Masterpiece

Out from the dim mind like dark fire rises thought,

And one must be quick on it … or scratch sketches, a few …

And later, three weeks later, in fashion sedater,

See, the night worker writing his square work out,

Set to the labour, muscle strained, his light hidden under.

Half-past two? Time for tea … Half-past, half-past two …

And then by degrees of half hours see how it shows:

The pages fill with black notes, the paper-bill goes

Up and up, till the musician is left staring

At a String Quartett nobody in the world will do …

And what Schumann would say there's no one to be caring.

Now, had it been a joke or some wordy, windy poem

About Destiny or Fatal-Way or Weltmuth or Sarsparilla,

London would have hugged to it like a glad gorilla …

Happy to know its deepest heart told out so,

Deepest conviction, or maxim driven so home

(To the next door neighbour). But since the new making is still a

Mere Quartett for Strings after the Beethoven way,

With no aspiration to say more than ever was said

By Beethoven; expecting such treatment and casual pay;

The musician is left to turn over Shakespeare and to find

Favourite passages when the dim East shows blind.

Get rid of his drink how he may, blamed for such drinking;

Leave his MS there, wondering what neighbours may be thinking

Of people who work a week through without end

And neither Lyons, Lipton or the London String Quartett

To care much what high glory from the light glory came to command;

Or – see … how the two tunes into one English picture came linking.

IVOR GURNEY

Gurney: At the Front

Was it a mine? To me Aladdin's cave

More like,

Or really like a mine shaft candle lit,

So in we crawled

And naturally, the men were Welsh, pit men. I felt

So much

At home, for instantly, it seems, rather than speak

We fell to song

And it was music to my soul, the Celt

In me,

And with them I felt so much less the freak

I had for long …

And I was glad to wear a uniform

That held

Me inextricably bound up with others.