A History of Elizabethan Literature - Saintsbury George

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and as containing much of that personal puzzlement which rejoices critics, has had much attention of late years, is not strictly a collection of sonnets; its poems being longer and of differing stanzas. But in general character it falls in with the sonnet-collections addressed or devoted to a real or fanciful personage. It is rather satirical than panegyrical in character, and its poetical worth is very far from high. William Percy, a friend of Barnes (who dedicated the Parthenophil to him), son of the eighth Earl of Northumberland, and a retired person who seems to have passed the greater part of a long life in Oxford "drinking nothing but ale," produced a very short collection entitled Cœlia, not very noteworthy, though it contains (probably in imitation of Barnes) one of the tricky things called echo-sonnets, which, with dialogue-sonnets and the like, have sometimes amused the leisure of poets. Much more remarkable is the singular anonymous collection called Zepheria. Its contents are called not sonnets but canzons, though most of them are orthodox quatorzains somewhat oddly rhymed and rhythmed. It is brief, extending only to forty pieces, and, like much of the poetry of the period, begins and ends with Italian mottoes or dedication-phrases. But what is interesting about it is the evidence it gives of deep familiarity not only with Italian but with French models. This appears both in such words as "jouissance," "thesaurise," "esperance," "souvenance," "vatical" (a thoroughly Ronsardising word), with others too many to mention, and in other characteristics. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his most valuable collection of these sonneteers, endeavours to show that this French influence was less uncommon than has sometimes been thought. Putting this aside, the characteristic of Zepheria is unchastened vigour, full of promise, but decidedly in need of further schooling and discipline, as the following will show: —

      "O then Desire, father of Jouissance,

      The Life of Love, the Death of dastard Fear,

      The kindest nurse to true persèverance,

      Mine heart inherited, with thy love's revere. [?]

      Beauty! peculiar parent of Conceit,

      Prosperous midwife to a travelling muse,

      The sweet of life, Nepenthe's eyes receipt,

      Thee into me distilled, O sweet, infuse!

      Love then (the spirit of a generous sprite,

      An infant ever drawing Nature's breast,

      The Sum of Life, that Chaos did unnight!)

      Dismissed mine heart from me, with thee to rest.

      And now incites me cry, 'Double or quit!

      Give back my heart, or take his body to it!'"

      This cannot be said of the three remarkable collections yet to be noticed which appeared in this year, to wit, Constable's Diana, Daniel's Delia, and Drayton's Idea. These three head the group and contain the best work, after Shakespere and Spenser and Sidney, in the English sonnet of the time. Constable's sonnets had appeared partly in 1592, and as they stand in fullest collection were published in or before 1594. Afterwards he wrote, like others, "divine" sonnets (he was a Roman Catholic) and some miscellaneous poems, including a very pretty "Song of Venus and Adonis." He was a close friend of Sidney, many of whose sonnets were published with his, and his work has much of the Sidneian colour, but with fewer flights of happily expressed fancy. The best of it is probably the following sonnet, which is not only full of gracefully expressed images, but keeps up its flight from first to last – a thing not universal in these Elizabethan sonnets: —

      "My Lady's presence makes the Roses red,

      Because to see her lips they blush for shame.

      The Lily's leaves, for envy, pale became;

      And her white hands in them this envy bred.

      The Marigold the leaves abroad doth spread;

      Because the sun's and her power is the same.

      The Violet of purple colour came,

      Dyed in the blood she made my heart to shed.

      In brief all flowers from her their virtue take;

      From her sweet breath, their sweet smells do proceed;

      The living heat which her eyebeams doth make

      Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed.

      The rain, wherewith she watereth the flowers,

      Falls from mine eyes, which she dissolves in showers."

      Samuel Daniel had an eminently contemplative genius which might have anticipated the sonnet as it is in Wordsworth, but which the fashion of the day confined to the not wholly suitable subject of Love. In the splendid "Care-charmer Sleep," one of the tournament sonnets above noted, he contrived, as will be seen, to put his subject under the influence of his prevailing faculty.

      "Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,

      Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,

      Relieve my anguish, and restore the light,

      With dark forgetting of my cares, return;

      And let the day be time enough to mourn

      The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth;

      Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn

      Without the torment of the night's untruth.

      Cease, Dreams, th' imag'ry of our day-desires,

      To model forth the passions of the morrow,

      Never let rising sun approve you liars,

      To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.

      Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;

      And never wake to feel the day's disdain."

      But as a rule he is perhaps too much given to musing, and too little to rapture. In form he is important, as he undoubtedly did much to establish the arrangement of three alternate rhymed quatrains and a couplet which, in Shakespere's hands, was to give the noblest poetry of the sonnet and of the world. He has also an abundance of the most exquisite single lines, such as

      "O clear-eyed rector of the holy hill,"

      and the wonderful opening of Sonnet XXVII., "The star of my mishap imposed this pain."

      The sixty-three sonnets, varied in different editions of Drayton's Idea, are among the most puzzling of the whole group. Their average value is not of the very highest. Yet there are here and there the strangest suggestions of Drayton's countryman, Shakespere, and there is one sonnet, No. 61, beginning, "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part," which I have found it most difficult to believe to be Drayton's, and which is Shakespere all over. That Drayton was the author of Idea as a whole is certain, not merely from the local allusions, but from the resemblance to the more successful exercises of his clear, masculine, vigorous, fertile, but occasionally rather unpoetical style. The sonnet just referred to is itself one of the very finest existing – perhaps one of the ten or twelve best sonnets in the world, and it may be worth while to give it with another in contrast: —

      "Our flood's Queen, Thames, for ships and swans is crowned;

      And stately Severn for her shore is praised.

      The crystal Trent for fords and fish renowned;

      And Avon's fame to Albion's cliffs is raised;

      Carlegion Chester vaunts her holy Dee;

      York many wonders of her Ouse can tell.

      The Peak her Dove, whose banks so fertile be;

      And Kent will say her Medway doth excel.

      Cotswold commends her Isis to the Tame;

      Our northern borders boast of Tweed's fair flood

      Our western parts extol their Wily's fame;

      And the old Lea brags of the Danish blood.

      Arden's sweet Ankor, let thy glory be

      That fair Idea only lives by thee!"

      "Since

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