OTHER POETS
1. Sir Thomas Wyat (1503–42) was descended from an ancient Yorkshire family which adopted the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. He was educated at Cambridge, and, entering the King’s service, was entrusted with many important diplomatic missions. In public life his principal patron was Thomas Cromwell, after whose death he was recalled from abroad and imprisoned (1541). Though subsequently acquitted and released, he died shortly afterward.
None of Wyat’s poems is very long, though in number they are considerable. The most numerous of them are his love-poems, ninety-six in all, which appeared in a compendium of the day called Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). The most noteworthy of these poems are the sonnets, the first of their kind in English, thirty-one in number. Of these, ten are written almost entirely in the Italian or Petrarchan form. In sentiment the shorter poems, and especially the sonnets, are serious and reflective; in style and construction they are often too closely imitative to be natural and genial; but as indications of the new scholastic and literary influences at work upon English, sweetening and chastening the earlier uncouthness, they are of the highest importance. Wyat’s epigrams, songs, and rondeaux are lighter than the sonnets, and they also reveal a care and elegance that were typical of the new romanticism. His Satires are composed in the Italian terza rima, once again showing the direction of the innovating tendencies.
2. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1518–47), whose name is usually associated in literature with that of Wyat, was the younger poet of the two. He was the son of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, and when his father became Duke of Norfolk (1524) the son adopted the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey. Owing largely to the powerful position of his father, Surrey took a prominent part in the Court life of the time, and served as a soldier both in France and Scotland. He was a man of reckless temper, which involved him in many quarrels, and finally brought upon him the wrath of the ageing and embittered Henry VIII. He was arrested, tried for treason, and beheaded on Tower Hill.
About 1542 Surrey began his literary relations with Wyat, who was his elder by fifteen years. His poems, which were the recreations of his few leisure moments, and which were not published till after his death (1557), appeared along with Wyat’s in Tottel’s Miscellany. They are chiefly lyrical, and include a few sonnets, the first of their kind, composed in the English or Shakespearian mode—an arrangement of three quatrains followed by a couplet. There are in addition a large number of love-poems addressed to a mysterious “Geraldine.” They are smoother than Wyat’s poems, and are much more poetical in sentiment and expression. His most important poem was published separately: Certain Bokes of Virgiles Æneis turned into English Meter (1557). Though the actual translation is of no outstanding merit, the form is of great significance; it is done in blank verse, rather rough and frigid, but the earliest forerunner of the great achievements of Shakespeare and Milton.
In the development of English verse Surrey represents a further stage: a higher poetical faculty, increased ease and refinement, and the introduction of two metrical forms of capital importance—the English form of the sonnet, and blank verse. We add a specimen of the earliest English blank verse. It is wooden and uninspired, but as a beginning it is worthy of attention.
But now the wounded quene with heavie care
Throwgh out the vaines doth nourishe ay the plage,
Surprised with blind flame, and to her minde
Gan to resort the prowes of the man
And honor of his race, whiles on her brest
Imprinted stake his wordes and forme of face,
Ne to her lymmes care graunteth quiet rest.
The next morowe with Phœbus lampe the erthe
Alightned clere, and eke the dawninge daye
The shadowe danke gan from the pole remove.
3. Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1536–1608), was born at Buckhurst, in Sussex, and was educated both at Oxford and Cambridge. He was called to the Bar, entered Parliament, took part in many diplomatic and public missions, and was created Lord Buckhurst in 1566. His plain speaking did not recommend itself to Elizabeth, and for a time he was in disgrace. He was restored to favor, created Lord High Treasurer, and made Earl of Dorset in 1604.
In bulk Sackville’s poetry does not amount to much, but in merit it is of much consequence. Two poems, The Induction and The Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, appeared in a miscellany called The Mirror for Magistrates (1555). Both are composed in the rhyme royal stanza, are melancholy and elegiac in spirit and archaic in language, but have a severe nobility of thought and a grandeur of conception and of language quite unknown since the days of Chaucer. The poems undoubtedly assisted Spenser in the composition of The Faerie Queene.
Sackville collaborated with Norton in the early tragedy of Gorboduc (see p. [77]).
We add a few stanzas from The Induction to illustrate the somber graphical power of the poem:
And, next in order, sad Old Age we found,
His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind,
With drooping cheer still poring on the ground,
As on the place where nature him assigned
To rest, when that the Sisters had untwined
His vital thread, and ended with their knife
The fleeting course of fast-declining life.
There heard we him, with broke and hollow plaint,
Rue with himself his end approaching fast,
And all for nought his wretched mind torment
With sweet remembrance of his pleasures past,
And fresh delights of lusty youth forwaste;[96]
Recounting which, how would he sob and shriek,
And to be young again of Jove beseek!
*****
Crook-backed he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed,
Went on three feet, and sometime crept on four;
With old lame bones, that rattled by his side;
His scalp all piled,[97] and he with eld forelore;
His withered fist still knocking at Death’s door;
Fumbling and drivelling as he draws his breath;
For brief, the shape and messenger of Death.
4. George Gascoigne (1535–77) is another of the founders of the great Elizabethan tradition. He was born in Bedfordshire, educated at Cambridge, and became a lawyer. Later in life he entered Parliament.
In addition to a large number of elegant lyrics, he composed one of the first regular satires in the language, The Steel Glass (1576). This poem has the additional importance of being written in blank verse. Among his other numerous works we can mention his tragedy Jocasta (1566), a landmark in the growth of the drama (see p. [77]); his Supposes (1566), an important early comedy which was the basis of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew; and Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse in English (1575), one of our earliest critical essays. In ease and versatility Gascoigne is typical of the best early Elizabethan miscellaneous writers.
5. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) was the chief of an elegant literary coterie, and exercised an influence which was almost supreme during his short life. He was the most commanding literary figure before the prime of Spenser and Shakespeare. Born in Kent of an aristocratic family, he was educated at Shrewsbury and Oxford, and then traveled widely. He took a brilliant part in the military-literary-courtly life common with the young nobles of the time, and at the early age of thirty-two was mortally wounded at Zutphen when assisting the Dutch against the Spaniards.
Sidney was successful in more than one branch of literature, but he owes his position chiefly to his collection of sonnets called Astrophel and Stella. Though they are strongly imitative of Italian sentiment, and are immature in thought and in general ideas, they are often remarkable for their flashes of real passion and their genuine poetical style. In metrical form they adopt the English scheme, and thus in another respect they foreshadow the great Shakespearian sonnets, to which alone they take second place.
6. Michael Drayton (1563–1631) represents the later epoch of Elizabethan literature. He was born in Warwickshire, studied at Oxford, was attached to a noble family as tutor, came to London about 1590, and for the remainder of his long life was busy in the production of his many poems.
His first book was a collection of religious poems called The Harmony of the Church (1591); then followed a number of long historical poems, which include England’s Heroical Epistles and The Barons’ Wars (1603). His Polyolbion is the most important of his longer poems, and belongs to a later period of his career. It is a long, careful, and tedious description of the geographical features of England, interspersed with tales, and written in alexandrines. His shorter poems, such as his well-known poem on Agincourt, and his verse tales and pastorals, such as The Man in the Moon and Nymphidia, are skillful and attractive. Drayton is rarely an inspired poet—the wonderful sonnet beginning “Since there’s no help” (see p. [152]) is perhaps his only poem in which we feel inspiration flowing freely—but he is painstaking, versatile, and sometimes (as in Nymphidia) delightful.
7. Thomas Campion (1567–1620) was born in London, educated at Cambridge, studied law in Gray’s Inn, but ultimately became a physician (1606). He wrote some masques that had much popularity, but his chief claim to fame lies in his attractive lyrics, most of which have been set to music composed partly by the poet himself. His best-known collections of songs were A Booke of Ayres (1601), Songs of Mourning (1613), and Two Bookes of Ayres (1613). Campion had not the highest lyrical genius, but he had an ear skillful in adapting words to tunes, the knack of sweet phrasing, and a mastery of complicated meters. He is one of the best examples of the accomplished poet who, lacking the highest inspiration of poetry, excels in the lower technical features.
The lyric of Campion’s that we add is typical not only of his own grace and melody, but also of the later Elizabethan lyrics as a whole. The ideas, in themselves somewhat forced and fantastic, are expressed with great felicity.
There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do grow;
There cherries grow that none may buy,
Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.
Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rose-buds fill’d with snow:
Yet them no peer nor prince may buy
Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.
Her eyes like angels watch them still;
Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threat’ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
These sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.
8. Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650) and Giles Fletcher (1588–1623) are usually associated in the history of literature. They were brothers, were both educated at Cambridge, and both took holy orders. Both were poetical disciples of Spenser.
Phineas Fletcher’s chief poem is The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man (1633), a curious work in twelve cantos describing the human body in an allegorical-descriptive fashion. There is much digression, which gives the poet some scope for real poetical passages. In its plan the poem is cumbrous and artificial, but it contains many descriptions in the Spenserian manner. The stanza is a further modification of the Spenserian, which it resembles except for its omission of the fifth and seventh lines.
Giles’s best-known poem is Christ’s Victorie and Triumph (1610), an epical poem in four cantos. The title of the poem sufficiently suggests its subject; in style it is glowingly descriptive, imaginative, and is markedly ornate and melodious in diction. It is said partly to have inspired Milton’s Paradise Regained. The style is strongly suggestive of Spenser’s, and the stanza conveys the same impression, for it is the Spenserian stanza lacking the seventh line.
The Fletchers are imitators, but imitators of high quality. They lack the positive genius of their model Spenser, but they have intensity, color, melody, and great metrical artistry.
9. John Donne (1573–1631) was born in London, the son of a wealthy merchant. He was educated at Oxford, and then studied law. Though he entered the public service and served with some distinction, his bent was always theological, and in 1616 he was ordained. In 1621 he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s.
Donne’s poetical works are probably more important than those composed in prose, valuable though the latter are. He began poetical composition with Satires (1593), forcible and picturesque, though crabbed and obscure in language. His other poems include The Progress of the Soul, his longest poem, composed about 1600; An Anatomy of the World (1611), a wild, exaggerated eulogy of a friend’s daughter, who had just died; and a large number of miscellaneous poems, including songs, sonnets, elegies, and letters in verse.
In his nature Donne had a strain of actual genius, but his natural gifts were so obscured with fitful, wayward, and exaggerated mannerisms that for long he was gravely underrated. His miscellaneous poems show his poetical features at their best: a solemn, half-mystical, half-fanatical religious zeal; a style of somber grandeur, shot with piercing gleams of poetical imagery; and an almost unearthly music of word and phrase. Often, and especially in the Satires, he is rough and obscure; in thought and expression he is frequently fantastic and almost ludicrous; but at his best, when his stubborn, melancholy humor is fired with his emotional frenzy, he is almost alone in his curious compound of gloom and brilliance, of ice and consuming fire. He is the last of the Elizabethans, and among the first of the coming race of the “Metaphysicals.”
His prose works comprise a large number of sermons, a few theological treatises, of which the greatest is The Pseudo-Martyr (1609), and a small number of personal letters. In its peculiar manner his prose is a reflex of his poetry. There is the same soaring and exaggerated imagery, the same fierce pessimism, and often the same obscurity and roughness. In prose his sentences are long and shapeless, but the cadence is rapid and free, and so is suited to the purposes of the sermon.
As a brief specimen of his poetical mannerisms, good and bad, we add the following sonnet. The reader will observe the rugged grandeur of the style and the curious intellectual twist that he gives to the general idea of the poem.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow:
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally;
And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.
Holy Sonnetts
10. Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) was born near Taunton in Somerset, educated at Oxford, and became tutor to the son of the Countess of Pembroke. For a time (1599) he was Poet Laureate, and was made (1603) Master of the Queen’s Revels by James I.
His poems include a sonnet-series called Delia (1592), a romance called The Complaint of Rosamund (1592), some long historical poems, such as The Civil Wars (1595), and a large number of masques, of which The Queenes Wake (1610) and Hymen’s Triumph (1615) are the most important. His best work appears in his sonnets, which, composed in the English manner, carry on the great tradition of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. In his longer poems he is prosy and dull, though the masques have pleasing touches of imagination.
11. The poetical miscellanies which abound during this period are typical of the time. By the very extravagance of their titles they reveal the enthusiasm felt for the revival of English poetry. Each volume consists of a collection of short pieces by various poets, some well known and others unknown. Some of the best poems are anonymous. Among much that is almost worthless, there are happily preserved many poems, sometimes by unknown poets, of great and enduring beauty. We have already drawn attention (p. [96]) to Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), which contained, among other poems, the pieces of Wyat and Surrey. Other volumes are The Paradyse of Daynty Devises (1576), A Handfull of Pleasant Delites (1584), The Phœnix Nest (1593), and The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). The last book contains poems by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Ralegh. The most important of the miscellanies is England’s Helicon (1600), which surpasses all others for fullness, variety, and excellence of contents.