Full text of the six John Drinkwater poems being sung by Cantores on December 3, 2011, to specially composed new musical settings by Cantores Musical Director John Holloway.
Cotswold Love
Blue skies are over Cotswold
And April snows go by,
The lasses turn their ribbons
For April’s in the sky,
And April is the season
When Sabbath girls are dressed,
From Rodboro’ to Campden,
In all their silken best.An ankle is a marvel
When first the buds are brown,
And not a lass but knows it
From Stow to Gloucester town.
And not a girl goes walking
Along the Cotswold lanes
But knows men’s eyes in April
Are quicker than their brains.It’s little that it matters,
So long as you’re alive,
If you’re eighteen in April,
Or rising sixty-five,
When April comes to Amberley
With skies of April blue,
And Cotswold girls are briding
With slyly tilted shoe.
The Broken Gate
I know a little broken gate
Beneath the apple-boughs and pines,
The seasons lend it coloured state,
And round its hinge the ivy twines -
The ivy and the bloomless rose,
And autumn berries flaming red;
The pine its gracious scent bestows,
The apple-boughs their treasure shed.It opens on an orchard hung
With heavy-laden boughs that spill
Their brown and yellow fruit among
The withered stems of daffodil:
The river from its shallows freed
Here falls upon a stirless peace,
The tides of time suspended lead
The tired spirit to release.A little land of mellowed ease
I find beyond my broken gate,
I hear amid the laden trees
A magic song, and there elate
I pass along from sound and sight
Of men who fret the world away, -
I gather rich and rare delight
Where every day is holy day.
Daffodils
Again, my man of Lady Street,
Your daffodils have come, the sweet
Bell daffodils that are aglow
In Ryton woods now, where they go
Who are my friends and make good rhymes.They come, these very daffodils,
From that same flight of Gloucester Hills,
Where Dymock dames and Dymock men
Have cider kegs and flocks in pen,
For I’ve been there a thousand times.Your petals are enchanted still
And when those tongues of Orphic skill
Bestowed upon that Ryton earth
A benediction for your birth,
Sun daffodils that now I greet.Because, brave daffodils, you bring
Colour and savour of a spring
That Ryton blood is quick to tell.
You should be borne if all were well,
In golden carts to Lady Street.
Mamble
I never went to Mamble
that lies above the Teme,
so I wonder who’s in Mamble,
and whether people seem
who breed and brew along there
as lazy as the name,
and whether any song there
sets alehouse wits aflame.The finger-post say Mamble,
and that is all I know,
of the narrow road to Mamble,
and should I turn to go
to that place of lazy token,
that lies above the Teme,
there might be a Mamble broken
that was lissom in a dream.So leave the road to Mamble
and take another road
to as good a place as Mamble
be it lazy as a toad;
who travels Worcester County
takes any place that comes,
when April tosses bounty
to the cherries and the plums.
The Boundaries
Although beyond the track of unseen stars
Imagination strove in weariless might.
Yet loomed at last inviolable bars
That bound my farthest flight.And when some plain old carol in the street
Quickened a shining angel in my brain,
I knew that even his passionate wings should beat
Upon those bars in vain.And then I asked if God omnipotent
Himself was caught within the snare, or free,
And would the bars at his command relent. -
And none could answer me.
Immortality
I
When other beauty governs other lips,
And snowdrops come to strange and happy springs,
When seas renewed bear yet unbuilded ships,
And alien hearts know all familiar things,
When frosty nights bring comrades to enjoy
Sweet hours at hearths where we no longer sit,
When Liverpool is one with dusty Troy,
And London famed as Attica for wit . . .
How shall it be with you, and you, and you,
How with us all who have gone greatly here
In friendship, making some delight, some true
Song in the dark, some story against fear?
Shall song still walk with love, and life be brave,[From here, not being sung....
And we, who were all these, be but the grave?
II
No; lovers yet shall tell the nightingale
Sometimes a song that we of old time made,
And gossips gathered at the twilight ale
Shall say, "Those two were friends," or, "Unafraid
Of bitter thought were those because they loved
Better than most." And sometimes shall be told
How one, who died in his young beauty, moved,
As Astrophel, those English hearts of old.
And the new seas shall take the new ships home
Telling how yet the Dymock orchards stand,
And you shall walk with Julius at Rome,
And Paul shall be my fellow in the Strand;
There in the midst of all those words shall be
Our names, our ghosts, our immortality.]