Part 1

# Minor Poems of Michael Drayton ### By Drayton, Michael

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MINOR POEMS OF MICHAEL DRAYTON

CHOSEN AND EDITED BY CYRIL BRETT

OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1907

Henry Frowde, M.A. Publisher to the University of Oxford London, Edinburgh, New York and Toronto

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE iv

INTRODUCTION v

SONNETS (1594) 1

SONNETS (1599) 28

SONNETS (1602) 42

SONNETS (1605) 47

SONNETS (1619) 51

ODES (1619) 56

ODES (1606) 85

ELEGIES (1627) 88

NIMPHIDIA (1627) 124

THE QUEST OF CYNTHIA 144

THE SHEPARDS SIRENA 151

THE MUSES ELIZIUM (1630) 161

SONGS FROM THE SHEPHERD'S GARLAND (1593) 231

SONGS FROM THE SHEPHERD'S GARLAND (1605) 240

SONGS FROM THE SHEPHERD'S GARLAND (1606) 242

APPENDIX 248

NOTES 257

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF DRAYTON'S LIFE AND WORKS

1563 Drayton born at Hartshill, Warwickshire.

1572? Drayton a page in the house of Sir Henry Goodere, at Polesworth.

c. 1574 Anne Goodere born?

Feb. 1591 Drayton in London. _Harmony of Church_.

1593 _Idea, the Shepherd's Garland_. _Legend of Peirs Gaveston_.

1594 _Ideas Mirrour_. _Matilda_. Lucy Harrington becomes Countess of Bedford.

1595 Sir Henry Goodere the elder dies. _Endimion and Phoebe_, dedicated to Lucy Bedford.

1595-6 Anne Goodere married to Sir Henry Rainsford.

1596 _Mortimeriados_. _Legends of Robert, Matilda, and Gaveston_.

1597 _England's Heroical Epistles_.

1598 Drayton already at work on the _Polyolbion_.

1599 _Epistles_ and _Idea_ sonnets, new edition. (Date of Portrait of Drayton in National Portrait Gallery.)

1600 _Sir John Oldcastle_.

1602 New edition of _Epistles_ and _Idea_.

1603 Drayton made an Esquire of the Bath, to Sir Walter Aston. _To the Maiestie of King James_. _Barons' Wars_.

1604 _The Owle_. _A Pean Triumphall_. _Moyses in a Map of his Miracles_.

1605 First collected edition of _Poems_. Another edition of _Idea_ and _Epistles_.

1606 _Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall_. _Odes_. _Eglogs_. _The Man in the Moone_.

1607 _Legend of Great Cromwell_.

1608 Reprint of Collected Poems.

1609 Another edition of _Cromwell_.

1610 Reprint of Collected Poems.

1613 Reprint of Collected Poems. First Part of _Polyolbion_.

1618 Two _Elegies_ in FitzGeoffrey's _Satyrs and Epigrames_.

1619 Collected Folio edition of Poems.

1620 Second edition of _Elegies_, and reprint of 1619 Poems.

1622 _Polyolbion_ complete.

1627 _Battle of Agincourt_, _Nymphidia_, &c.

1630 _Muses Elizium_. _Noah's Floud_. _Moses his Birth and Miracles_. _David and Goliah_.

1631 Second edition of 1627 folio. Drayton dies towards the end of the year.

1636 Posthumous poem appeared in _Annalia Dubrensia_.

1637 _Poems_.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Drayton was born in 1563, at Hartshill, near Atherstone, in Warwickshire, where a cottage, said to have been his, is still shown. He early became a page to Sir Henry Goodere, at Polesworth Hall: his own words give the best picture of his early years here.[1] His education would seem to have been good, but ordinary; and it is very doubtful if he ever went to a university.[2] Besides the authors mentioned in the Epistle to Henry Reynolds, he was certainly familiar with Ovid and Horace, and possibly with Catullus: while there seems no reason to doubt that he read Greek, though it is quite true that his references to Greek authors do not prove any first-hand acquaintance. He understood French, and read Rabelais and the French sonneteers, and he seems to have been acquainted with Italian.[3] His knowledge of English literature was wide, and his judgement good: but his chief bent lay towards the history, legendary and otherwise, of his native country, and his vast stores of learning on this subject bore fruit in the _Polyolbion_.

While still at Polesworth, Drayton fell in love with his patron's younger daughter, Anne;[4] and, though she married, in 1596, Sir Henry Rainsford of Clifford, Drayton continued his devotion to her for many years, and also became an intimate friend of her husband's, writing a sincere elegy on his death.[5] About February, 1591, Drayton paid a visit to London, and published his first work, the _Harmony of the Church_, a series of paraphrases from the Old Testament, in fourteen-syllabled verse of no particular vigour or grace. This book was immediately suppressed by order of Archbishop Whitgift, possibly because it was supposed to savour of Puritanism.[6] The author, however, published another edition in 1610; indeed, he seems to have had a fondness for this style of work; for in 1604 he published a dull poem, _Moyses in a Map of his Miracles_, re-issued in 1630 as _Moses his Birth and Miracles_. Accompanying this piece, in 1630, were two other 'Divine poems': _Noah's Floud_, and _David and Goliath_. _Noah's Floud_ is, in part, one of Drayton's happiest attempts at the catalogue style of bestiary; and Mr. Elton finds in it some foreshadowing of the manner of _Paradise Lost_. But, as a whole, Drayton's attempts in this direction deserve the oblivion into which they, in common with the similar productions of other authors, have fallen. In the dedication and preface to the _Harmony of the Church_ are some of the few traces of Euphuism shown in Drayton's work; passages in the _Heroical Epistles_ also occur to the mind.[7] He was always averse to affectation, literary or otherwise, and in Elegy viij deliberately condemns Lyly's fantastic style.

Probably before Drayton went up to London, Sir Henry Goodere saw that he would stand in need of a patron more powerful than the master of Polesworth, and introduced him to the Earl and Countess of Bedford. Those who believe[8] Drayton to have been a Pope in petty spite, identify the 'Idea' of his earlier poems with Lucy, Countess of Bedford; though they are forced to acknowledge as self-evident that the 'Idea' of his later work is Anne, Lady Rainsford. They then proceed to say that Drayton, after consistently honouring the Countess in his verse for twelve years, abruptly transferred his allegiance, not forgetting to heap foul abuse on his former patroness, out of pique at some temporary withdrawal of favour. Not only is this directly contrary to all we know and can infer of Drayton's character, but Mr. Elton has decisively disproved it by a summary of bibliographical and other evidence. Into the question it is here unnecessary to enter, and it has been mentioned only because it alone, of the many Drayton-controversies, has cast any slur on the poet's reputation.

In 1593, Drayton published _Idea, the Shepherds Garland_, in nine Eclogues; in 1606 he added a tenth, the best of all, to the new edition, and rearranged the order, so that the new eclogue became the ninth. In these Pastorals, while following the _Shepherds Calendar_ in many ways, he already displays something of the sturdy independence which characterized him through life. He abandons Spenser's quasi-rustic dialect, and, while keeping to most of the pastoral conventions, such as the singing-match and threnody, he contrives to introduce something of a more natural and homely strain. He keeps the political allusions, notably in the Eclogue containing the song in praise of _Beta_, who is, of course, Queen Elizabeth. But an over-bold remark in the last line of that song was struck out in 1606; and the new eclogue has no political reference. He is not ashamed to allude directly to Spenser; and indeed his direct debts are limited to a few scattered phrases, as in the _Ballad_ of _Dowsabel_. Almost to the end of his literary career, Drayton mentions Spenser with reverence and praise.[9]

It is in the songs interspersed in the Eclogues that Drayton's best work at this time is to be found: already his metrical versatility is discernible; for though he doubtless remembered the many varieties of metre employed by Spenser in the _Calendar_, his verses already bear a stamp of their own. The long but impetuous lines, such as 'Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree', afford a striking contrast to the archaic romance-metre, derived from _Sir Thopas_ and its fellows, which appears in _Dowsabel_, and it again to the melancholy, murmuring cadences of the lament for Elphin. It must, however, be confessed that certain of the songs in the 1593 edition were full of recondite conceits and laboured antitheses, and were rightly struck out, to be replaced by lovelier poems, in the edition of 1606. The song to Beta was printed in _Englands Helicon_, 1600; here, for the first time, appeared the song of _Dead Love_, and for the only time, _Rowlands Madrigal_. In these songs, Drayton offends least in grammar, always a weak point with him; in the body of the Eclogues, in the earlier Sonnets, in the Odes, occur the most extraordinary and perplexing inversions. Quite the most striking feature of the Eclogues, especially in their later form, is their bold attempt at greater realism, at a breaking-away from the conventional images and scenery.

Having paid his tribute to one poetic fashion, Drayton in 1594 fell in with the prevailing craze for sonneteering, and published _Ideas Mirrour_, a series of fifty-one 'amours' or sonnets, with two prefatory poems, one by Drayton and one by an unknown, signing himself _Gorbo il fidele_. The title of these poems Drayton possibly borrowed from the French sonneteer, de Pontoux: in their style much recollection of Sidney, Constable, and Daniel is traceable. They are ostensibly addressed to his mistress, and some of them are genuine in feeling; but many are merely imitative exercises in conceit; some, apparently, trials in metre. These amours were again printed, with the title of 'sonnets', in _1599_[10], 1600, _1602_, 1603, _1605_, 1608, 1610, 1613, _1619_, and 1631, during the poet's lifetime. It is needless here to discuss whether Drayton were the 'rival poet' to Shakespeare, whether these sonnets were really addressed to a man, or merely to the ideal Platonic beauty; for those who are interested in these points, I subjoin references to the sonnets which touch upon them.[11] From the prentice-work evident in many of the _Amours_, it would seem that certain of them are among Drayton's earliest poems; but others show a craftsman not meanly advanced in his art. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, this first 'bundle of sonnets' consists rather of trials of skill, bubbles of the mind; most of his sonnets which strike the reader as touched or penetrated with genuine passion belong to the editions from 1599 onwards; implying that his love for Anne Goodere, if at all represented in these poems, grew with his years, for the 'love-parting' is first found in the edition of 1619. But for us the question should not be, are these sonnets genuine representations of the personal feeling of the poet? but rather, how far do they arouse or echo in us as individuals the universal passion? There are at least some of Drayton's sonnets which possess a direct, instant, and universal appeal, by reason of their simple force and straightforward ring; and not in virtue of any subtle charm of sound and rhythm, or overmastering splendour of diction or thought. Ornament vanishes, and soberness and simplicity increase, as we proceed in the editions of the sonnets. Drayton's chief attempt in the jewelled or ornamental style appeared in 1595, with the title of _Endimion and Phoebe_, and was, in a sense, an imitation of Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. _Hero and Leander_ is, as Swinburne says, a shrine of Parian marble, illumined from within by a clear flame of passion; while _Endimion and Phoebe_ is rather a curiously wrought tapestry, such as that in Mortimer's Tower, woven in splendid and harmonious colours, wherein, however, the figures attain no clearness or subtlety of outline, and move in semi-conventional scenery. It is, none the less, graceful and impressive, and of a like musical fluency with other poems of its class, such as _Venus and Adonis_, or _Salmacis and Hermaphrodius_. Parts of it were re-set and spoilt in a 1606 publication of Drayton's, called _The Man in the Moone_.

In 1593 and 1594 Drayton also published his earliest pieces on the mediaeval theme of the 'Falls of the Illustrious'; they were _Peirs Gavesson_ and _Matilda the faire and chaste daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater_. Here Drayton followed in the track of Boccaccio, Lydgate, and the _Mirrour for Magistrates_, walking in the way which Chaucer had derided in his _Monkes Tale_: and with only too great fidelity does Drayton adapt himself to the dullnesses of his model: fine rhetoric is not altogether wanting, and there is, of course, the consciousness that these subjects deal with the history of his beloved country, but neither these, nor _Robert, Duke of Normandy_ (1596), nor _Great Cromwell, Earl of Essex_ (1607 and 1609), nor the _Miseries of Margaret_ (1627) can escape the charge of tediousness.[12] _England's Heroical Epistles_ were first published in 1597, and other editions, of 1598, 1599, and 1602, contain new epistles. These are Drayton's first attempt to strike out a new and original vein of English poetry: they are a series of letters, modelled on Ovid's _Heroides_,[13] addressed by various pairs of lovers, famous in English history, to each other, and arranged in chronological order, from Henry II and Rosamond to Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guilford Dudley. They are, in a sense, the most important of Drayton's writings, and they have certainly been the most popular, up to the early nineteenth century. In these poems Drayton foreshadowed, and probably inspired, the smooth style of Fairfax, Waller, and Dryden. The metre, the grammar, and the thought, are all perfectly easy to follow, even though he employs many of the Ovidian 'turns' and 'clenches'. A certain attempt at realization of the different characters is observable, but the poems are fine rhetorical exercises rather than realizations of the dramatic and passionate possibilities of their themes. In 1596, Drayton, as we have seen, published the _Mortimeriados_, a kind of epic, with Mortimer as its hero, of the wars between King Edward II and the Barons.[14] It was written in the seven-line stanza of Chaucer's _Troilus and Cressida_ and Spenser's _Hymns_. On its republication in 1603, with the title of the _Barons' Wars_, the metre was changed to _ottava rima_, and Drayton showed, in an excellent preface, that he fully appreciated the principles and the subtleties of the metrical art. While possessing many fine passages, the _Barons' Wars_ is somewhat dull, lacking much of the poetry of the older version; and does not escape from Drayton's own criticism of Daniel's Chronicle Poems: 'too much historian in verse, ... His rhymes were smooth, his metres well did close, But yet his manner better fitted prose'.[15] The description of Mortimer's Tower in the sixth book recalls the ornate style of _Endimion and Phoebe_, while the fifth book, describing the miseries of King Edward, is the most moving and dramatic. But there is a general lifelessness and lack of movement for which these purple passages barely atone. The cause of the production of so many chronicle poems about this time has been supposed[16] to be the desire of showing the horrors of civil war, at a time when the queen was growing old, and no successor had, as it seemed, been accepted. Also they were a kind of parallel to the Chronicle Play; and Drayton, in any case even if we grant him to have been influenced by the example of Daniel, never needed much incentive to treat a national theme.

About this time, we find Drayton writing for the stage. It seems unnecessary here to discuss whether the writing of plays is evidence of Drayton's poverty, or his versatility;[17] but the fact remains that he had a hand in the production of about twenty. Of these, the only one which certainly survives is _The first part of the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham,_ &c. It is practically impossible to distinguish Drayton's share in this curious play, and it does not, therefore, materially assist the elucidation of the question whether he had any dramatic feeling or skill. It can be safely affirmed that the dramatic instinct was nor uppermost in his mind; he was a Seneca rather than a Euripides: but to deny him all dramatic idea, as does Dr. Whitaker, is too severe. There is decided, if slender, dramatic skill and feeling in certain of the _Nymphals_. Drayton's persons are usually, it must be said, rather figures in a tableau, or series of tableaux; but in the second and seventh _Nymphals_, and occasionally in the tenth, there is real dramatic movement. Closely connected with this question is the consideration of humour, which is wrongly denied to Drayton. Humour is observable first, perhaps, in the _Owle_ (1604); then in the _Ode to his Rival_ (1619); and later in the _Nymphidia_, _Shepheards Sirena_, and _Muses Elyzium_. The second _Nymphal_ shows us the quiet laughter, the humorous twinkle, with which Drayton writes at times. The subject is an [Greek: agôn] or contest between two shepherds for the affections of a nymph called Lirope: Lalus is a vale-bred swain, of refined and elegant manners, skilled, nevertheless, in all manly sports and exercises; Cleon, no less a master in physical prowess, was nurtured by a hind in the mountains; the contrast between their manners is admirably sustained: Cleon is rough, inclined to be rude and scoffing, totally without tact, even where his mistress is concerned. Lalus remembers her upbringing and her tastes; he makes no unnecessary or ostentatious display of wealth; his gifts are simple and charming, while Cleon's are so grotesquely unsuited to a swain, that it is tempting to suppose that Drayton was quietly satirizing Marlowe's _Passionate Shepherd_. Lirope listens gravely to the swains in turn, and makes demure but provoking answers, raising each to the height of hope, and then casting them both down into the depths of despair; finally she refuses both, yet without altogether killing hope. Her first answer is a good specimen of her banter and of Drayton's humour.[18]

On the accession of James I, Drayton hastened to greet the King with a somewhat laboured song _To the Maiestie of King James_; but this poem was apparently considered to be premature: he cried _Vivat Rex_, without having said, _Mortua est eheu Regina_, and accordingly he suffered the penalty of his 'forward pen',[19] and was severely neglected by King and Court. Throughout James's reign a darker and more satirical mood possesses Drayton, intruding at times even into his strenuous recreation-ground, the _Polyolbion_, and manifesting itself more directly in his satires, the _Owle_ (1604), the _Moon-Calfe_ (1627), the _Man in the Moone_ (1606), and his verse-letters and elegies; while his disappointment with the times, the country, and the King, flashes out occasionally even in the Odes, and is heard in his last publication, the _Muses Elizium_ (1630). To counterbalance the disappointment in his hopes from the King, Drayton found a new and life-long friend in Walter Aston, of Tixall, in Staffordshire; this gentleman was created Knight of the Bath by James, and made Drayton one of his esquires. By Aston's 'continual bounty' the poet was able to devote himself almost entirely to more congenial literary work; for, while Meres speaks of the _Polyolbion_ in 1598,[20] and we may easily see that Drayton had the idea of that work at least as early as 1594,[21] yet he cannot have been able to give much time to it till now. Nevertheless, the 'declining and corrupt times' worked on Drayton's mind and grieved and darkened his soul, for we must remember that he was perfectly prosperous then and was not therefore incited to satire by bodily want or distress.

In 1604 he published the _Owle_, a mild satire, under the form of a moral fable of government, reminding the reader a little of the _Parlement of Foules_. _The Man in the Moone_ (1606) is partly a recension of _Endimion and Phoebe_, but is a heterogeneous mass of weakly satire, of no particular merit. The _Moon-Calfe_ (1627) is Drayton's most savage and misanthropic excursion into the region of Satire; in which, though occasionally nobly ironic, he is more usually coarse and blustering, in the style of Marston.[22] In 1605 Drayton brought out his first 'collected poems', from which the _Eclogues_ and the _Owle_ are omitted; and in 1606 he published his _Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall_, _Odes_, _Eglogs_, _The Man in the Moone_. Of these the _Eglogs_ are a recension of the _Shepherd's Garland_ of 1593: we have already spoken of _The Man in the Moone_. The _Odes_ are by far the most important and striking feature of the book. In the preface, Drayton professes to be following Pindar, Anacreon, and Horace, though, as he modestly implies, at a great distance. Under the title of _Odes_ he includes a variety of subjects, and a variety of metres; ranging from an _Ode to his Harp_ or _to his Criticks_, to a _Ballad of Agincourt_, or a poem on the Rose compared with his Mistress. In the edition of 1619 appeared several more Odes, including some of the best; while many of the others underwent careful revision, notably the _Ballad_. 'Sing wee the Rose,' perhaps because of its unintelligibility, and the Ode to his friend John Savage, perhaps because too closely imitated from Horace, were omitted. Drayton was not the first to use the term _Ode_ for a lyrical poem, in English: Soothern in 1584, and Daniel in 1592 had preceded him; but he was the first to give the name popularity in England, and to lift the kind as Ronsard had lifted it in France; and till the time of Cowper no other English poet showed mastery of the short, staccato measure of the Anacreontic as distinct from the Pindaric Ode. In the _Odes_ Drayton shows to the fullest extent his metrical versatility: he touches the Skeltonic metre, the long ten-syllabled line of the _Sacrifice to Apollo_; and ascends from the smooth and melodious rhythms of the _New Year_ through the inspiring harp-tones of the _Virginian Voyage_ to the clangour and swing of the _Ballad of Agincourt_. His grammar is possibly more distorted here than anywhere, but, as Mr. Elton says, 'these are the obstacles of any poet who uses measures of four or six syllables.' His tone throughout is rather that of the harp, as played, perhaps, in Polesworth Hall, than that of any other instrument; but in 1619 Drayton has taken to him the lute of Carew and his compeers. In 1619 the style is lighter, the fancy gayer, more exquisite, more recondite. Most of his few metaphysical conceits are to be found in these later Odes, as in the _Heart_, the _Valentine_, and the _Crier_. In the comparison of the two editions the nobler, if more strained, tone of the earlier is obvious; it is still Elizabethan, in its nobility of ideal and purpose, in its enthusiasm, in its belief and confidence in England and her men; and this even though we catch a glimpse of the Jacobean woe in the _Ode to John Savage_: the 1619 Odes are of a different world; their spirit is lighter, more insouciant in appearance, though perhaps studiedly so; the rhythms are more fantastic, with less of strength and firmness, though with more of grace and superficial beauty; even the very textual alterations, while usually increasing the grace and the music of the lines, remind the reader that something of the old spontaneity and freshness is gone.