Published in 1938, Come Sleep is one of the best-loved of all Glanville-Hicks’s songs. The poem, which she thought was by John Fletcher (seen here in a portrait by an unknown artist), was published in the Oxford Book of English Verse in 1919 and has been set by others, including Rebecca Clarke, as simply “Sleep”. It derives from the play The Woman Hater, now attributed to both John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, published in 1607. Possibly its origins were unknown to Glanville-Hicks, who was simply attracted to a song about delight, pleasing dreams and abiding joys. But as a hymn to women’s wiles and as an example of a women using music to woo a man impervious to her charms, it seems fitting that it was published in the year Glanville-Hicks married Stanley Bate.
A song titled Ireland is the earliest extant work by Glanville-Hicks. In 1931 the Australian Musical News claimed it was a setting of Herrick, but the manuscript score reveals that the poem’s author was the Irish-born poet David McKee Wright. Taken from Wright’s “Dark Rosaleen” suite, it was published in An Irish Heart of 1918. The title refers to Wright’s own nostalgia for “my country”, having emigrated at the age of eighteen to New Zealand.