[2] In original "tencrease," and below "timbrace." This substitution of elision for slur or hiatus (found in Chaucerian MSS.) passed later into the t' and th' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Wyatt's awkwardness is not limited to the decasyllable, but some of his short poems in short lines recover rhythmical grace very remarkably, and set a great example.
Surrey is a far superior metrist. Neither in his sonnets, nor in his various stanzas composed of heroics, nor in what may be called his doggerel metres—the fatally fluent Alexandrines, fourteeners, and admixtures of both, which dominated English poetry from his time to Spenser's, and were never quite rejected during the Elizabethan period—do we find evidence of the want of ear, or the want of command of language, which makes Wyatt's versification frequently disgusting. Surrey has even no small mastery of what may be called the architecture of verse, the valuing of cadence in successive lines so as to produce a concerted piece and not a mere reduplication of the same notes. And in his translations of the Æneid (not published in Tottel's Miscellany) he has the great honour of being the originator of blank verse, and blank verse of by no means a bad pattern. The following sonnet, combined Alexandrine and fourteener, and blank verse extract, may be useful:—
(Complaint that his lady after she knew of his love kept her face alway hidden from him.)
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"I never saw my lady lay apart Her cornet black, in cold nor yet in heat, Sith first she knew my grief was grown so great; Which other fancies driveth from my heart, That to myself I do the thought reserve, The which unwares did wound my woeful breast. But on her face mine eyes mought never rest Yet, since she knew I did her love, and serve Her golden tresses clad alway with black, Her smiling looks that hid[es] thus evermore And that restrains which I desire so sore. So doth this cornet govern me, alack! In summer sun, in winter's breath, a frost Whereby the lights of her fair looks I lost."[3] |
[3] As printed exactly in both first and second editions this sonnet is evidently corrupt, and the variations between the two are additional evidence of this. I have ventured to change "hid" to "hides" in line 10, and to alter the punctuation in line 13. If the reader takes "that" in line 5 as = "so that," "that" in line 10 as = "which" (i.e. "black"), and "that" in line 11 with "which," he will now, I think, find it intelligible. Line 13 is usually printed:
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"In summer, sun: in winter's breath, a frost." |
Now no one would compare a black silk hood to the sun, and a reference to line 2 will show the real meaning. The hood is a frost which lasts through summer and winter alike.
(Complaint of the absence of her lover being upon the sea.)
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"Good ladies, ye that have your pleasures in exile, Step in your foot, come take a place, and mourn with me a while. And such as by their lords do set but little price, Let them sit still: it skills them not what chance come on the dice. But ye whom love hath bound by order of desire, To love your lords whose good deserts none other would require, Come ye yet once again and set your foot by mine, Whose woeful plight and sorrows great, no tongue can well define."[4] |