Far in a Western Brookland (1918-20)

In the Morning (1926)

Carrey Clavel (1925)

The distinctive quality of Bax’s settings of English lyric poetry is their harmonic and textural abundance. Melody is not unimportant: that much is clear from the nostalgic phrase that goes with the first line of Far in a Western Brookland, its regular recurrences in the vocal part (in all but the troubled third stanza) and its rhapsodic treatment in the piano interludes and epilogue. The more original aspects of this Housman setting, however, are the gradually proliferating elaboration of the piano part and the sighing sequence of chromatic dissonances that is provoked by the linear twist at the end of the second stanza and lingeringly recalled in the last.

The whole point of the other Housman song in this group, In the Morning, is the way in which the sweetly luxuriant harmonies that echo throughout turn briefly but ironically hollow on the very last line. The setting of Carrey Clavel from Hardy’s “Country Songs” is the same kind of thing in reverse, its robust minor-key demeanour melting into a last stanza of sentimental major harmonies and reasserted only just in time.