Bridal Song

Description

From a twenty-first century perspective, the use of a war as a metaphor for the tender embrace of the wedding night is perplexing, if not shocking. Not so in Tudor times, when war was seen as a glorious act, and romantic love often compared, favourably, to conquest and colonization—pursuits that defined the age. The martial metaphor was a common trope in the work of the metaphysical poets, as seen in John Donne’s To His Mistress Going to Bed:

O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!

Anachronistic hand-wringing it may be, from our vantage point after centuries of the civilising process, but I cannot celebrate the idea of romantic love as domination, or of war as an uniquely honourable endeavour. Hence the song’s sinister tone. The accompaniment contains figurations inspired by the keyboard piece ‘The Battell’ from My Ladye Nevells Booke by the Tudor composer William Byrd.