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Bruce Blunt
Born: 1 July 1899 in Kensington, England. Died: 8 July 1957.
George Henry Bruce Blunt, otherwise known as Bruce Blunt was an English poet, journalist and wine merchant best known for his collaborations with the composer Peter Warlock. In Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock: a friendship revealed he is described as a "bon viveur, poet, journalist, and writer on wine, gardening, and the turf." His poetry is included in the 1932 anthology Modern Poets edited by J.C. Squire.
For Warlock he wrote a number of short song texts including the carol "Bethlehem Down" (1927) and the songs "The Fox", "The Frostbound Wood" (1929), "The First Mercy" and "The Cricketers of Hambledon" (1928). It has been commented that Warlock's settings of Blunt are amongst his finest. His poem "The Long Barrow" was also set by Bernard van Dieren in 1931.
Warlock seems to have had a particularly close relationship with Bruce Blunt. Blunt was born in 1899, making him four years Warlock’s junior; but, dying in 1957, outlived him twenty-seven years. During this later time, it’s hard to find any record of his existence at all. In 1929, he and Warlock (with Augustus John) were drawn, in an inn, by Anthony Wysart.
What scant critical attention has been paid him seems invariably to have been paid Warlock in the same breath, and often suggests their relationship was ‘merely’ that of drinking partners. And they seem too one of those artist-artist relationships which was about as productive in anecdotes as in works; perhaps Blunt shared Warlock’s propensity for slightly destructive self-mythologizing. In 1927, they were short of funds. A plan was hatched. Blunt wrote a four-verse text called ‘Bethlehem Down’, which Warlock then set to music. They entered it in the Daily Telegraph’s annual Christmas carol contest, and won. The prize money financed what Warlock called an ‘immortal carouse’—by some accounts, an almighty piss-up which lasted from Christmas eve until a few days after Boxing Day.
Bethlehem Down
“When He is King we will give Him the Kings’ gifts, Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown, Beautiful robes,” said the young girl to Joseph, Fair with her firstborn on Bethlehem Down.
Bethlehem Down is full of the starlight, Winds for the spices, and stars for the gold, Mary for sleep, and for lullaby music Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.
When He is King, they will clothe Him in gravesheets, Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown, He that lies now in the white arms of Mary Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down.
Here He has peace and a short while for dreaming, Close huddled oxen to keep Him from cold, Mary for love, and for lullaby music Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.
It seems that the scene described here has somehow been transplanted to a winter-bitten England; specifically, East Sussex, though it’s more likely to have been Hampshire, where Blunt lived for a time. ‘The First Mercy’ is somehow just as deeply-felt, though with more surprising versification and enjambment, and an altogether more unusual perspective:
Ox and ass at Bethlehem On a night, ye know of them. We were only creatures small, Hid by shadows on the wall.
We were swallow, moth and mouse; The Child was born in our house, And the bright eyes of us three Peeped at His nativity.
Hands of peace upon that place Hushed our beings for a space. Quiet feet and folded wing, Nor a sound of anything.
With a moving star we crept Closer when the baby slept; Men who guarded where He lay Moved to frighten us away.
But the Babe, awakened, laid Love on things that were afraid; With so sweet a gesture He Called us to His company.
The last poem of Blunt’s concentrates again on a charged emptiness of environment, charged partially by temperature, partially by our learned-into-instinct knowledge of the effect, on foliage and of air and of light-in-air and breath-in-air, of that temperature:
The Frostbound Wood
Mary that was the Child’s mother Met me in the frostbound wood: Her face was lovely and careladen Under a white hood.
She who once was Heaven’s chosen Moved in loneliness to me, With a slow grace and weary beauty Pitiful to see.
Bethlehem could hear sweet singing, ‘Peace on earth, a Saviour’s come.’ Here the trees were dark, the Heavens Without stars, and dumb.
Past she went with no word spoken, Past the grave of Him I slew, Myself the sower of the woodland And my heart the yew.
Mary that was the Child’s mother Met me in the frostbound wood: Her face was lovely and careladen Under a white hood.
The impression is of a man who might not have been particularly ‘driven’ to poetry, Muse-whipped, might not have had aspirations to greatness, or even perhaps to ‘beauty’, but in simply having a knack for verse, for ringing musicality and judged cadence, frequently achieved the latter; and with a calmness and an ease which is utterly beguiling. It’s hard to detect traces particularly of any social or political leanings he might have had, except perhaps for the disappointed or threatened nostalgia evident in the roistering balladeering of e.g. ‘The Cricketers of Hambledon’; and, likewise, to be honest, I wonder how religious he really was. Certainly these pieces lack the resistible moral didacticism which pokes out of some contemporaries like Hilaire Belloc. In terms of Bethlehem, etc.: perhaps it’s a leap too far, but the three poems above in some ways seem more to be about the stark, brittle beauty of winter, and of our relationship with it and our struggle, as that of other animals and plants, to continue through it, than about the nativity itself; and when Christ’s presence is felt in the poems, as indeed with Mary’s, it strikes as a presence comprising reassurance, comfort, and warmth, both physical and emotional, given and received.
Finally, ‘The Fox’, or ‘At The Fox Inn’. Poem by Bruce Blunt, this, qua song, is often said to have been Warlock’s finest achievement (it’s remarkable that all three poems above were set by Warlock, and may well have been written with this purpose in mind), an assertion it’s hard to argue with until you’ve heard The Curlew. Not entirely unpredictably, ‘The Fox’ comes with its own little anecdote. Blunt himself, in a 1943 letter to Gerald Cockshott:
. . . I can, however, tell you the whole story of ‘The Fox’. Philip [Heseltine; 'Peter Warlock' was a pseudonym] was staying with me in Bramdean in the summer of 1930 [the original MS has '29 vii 1930'], and we spent a long evening in ‘The Fox’, which is the local pub. When we got back home, Philip went almost straight to bed, but I stayed up and opened a bottle of Chablis (what an inadvisable addition to a lot of beer) and wrote the words of ‘The Fox’. As I did not go upstairs till about 3.0, I thought that Philip would probably be down before me, so I left the poem on the table with a note to the effect that I thought it was unsuitable for setting to music on account of the shortness of the lines. When I got down at about noon next day, I found Philip sitting at the table with music MS paper in front of him and he was working at the song. He said ‘On the contrary, my dear sir, I think that this is admirably suited for setting to music’. We were going to Salisbury that afternoon and, when we got there, Philip hired a room with a piano at some music shop, played and whistled the thing over, and finished the song on the spot. So ‘The Fox’, words and music, was conceived and completed within about eighteen hours, which may, or may not, be a record.
At “The Fox Inn” The tatter’d ears, The fox’s grin Mock the dead years.
High on the wall Above the cask Laughs at you all The fox’s mask.
The horn is still, The huntsmen gone; After the kill The fox lives on.
Death’s date is there In faded gold; His eyes outstare The dead of old.
Beneath this roof His eyes mistrust The crumbled hoof, The hounds of dust.
You will not call, I shall not stir, When the fangs fall From that brown fur. |