Poetry Tuesday

I'm listening to Benjamin Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia. This recording is of a boys' choir, which, unfortunately, doesn't quiet achieve the richness of tone the work needs.

Britten began writing this ode to the patron saint of music in the early 1940s, before leaving the U.S. to return to England. As he boarded the ship in the midst of WWII, a U.S. customs official confiscated the unfinished score for fear that it might contain some kind of code. Can you imagine? I would have hurled myself overboard! But Britten re-wrote the completed sections from memory on the voyage home and finished the work in 1942.

I absolutely adore the hymn's poetry by W.H. Auden. Particularly beautiful is this text from the third section:

O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain,
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

Stunning.