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.
We are delighted to introduce the performers who will sing the parts written for children’s voices in The Cool Web.
Their presence is very important to us, and central to the narrative of the oratorio, which not only focuses on the journey from the vivid responses of youth to the wariness of experience, but also returns again and again to both the joys and the nightmares of childhood.
Robert Graves, like so many of his contemporaries in the trenches, was only 19 when he arrived on the Somme; the memories of childhood were not far behind him, and a natural source of emotional reference for his poetry.
The Melody Makers will be singing in very distinguished company; under the baton of Robin O’Neill, they will join Endymion, Philharmonia Voices, and soloist Edward Grint in the first ensemble ever to perform this vibrant and exciting new oratorio.
We are so grateful to them for joining us; we know they will add that final touch of enchantment to what promises to be an exhilarating evening.
The Melody Makers were founded in January 2011 by Bath Abbey’s Assistant Director of Music, Shean Bowers. The group has grown consistently over the years and now has forty members from all over the city who regularly meet for music, song and friendship.
The choir sing a lively and varied repertoire which is accessible to all and always enjoyed by both the children singing it and those listening to it.
As well as one-off performances during the year, the youngsters also give a number of regular concerts, including a slot at the opening of Party in the City, they always turn out to give a warming rendition of carols at the Christmas market and never fail to delight at the Carols for Choir and Audience in the Abbey, where they get to sing alongside the Girls’ and Boys’ choirs too.
Shean Bowers with the Melody Makers
The group have travelled a fair amount in their short history, singing in places such as Salisbury and Gloucester Cathedrals and Stroud Town hall, as well as lending their voices to various performances, including Carmina Burana, Britten’s Friday Afternoons and even appearing BBC Radio 4.
Many of the children will go on to join the Bath Abbey Girls’ and Boys’ choirs when their time as a Melody Maker comes to an end, and it’s with great joy that we help them develop their singing to a point where this is achievable.
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 rose 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 Faunsas 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.
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.
Owls, in the poems we have chosen for this oratorio, are creatures of the night; allied, as in Robert Graves’ Outlaws,
to
...the old gods, shrunk to shadows, there In the wet woods they lurk, Greedy of human stuff to snare In webs of murk.
Robert Graves, who was to become, in his later years, an expert authority on mythology, was tapping into a long history of disquiet about owls. Their piercing eyes, silent dark flight and eerie calls have associated them with that shadowy hinterland between the dead and the living in many cultures. We fear the dark and those things that might dwell there.
In general, the hooting of an Owl is considered a portent of bad luck, often death, although, conversely, in ancient Greece, owls were often seen as a symbol of good fortune, and are, of course, associated with the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, whose owl revealed hidden truths to her. But, even here, the owl is revealing occult truths, veiled from the daylight knowledge of humans.
The Romans, however, saw owls as omens of impending disaster; often of imminent death. Julius Caesar, Augustus & Agrippa were all warned of their deaths by the screech of owls.
The Ainu in Japan trust the Owl because it gives them notice of evil approaching. They revere the Owl, and believe it mediates between the Gods and men.
Ai- Apaec
To the Welsh, the Owl is a night predator , symbolizing death and renewal, wisdom, moon magic, and initiations. Their Goddess Arianrhod , the White Goddess herself, shapeshifts into a large Owl, and through the great Owl-eyes, sees even into the darkness of the human subconscious and soul.
She is said to move with strength and purpose through the night, her wings of comfort and healing spread to give solace to those who seek her.
We return to owls, which inspired one of the most haunting of musical cadences in the Oratorio, in Night March where they are, like banshees, prophesying death and horror to come…
Silence, disquiet: from those trees Far off a spirit of evil howls. ‘Down to the Somme’ wail the banshees With the long mournful voice of owls.
The spell cast by these magnificent and mysterious creatures, flying silently out of the darkness to bring us hidden truths we would rather not hear, is beautifully caught by Randall Jarrell in his poem The Bird of Night:
Bats do have their relaxed moments, when they are just hanging; doing their own thing..
But we are afraid of them. We always have been.
My one and only close encounter with a bat took place in South Africa. One hot summer night I slid into the back seat of my parent’s car, the windows of which had been left open to keep it cool , and felt something soft, furry and warm move onto my sandeled foot. In the darkness I couldn’t see what it was. My father shone a torch onto it and all we could see was a round dark furry shape. I froze in terror; we had an open thatch house which regularly provided us with unexpected tarantulas. Eventually my parents persuaded me to move; I gingerly put my foot out of the car onto the path; whatever it was clung to me fondly. In the moonlight we saw it was a small bat ( it would have been a very large spider!) which we eventually persuaded to cling to a tree instead. But while it was still breathing on my foot, even when I knew it was a harmless bat, and not a spider, I was still terrified; I just wanted it off..
Perhaps it’s because of the company we think they keep..
Bats have always been associated with the Netherworld
(Following quotes are taken from an article by Professor Gary F. McCracken; there is a link to the full piece above.)
One common folk belief is that bats are human souls that have left the body. Contemporary Finnish folklore relates that during sleep, the soul leaves the body and may appear as a bat. Such lore also explains the disappearance of bats during the day, since when humans awake, their souls return home to their bodies.
When seen as human souls, bats are often imagined as souls of the dead, particularly souls of the damned, or those that are not yet at peace. Both African-Americans and those of European descent from around the United States frequently maintain that bats are “ghosts” or “haunts.” Sicilian peasants relate that the souls of persons who meet a violent death must spend a period of time, determined by God, as either a bat, lizard, or other reptile. In the Auguries of Innocence, William Blake saw the bat as the damned soul of the infidel:
The bat that flits at close of eve Has left the brain that won’t believe.
An even earlier example of Western tradition associating bats with souls of the damned is provided by Homer when Hermes conducts squeaking, bat-like souls to Hades (The Odyssey, XXIV, 5-10). In Greek mythology, the bat was said to be sacred to Proserpina, the wife of Pluto, ruler of the underworld.
There is also long tradition associating bats directly with the devil and evil spirits. In medieval Europe, artists typically represented devils with bat-like wings and pointed ears. Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno followed the tradition of portraying good spirits with the wings of birds and evil spirits with the wings of bats.
Similarly, the Mayas of Central America had a bat God, Cama-Zotz (or “death bat”), depicted as a man with bat wings and a bat-like leaf nose, who lived in a region of darkness through which a dying man had to pass on his way to the netherworld.
American equivalent of the Ahool, in Mythology known as Camazotz.
The association of bats with the devil continues today in many cultures. An African-American folk legend relates that the devil may appear as a bat.
The association of bats with death, hell and the devil, established long before Meatloaf, might seem to have affected the way they were named…
The species name of the common North American little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), might connote an association with Lucifer, the fallen Archangel. That was not, however, the intent of “lucifugus,” which has the less forbidding translation of “light fleeing.” (It is interesting to note that “lucifer” means “light bringing,” and that prior to his fall from grace, Lucifer was the most beautiful of the Archangels.) Then there is the Neotropical fruit bat, Vampyrops helleri. Despite appearances, this bat was not named for the abode of the damned, but in tribute to Florian Heller, a biologist.
Although folklore persists, most people know that bats are not disembodied spirits or the devil’s friends, confidants, or alter egos. Increasingly, people are coming to know that bats are one of the most diverse, interesting, and ecologically important groups of mammals. The myriad of physical, ecological, and behavioral features that make bats so prominent in folklore are the products of natural selection, demonstrating once again that the natural often surpasses the supernatural.
Robert Graves, in Outlaws, on of the poems we feature in The Cool Web, gives bats a walk-on part as far as foreboding goes – his main harbinger of evil is the owl; of which more in a later blog..
One of the strongest messages to come from the poems Robert Graves wrote while at the front – and Edmund Blunden’s, and Siegfried Sassoon’s – in fact one echoed by all soldiers everywhere – is one of love.
No mattter how numb, dehumanised and battle-weary men become, still they grieve for their dead comrades and long for their families far more than they hate their enemies. And the mirror image of this is the desperation of their loved ones left at home.
There are few poets that express this more eloquently than Wang-Chein
Hearing that his Friend was Coming Back from the War
Wang-Chein d.830? Translated by Arthur Waley.
In old days those who went to fight
In three years had one year’s leave.
But in this war the soldiers are never changed;
They must go on fighting till they die on the battlefield.
I thought of you, so weak and indolent,
Hopelessly trying to learn to march and drill.
That a young man should ever come home again
Seemed about as likely as that the sky should fall.
Since I got the news that you were coming back,
Twice I have mounted to the high wall of your home.
I found your brother mending your horse’s stall;
I found your mother sewing your new clothes.
I am half afraid; perhaps it is not true:
Yet I never weary of watching for you on the road.
Each day I go out at the City Gate
With a flask of wine, lest you should come thirsty.
Oh that I could shrink the surface of the world,
So that suddenly I might find you standing at my side!
Robert Graves, well known to so many for his World War One memoir Goodbye to all that, was fortunate enough to live for many more years after the war; many of which were spent in sunshine far away from the choking gas and mud of the trenches.
On a wonderful summer day like this, only one of his happiest love poems will do.
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.
As well as one-off performances during the year, the youngsters also give a number of regular concerts, including a slot at the opening of Party in the City, they always turn out to give a warming rendition of carols at the Christmas market and never fail to delight at the Carols for Choir and Audience in the Abbey, where they get to sing alongside the Girls’ and Boys’ choirs too.
We can’t wait to hear them.
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Similarly, the Mayas of Central America had a bat God, 
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