James Elroy Flecker

Flecker, in his rooms at Cambridge

James Elroy Flecker (5 November 1884 – 3 January 1915) was an English poet, novelist and playwright. As a poet he was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.

Biography

Born on 5 November 1884 in Lewisham, London, and baptised Herman Elroy Flecker, Flecker later chose to use the first name "James", either because he disliked the name "Herman" or to avoid confusion with his father. "Roy", as his family called him, was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where his father was the headmaster, and later at Uppingham School. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there under John Addington Symonds, and became a close friend of the classicist and art historian John Beazley.[1]

From 1910 Flecker worked in the consular service in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a ship to Athens he met Helle Skiadaressi,[2] and in 1911 he married her.

Flecker died on 3 January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".[3]

Works and influence

The excerpt from Flecker's verse drama Hassan ... The Golden Journey to Samarkand inscribed on the clock tower of the barracks of the British Army's 22 Special Air Service regiment in Hereford provides an enduring testimony to Flecker's work:

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.[4]

The same inscription also appears on the NZSAS monument at Rennie Lines in the Papakura Military Camp in New Zealand.[5]

A character in the second volume of Anthony Powell's novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is said to be "fond of intoning" the lines For lust of knowing what we should not know / We take the Golden Road to Samarkand, without an attribution to Flecker.

Saki's short story "A Defensive Diamond" (in Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914) references "The Golden Journey to Samarkand".

Agatha Christie quotes Flecker several times, especially in her final novel, Postern of Fate.

Jorge Luis Borges quotes a quatrain from Flecker's poem "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence" in his essay "Note on Walt Whitman" (available in the collection Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952):

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Flecker's poem "The Bridge of Fire" features in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, in the volume The Wake, and Samarkand is quoted in volume World's End.

Nevil Shute quotes from Hassan in Marazan, his first published novel, and in the headings of many of the chapters in his 1951 novel Round the Bend.

Diana Rigg quotes an amended stanza (not the original) from Hassan in the 1969 film On Her Majesty's Secret Service as she looks out of the window of Piz Gloria at the sun rising over the Swiss alps:

Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn;
For thee the sunlight creeps across the lawn,
For thee the ships are drawn down to the waves,
For thee the markets throng with myriad slaves,
For thee the hammer on the anvil rings,
For thee the poet of beguilement sings.

The original in Flecker's play is more romantic, and makes clear that the Caliph is being addressed, not the Almighty:

Thy dawn O Master of the world, thy dawn;
The hour the lilies open on the lawn,
The hour the grey wings pass beyond the mountains,
The hour of silence, when we hear the fountains,
The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,
The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,
O Master of the world, the Persian Dawn.

That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:
Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,
The braves who fight thy war unsheathe the sabre,
The slaves who work thy mines are lashed to labour,
For thee the waggons of the world are drawn -
The ebony of night, the red of dawn!

Works

Poetry

Novels

Drama

  • Incidental music to the play was written by Frederick Delius in 1920, before the play's publication, and first performed in September 1923.[7]

Other

References

  1. ↑ "Beazley, J[ohn] D[avidson], Sir". Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved 14 June 2012.
  2. ↑ Walker, Heather. Roses and Rain (2006). Melrose Books. ISBN 1-905226-06-3
  3. ↑ "James Elroy Flecker, About.com". Classiclit.about.com. 1915-01-03. Retrieved 2014-08-23.
  4. ↑ The same extract appears on the UK SAS Memorial in Herefordshire (Popham, Peter (30 May 1996). "SAS confronts its enemy within". The Independent.)
  5. ↑ Staff (15 September 2009). "The Selected Few – Training in the SAS". New Zealand Army. External link in |publisher= (help)
  6. ↑ "Forty-Two Poems by James Elroy Flecker - Free Ebook". Gutenberg.net. 2002-01-01. Retrieved 2014-08-23.
  7. ↑ "Delius-hassan-review-1923". Thompsonian.info. 1923-09-29. Retrieved 2014-08-23.

Sources

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