My Gostly Fader is one in a group of minor miracles—with such things as The Bayley Berith the Bell Away; As Ever I Saw, Lullaby; Take, O Take Those Lips Away (second setting); As Dew in Aprylle, among others—composed within a two-week period in 1918 announcing the arrival of Peter Warlock in the full flush of his unique genius. The stylistic gaucheries of the early songs and the self-consciously hyper-aesthetic Modernism of the Saudades, composed under the mentorship of Bernard van Dieren, give way here to an idiom whose mingling of the archaic and contemporary, quaintness and immediacy, eldritch fantasy, and timeless directness remains unique in English song. Attempts to grasp the peculiar nature of that idiom by harmonic analysis and musicological probing, while of some interest (especially in tracing Warlock's modal inflections), seem tortuously grotesque beside its ineffable magic. This is all the more remarkable given the simplicity of means with which such an indelible impression is limned. Composed to a poem by Charles, Duc d'Orléans (1394-1465), it has been questioned whether the verse of "My Gostly Fader" is a translation from French, or Charles' own English. Captured in the French defeat at Agincourt in 1415, Charles spent the next 24 years as a prisoner of war, albeit in more or less luxurious circumstances, during which he wrote most of his nearly 500 poems. He appears, by the way, in Shakespeare's Henry V as a swaggering, boastful dandy and wit. Regaining his freedom in 1440, he returned to France "speaking better English than French," if the poem is, indeed, by Charles, it appears to have been written in English. Warlock is more circumspect, noting the poem as "An early 15th Century Rondel attributed to Charles d'Orléans." The "gostly," that is, "ghostly" or spiritual, "fader" is, of course, the father confessor. The confession—"How at a window (wot ye how?) I stale a cosse of grete swetenesse, Which don was out avisènesse..."—has been paraphrased by Michael Pilkington as "At a window—you know how?—I stole a sweet kiss; It was done without premeditation...." And the singer makes a vow that he shall "restore" it as soon as he may. The performing direction, "Moderato-rubato (declaim confidentially)," lends the business a conspiratorial tongue-in-cheek air. While one of Warlock's most popular songs in its piano accompanied version, despite its verbal obscurities, the string quartet arrangement, which followed soon after, deepens its pseudo-liturgical aura to delicious effect.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi