MODERN ENGLISH SONGS, sung by JOHN THORNE (Baritone)
Songs by ROGER QUILTER
Love's Philosophy
Now sleeps the crimson petal
I love the jocund dance
The Fuchsia Tree
Over the Mountains
QUILTER'S quick sympathy produces music that chimes happily with any mood of verse, whether it be, as in the first song, the impulsive urging in Shelley's song :—
.. The sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea : What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me ? or the sensitiveness of Tennyson's lines (from The Princess) :—
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk ;
Now winks the gold fin in the porphyry font : The fire-fly wakens : waken thou with me ... Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake :
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip Into my bosom and be lost in me.
There is a winsome lilt in the music to Blake's poem in praise of ' the jocund dance, the softly-breathing song, ... the laughing vale, ... the pleasant cot,' and, lastly, of Kitty, who is ' all to me.'
The Fuchsia Tree is a setting of an old Manx ballad, beginning:-
0 what if the fowler my blackbird has taken ? The sun lifts his head from the lip of the sea. Awaken, my blackbird, awaken, awaken ! And sing to me out of my red fuchsia tree !
In Over the Mountains (the words from Percy's
Reliques) Quilter has arranged an air from a collection dated 1652. The joyous burden of the song is ' Love will find out the way.'