Remembered for his children's verse (e.g., The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, More Beasts for Worse Children), Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was an imposing presence in English life and letters from the turn of the century until all but silenced by a crippling stroke in 1941. His productions spanned history, politics, polemics, satire, fiction, and a body of exquisitely straightforward poetry, which, beloved by readers, has been critically ignored because it had the misfortune to appear in the same years with the self-consciously Modern utterances of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Warlock drew the poem "My Own Country" from Belloc's novel, The Four Men: A Farrago (1912), for the third of his Three Belloc Songs, composed in January 1927. E.J. Moeran, with whom Warlock shared a cottage in Eynsford, Kent, during the years 1925-1928, recalled departing Eynsford on a Friday, leaving Warlock with no work in hand, and returning the following Monday to find the three Belloc songs composed and completed. This is the more remarkable not only because the Eynsford years were notable for weekend binges in which the household was crowded with distinguished artists, rootless bohemians, and assorted riffraff up from London for the party, of which Warlock was a prankish master of revels, but because the Belloc songs are among their composer's finest, possessed of rare visionary prehensions and piquant turns illuminating, so to speak, Belloc's verse. It is the testament of a wayfarer—"I shall go without companions, And with nothing in my hand; I shall pass through many places That I cannot understand...." Copley, in The Music of Peter Warlock: A Critical Survey (London: Dobson, 1979), noted, "In the second verse, 'The trees that grow in my own country [Are the beech tree and the yew; Many stand together'], the accompaniment moves above the voice, and at the words 'And some stand few' there is a grateful modulation to A major. The sudden return to F at the word 'new' in 'All the woods are new' is a master stroke..." with the effect of sudden discovery, renewal, radiance. "When I get to my own country I shall lie down and sleep..." marks homecoming in a major sense, for "... then I shall dream for ever and all, A good dream and deep," a presentiment of death in which one's "own country" is recognized, for Belloc the militant Catholic, as Paradise. Conceived as a set, the Three Belloc Songs were published separately by Oxford University Press.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi