Bruce Blunt (1899-1957) enters Warlock's biography via a press clipping pasted into his diary for February 1927 noting that he and Blunt had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Cadogan Street, and fined 10 shillings each for shouting and singing. Blunt was far more than a drinking buddy. During Warlock's last years, as inspiration and money disappeared, collaboration as Warlock's lyricist brought out the composer's best in startlingly disparate ways. Bethlehem Down and The First Mercy, both composed in 1927, are among the finest carols of the 20th century, while The Cricketers of Hambledon tantalizingly hovers between satire and beefy earnestness. But it is in the Frostbound Wood (1929) and The Fox (1930) that Warlock's oeuvre takes a new turn, musically sparer but a more freighted, touching human experience no longer trippingly or with winsome sentiment, but with stark power etched in bitters. Not since the protracted composition of The Curlew, completed in 1922, had he ventured into this perilous psychic terrain, through which the Frostbound Wood strikes more deeply and disturbingly. Where The Curlew is a visionary litany to failed love, a concatenation of dark hymns to alienation and despair, Frostbound Wood mixes betrayal, loss, and remorse with Warlock's lifelong fascination with the Virgin in a surreal mysticism. An occasional, rather than voluminous, poet, Blunt's lyrics articulate Warlock's deepest inwardness, spurring an uncanny resonance. "Mary that was the Child's mother Met me in the frostbound wood... She who once was Heaven's chosen Moved in loneliness to me, With a slow grace and weary beauty Pitiful to see." Here is the end of those radiant prehensions of the "mayden that is makèles" (As Dew in Aprylle), and also of all those ladies "sweet and kind" glimpsed over the years in There is a Lady, Passing By, and After Two Years, among others. "Past she went with no word spoken, Past the grave of Him I slew, Myself the sower of the woodland And my heart the yew." Irish composer Denis ApIvor (1916-2004), who made a career of editing the disjecta membra of the Warlock/van Dieren circle, opined that, at the end, Warlock "did not have the technique or the sense of direction to move into new fields and exploit new attitudes towards composition, which would have involved some sort of linguistic extension, some inquiry into what his language had been and why it no longer satisfied him or seemed appropriate." The Frostbound Wood provides a compelling refutation.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi