I would also dispute that I am in any way seeking to judge the verses of Allingham purely by the standards of a different and later age. Even in the Victorian era we find Andrew Lang in his preface to the Lilac Fairy Book commenting on writers of the then-contemporary school, whose “fairies try to be funny and fail; or they try to preach and succeed.” The whimsical nature of Allingham’s poetry avoids the second trap by falling headlong into the first, as is instanced by the deliberately comic use of a word such as “gizzard” purely on the basis that it provides a rhyme for “wizard”. The texts employed by Stanford in A Fairy Day are full of such would-be humorous conceits.
Shakespeare really doesn’t enter into the equation, such poems as Where the bee sucks being employed for purely comic effect in a more extended narrative. There is plenty of scope for ‘light verse’ in this all-too-dismal world; but we shouldn’t make a habit of elevating it even by a ‘magic name’ such as Shakespeare to the standard of great literature, even when it can furnish the basis for effective musical setting (as Stanford certainly does in places in A Fairy Day). And Shakespeare did the same for Mendelssohn, of course, in such settings as Ye spotted snakes. In the next generation of English poetry, writers such as Belloc, Milne and Kipling achieve these humous effects with a much more assured touch totally defying the stiffest of upper lips.
But this has now strayed even further from the original discussion of Stanford’s music.
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