I will go with my father a-ploughing (1921)

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)

I will go with my father a-ploughing (1921)

Epitaph in old mode (1920)

On the downs (1919)

All night under the moon (For G) (1918)

The scribe (1918)

By a bierside (1916)

The most fruitful period in Ivor Gurney’s development as a poet and composer was between 1917, when he was invalided out of the Army with “shell shock,” and 1922, when he was committed to the mental hospital where he would spend the rest of his life. Although he was far from well during this time – his behaviour was so erratic that he had to abandon the studies he had resumed at the RCM in 1918 and return home to Gloucester, severely disillusioned and unemployable – he did produce some of his best work during those four of five years.

Although it comes from near the end of that period, I will go with my father a-ploughing is a robustly tuneful affirmation of Gurney’s allegiance to the English folk song. In a very different but no less precisely expressed frame of mind, Epitaph in old mode is a sensitively harmonised setting of a little elegy by a much admired poet colleague. More complex than either of them and haunted by its uneasy piano part, On the downs so successfully captures the eerie atmosphere of the poem that even Masefield – who apparently cared little for By a bierside – approved of it. All night under the moon, a setting of Wilfrid Gibson’s “For G,” is a nocturnal love song tinged with melancholy and The Scribe an exultant declaration of a poet’s faith in God and nature, the latter affectionately recalled in the short piano postlude.

For composers, unlike poets, creative work at the front during the First World War was almost impossible. Gurney was one of the few who composed anything of value in those conditions. His creative energy was such that between August 1916 and June 1917 he was able to write four songs literally in the trenches. He was particularly proud of the first of them, By a bierside, composed in a disused trench-mortar emplacement at Laventie: ‘There was never anybody,’ he wrote, ‘could have set the words “Death opens doors” as it is set here.’ Certainly, he held back nothing in this highly emotional song. If the Brahms echoes suggest an orchestral dimension, that is apparently what the composer had in mind (and what his friend Herbert Howells duly supplied).