The Slipped Disc daily comfort zone (117): Where I wish to be

E. says:

This is sublime…and so English (“this elfin land”). Thank you for posting it.
Searching “Sea birds sleeping,”
I found a reminder that migrating sea-birds sleep in flight, and that many will sleep while floating…a regular sight in Lucerne.
Here is the text that Janet Baker sings.

The poem here is as sung in Sea Pictures.[2]

Italicised text indicates lines repeated in the song but not in the original poem.

Sea Slumber Song

Sea-birds are asleep,
The world forgets to weep,
Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song
On the shadowy sand
Of this elfin land;
“I, the Mother mild,
Hush thee, O my child,
Forget the voices wild!
Isles in elfin light
Dream, the rocks and caves,
Lulled by whispering waves,
Veil their marbles bright,
Foam glimmers faintly white
Upon the shelly sand
Of this elfin land;
Sea-sound, like violins,
To slumber woos and wins,
I murmur my soft slumber-song,
Leave woes, and wails, and sins,
Ocean’s shadowy might
Breathes good-night,
Good-night!”[3]

“The world forgets to weep.”

Edgar Self says:

A thousand thanks, E., for giving the words, as I got few from Dame Janet, admirable as she is. That curiously strangulated first high note, repeated, is so odd I don’t quite know what she means by it, though it sounds peculiarly like a minor voca l difficulty.

I Everyone but me evidently knows the poet’s name; I would like to know also, just for the record. Seabirds asleep like many brave men pn the bosom of th deeps is a fine ida confirmed by your Lucerne experience,– as fine a title as Mendelssohn’s haunting duet “Farewell Song of the Birds of Passage” — “Abshiedslied ddes Zugvoegel” or something like that.

This would make a good programme with Delius-Walt Whitman’s “Sea Drift” and some of Stanford’s Sea Songs and Shanties so well sung by baritone Gerald Finley, if not too much of a good thing, of which we cannot have enough.