I’ve always found the Lament for Boromir one of Tolkien’s most beautiful poems but the way it’s sung by the Clamavi De Profundis musical group brings out subtleties in its composition that I’d never paused over on the page. Their sensitivity to Tolkien’s expressive handling of a difficult metre has changed the way I say the poem to myself.

Essentially, I think, the metre is a freely handled iambic heptameter, with frequent substitution of trochees (feet of two stresses) or other non-iambic feet for the iambs. The problem with the heptameter line is that it can easily fall into a kind of mechanical gallop that gives each line a similar cadence that flattens out meaning and expressiveness. Tolkien has resisted this by varying the metre. Usually this means slowing the movement by runs of stressed syllables (‘long grass grows’, ‘West Wind comes walking’, ‘saw him walk’, ‘saw him then no more’, ‘North Wind may have heard’, ‘high walls westward’) or by introducing an additional stressed syllable (‘ride over’); sometimes it means lightening and speeding it by runs of unstressed syllables, very obviously in line three, where we have three extra unstressed syllables. The Clamavi De Profundis singers emphasise this by sounding each word and syllable clearly and distinctly and pausing between phrases so that we feel the unique aural contour each individual phrase has, as well as how the underlying metre gives pattern to the stanza as a whole. They help us see the lovely way in which Tolkien has made separate, specific moments of memory and feeling flow together in a single powerful expression of love, yearning, grief and compassion.

The music Clamavi De Profundis have added to the poem is moving and beautiful in itself but what’s most beautiful about it is the way it makes Tolkien’s words stand out and bathes itself in the light of their meanings. Paused over in reading or as sung by Clamavi De Profundis each phrase seems to hang in the air, simple in itself but richly and multiply evocative, reaching beyond Aragorn and Legolas to the imagined feelings of Denethor and the city of Minas Tirith, bringing in the winds, the waters, the grass, the whole order of nature as living forces surrounding the actions and fates of men. Ceremonial patterning, archaisms in the expression and the use of mythic or fairytale personifications help free Boromir’s death from mere particularity and give it an archetypal significance.

To my mind, it’s in the second stanza that the interweaving of different kinds of poetic appeal is at its most intense, most imaginatively enlarging. On the one hand there’s a wonderfully vivid snapshot panorama of the southern half of the book’s geography. Feeling the wind, hearing the gulls, seeing the sandhills and the stones, you almost smell the salt of the southern sea in a quite literal and physical way before the panorama becomes vaster and more visionary with ‘the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky’. In the third stanza, this movement into vastness reaches a temporal culmination with ‘until the end of days’. Against these enormous reaches of space and time, poignantly contrasting with them, we have the intimate particularity of  ‘where now is Boromir’, of this night, this evening, today, on the walls or at the gate of Minas Tirith where a single speaker yearns for the news of a living Boromir that will never come. I don’t see how we can help thinking of Denethor in this context, but behind him there’s a shadowy army of admirers and people for whom Boromir is the hope for the city’s defense, each feeling his absence in their own way (it’s like a Greek chorus, whose members speak of themselves in the first person singular). There’s a different kind of vastness in the evocation of numberless deaths in this second stanza, so that the particular lament of Aragorn and Legolas is momentarily held in tension with the way that for the wind Boromir’s death is just another in an endless tale. I think there’s a double action too to the marvellous animating of the natural world as wind, sea, shore and stormy sky become as much sentient, living presences as the different kinds of people we meet in the book. Though for a moment or on one level it may diminish the individual death by setting it in such a huge context, the poem’s insistent return to Boromir as a unique loss absorbs these other forces into a chorus of implicit lamentation.

Here’s Tolkien’s text:

……….Aragorn sang:

Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass grows
The West Wind comes walking, and about the walls it goes.
‘What news from the West, O wandering wind, do you bring to me tonight?
Have you seen Boromir the Tall by moon or by starlight?
‘I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey,
I saw him walk in empty lands until he passed away
Into the shadows of the North, I saw him then no more.
The North Wind may have heard the horn of the son of Denethor,
‘O Boromir! From the high walls westward I looked afar,
But you came not from the empty lands where no men are.’

……….Then Legolas sang:

From the mouths of the Sea the South Wind flies, from the sandhills and the stones,
The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moans.
‘What news from the South, O sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?
Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.
‘Ask not of me where he doth dwell – so many bones there lie,
On the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky,
So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing Sea.
Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!’
‘O Boromir! Beyond the gate the seaward road runs south,
But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey sea’s mouth’.

……….Then Aragorn sang again:

From the Gate of Kings the North Wind rides, and past the roaring falls,
And clear and cold about the tower its loud horn calls.
‘What news from the North, O mighty wind, do you bring to me today?
What news of Boromir the bold? For he is long away.’
‘Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought,
His cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.
His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest,
And Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, bore him upon its breast.
‘O Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gaze,
To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of days.’