3 - “Come and sing”: Elizabethan Temper, Eco-entanglement, and Lyric in Underneath the Bough

Summary

All art constantly aspires to the condition of music

—Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” (1877)

Mick and I were just two waves at our dance on the shore.

—[Edith Cooper], Works and Days (1896)

In the other, Heraclitean universe, being in your body is more like having a volume out from the library, a volume subject to more or less instant recall by other borrowers—who rewrite the whole story when they get

it.

—Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile (2012)

When in 1889 Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper first conceived of the project that eventually became Underneath the Bough, they wrote to John Miller Gray of “our new and beautiful Elizabethan songbook—which aspires to treat of Victorian themes in Elizabethan temper” (in Bristow, “Lyrical” 50). Their project was inspired by three texts. The first was William Byrd’s 1589 Songs of Sundrie Natures, a title Michael Field also used while they were working on their collection. The second was Thomas Campion’s Works, a collection of verse and essays from the early 1600s which, thanks to A. H. Bullen’s 1889 edition, garnered new interest among the Victorians in the Renaissance poet, musician, and physician. The third influence, more properly medieval than Renaissance, was Edward FitzGerald’s popular Victorian translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which ultimately gave Underneath the Bough its final title and epigraph:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! (FitzGerald (1872) 130)

From 1859 to 1879, Edward FitzGerald published The Rubáiyát in four significantly different revisions and reorderings; although they did not initially win much attention, these eventually became quite popular among the Victorians, and particularly beloved by the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, and Tennyson, from whom FitzGerald also sought editorial advice.

Like The Rubáiyát, Underneath the Bough’s three editions proved to be particularly recombinant; this chapter focuses on the first edition, which was divided into four books of songs.