6 Songs from “A Shropshire Lad” (1911)

Loveliest of trees

When I was one-and-twenty

Look not in my eyes

Think no more, lad

The lads in their hundreds

Is my team ploughing?

Unlike his composer colleague Ivor gurney, who survived the experience, George Butterworth was killed at the front in the First World War. Inevitably, the manner of his death colours our reactions to his music, not least the two sets of songs and the orchestral rhapsody inspired by the poetry of A.E. Housman. At the same time we know full well that, while he might have had premonitions of an approaching war, he could have had no idea of the devastating effect it was to have on his generation. Nor, still less, could Housman, whose A Shropshire Lad collection was published fifteen years before Butterworth made his selection from it.

The poems and the songs are rich enough in nostalgia without the addition of another layer by post-war hindsight. After all, in spite of the minor-key intimations of mortality in the middle section, the beauty of Butterworth’s setting of Loveliest of trees is its springtime freshness. Gentle irony is as much part of When I was one-and-twenty as the rueful direction taken by its modal folk-song harmonies. The curious rift in Housman’s Look not in my eyes, which begins as a love song and falls into an elegiac reflection on the “Grecian lad” Narcissus, is ingeniously repaired by a setting which applies much the same music to both parts. Death lies in waiting in Think no more, lad but is thrust aside by dancing rhythms and harmonies that evade the implications of the underlying minor tonality. Pathos by hindsight is particularly difficult to avoid in The lads in their hundreds with its “lads that will die in their glory and never be old” and the gently lilting melody that goes with them in the piano part. At least with Is my ploughing?, poignant though it is in its modal harmonies, we know that the dead man lies in his own rather than some foreign field.