NABOKV-L post 0020626, Sat, 28 Aug 2010 06:19:01 -0300

Trying to find more about "Atalanta stars" I checked Jonathan Swift, for
Stella and Vanessa (searching in vain after a way to joini star and
butterfly), but google led me to Swinburne's "Dolores" (heavily satirized in
"Ada" and a subject of former List postings).
Then I came to Swinburne's 1894 poem with the title "A Nympholept"* and to a
couple of 1912 music/verses inspired by this word ** and its woody
intimations - which also have captivated Humbert Humbert.


.........................................................
* (excerpts)


163. A Nympholept


By Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)




If truth be spoken of flowers and of waves that kiss,



Of clouds and stars that contend for a sunbright goal.

230


And yet may I dream that I dream not indeed of this?



..................
The terror that whispers in darkness and flames in light,



The doubt that speaks in the silence of earth and sea,



The sense, more fearful at noon than in midmost night,



Of wrath scarce hushed and of imminent till to be,

270


Where are they? Heaven is as earth, and as heaven to me



Earth: for the shadows that sundered them here take flight;



And naught is all, as am I, but a dream of thee.







** Arnold Bax, Tone Poem for Orchestra: Originally a work for solo piano,
Nympholept was completed in July 1912 and dedicated to Tobias Matthay, Bax's
piano teacher at the Royal Academy. Describing the work as a "poem for
piano," Bax inscribed at the top of the score the following program: "The
tale telleth how one walking at Summer-dawn in haunted woods was beguiled by
the nymphs, and, meshed in their shining and perilous dances was rapt away
for ever into the sunlight life of the wild-wood." At about the same time he
composed the music, Bax wrote a poem with the same title in which the
narrator "chased all day the elfin bride" through a forest.

Both the diminutive program of Nympholept and its musical language are
impressionistic, a characteristic of other tone poems of the time: Spring
Fire (1913), Happy Forest (1914), and Garden of Fand (1913, orchestrated
1916). Both Happy Forest and Spring Fire are concerned with extramusical
subject matter similar to that of Nympholept, and Bax's satisfaction with
them may have prompted him to orchestrate the piano score of Nympholept in
early 1915. That version he dedicated to Constant Lambertb Connections
between Garden of Fand and Nympholept become clear when we hear one of the
frenetic tunes from Nympholept expanded into the "Song of Immortal Love" in
Garden of Fand.

Bax headed the orchestrated version of Nympholept with the lines, "Enter
these enchanted woods / You who dare," explaining that the title, meaning
"captured by nymphs," is the title of a poem of 1894 by Algernon Swinburne.
The poem describes a "perilous pagan enchantment haunting the midsummer
forest." Nympholept was never performed during Bax's life, receiving its
premiere on May 31, 1961, at the Royal Academy of Music in London, given by
the Strolling Players under Terence Lovett.




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