On Wenlock Edge

In honour of Remembrance, Discovering Music featured the Butterworth's and Vaughan Williams' settings of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, with their ominous potents of early death. The highlight of the programme was James Gilchrist's delightful performance of RVW's On Wenlock Edge and, in particularly, the wonderfully evocative Bredon Hill:

In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.

The bells would ring to call her
In valleys miles away:
"Come all to church, good people;
Good people, come and pray."
But here my love would stay.

And I would turn and answer
Among the springing thyme,
"Oh, peal upon our wedding,
And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time."

But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.

They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.

The bells they sound on Bredon
And still the steeples hum.
"Come all to church, good people," —
Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;
I hear you, I will come.

While it may not be explicitly war-related, it does possess a wonderful feeling lost innocencen and terrible regret — something that Vaughan Williams really captures in his evocation of the happy bells at the start of the poem, the passing bell in the middle and the finally terrible clangour. Amazing stuff.