The Cool Web : A Robert Graves Oratorio

Category: Robert Graves

Introducing… Endymion.. the orchestra of The Cool Web

Endymion playing in a Steve Reich concert at the Proms, 2014

“The brilliant Endymion” (Sunday Times) exists to deliver world-class performances of chamber music throughout London, the UK and abroad. It nurtures the UK’s most dynamic and original composers, inspire younger and new audiences and champions mixed chamber music of all genres, through performance, commissioning, recording and promotion.

Since Endymion was formed in 1979 from a group of outstanding National Youth Orchestra students, it has built a secure reputation across a broad and often adventurous repertoire and won a strong following among audiences throughout the UK and abroad, touring in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Finland and Mexico. Unusually for chamber groups so well established, Endymion retains most of its original players. These performers now number among the best soloists and chamber musicians in Europe, including Mark van de Wiel, Stephen Stirling, Melinda Maxwell, Michael Dussek and Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE. Performing together for over thirty years, Endymion has been called one of the few chamber groups as much at home with Mozart as with Birtwistle.

Endymion has made a speciality of 20th century music theatre and chamber opera, including collaborations with the Royal Opera House’s Garden Venture, Women’s Playhouse Trust and Opera Factory, with which it undertook a European tour of Dido and Aeneas and Curlew River in 1995.

Endymion has appeared at most of the major British festivals, including nine times at the Proms, and was in residence at Blackheath Concert Halls for several years. Recent appearances at Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Kings Place and at the Cheltenham and Spitalfields Festivals have included works by Kurtag, Simon Holt and Simon Bainbridge, premières by Vic Hoyland, Philip Cashian and Brian Elias and an Elisabeth Lutyens portrait concert. A retrospective of Anthony Gilbert’s music featured a dozen especially composed musical tributes by distinguished contemporaries, including Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Colin Matthews and Anthony Payne. Endymion’s collaborations with the BBC Singers have included world premières of Giles Swayne’s Havoc (Proms, 1999) and Edward Cowie’s Gaia (2003), as well as the UK première of Birtwistle’s Ring Dance of the Nazarene at the 2004 Proms (“startling virtuosity from all concerned” – Daily Telegraph)

A particularly successful (and much imitated) innovation is the wide-ranging series of Composer Choice concerts staged by Endymion at the Southbank, which have included Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Oliver Knussen, Gavin Bryars, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Judith Weir, John Woolrich and Michael Berkeley.

In June 2009 Endymion celebrated its 30th Birthday at Kings Place with the Sound Census festival. Alongside a celebration of classical chamber music repertoire, 20 British composers were commissioned to write new works for Endymion. These were recorded for release by NMC Recordings. This disc will join a host of other recordings by Endymion including works by Lutyens, Stravinsky, Britten and Magnus Lindberg and (with the Dutton label) York Bowen, Edmund Rubbra, Thomas Dunhill, Lennox Berkeley, Erno Dohnanyi and Zdenek Fibich.

In 2011, a major collaboration with EXAUDI vocal ensemble included performances at Southbank Centre, Sound Festival Scotland and Wigmore Hall, (where Endymion will be returning next year as part of the Wigmore series), the premieres of four new commissioned works by young British and Irish composers, and programmes focusing on Morton Feldman and Arvo Pärt. 2011 also featured Goodbye Stalin! – a three-day festival of chamber music by Shostakovich and Schnittke at King’s Place – and the UK premiere of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Quintet.

In February 2014 Endymion celebrated its 35th Birthday at Kings Place with a weekend of concerts focused on Brahms chamber music for wind and strings, as well as a programme of music for flute, viola and harp. Two of these concerts were part of the “Top 50 Chamber Classics Unwrapped” series, presenting favourite works voted for by readers of BBC Music Magazine.

Endymion’s wide range, its genuine enthusiasm for the work of new composers combined with its irreproachable understanding of the classical repertoire, makes it the perfect ensemble to premiere The Cool Web.

Endymion performing Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet at Kings Place in 2009

a powerful sense of energy and mystery ‘ – The Daily Telegraph

October 10, 2014
Shell Shock: Robert Graves’ own description

Soon to be young officers 1914

Shell shock, by Robert Graves

This is Robert Graves’ own dispassionate account of the deterioration of young officers at the front.

Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line; he did not know his way about, had not learned the rules of health and safety, or grown accustomed to recognising degrees of danger.

Young Officer 1914

Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or 10 months, unless he had been given a few weeks’ rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or 15 months he was often worse than useless.

Dr WHR Rivers [the famous psychiatrist at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh who was both doctor and mentor to Siegfried Sassoon] told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands – I think the thyroid – caused this slow general decline in military usefulness by failing at a certain point to pump its sedative chemical into the blood. Without its continued assistance the man went about his tasks in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance. It has taken my blood 10 years to recover.

Patient suffering from shell shock

Officers had a less laborious but a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though a man’s average expectancy of trench service before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an officer’s. Officers between the ages of 23 and 33 could count on a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young. Men over 40, though not suffering from want of sleep so much as those under 20, had less resistance to sudden alarms and shocks.

The unfortunates were officers who had endured two years or more of continuous trench service. In many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before being lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way. A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions is still alive who, in three shows running, got his company needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear decisions.

• Extracted from Robert Graves’s autobiography, Good-bye to All That (first published by Carcanet in 1929).

September 23, 2014
Robert Graves reading his poems

It is always fascinating to hear a poet read his own work. Particularly when you have been spending some considerable time using it; putting it in context; setting it to music. By the time you have finished working with it, what you unconsciously respond to in that poem has affected its shape, its feel, its heft. It is a different thing to the poem on the page. Hopefully, the poems we have chosen in the oratorio have not been twisted out of shape or betrayed by what we have done to them, but they will have been altered.

When we hear Graves read them, are we hearing the essence of the poem itself? Or has it acquired its own independent life, sitting there four-square and alone on the page, defined by its print? And did he, by reading it, pull it back to its infancy, before it acquired its own shape?

I suppose, in the end, the answer is simple; a poem, like any communication in art, is always altered by the interaction between artist and reader and hearer; it is never only itself.

R

September 22, 2014
David

The wonderful thing about the internet – and about having an excuse to write blogs – is that whatever you are searching for, there is always the possibility of glimpsing something unexpected and beguiling that leads you down a garden path into unknown territory.

I was wandering around on google, minding my own business, when I glimpsed an article that dropped into my lap, out of the blue, a treasure so precious it brought me to tears.

I have been reading everything I could find about Graves’ war experience, but at the centre of it all there was something of a gap. Both Graves and Siegfried Sassoon were profoundly affected by the death of a friend of theirs called David Thomas, with whom Sassoon was deeply in love. Two poems in the oratorio, Goliath and David, and Not Dead, are about David. He is mentioned, mostly in passing, in Goodbye to All That, and is fictionalised in Sasson’s Sherston Trilogy, as Dick Tiltwood.

This man has become for us the central focus of the grief felt for the terrible losses at the front. We thought, when compiling the poems for the oratorio, that it was better to consider the impact of one death, in order to understand the enormity of the death of millions, and David’s had clearly moved Graves deeply.

But there were no pictures, very little detail, no clear view of him. And then I saw this article, about a discovery of some photos of David as a schoolboy, just before he joined up, and as a soldier. All photographs have been made available on the People’s Collection Wales website.

And there he was.

David was the son of Evan and Ethelinda Thomas of Llanedy Rectory, Pontardulais, Glamorgan. His first commission was as a Second Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, the same regiment as Sassoon and Graves. He was then trained and posted to the same regiment’s 1st Battalion, which was then attached to 22 Brigade, itself part of 7th Infantry Division.

Graves describes meeting him, in Goodbye to all That (from which all subsequent quotes are taken) very matter-of-factly:

..I played full-back for the battalion. Three other officers were members of the team: Richardson, a front-row scrum man, Pritchard, another Sandhurst boy, the fly-half, and David Thomas, a third battalion second-lieutenant, an inside three-quarter. David came from South Wales, simple, gentle, fond of reading. He, Siegfried Sassoon and I always went about together…

And here he is, in a team photograph, at his school, sitting in a chair, far right.

He was also a member of his school’s cricket team:

David in in the front row, far right

And clearly carried his love of this sport into the army too: a week before he died, Sassoon wrote a sonnet about him as a cricketer, which is published as follows:

12. A Subaltern

HE turned to me with his kind, sleepy gaze
And fresh face slowly brightening to the grin
That sets my memory back to summer days,
With twenty runs to make, and last man in.
He told me he’d been having a bloody time
In trenches, crouching for the crumps to burst,
While squeaking rats scampered across the slime
And the grey palsied weather did its worst.

But as he stamped and shivered in the rain,
My stale philosophies had served him well;
Dreaming about his girl had sent his brain
Blanker than ever—she’d no place in Hell….
‘Good God!’ he laughed, and slowly filled his pipe,
Wondering ‘why he always talked such tripe’.

but this first draft, written in pencil in the trenches, is touchingly different:

HE looked at me with his kind, sleepy gaze
And blonde face brightening slowly to the grin
That always makes me think of summer days,
With twenty runs to get, and last man in.
He said, when he was having a rotten time
In trenches, wondering when the crumps would burst,
With hateful rats scampering across the slime
And the blank, bitter weather doing its worst,

He’d thought of me, and in his ugly plight,
My stale philosophies had kept him going;
When ‘thinking about his girl ‘had made the night
Blacker than ever—and all the skies were snowing….
Then, while my heart rejoiced and crowned him King,
I said, ‘We’ll have them beaten by the Spring!’.

On 18 March 1916 David was leading a working party to repair wire emplacements in No man’s land at the Citadel, near Fricourt in France when he was shot in the throat. Graves had had a brief encounter with him earlier on that day:

David, bringing up the rear of ‘C’, looked worried about something. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m fed up, he answered, and I’ve got a cold.’

and then,

About half-past ten, rifle-fire broke out on the right and the sentries passed along the news, ‘Officer Hit’ Richardson hurried away to investigate. He came back to say:‘It’s young Thomas, A bullet through the neck; but I think its all right. It can’t have hit his spine or an artery, because he’s walking to the dressing station’ I was delighted. David should now be away long enough to escape the coming offensive, and perhaps even the rest of the war.

Then news came that David was dead. The regimental doctor, a throat specialist in civil life, had told him at the dressing station: ’ You’ll be all right only don’t raise your head for a bit’ David then took a letter from his pocket, gave it to an orderly, and said Post this! It had been written to a girl in Glamorgan, for delivery if he got killed. The doctor saw he was choking and tried tracheotomy, but too late.

Sassoon wrote the next day: “Tonight I saw his shrouded form laid in the earth – Robert Graves beside me with his white whimsical face twisted and grieving.

“Once we could not hear the solemn words for the noise of a machine-gun along the line; and when all was finished a canister fell a hundred yards away and burst with a crash.

“So Tommy left us, a gentle soldier, perfect and without stain. And so he will remain in my heart, fresh and happy and brave.”

He is buried at reference D3 in Point 110 New Military Cemetery at Fricourt.

Graves wrote: “I felt David’s death worse than any other since I had been in France, but it did not anger me as it did Siegfried.

“He was acting transport-officer and every evening now, when he came up with the rations, went out on patrol looking for Germans to kill.

I just felt empty and lost.”

September 21, 2014
BRSLI Talk on Oratorio on October 22nd.

The original BRSLI building, demolished by the Council in 1932

Anyone thinking of coming to the premiere of the Oratorio on October 30th might be interested in a talk at the BRSLI at 16 Queen Square, Bath, BA1 2HN, 7.30 0n October 22nd.

Sue Curtis will be talking about the poetry of Robert Graves as it is used in the oratorio, Jools Scott will play a recording of some of the music from the oratorio, and Tim Snowdon will read the poems being discussed. There will be an opportunity to ask questions of the compiler and composer about the piece.

The Cool Web is an oratorio based on the poems Robert Graves wrote at the front as a young officer. As such, it offers a moving glimpse of a poet struggling to write about an unbearable experience as it happened. In this talk Sue Curtis, the compiler, talks about the poems she and Jools Scott chose to include, why they are there, what they mean to her, and how they have informed the emotion, narrative and intensity of the music itself.

The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution has been central to the intellectual and cultural life of Bath for centuries.

BRLSI originally occupied a purpose-built building at Terrace Walk in the centre of Bath, near the Abbey and overlooking what is now the Parade Gardens. Opened in 1824, it occupied the site of Harrison’s Assembly Rooms, a regular haunt of Beau Nash, which had burnt down in 1820. A century later an equally terminal fate befell the BRLSI building, when the local Council decided to demolish it to make way for a traffic scheme…

The Institution building on Terrace Walk, Bath had housed the collections, lectures, libraries and all manner of events for 108 years. The demolition of the building, which began in December 1932, took eight months, such was the enormity of the task. Many believed the building to be of outstanding architectural importance, and lobbied that an alternative to demolition be found.

Many suggestions were put forward by such bodies as : Old Bath Preservation Society, Bath City Council and others regarding a relocation of the building ( the Portico being of particular importance) however no solution was found. By September 1933 no trace of the Institution building remained on the site.

In the photograph above, the front entrance of the Institution can be seen clearly; the impressive Portico was unmistakable. Many believed (and still do) that this Portico was part of Harrisons (later renamed Kingston) Assembly rooms which stood on this site until 1820. Much controversy surrounded the pedigree of this Portico, the original being designed by William Wilkins (who went on to design The London University College, The National Gallery London etc.) in 1808.

The BRSLI today

September 19, 2014
Introducing Robin O’Neill, The Conductor of ‘The Cool Web’

Robin O’Neill at the Wimbledon festival

As the time for the actual performance of the Oratorio grows near, we want to celebrate the people involved with the first performance of this new work.

Robin O’Neill has been part of this project from the very beginning.

Robin knew of Jools’ music from his sound-track to The Door, a short film by Andrew Steggall,

<a href="http://joolsscottmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-door-original-sound-track">The Door – Original Sound Track by Jools Scott | Composer</a>

Andrew with Charles Dance, who starred in ‘The Door’

who directed The Soldier’s Tale at the Old Vic, (stay with me here)

The Soldier’s Tale at the Old Vic

for which Robin directed the music.

Commenting on Robin O’Neill’s work as music director of The Soldier’s Tale (in a European/Iraqi collaboration which took him to Baghdad in Sept 2005 and then on a two week run at the Old Vic Theatre) the late Sir Charles Mackerras said “I would like to congratulate Robin O’Neill on his marvellous conducting of the whole ensemble, whether European or Iraqi. I particularly admired the fact that a great deal of the Stravinsky seemed to be played from memory. This in itself is a tremendous feat!”

Iraqi musicians in The Soldier’s Tale

We met to discuss the project over lunch in London at the point where we had a rough idea of the libretto, but had written none of the music at all. Robin’s enthusiasm and genuine interest was one of the spurs which turned a good idea into a real piece of work.

Since then he has stayed faithfully with it, consulting on the score, pointing us in the direction of the right orchestra, Endymion, and the Philharmonia Voices, whose work he knows through his own long association with them, and now conducting it at Bath Abbey eighteen months after our first meeting.

The Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall

In the past few seasons Robin O’Neill has conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus (with whom he gave the orchestra’s first performance in London’s newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall), London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Nordic Chamber Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, Bogota Philharmonic, Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa Japan, Orchestra Cittaperta and the Orchestras of the Guildhall School of Music, Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, where he is professor of conducting.

Robin O’Neill’s conducting has been praised for it’s balance of intellectual rigour, immaculate line and visceral excitement. A performance of the Sibelius 7th Symphony prompted one reviewer to note that “he obtained a rock-like stability to the tonal structure that underpins the disturbances, thereby creating a symphonic statement both powerful and concise.”

Matthew Rye in the Daily Telegraph has commented: “Robin O’Neill conducted them (London Philharmonic) in sleek, suave performances where phrases were ideally shaped and balance nigh perfect” and the Financial Times has commented that: “Robin O’Neill conducted the brilliant Philharmonia Orchestra in faultless up-tempo style.”

Stephan Kovacevich

Robin O’Neill has collaborated with musicians such as Mikhail Pletnev, Boris Berezovsky, Mitsuko Uchida, Christoph Eschenbach, Pascal Roge, Stephen Kovacevich, Alexander Madzar, Pinchas Zuckerman, Salvatore Accardo, Isabelle Faust, Gautier Capucon, Michael Collins, Alina Ibragimova, the Lars Jansson Jazz Trio and actors such as Jeremy Irons, Julian Glover, Paul McGann and Hugh Dancy. He has also performed by invitation for His Royal Highness Prince Charles the Prince of Wales.

Jeremy Irons, who read the soldier in the first production of ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ Andrew Steggall directed at the Old Vic

Robin O’Neill regularly broadcasts on the BBC and has also had concerts broadcast on Swedish Radio, South African Radio and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. He has made two CDs with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra on the Hyperion Label.

In his parallel career, Robin O’Neill is principal bassoonist with the Philharmonia Orchestra and has held the same position with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the English Chamber Orchestra. He is a member of London Winds and the Gaudier Ensemble.

He is a Grammy nominated recording artist and has recorded virtually the whole of the core chamber music repertoire with more than 40 CDs to his name on labels such as Hyperion, Chandos, Decca and Philips.

Robin O’Neill is an Honorary Associate and Visiting Professor of Bassoon at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has coached bassoon and wind sections for several summer festivals including Canton International Summer Music Orchestra in China, the Lindenbaum Festival in South Korea and the Adam Mickiewicz Iculture Orchestra in Poland.

And now, what an immense privilege it is to have him shaping and conducting the first performance of The Cool Web.

Don’t miss it.

September 6, 2014
The Cool Web itself

There’s a cool web of language winds us in..
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear..
we grow sea-green at last and coldly die
in brininess and volubility..

The idea of language as a cool web; a way of keeping the intensity of life at bay, is a fascinating one. It stems, of course, from the many ideas surrounding the power of words and the way they interact with what they name.

According to Wikipedia, A true name is a name of a thing or being that expresses, or is somehow identical with, its true nature. The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names has been central to philosophical study as well as various traditions of magic, religious invocation and mysticism (mantras) since antiquity.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God..

Hellenistic Judaism emphasized the divine nature of logos, later adopted by the Gospel of John.

The ancient Jews considered God’s true name so potent that its invocation conferred upon the speaker tremendous power over His creations. To prevent abuse of this power, as well as to avert blasphemy, the name of God was always taboo.

According to practises in folklore, knowing someone’s, or something’s, true name gives the person who knows the true name power over them. This effect is used in many tales, such as in the German fairytale of Rumpelstiltskin – within Rumpelstiltskin and all its variants, the girl can free herself from the power of a supernatural helper who demands her child by learning its name.

Bilbo Baggins, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, uses a great deal of trickery to keep the dragon, Smaug, from learning his name; even the sheltered hobbit realises that revealing his name would be very foolish.

Likewise, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea canon, and specifically in her seminal short story The Rule of Names, power over dragons, and additionally, men, is conferred by the use of a true name.

The opposite is true in popular culture, too.

Saying the name of a powerful being can give the named person power over the speaker- in the Candyman films, saying his name five times in a mirror causes him to appear; Voldemort has a similar unfortunate habit; and the actors’ superstition about quoting from a certain Scottish play during rehearsals has its origins in the same idea.

I’m not even using any illustrations of them, for Health and Safety reasons.

So, in what is a distant cousin of this line of belief, as the children of the Cool Web learn language, they gain control over excessive fear and excessive emotion; they learn not to feel too much.

The whole of modern therapy is based on the same principle; talk about it, whatever it is, and you will be healed.

Shakespeare, in a play based somewhere around Luton, as I recall, says the same thing:

What, man! Ne’er pull your hat upon your brows.

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak.

Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.

But Graves does not see this process as purely beneficial; it may save us from madness, but it also shields us from actual living. Spelling everything away dilutes the whole experience of reality. And volubility winds us in, like a winding-sheet…like a corpse.

What would Graves have thought of our own cool web, I wonder? The ceaseless rain of words that thunders on our brains, day and night, so much that words and experience- our own and other people’s – are both devalued and diluted, until our emotions freeze and our heads explode and we grow sea-green at last and coldly die in brininess and volubility..

August 26, 2014
The hot scent of the summer rose

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is..

How hot the scent is of the summer rose..

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by

The hot scent of the summer rose; sensual delight seen by Robert Graves in this first verse of The Cool Web as a sensation as overwhelming in its intensity as heat or terror.

The black sky, the drums, the soldiers, the dread, recur so often in the imagery of Graves’ youthful poetry that they have woven themselves into the narrative of the oratorio, and it is easy to see how they relate to the terror of the war, but the rose is different.

In classical and popular culture, the rose is the symbol of romantic love, both the longing for, and the object of it.

But it also appears in many religions – particularly in Sufi mysticism – as a symbol of the longing for divine love, and also of the beauty of a human soul grown to perfection.

For these reasons, the cultivation of geometrical rose gardens has a long history in Iran and surrounding lands. In the lyric ghazal, it is the beauty of the rose that provokes the longing song of the nightingale.

Hazrat Inayat, in Volume 10 of The Sufi message, expresses it thus:

“Just as the rose consists of many petals held together, so the person who attains to the unfoldment of the soul begins to show many different qualities.

The qualities emit fragrance in the form of a spiritual personality.

The rose has a beautiful structure, and the personality which proves the unfoldment of the soul has also a fine structure, in manner, in dealing with others, in speech, in action.

The atmosphere of a spiritual being pervades the air like the perfume of a rose.”

Mandalas, which express the human aspiration towards wholeness and coherence – i.e. a spiritually complete soul, have existed in Eastern religion and philosophy for centuries, and are echoed in Christianity by the medieval r ose window.

In much the same way the centre of Eastern mandalas depict the “godhead” or divine aspect of the world, so do rose windows; typically Christ or the Virgin and Christ are found in the central rosette.

In eastern philosophy, there are many paths to reach the divine, and these are represented by “gates” at the cardinal points of the mandala. By the same token, saints depicted in the petals of a rose window can be seen as intermediaries (or paths) to Christ.

The basis of many churches is geometry and proportion. Numbers had a metaphysical significance, and were thought to have occult power.

In a rose window every space is defined by another smaller geometric figure – a trefoil, a quatrefoil, rosette, or spherical triangle. Even the glasswork itself adds to this hidden geometry which defines the exact placement of every major feature of the rose window – relating to the radial elements, concentric divisions, and all to the centre.

Circles, squares, triangles, stars, and, of course, the 12 major divisions typically found in rose windows all point to the finite and infinite, earth and heaven, or matter and spirit.

In Christian iconography the rose has a common association with the Virgin Mary,

and is also associated with sacrifice and death; it is a direct symbol of the five wounds of Christ; the red rose was eventually adopted as a symbol of the blood of the Christian martyrs.

Here the rose is associated with St Valentine – later ironically to be responsible for the giving of countless thousands of red roses – as a martyr.

Graves picks up on this association in The Dying Knight and the Fauns as the blood of the fallen hero soaks into the woodland ground, turning the innocent daisies into roses.

The idea of a rose as a symbol of the completed soul is an abstract one for most ordinary mortals to hang on to; much more poignant for most of us is the rose as redolent of the power and fragility of earthly beauty, earthly love, and the heat and glory of life itself, to be longed for and feared in equal measure.

Feared especially for a soldier; for the stronger your passion for a lover, or for the beauty of the world, the more agonising it is to die.

The roses in Graves’ Garden in The Morning before the Battle are withered by the chill wind of death; they contain all these meanings.

I knew it walking yesterday at noon
Down a deserted garden full of flowers.
…Carelessly sang, pinned roses on my breast,
Reached for a cherry-bunch—and then, then, Death
Blew through the garden from the North and East
And blighted every beauty with chill breath.

So perhaps the rose of The Cool Web, with its cruel scent, contains them all too.

“Roses of Picardy” was one of the most famous songs of the First World War and is still frequently recorded today. Picardy was a historical province of France; the area which contained the Somme battlefields.

Hayden Wood related that as he was going home one night on the top of a London bus the melody came to him. He jumped off and wrote down the refrain on an old envelope while standing under a street lamp.

British soldiers sang his song as they enlisted for the Front in France and Flanders. During the war itself, the song sold at a rate of 50,000 copies of the sheet music per month; after the war, the singing of it helped soldiers who were suffering from shell-shock to regain their powers of speech.

If it is true that we unconsciously retain a collective knowledge of the past and its symbolism, no wonder Roses of Picardy held such meaning for the young men on the Western Front, and their anxious sweethearts at home.

August 25, 2014
Blog of Blogs

One of these men might quite possibly be Robert Graves. Or one of his friends. Or an English poet. Or have written an Oratorio. Or not

Robert Graves, Trenches, Goodbye to all that, Edith Cavell, Battle, World War I, English poets, are all terms that should appear in the top line of the perfect “The Cool Web: A Robert Graves Oratorio” blog.

The perfect blog should be written in short paragraphs,

It should have lots of illustrations.

Be easy to comprehend

Blog Standard Comprehensive

Have Music,tags, and links

and be couched

Couched

in easy

Easy

and familiar

family

terms.

The perfect blog should not be written by people like me

Like me

who get enthusiastic

enthusiastic

about the content of what they write.

Write

and feel sad

sad

when no-one

no-one

reads it.

Which is not the point.

The point

It is all, and only about footfall.

Footfall

Let us hope this is not

The last Post.

August 20, 2014
William Graves on Robert Graves and his experiences in WW1

The following interview with William Graves, Robert Graves‘ son, was conducted by the BBC as part of its commemoration of WW1.

It provides an intimate and touching portrait of Robert Graves in his later years, and makes very clear how the experiences he underwent as a young soldier, acutely examined in Goodbye to All That, haunted him all his life.

William Graves is himself a distinguished writer – his memoir, Wild Olives, about his childhood years in Deia with his father, is a classic of the genre.

August 2, 2014