Fand Catalogue

Beauty’s Hour

Four John Drinkwater Songs

for voice and piano

John Mitchell

£9.95

Although his work is somewhat out of fashion now, John Drinkwater (1882–1937) was best known in his time as a dramatist and poet. In the latter capacity he was one of the Dymock Poets – a loose literary group that also included Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Wilson Gibson, centred around the Gloucestershire village of Dymock between 1913 and 1915. Accordingly, perhaps it comes as no surprise that much of Drinkwater’s verse deals with rural subject matter, and indeed two of the song lyrics in Beauty’s Hour are in this category.

Three of the four set poems are of a lighter nature, in contrast to Birthright which laments how the transience of beauty has been with mankind since time immemorial. The last song in the group, Mamble, alludes to a real village of that name in Worcestershire, and with the lyric being of a mildly preposterous nature, its setting as something in the style of a music hall romp seemed rather appropriate!

Sample pages

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Catalogue code: FM262 • Published: 26th February 2023
Entry last updated: 26th February 2023