The Wreckers
Deeply evocative and profoundly moving, poignantly exploring themes of life and death, grief and acceptance, The Wreckers is the haunting second single from Neil Gaiman & FourPlay String Quartet’s album Signs of Life, featuring a brand new and deeply stirring poem from Neil.
Neil brought this poem, written for a friend who had suffered a miscarriage, to a FourPlay rehearsal one day, asking if they’d like to set it to music. The band immediately set to work finding a musical expression to match the words. The music combines open harmonies with occasional, completely atonal clashes, creating a sense of space, to which Neil’s free verse - with its typical musicality - can breathe and find its own rhythm.
Fans of Neil Gaiman will revel in his narration of this stirring poem set to music which reflects and deepens the fragility and weight of these most human themes. Find out more: https://bio.to/NeilandFourPlay
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Hi Neil! We were talking about Puck of Pook's Hill in one of my seminars, and we were wondering if your Puck in The Sandman was inspired by that book?
Yes and no. Puck of Pook's Hill is hugely influential on me and the way I think about the land and Sussex, and I'm sure it was an influence on Sandman #19.
But my wild Puck is closer to the Robin Goodfellow of the ballad:
From Oberon, in fairy land,
The king of ghosts and shadows there,
Mad Robin I, at his command,
Am sent to view the night-sports here.
What revel rout
Is kept about,
In every corner where I go,
I will o'ersee,
And merry be,
And make good sport, with ho, ho, ho
More swift than lightning can I fly
About this airy welkin soon,
And, in a minute's space, descry
Each thing that's done below the moon.
There's not a hag
Or ghost shall wag,
Or cry, 'ware goblins! where I go;
But Robin I
Their feats will spy,
And send them home with ho, ho, ho!
Whene'er such wanderers I meet,
As from their night-sports they trudge home,
With counterfeiting voice I greet,
And call them on with me to roam:
Through woods, through lakes;
Through bogs, through brakes;
Or else, unseen, with them I go,
All in the nick,
To play some trick,
And frolic it, with ho, ho, ho!
Sometimes I meet them like a man,
Sometimes an ox, sometimes a hound;
And to a horse I turn me can,
To trip and trot about them round.
But if to ride
My back they stride,
More swift than wind away I go,
O'er hedge and lands,
Through pools and ponds,
I hurry, laughing, ho, ho, ho!
When lads and lasses merry be,
With possets and with junkets fine;
Unseen of all the company,
I eat their cakes and sip their wine!
And, to make sport,
I puff and snort:
And out the candles I do blow:
The maids I kiss,
They shriek—Who's this?
I answer nought but ho, ho, ho!
Yet now and then, the maids to please,
At midnight I card up their wool;
And, while they sleep and take their ease,
With wheel to threads their flax I pull.
I grind at mill
Their malt up still;
I dress their hemp; I spin their tow;
If any wake,
And would me take,
I wend me, laughing, ho, ho, ho!
When any need to borrow aught,
We lend them what they do require:
And, for the use demand we nought;
Our own is all we do desire.
If to repay
They do delay,
Abroad amongst them then I go,
And night by night,
I them affright,
With pinchings, dreams, and ho, ho, ho!
When lazy queans have nought to do,
But study how to cog and lie:
To make debate and mischief too,
'Twixt one another secretly:
I mark their gloze,
And it disclose
To them whom they have wronged so:
When I have done,
I get me gone,
And leave them scolding, ho, ho, ho!
When men do traps and engines set
In loop-holes, where the vermin creep,
Who from their folds and houses get
Their ducks and geese, and lambs and sheep;
I spy the gin,
And enter in,
And seem a vermin taken so;
But when they there
Approach me near,
I leap out laughing, ho, ho, ho!
By wells and rills, in meadows green,
We nightly dance our heyday guise;
And to our fairy king and queen,
We chant our moonlight minstrelsies.
When larks 'gin sing,
Away we fling;
And babes new born steal as we go;
And elf in bed
We leave in stead,
And wend us laughing, ho, ho, ho!
From hag-bred Merlin's time, have I
Thus nightly revelled to and fro;
And for my pranks men call me by
The name of Robin Good-fellow.
Fiends, ghosts, and sprites,
Who haunt the nights,
The hags and goblins do me know;
And beldames old
My feats have told,
So vale, vale; ho, ho, ho!
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