Off the Beaten Track #10: The Seafarer by Tim Benjamin

From the album Paths of Exile by Kantos Chamber Choir, conducted by Ellie Slorach

The Seafarer is an Old English poem, written in Anglo Saxon, which is preserved in The Exeter Book, a collection of manuscripts which probably dates back to the late tenth century. The Exeter Book was donated to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter in 1072, and is of such importance to our understanding of Anglo Saxon poetry that in 2016 it was listed by UNESCO as one of ‘the world’s principal cultural artefacts’, due to its status as the ‘foundation volume of English literature.’

Since it was first translated into modern English in 1842, there have been over 60 different translations of The Seafarer in eight different languages, probably the most notable of which is by American poet Ezra Pound, published in 1911, an interpretation rather than a literal translation. The poem has inspired various classical composers, including Sally Beamish who has written three pieces based on the text – for string trio and narrator; solo violin; and a concerto for viola and orchestra. The composer, director and writer Tim Benjamin has written a new setting of the poem for male voices with an ‘immersive audio soundtrack’, which has been recorded by Kantos Chamber Choir, conducted by Ellie Slorach on their new release Paths of Exile. The Choir’s most recent concert was themed around the sea, and music from the new recording was played in the foyer of Manchester’s Stoller Hall beforehand. Paths of Exile also features a setting of The Wanderer, another poem from The Exeter Book, which will be reviewed in the Off the Beaten Track series at a later date.

There has been a great deal of scholarly debate as to: whether The Seafarer is a secular or religious poem; whether there are two voices in dialogue or a single voice expressing mixed emotions; whether it was written by one poet or is the work of two poets, the second of whom is more overtly religious than the first. Some versions delete the final section of the poem which ends with an ‘Amen’ like a prayer, so that the poem becomes largely about human struggle and the ambiguous relationship the seafarer has with the sea, rather than a religious homily. The American poet Ezra Pound uses the shortened version, as does the English translator A.S. Kline who ends at line 99 (out of 125), ‘for artistic coherence, and from lack of sympathy for the undistinguished ending of the manuscript.’ Benjamin adapts Kline’s translation by translating words such as ‘mew’ into the modern English ‘gull’, and more generally to clarify the meaning for the contemporary listener, also changing some words to make them sing better. Perhaps more significantly, ‘Lord’ becomes ‘lord’, suggesting a secular power rather than a religious one. Benjamin elegantly and succinctly summarises The Seafarer as a poem that,

“… captures a sense of melancholic and spiritual connection to the Earth, and is told from the perspective of a seafarer, reminiscing and evaluating his life. His hardships – physical and mental – on the sea are described in vivid detail, and drawn in contrast to the lives of men on land who he imagines surrounded by friends, free from danger, and with ready access to food and wine.” 

Benjamin uses an austere musical language, partly to illustrate the hardships that the seafarer suffers, but also to create musical lines that match the ruggedness of the original poetry, and to reflect the musical idiom from over a thousand years ago when the poem was written by an anonymous poet. The text is delivered mostly by a single male voice, accompanied by low-voiced drones and chords. In the score, Benjamin stresses that the words should always be sung, ‘in speech rhythm, like plainsong, without a strict beat.’ In emails to Nick Holmes Music, Benjamin clarified that the note lengths – minims and crotchets – simply indicate that some notes are slightly longer than others, and that the bar lines mark breaks between phrases rather than rhythm divisions,

‘it’s important to note that the score is, like for example much ancient music, quite a small component of the final rendition. Contrast with much other music, where the score is king!’

It’s interesting to note that there are some religious overtones in this recording. The use of plainsong is associated with Christian church music until the ninth century and beyond, before the advent of polyphony. The long echo on the main solo voice suggests that it was recorded in a large acoustic like a church or a cathedral. The use of the Gregorian psalm tone known as the tonus peregrinus links back to Psalm 114 (or 113) with which it is often associated. And the use of low male-voice drones evokes the religious music of Sir John Tavener, who died in 2013.

The secular aspects of Benjamin’s setting include a recorded soundscape of the sea in which the poem is bathed and which is integral to the work and the recording. We also hear the voices of the seabirds that accompany the seafarer’s solitary journey, and the cuckoo heard from nearby land singing, ‘with melancholy voice/Summer’s watchman.’ Without the final more didactic ending of the original poem there is a sense of the passage of time marking the ephemeral nature of human life. The setting passes from the ‘cold clasp’ and ‘snow from the north’ of Winter, through to Spring when ‘the world quickens,’ to Summer when ‘fields grow fair.’ Summer brings the hope of eternity, when man’s fame will ‘ever live with the angels,’ but at the end we return to the melancholy of the opening, albeit in a very different context; the struggle of one individual is replaced by more universal sorrow for the vanity of humanity, a common literary trope expressed for instance in the early nineteenth century poem, Ozymandias by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; compare Shelley’s words,

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains…’

with these words from The Seafarer,

‘The days are gone,
All the glory of earthly riches;
Now are no kings
Nor Caesars,
Nor gold-givers
As once there were’

If Benjamin concentrates on the poem’s humanity, rather than seeing it as a metaphorical journey into the Afterlife, this superb recording equals his ambition. There is heightened emotion in the anguished word-painting of passages like, ‘Ever the eagle screamed/Sea foam-feathered/No bright companion there to comfort the careworn soul’ in Part 2. In Part 5, there’s an explosion of passion in the agonised cry, ‘Wretched outcasts/Widest must wander.’ Although Benjamin makes no explicit link with the current displacement of peoples across the world, he does have compassion for his subject, stating that, ‘the poem is a powerful meditation on loneliness and ‘outsiderness’’

This recording by Kantos Chamber Choir draws out both the humanity of the music and its asceticism, the sense that the seafarer is a secular martyr to his fate on the cruel sea, preferring it to the more comfortable joys on land.

Performers

Kantos Chamber Choir: Jonny Hill (main soloist on The Wanderer), James Connolly (main soloist on The Seafarer), Henry Saywell, Edmund Phillips; conductor Ellie Slorach.

Paths of Exile is out now. Tim Benjamin’s setting of The Wanderer is discussed here.