6 - Musical Capitalisation I: Events and Inventions

Summary

❧ A Song and Some Theory

IN CHAPTER 3 a poem by Thomas Hardy about instrumental playing was quoted and discussed. Another Hardy poem, ‘Her song’, presented below in its entirety, is about singing.

I sang that song on Sunday,

To witch an idle while,

I sang that song on Monday,

As fittest to beguile:

I sang it as the year outwore,

And the new slid in;

I thought not what might shape before

Another would begin.

I sang that song in summer,

All unforeknowingly,

To him as a new-comer

From regions strange to me:

I sang it when in afteryears

The shades stretched out,

And paths were faint; and flocking fears

Brought cup-eyed care and doubt.

Sings he that song on Sundays

In some dim land afar,

On Saturdays, or Mondays,

As when the evening star

Glimpsed in upon his bending face,

And my hanging hair,

And time untouched me with a trace

Of soul-smart or despair?

This poem's protagonist, like all of Hardy's heroines a Wessex or west country woman, is undoubtedly rural, if part of the man's attraction was that he came from a different region. Hardy therefore wants us to think of her song as a folksong, with three functions specified in turn in the first six lines: it is sung at leisure, at work, and at feasting. She sings the song on Sunday because in a rural community there is nothing else to do on a Sunday, and by 1850 half the population of England was no longer going to church. (Nevertheless, the first line is intended to shock: one should not sing a secular song on the Sabbath.) She doubtless sings the song on Monday while she does the washing, though there is also the implication, returning in the final stanza, that it was on Monday that the song undid her, when she beguiled somebody with it. Then she sings it at a New Year's Eve party.

She will probably have learnt the song from her mother, who quite likely underwent a similar life and may still be working and singing alongside her, and, although no child is mentioned, there would not have been such dreadful ‘cup-eyed care and doubt’ without one, and it is probably to the child that she is passing on the song during the second half of stanza 2.