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Monday, December 13, 2004
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GRAVESIAN
Louise Horn, a widow four doors down, died last month. Her house sold right away, and her daughter had to scramble to set up an estate sale and clear the place for the young couple moving to our town from the city. A fellow pianist, Louise had already given UD a lot of her old sheet music, most of it popular songs of the ‘thirties with strange titles (“The Irish were Egyptians Long Ago”) and banal tunes. Art Songs for School and Studio was different. Its editor, Alfred Spouse of Rochester, NY, announced his intention to “engender in the student, aside from the music, a more conscious aesthetic sense, from having lived intimately with an art subject.” Among the songs, UD found one whose title seemed almost as silly as the Egyptian one: “My Love’s an Arbutus.” A red, red, rose, yes. An arbutus? She gave it a whirl on the piano, though, and loved its stately Irish lines: My love’s an arbutus by the borders of Lene, So slender and shapely in her girdle of green. And I measure the pleasure of her eye’s sapphire sheen By the blue skies that sparkle thro’ the soft branching screen. But tho’ ruddy the berry and snowy the flow’r That brighten together the arbutus bow’r, Perfuming and blooming through sunshine and show’r, Give me her bright lips and her laugh’s pearly dow’r. Way sentimental, of course; but there was a bit more: Alas, fruit and blossom shall lie dead on the lea, And Time’s jealous fingers dim your young charms, Machree. But unranging, unchanging you’ll still cling to me, Like the evergreen leaf to the arbutus tree. “Unranging, unchanging” was nice. Sang well, too …. Eventually UD noted the odd antique name of the lyricist - Alfred Perceval Graves - but thought no more of it until, singing the song again a few days ago in honor of Louise, something clicked. UD got out her copy of Goodbye to All That and read Robert Graves’s description of his father: “That my father is a poet has, at least, saved me from any false reverence for poets. I am even delighted when I meet people who know of him and not of me. I sing some of his songs while washing up after meals, or shelling peas, or on similar occasions.” So UD had come full circle, as she often did, taking a circuitous path back to one of the handful of writers she obsessively rereads … She thought of the chasm between father and son, and the Great War which stopped Perceval Graves’s sentiment: “We waited on the fire-step from four to nine o’clock, with fixed bayonets,” writes the younger Graves later in his memoir, “for the order to go over. My mind was a blank, except for the recurrence of '‘S’nice ‘S’mince Spie, S’nice S’mince S’pie … I don’t like ham, lamb or jam, and I don’t like roly-poly…’ The men laughed at my singing. The acting C.S.M. said: ‘It’s murder, sir.’ ‘Of course it’s murder, you bloody fool,’ I agreed. ‘And there’s nothing else for it, is there?’ It was still raining. “But when I sees a s’nice s'mince spie, I asks for a helping twice …’" |