is an allusion to his career as a jockey.  At Blue Lake in South Australia an obelisk was erected to commemorate one of his horse-riding feats: 'This obelisk was erected as a memorial to the famous Australian poet. From near this spot in July, 1864, Gordon made his famed leap on horseback over an old post and rail guard fence onto a narrow ledge overlooking the Blue Lake and jumped back again onto the roadway...'  From a landscape perspective this monument may be his most significant contribution - few of his poems stop long to admire a view.

Stamp issued in May 1985

Sea Pictures itself is apparently not well known outside Europe, possibly affected by Elgar's Last Night of the Proms reputation, as an Arts Fuse article suggests.  I cannot comment on the music because it so far removed from what I normally listen to, but it certainly drew praise at the time.  'A certain amount of less favourable criticism was directed towards the poetry,' however, according to an ABC article.  'Elgar did seem to have sentimentally Victorian tastes when it came to lyrics.'  Of the five writers he alighted on, only Roden Noel could really be described as a landscape poet and his work is now largely forgotten.  It is strange how some creative figures have an afterlife only via another medium, painted by a great artist, say, or inspiring a character in a novel, or in this case, drawn into a piece of music that has carried this odd little collection of poems floating out of their original time like flotsam drifting on the sea.