Words, Words, Words....

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 389, 6 December 1946, Page 14

Words, Words, Words....

OBSERVE that another commentator in these columns has found occasion to question .the musical treatment afforded William Blake’s "Tyger! Tyger!’ A somewhat similar case arose

from 3YA recently, with a setting of that poem of Blake’s whose second verse should run: "Soon after she was goné from me, A traveller came by, Silently, invisibly, O! was no deny." Lytton Strachey in his essay on Blake singled

this verse out as a premier count in his indictment of the poet’s editors, for, noting that as written there was no main verb in the second sentence (or some nonsense of that sort), they deleted the last line and substituted "He took her with a sigh." "Completing their work," Strachey adds, "by clapping on the whole ‘Love’s Secret,’ a title which there

is no reason to suppose had ever entered the poet’s head." "Love’s Secret," complete with judicious emendations, was duly sung from 3YA, and none of those concerned, I suppose, knew that they were perpetuating a literary crime. Incidentally, why is it the usage among those who compile programmes, record labels, etc., that only the composer’s name need be mentioned and that the author of the words, be he Shakespeare, Jonson, Tennyson, Goethe, or Omar, may be left in anonymity or disguised under the insult-to-injury of "trad."? Is the time not ripe for a militant organisation or crusade to ram it down the throats of the music-lovers that the words of a song have rights of their own, that they should be audibly pronounced, and their authors recognised, and that only a distorted snobbery has denied them these things?