Page images
PDF
EPUB

of such

Elizabethans. Two that appeared before Spenser are the Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), edited by Popularity Richard Edwards, who, although no great collections poet, wrote one charming poem, and A of poems. Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), edited by Proctor and Roydon. The former book was immensely popular, and went through nine or ten editions in thirty years.

The cause of the publication and popularity of these miscellanies is to be found in the aversion that men had to publish their poems, and so to be known as poets. The calling of a poet, as such, had not in the early days of Elizabeth the fascination it acquired later. But the poetical inspiration that was beginning to be felt by men could not be repressed, and found outlet in the composition of many fine poems, which were published anonymously in the popular collections. When a soldier and a courtier like Philip Sidney avowed himself a poet and a man of letters, men's dislike to see their compositions in print grew less strong, and the excellence of the large output of verse during the reigns of Elizabeth and her successor is extraordinary.

The principal poets represented in Tottel's Miscellany are Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey.

Sir Thomas

the sonnet.

To Wyatt (1503-1542) belongs the honour of introducing a new form, that of the sonnet, to English poetry. It was the invention of the Italians, and was first written probably in the thirteenth cen- Wyatt and tury by Fra Guittone d' Arezzo. Dante and Petrarch followed him, and helped to perfect the form. Wyatt adapted it to the needs of the English tongue from those Italian poets, and in his structure of the sonnet he comes nearest that used by Petrarch (1304–1374). The sonnet1 is a short poem of fourteen lines, treating of one subject. One thought, one idea, or one emotion must run through it, must be, as it were, evolved in the course

1 The term sonnet is derived from the Italian sonetto, a short poem, the diminutive of suono, sound. It was originally recited to a musical accompaniment.

of the poem. It is divided into two parts of eight and six lines (iambic pentameters) respectively. The first part usually consists of two quatrains riming abba, abba, and from this there should be no departure; in the second part more license is permitted as regards the arrangement of the rimes, and poets greatly differ.1 Wyatt and his contemporary Surrey, and a few others, however, do not always, as will be seen by the examples given below, adhere strictly to the rules of the first part.

English poets have excelled in the writing of sonnets. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, to name only the greatest poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gave voice to some of their most beautiful thoughts in the sonnet; the eighteenth-century poets, with unimportant exceptions, left it aside. Wordsworth revived it in all its stately perfection early in the present century, and the form has been a favourite method of expression with most of the poets who have followed him.

The use of the sonnet marks a change in the poet's way of treating the subjects of his poems. Allegory and dreams are less favoured, a more personal lyric note is struck, and men voice aloud their own feelings, with more intensity, more introspection, and less simplicity than had been the custom of the older poets.

As an example of Wyatt's sonnet, let us take the following:

123456 7∞ a

My heart I gave thee, not to do it pain,
But to preserve, lo, it to thee was taken.

I served thee, not that I should be forsaken;
But, that I should receive reward again,
I was content thy servant to remain;
And not to be repaid after this fashion.

Now, since in thee there is none other reason,
Displease thee not, if that I do refrain,

9

Insatiate of my woe, and thy desire;

ΙΟ

Assured by craft for to excuse thy fault:

[subsumed][merged small][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed]

1 One example, at least, will be given of the sonnet as written by every great English poet who has used that form. Thus the student will be able at a glance to note the variations made by each writer.

[blocks in formation]

Such, then, was the earliest form in English poetry of the sonnet, the key with which, in Wordsworth's memorable words

Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody

Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief;
The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp,

It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand

The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains-alas, too few!

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1518-1547), spent much of his boyhood at Windsor in attendance on the king, Henry VIII., and was imprisoned there The Earl of in later life on account of his share in the Surrey. rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536). He accompanied the king on many expeditions to France, and was in 1545 made governor of Boulogne. It was suggested to Henry that Surrey and his father, the Duke of Norfolk, had designs on the throne. Surrey was therefore tried for treason on frivolous charges, and beheaded on Tower Hill in 1547. Norfolk escaped because Henry died before he had signed his death-warrant.

Like Wyatt, Surrey wrote under the influence of Italian poetry, and favoured the form of the sonnet. The Italians, with Petrarch at their head, had long been in the habit of addressing sonnets to ladies with whom they were not actually in love. The lady for whom Surrey wrote his love poems, and whom he called Geraldine, was Elizabeth

Fitzgerald, daughter of the Earl of Kildare, a little girl of ten. Through her mother, a granddaughter of Edward IV.'s queen, Elizabeth Woodville, she was first cousin to Henry VIII., and a pet child of the court. The following sonnet in praise of her will serve to show us how Surrey used that form:

I From Tuscan came my Lady's worthy race;
Fair Florence was sometime their ancient seat:
The western isle1, whose pleasant shore doth face
Wild Camber's' cliffs, did give her lively heat:
Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast:

234 SO M8

5

6 Her sire an Earl; her dame of Prince's blood. 7 From tender years, in Britain she doth rest,

9

ΙΟ

II

12

13

14

With King's child; where she tasteth costly food.
Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyne3:
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight*.
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine;
And Windsor alas! doth chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kind5; her virtues from above;
Happy is he that can obtain her love.

a

a

b

C

с

e

f

e

f

g

g

But Surrey, like Wyatt, introduced a new verse form into English poetry. Virgil and Horace had written in unrimed verse. The Italians of the Renaissance tried

Blank verse. to imitate them, and called such attempts untied or free verses. Surrey translated the second and fourth books of Virgil's Æneid into the unrimed verse we have named blank verse. An Italian poet had turned the same two books into Italian blank verse, and Surrey was doubtless acquainted with Gavin Douglas's translation of the Eneid into rimed heroics, the metre used later by Chapman for his translation of Homer's Odyssey. Thus the "mighty line" that was to have so great a part in our poetry, especially in our drama, was the outcome of the classical revival in Italy, and was first used by Surrey. In his hands, however, it was very different from what it be

[blocks in formation]

Yet all honour is

came with Marlowe and Shakespeare.1
due to the pioneer whose new invention has played, and
still plays, so important a part in our literature. As a
specimen of the earliest blank verse in our language, we
may take the following lines from the death of Laocoon
in the second book of the Æneid:—

Whiles Laocoon that chosen was by lot
Neptunus' priest, did sacrifice a bull,
Before the holy altar; suddenly

From Tenedon, behold! in circles great
By the calm seas come fleeting adders twain,
Which plied towards the shore (I loathe to tell)
With reared breast lift up above the seas:
Whose bloody crests aloft the waves were seen;
The hinder part swam hidden in the flood.
Their grisly backs were linked manifold.
With sound of broken waves they gat2 the strand,
With glowing eyne3 tainted with blood and fire;

Whose waltring tongues did lick their hissing mouths.

Another contributor to Tottel's volume was Lord Vaux. His chief poem in it is the Image of Death. Some verses from it are quoted by the grave-digger in Shakespeare's Hamlet (v. 1).

II. The "Mirror for Magistrates".

"Mirror for Magis

The influence of Wyatt and Surrey, however, was not to bear fruit immediately. The greatest poem of this period, the Mirror for Magistrates, follows Sackville's Chaucer and the fifteenth-century poets in form and manner. It was planned about by William Baldwin on the model of Lydgate's Falls of Princes. The events of the last few years had clearly

1555

trates

1 In our early blank verse there is a great monotony, chiefly because the cæsura (pause) always occurs in the same place, and in each line the sense is usually complete. Marlowe gave variety by placing the pause wherever it was most convenient, Shakespeare carried on a like plan, often adding an extra syllable, and Milton sometimes has two pauses in the line. 2 reached.

3 eyes.

« PreviousContinue »