He conceives the idea of a parliament of the elements assembled to hear the complaint of Prometheus that his work is imperfect. He calls for help, and the Earth is invoked. But ‘Grandame Ops her grieved head did shake.’ She declares however that,
A plant shall from my wrinkled forehead spring
Which once enflamed with the stolne heavenly fire
Shall breath into this lifeless corse inspire.
Despite of Fate the elements combine to form the plant. Their work accomplished, it is found that Tellus had tempered too much terrene corruption in its composition. But for this
The man that tasted it should never die
But stand in record of eternitie.
Jupiter is enraged at the daring attempt to usurp his divine prerogative and banishes the plant to an unknown region. After long searching the graces discover it in the palace of the great Montezuma. They are royally entertained and wish for no greater happiness than to remain eternally regaling themselves with the vapour of the divine herb. Another flight of fancy reveals the ‘sweet and sole delight of mortal men’ as a nymph of Virginia receiving the visits of Jupiter clad in the garb of a shepherd. Juno, ever watchful over the movements of her lord, discovers the intrigue, and with threatening gesture storms at the poor thing and transforms her into the Indian weed.
It may be that the divine afflatus which Drayton, speaking of Marlowe, says, ‘rightly should possess a poet’s brain,’ imaging ‘those brave translunary things that the first poets had,’ had not yet descended upon the young poet of Grace Dieu. But it cannot be denied him that his diction is stately, and that at times he displays flashes of grandeur. Chalmers remarks of him that he brought to his task ‘a genius uncommonly fertile and commanding.’ All through his brief career he had yearned after a true poet’s renown. ‘No earthly gift,’ he wrote, ‘lasts after death but fame.’ And he sighed over the thought that all his labour should be left incomplete—‘That’s my vexation, that’s my only grief.’ His longing for posthumous fame Drayton tenderly notices in the following lines: