The composer and First World War poet Ivor Gurney wrote a little lament for Pan as the god of nature that reflects a common sense, at the close of the Great War, that much of the hope and revived interest in the Greek deity that had suffused British culture in late Victorian and Edwardian times had dissipated. In addition, the poem is as likely to reflect Gurney’s own sense of despair and professional frustration and failure in the early 1920s, as the depression that was to hospitalise him for the remainder of his life descended.
“What was dear to Pan is dear to him no more,
He answers prayers never- nor ever appears-
And so sore a loss is this to his lovers
They play never, the sweet reed sounds no more
In the oak coppice- or the Severn poplar shade
Silver hearted… softly wailing at eve,
The silent country folk no more bring gifts
They delighted in- nor the new pipe greenly made.”
Gurney, What was dear to Pan
I think there is an echo too of a common conceit in Gurney’s verse, that the Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire, once the site of many Roman villas, still bore traces of those ancient Roman settlers- although plainly in this case the incursions of the modern world were driving them away. Pan himself is affirmed as a beloved deity of farming folk, associated with music and green vegetation. The mood, though, is wistful, evocative of abandonment and loss.
Not all poets were convinced that Christianity and mechanical farming, transport (and warfare) had banished the Great God. The poet Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) wrote the poem Old and New to celebrate that very displacement of the old deities by Jesus, but (in my opinion anyway) he made the older ways sound like a lot more fun…
“Come, Hesper, and ye Gods of mighty waters,
Ye nymphs and Dryades,
Come, all the choir of white Pierian daughters,
And girls of lakes and seas,
Evoe! and Evoe lo! crying,
Fill all the earth and air ; Evoe Io!
And the hanging woods, replying,
Shall shout the echo there!
All day in breathless swoon or heavy slumber.
We lay among the flowers.
But now the stars break forth in countless number
To watch the dewy hours ;
And now lacchus, beautiful and glowing,
Adown the hill-side comes,
With tabrets shaken high, and trumpets blowing,
And resonance of drums.
The leopard-skin is round his smooth white shoulders,
The vine-branch round his hair ;
The eyes that rouse delight in maid-beholders,
Are glittering, glowworm-fair ;
The king of all the provinces of pleasure,
Lord of a wide domain,
He comes and brings delight that knows no measure,
A full Saturnian reign.
O take me, Maenads, to your foxskin-chorus.
Pink-lipped like volute-shells,
For I must follow where your chant sonorous
Roars down the forest-dells ;
The sacred frenzy rends my throat and bosom,
I shout, and whirl where He,
Our vine-god, tosses like some pale blood-blossom,
Borne on a windy sea.
Around the car, with streaming hair and frantic,
The Maenads and wild gods.
And shaggy fauns and wood-girls corybantic
Toss high the ivy-rods ;
Brown limbs with white limbs hotly intertwining
Whirl in a maddening dance.
Till, when at last Orion is declining,
We slip into a trance.
The satyr’s heart is faintly, faintly beating ;
The white-lipped nymph is mute ;
lacchus up the western slope is fleeting,
Uncheered by horn or lute ;
Hushed, hushed are all the shouting and the singing,
The rapture, the delight,
For out into the cold grey air upspringing,
The morning-star shines bright.”
Gosse, Old & New
Gosse’s verse is crammed with classical references. Hesper is Hesperus, the planet Venus in the evening and son of the dawn goddess Eos (or Aurora). The Pierides were the nine royal sisters who competed with the Muses song contest and, when they were defeated, were turned into birds. Iacchus is another name for Dionysos, and those ecstatic, frenzied sea nymphs, dryads and bacchae we’ve also met before. Evoe Io is the traditional cry of the maenads and bacchantes, an exclamation of joy addressed to and naming the divinities Dionysos and Isis. It was also used in poetry by Aleister Crowley, who more seriously desired to invoke Bacchus.
Gosse wanted to argue that the Dionysian revels had been suppressed and displaced (driven off by the ‘Morning Star,’ by whom he meant Jesus- whom he addressed in the second part of this poem, entitled A.D.). However, as I have demonstrated before, other poets did not want to abandon those dreams of freedom and unrestrained expression, so that- even after several millennia- we’re not yet fully prepared to accept that the Great God Pan and his entourage are truly dead.
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