YEATS AND WARLOCK
HE four poems of Yeats which provide the text for Peter Warlock’s song-cycle The Curlew (from 1YC) are all early, and the setting shows them off to advantage. The first two are tiny poems, "He Reproves the Curlew" and "The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love," inset’ into an elaborate accompaniment, like the text dwarfed by gorgeous borders in a book printed by William Morris, The last is another short poem, "He Hears the Cry of the Sedge," which brings the appropriate and elegiac close. But in the middle is a poem of considerable weight, "The Withering of the Beughs,’ and here the mood varies dramatically-the serene melancholy of "the honey-pale moon," the threatening witches, and the "sleepy country" of the royal swans, ending with the almost-whispered sadness of "The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams." With its beautiful matching of voice and woodwind, this is a piece exactly within the range and tone of Warlock’s not inconsiderable talent. But who will do it now for the later Yeats, and give us the right music for (say) "Crazy Jane" or "Blood and the Moon"?
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530731.2.22.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 733, 31 July 1953, Page 10
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192YEATS AND WARLOCK New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 733, 31 July 1953, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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