Music Monday: Jerusalem

Storytime: The Jumblies

Year: 2013
Author: Edward Lear
Illustrator: Sam McPhillips

They went to sea in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a sieve they went to sea!

And when the sieve turned round and round,
And everyone cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, ‘Our sieve ain’t big.
But we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!
In a sieve we’ll go to sea!’

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue.
And they went to sea in a sieve.

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Cor cordium

O heart of hearts, the chalice of love’s fire,
Hid round with flowers and all the bounty of bloom;
O wonderful and perfect heart, for whom
The lyrist liberty made life a lyre;
O heavenly heart, at whose most dear desire
Dead love, living and singing, cleft his tomb,
And with him risen and regent in death’s room
All day thy choral pulses rang full choir;
O heart whose beating blood was running song,
O sole thing sweeter than thine own songs were,
Help us for thy free love’s sake to be free,
True for thy truth’s sake, for thy strength’s sake strong,
Till very liberty make clean and fair
The nursing earth as the sepulchral sea.

~Algernon Charles Swinburne~

The Pilgrims

Who is your lady of love, O ye that pass
Singing? and is it for sorrow of that which was
That ye sing sadly, or dream of what shall be?
For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing.
—Our lady of love by you is unbeholden;
For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden
Treasure of hair, nor face nor form; but we
That love, we know her more fair than anything.

—Is she a queen, having great gifts to give?
—Yea, these; that whoso hath seen her shall not live
Except he serve her sorrowing, with strange pain,
Travail and bloodshedding and bitterer tears;
And when she bids die he shall surely die.
And he shall leave all things under the sky
And go forth naked under sun and rain
And work and wait and watch out all his years.

—Hath she on earth no place of habitation?
—Age to age calling, nation answering nation,
Cries out, Where is she? and there is none to say;
For if she be not in the spirit of men,
For if in the inward soul she hath no place,
In vain they cry unto her, seeking her face,
In vain their mouths make much of her; for they
Cry with vain tongues, till the heart lives again.

A Watch in the Night

1

Watchman, what of the night?—
Storm and thunder and rain,
Lights that waver and wane,
Leaving the watchfires unlit.
Only the balefires are bright,
And the flash of the lamps now and then
From a palace where spoilers sit,
Trampling the children of men.

2

Prophet, what of the night?—
I stand by the verge of the sea,
Banished, uncomforted, free,
Hearing the noise of the waves
And sudden flashes that smite
Some man’s tyrannous head,
Thundering, heard among graves
That hide the hosts of his dead.

3

Mourners, what of the night?—
All night through without sleep
We weep, and we weep, and we weep.
Who shall give us our sons?
Beaks of raven and kite,
Mouths of wolf and of hound,
Give us them back whom the guns
Shot for you dead on the ground.