H050548 QUOTATION SOURCE SOUGHT 6/14/05 - HARDY FORUM ARCHIVES ____________________________________________________________________________
From: segr@segr-music.net
Subject: Help track "quotation" please
Date: June 13, 2005 4:46:27 PM PDT
Dear listers, I have a puzzle for you to ponder
if you will!
I've just been making a revised recording of
my setting (vocal duet) of "The Curtains Now Are Drawn".
Possibly Hardy's most treasured memory
is described by him here although with that
agonising sequel.
The vein of hope that Love is stronger
than Death, conveyed by the words of the
refrain sung by Emma in the poem
"O the dream that I am thy Love be it thine,
And the dream that thou art my Love be it mine.
And death may come but loving is divine."
is used to lift the song to an ecstatic ending
that is perhaps not possible in a spoken recitaion
of the poem.
Be that as it may, my present worry is to identify the
ultimate source of those words. Was there a song that Emma
possessed containing them? (They have the feel of rhetoric
that might almost be Shakespearean.) I trawl endlessly with
the search engines and so far fruitlessly.
I discussed this often with Jim Gibson in the hope
of tracking it down as it seemed so unlikely that Hardy would
have made it up as a story. After all; "That song, that song.."
must have resounded in Max Gate sometimes!
I would very much like to find "that song"!
Best wishes to all.
Roy.
www.segr-music.net
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Help track "quotation" please
Date: June 14, 2005 3:58:39 AM PDT
Roy- have you tried Victorian popular songs -- the village hall/music hall kind? This sounds very much like the kind of sentimental jingle (Patience Strong style) which, like rock music today, saturated the popular culture -- the kind of song everyone would enjoy singing around the parlour piano.
Good Luck in your search,
Rosemarie
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From: segr@segr-music.net
Subject: RE: Help track "quotation" please
Date: June 14, 2005 4:11:54 AM PDT
To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu
Reply-To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu
Yep Rose:I've a large collection acquired during
these lengthy searches but never a trace of those
words.
Hope springs....
Nice to get yr message.
R.
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From: meryfac@hotmail.com
Subject: quotation
Date: June 14, 2005 3:45:55 PM PDT
Dear Roy...
I tried all the day long to find out something useful to resolve your puzzle, but I have not yet found anything...
I think that that lines could be part of a holy hymn, because you know that Hardy was much involved in religious music...
I scroll every single lines I have found at this site http://www.oremus.org/hymnal/ch1874.html
because the period analized here could be near at the one of Hardy's writing, but at the moment I have not any good result.
I'm really sorry for my English, but here in Milan is about 1.00 am, and I am very tired..
I'll keep on searching tomorrow
Good Luck (and Good Night!)
Maria
Ps. Many Thanks to All...you are really important for the development of my thesis about Hardy, and I'll be soon graduated!!
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From: tomlessup@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Help track "quotation" please
Date: June 14, 2005 3:50:03 PM PDT
(They have the feel of rhetoric that might almost be Shakespearean.) <
They seem to me rather to have the rhetoric of the hymnal - cf. the work of
Charlotte Elliott, author of (among others) The
Invalid's Hymnbook (1841). Her "Just as I am, without one plea" runs on
the following pattern:
Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, Thy love unknown
Hath broken every barrier down;
Now, to be Thine, yea, Thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
similarly, her "My God and Father, while I stray":
Renew my will from day to day,
Blend it with Thine, and take away
All now that makes it hard to say,
"Thy will be done!"
Then when on earth I breathe no more
The prayer oft mixed with tears before,
I'll sing upon a happier shore,
"Thy will be done!"
Which makes me wonder whether although Hardy uses the thine/mine/divine
lines as a refrain in his poem, in the original song they may have been not
a refrain but the first three lines of one of the verses, each verse ending
with a similar last line. One can imagine something such as :
O the dream that I am thy Love be it thine,
And the dream that thou art my Love be it mine.
And death may come but loving is divine,
The long night outlasting.
Oh let the one that I love be the one that is thee,
And the one that you love be the one that is me,
So the one that is each becomes the one that is we,
The high day enhancing.
Tom (no poet, alas) Eldron
tomlessup@hotmail.com
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From: segr@segr-music.net
Subject: RE: Help track "quotation" please
Date: June 14, 2005 4:18:12 PM PDT
Yes Maria and Tom, and thank you.
If it was a holy original there would not
it seems to me be a suggestion of reciprocal Love,
would there?
It's a good suggestion, although my searches have
yielded a welter of religious and quasi-religious
stuff but not those words....yet!
Roy
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From: tomlessup@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Help track "quotation" please
Date: June 14, 2005 4:56:25 PM PDT
>If it was a holy original there would not it seems to me be a suggestion of
>reciprocal Love<
No, indeed! I just meant to suggest that Emma's song seems more likely to
have been Victorian in origin than earlier; and perhaps that those familiar
with hymns of this kind might have felt at ease singing a parlour song that
followed a similar pattern of rhyme and metre. One can imagine the
inmates of St Juliot's Rectory gathered round the piano of a winter's
evening, tapping their feet in time to the familiar cadences - well, perhaps
not the Reverend Holder himself: you don't tap your feet in time to anything
if you suffer from gout!
Cheers
K Eldron
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