The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Allusion to Elizabeth’s death.
It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected turn of events, by which Elizabeth’s crown had passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable
consequence of Elizabeth’s demise was happily averted. Cynthia (i.e. the moon) was the Queen’s recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greville, and Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fashion. ‘Fair Cynthia’s dead’ sang one.
Luna’s extinct; and now beholde the sunne
Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares,
wrote Henry Petowe in his ‘A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hearse of Dead Eliza,’ 1603. There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. One poet asserted that death ‘veiled her glory in a cloud of night.’ Another argued: ‘Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will shine in darkest night.’ A third varied the formula thus:
When winter had cast off her weed
Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh! light most fair. [148a]
At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his inheritance ‘not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone’ but to all Europe. [148b]
Allusions to Southampton’s release from prison.
‘The drops of this most balmy time,’ in this same sonnet, cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a springtide of rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned of the