The Rising of Music’s New Dawn

I am weary of high-born people,
Of men with milky hands,
Of idle malignant women,
And a life none understands,
And the mountainless horizons
Of these burning alien lands.

 I will go back to my country
To live with Ireland’s poor,
To eat at a kitchen table,
(And my friend lying drunk on the floor)
While chickens and geese and turkeys
Are scratching about the floor.

 There the dream-grey eyes of the humble
Will pour kind mist on my pain,
And the sea’s old sleepy rustle,
The soft sigh of the rain,
And the blessed scent of the turf-smoke
Will give me content again.

Knowing well Quadrant’s commitment to the publication of quality verse, it seems fitting to commence the magazine’s inaugural music pages with this 1910 poem, “A Summer in Exile”. It is by the English composer Arnold Bax, unpublished until 1979 and written near Lubny, a small locality halfway between Kiev and Kharkov. Bax was drawn to Imperial Russia in the pursuit of love, chasing the affections of a…