The Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery is best known for her novels, particularly Anne of Green Gables. Anyone who has read her fiction will have come across her beautiful descriptions of rosy sunsets and shining waters; it will therefore come as no surprise that Montgomery also wrote poetry. In this guest blog post, Ruth Carlyle discusses the process of selecting poems and commissioning me to set them to music.
This year is the 150th anniversary of the birth of L. M. Montgomery. I have loved her novels since I was a child. Re-reading the Anne series with my mother-in-law and her mother also formed part of the bonding with my new family on my marriage. Being able to sing some of her words seemed a logical next step in tribute to the author.
I selected four of Montgomery’s poems from her 1916 poetry collection The Watchman and Other Poems. Taking poems from within this collection meant that they were poems for which Montgomery herself wanted to be remembered (rather than poems she had published as fillers in magazines) and also they were out of copyright under Canadian/US laws as well as UK copyright law. Montgomery’s poems published between 1925 and her death in 1942 are still covered by US copyright.
The first poem that I selected is ‘The Old Home Calls’. This poem was cited by the Saturday Review on announcing Montgomery’s death in 1942 as evoking ‘the spirit of her work’ and the closing verse of the poem is included in the article:
‘I keep for you all your childhood dreams, your gladness and delights,
The joy of days in the sun and rain, the sleep of care-free nights,
All the sweet faiths ye have lost and sought again shall be your own,
Darlings come to my empty heart – I am old and still and alone!’
David Barton accepted a commission to set this poem and also one that I felt reflected the need to take time away from the pace of the modern world ‘Come, Rest Awhile’. I approached Tim Knight to work on two further poems, ‘In An Old Town Garden’ and ‘A Request’. As a set, I felt that the poems reflected Montgomery’s love of home, landscape and gardens and were representative of the styles used in her poetry.
With the settings, I wanted to have an art song style that would be sympathetic to the early 20ᵗʰ century texts. There are many Montgomery fans around the world and the music needed to provide sufficient space for the words to come through clearly. Montgomery does not always write in a regular pattern: with ‘The Old Home Calls’ there are seven stresses in each line, but a variation between 15, 16 and 17 syllables. To allow the music to dance with long and varying lines, David played different options to me and we selected a slightly unusual 15/8 time signature to go with the flow of the poem.
David and I recorded the four song settings as an EP The Old Home Calls: song settings of poems by L. M. Montgomery. The songs were recorded professionally at the Summerfield Recording Studio, but it is not a commercial project and, alongside availability through the major music platforms, there are free listening options on Soundcloud and YouTube. Find our how to listen here.
We hope that you enjoy the song settings. If you would like to know more about tributes to L. M. Montgomery in her 150th anniversary year, do follow #Maud150 on social media.
If you’d like to find out more about commissioning me, click here.
Published 30.10.24
