I

Barnabe Googe's Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, … appeared in 1563. Googe was then twenty-three years old. It will be well to examine the tradition which informed Googe's poems, for that tradition is alien to most contemporary readers.

Googe's education had prepared him to serve in the government (he was the son of the Recorder of Lincoln, and a kinsman and retainer of Lord Burghley) and, as contemporary scholars have shown, education at that time was intensively rhetorical: year after year, the boy spent about nine hours a day, six days a week, inching up through the ranks of his Latin texts, from Aesop and the Bible, through the verse of the Italians Mantuan and Palingenius, into Cicero's Topica, Susenbrotus's Epitome of one hundred and thirty-two tropes, and Erasmus's De duplici … ; thence into more Cicero, and Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, Juvenal, and Persius. He memorized the Metamorphoses. Confronted with a set of verses, he could give an account of the grammatical structure; of the prosodic form; of the distinctive logical tactics of the argument; of the meaning, phrase by phrase; of the diversified forces at work in the rhetorical figures. He could detect vices of style, and he could name them. He had learned, in a discipline of ancient lineage, that poetry was not a mystery which simultaneously required his devotion and forbade his approach. Poetry was an art, and as it mobilized and directed the passions, it profoundly engaged the understanding.

From this tradition Googe could look to another: the tradition of the short poem written in English. When he began writing his own poems, this tradition was in general still moving with the peculiar momentum of the late medieval. In the fifteenth century the courtly love poem had been as common as the gnomic or moral poem, the epitaph, the satire, the occasional poem. These are precisely the kinds that make up the bulk of Tottel's Miscellany (1557), which Googe had studied with care. The tradition was not obsolescent; at that time it possessed clarity, variousness, and force, and it would proceed, still robust, into the seventeenth century. It had never been insular. Since Chaucer's time it had been in communication with Latin and with French. And though the form of English speech in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was altering rapidly, the earlier poets nevertheless commanded formal principles by which they could fix vigorous meaning in attitudes of great precision and beauty:

                              A God and yet a man?
                              A maid and yet a mother?
                              Wit wonders what wit can
                              Conceive this or the other.
                              A God, and can he die?
                              A dead man, can he live?
                              What wit can well reply?
                              What reason reason give?
God, truth itself, doth teach it;
Man's wit sinks too far under
By reason's power to reach it.
Believe and leave to wonder.

.....

What is this world but only vanity?
Who trusteth fortune soonest hath a fall.
Each man take heed of prodigality;
Wealth that is past no man again may call.
The greenest wound that ever man had or shall
Is to think on wealth that is gone and past,
And in old age in misery to be cast.

.....

The smiling mouth, the laughing eyën gray,
The breastës round, and long small armës twain,
The handës smooth, the sidës straight and plain,
Your feetës light—what should I further say?
It is my craft when you are far away
To muse thereon in stinting of my pain. …

.....

The first of these, which is the finest, moves in its stanzas with the intricacy, the exactitude and the rapidity of Shakespeare's “The Phoenix and the Turtle”—

Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded,

and it does so with less repetitiousness and fuss. The second concludes with the massed, deliberate force and the unshadowed clarity of Ben Jonson—

No, I do know that I was born
To age, misfortune, sickness, grief;
But I will bear these with that scorn
As shall not need thy false relief. …

And the last, from which Wyatt evidently picked up and reworked a phrase (“her arms long and small”), has the smoothness and steadiness of the courtly verses in Tottel's Miscellany.¹ All three were written in the fifteenth century. In a statistical survey of fifteenth-century verse, their qualities would vanish. The poems are exceptional, of course. But when practicing poets seek the vitality of their tradition, they do not consult charts of tendencies and averages.

The technical clarity in this work ought to embarrass those who declare that English verse fell into chaos in the fifteenth century. Neither the first nor the second poem is troubled rhythmically by the contemporaneous decay of grammatical inflections (the third, written before 1440, is less pertinent here). The old alliterative line, too, could hold firm from the fifteenth century—

Excellent sovereign, seemly to see,
Preved prudent, peerless of price …

through to Vaux's poem in Tottel's Miscellany:

O temerous tauntres that delights in toys,
Tumbling cockboat tottering to and fro. …

And when Heywood composes this—

This write I not to teach, but to touch, for why
Men know this as well or better than I …

or Lord Morley this—

Never was I less alone than being alone
Here in this chamber. Evil thought had I none,
But always I thought to bring the mind to rest,
And that thought of all thoughts I judge it the best,

there are formal principles at work; in the interior, the line is defined roughly by stress and by simple syntactical figures; at the end, by rhyme. It is a minimal verse, capable of maneuvers slightly more definitive than those of prose. Wyatt worked easily in it:

Though myself be bridled of my mind,
Returning me backward by force express,
If thou seek honor to keep thy promise,
Who may thee hold, my heart, but thou thyself unbind?

However, when he set out to write a song, he had work like this, from the fifteenth century, for precedent:

O mistress, why
Outcast am I
All utterly
          From your pleasaunce,
Since you and I
Ere this, truly,
Familiarly
          Have had pastaunce?

And he was able to extend this movement into longer lines.

II

The native tradition of the lyric, then, had not disintegrated. But of course it had changed by the time it reached Googe. There is a present-day academic version of what happened in Tudor poetry: out of the medieval dark came the Italianate glimmer of Wyatt and Surrey; then a dense, unnaturally prolonged twilight; then the blaze of Sidney and Spenser. This account has a picturesque simplicity, but what happened, apparently, is more complicated.

In 1524, Cox's Art or Craft of Rhetoric appeared; in 1550, Sherry's Treatise of Schemes and Tropes; in 1553, Wilson's Art of Rhetoric. During these years, an English poet could turn from direct dealings with the rhetoric of his Latin texts at grammar school and university, and find this rhetoric becoming denizened in English. Simultaneously, the translators were working on the Latin texts favored by the humanists, so that there came into English an array of moral poems and satires and epigrams and elegies with an extended range of materials, with tactics new in English phrasing, and with emotions of a novel order and focus. But all this did not bring on a poetical revolution. Modes of language proceed with such inertia that they may be deflected only minutely. The tradition continued, its center of gravity now slightly shifted, its movement a little more intricate.

This continues to hold true when we take into account the work by the “new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy …, greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy. …”² Googe read this work in the miscellany, where he found several practical lessons in writing poems. The courtly love poetry which had been brought over from the continent characteristically differs from that previously written in English in two respects: violent emotion (in the original Italian and French) is thrust to its extreme, repeatedly and as a matter of course; and the materials of the entire poem are fixed in the grasp of a single figurative scheme.

Surrey turns this poetry into work that is curiously bland. Although he clearly and deliberately establishes his language inside the form, he commonly limits his syntactical devices to the line unit, and arranges for marked rhythmical events not within the line, but only along the borders of the poem, in initial trochees, in end-rhyme, in the final verse. He writes the poem by accumulating individual lines, and averages out the extreme feeling of the original in line by line of even, unemphatic iambs. When Surrey is not merely setting one line below another, but stringing the syntax out to cover a set of lines, he provides the syntax with no rhythmic support, so that the structure is flimsy, as it is in his blank verse. He constructs most of his original verse, likewise, of lines that exist apart—the poem on his imprisonment at Windsor, for example, is in quatrains only by virtue of the rhyme scheme. Only once (in “When raging love with extreme pain,” Number 16 in the Miscellany) does he place an entire poem under the control of a single principle of organization. In general, Surrey evidently relied on the Petrarchan convention, the prestige of the given exotic materials, to do his work for him. The results are dull. However, when Googe read Surrey he could have noticed that an iambic movement, running steadily throughout a poem in pentameter or poulter's measure, had possibilities: it might make for singular emotional cohesion.

Surrey's elder, Wyatt, recognizes the violence implicit in the foreign poetry; he does not simply set the material forth to be looked at. However, he accepts its peculiar conditions not as an end but as a fated beginning:

Since love will needs that I must love,
Of very force I must agree. …

Thence he takes up the conventional material entire and sets it in motion with a strong intelligence in unwavering concentration. The meaning is hard, exact, full; the poem advances inexorably. Though his original poems show traces of Petrarch and Serafino in scheme and image, they are not Italianate in feeling. The form is clear and steady; the tone is single and grave—gravely sad, gravely admonitory, gravely meditative or vehement. The poems are severe inquiries into the courtly heritage of the continental renaissance. Googe would observe the power in these, and in the epigrams and occasional poems. The same qualities are present in Wyatt's translations from the Italian and French, though in his direct encounters here, one senses the shock of his mind's collision with the alien sensibility in the materials. In his original poems, the form of the ballet accommodated him. Translating offered special resistances, as the rough metric discloses. Again, the continental poems were, after all, something new in England. He may well have translated them with a motive similar to Surrey's—to cast new matter and new rhetorical methods into English, where they might be scrutinized and made use of.

The first edition of the Miscellany presented Surrey's and Wyatt's poems first, and then forty poems by Nicholas Grimald, churchman, scholar, translator, playwright (in Latin), and author of poems in Latin and English. Hyder Rollins remarks that Grimald was rather out of place amongst the courtiers in the Miscellany. His sources are not French or Italian but Latin (frequently medieval and renaissance) and occasionally Greek. These are some of his titles: “Musonius the Philosopher's Saying,” “To Mistress D. A.,” “Of Mirth,” “Of Friendship,” “A New Year's Gift, to the L. M. S.” “Upon the Decease of W. Ch.” Here is the precise convention that Googe chose to work in. The poet appears not as the disaffected servant of the court, nor as the lover confined in the ritual of courtly love. He appears as the private person engaged in a public utterance. Late medieval moral poems are anonymous and generalized; Grimald writes as Grimald, and frequently addresses his meditations to a particular occasion: the death of his mother, a cherished literary text, his friendship with Mistress Damascene Audley. The poem gives access to the private event—

Ah, could you thus, dear mother, leave us all?
Now should you live, that yet before your fall
My songs you might have sung, have heard my voice—

but it does not grow indistinct in mists of private feeling. Grimald locates it in a ponderous structure of classical allusion (which happens to be only remotely relevant):

Have, mother, monuments of our sore smart:
No costly tombs, areared with curious art,
Nor Mausolean mass …
But wailful verse, and doleful song accept.
By verse the names of ancient peers be kept;
By verse lives Hercules

and Achilles, and Hector, and Aeneas. The very crudity makes the method unmistakable; the uses of the method would be apparent.

Googe took other lessons from Grimald. He learned to make the line his minimum unit of utterance, by building it up of distinct and emphatic iambs set close on one another; he then piled line upon line, poised in a single thought, so that the poem is constructed of massive blocks. And he learned that the use of emphatic feet gave him a metrical opportunity: in a context of heavy iambs he could suddenly introduce a spondee, and the rhythm would deliver a sharp blow. Here is a passage from Grimald:

So happy be the course of your long life,
So run the year into his circle rife,(3)
That nothing hinder your well meaning mind:
Sharp wit may you, remembrance ready find,
Perfect intelligence, all help at hand;
Still stayed your thought in fruitful studies stand.
Head framëd thus may th' other parts well frame.

Googe was to work in the same range of diction, also. There are other distinctive features in Grimald's verse which Googe chose to let alone; he took what he needed, and put it to his own uses.

III

The poem to Dr. Bale … offers a good opportunity for examining Googe's procedures. The first six of the ten lines, each set solidly in the pentameter measure, are welded in a syntactical unit; the alliterated phrasing is almost entirely formulary, holding the figure of Bale at a distance, a paradigm fixed in heavy iambs. The immediate life of the passage issues from two unobtrusive rhythmic events located in the context of the emphatic beat, and thrown into intimate relation: “Good aged Bale,” which opens the poem, and “Give over now,” which opens line five and is placed crucially at the grammatical turning point. In the entire passage, these phrases alone share the hard g and the peculiar rhythm produced by the extraordinary stress on the metrically unaccented first syllable. The first phrase suffuses the passage with personal affection and respect; the second quickens it with concern. The ninth line develops a quiet urgency through the mounting rhythm in

For aged men unfit sure is such pain,

a rhythm consummated in the rare trochaic substitution at the fourth position. The final two lines bring the poem to rest in simultaneous wonder and resignation, cast in the finality of the stable, distinct iambic movement. The vitality of the writing is subtle but unmistakable, once one grasps what order of perception is at stake, and finds the points of entry. And there is something more to notice about the poem.

The figure of Dr. Bale, I have said, appears as a paradigm; there is method in this. Implicit in the poem is the knowledge that the old scholar leans above a particular text, which both he and Googe have known long and intimately. When we draw close enough to see what the text is, Googe's lines grow translucent and suddenly dense with new meaning. It is Cicero's essay On Old Age:

… there is also the calm and serene old age of a life passed peacefully, simply, and gracefully. Such, we have heard, was Plato's, who died at his desk in his 81st year; such was Isocrates', who was 94 when he wrote his Panathenaicus and lived five years more. His teacher Gorgias of Leontini rounded out 107 years without suspending his diligence or his pursuits.

Such texts lie under the surface of several of Googe's poems. On these occasions he is neither imitating nor translating; the implicit allusion produces a resonance from beneath, which vibrates in the immediate feeling of the lines. Out of Sight, Out of Mind … is a clanging parody both of a stock courtly motif and of a solemn poem he found in the Miscellany:

The longer life, the more offense,
The more offense, the greater pain,
The greater pain, etc.

(Googe gives the courtly mode a rough treatment elsewhere, as well.) To George Holmedon, of a Running Head, has behind it another poem in the Miscellany, which is entitled That Few Words Show Wisdom, and Work Much Quiet, and which is remarkably prolix. Googe's piece is short; it parodies the prolixity by vehemently accumulating ponderous phrases, yet at the same time swiftly pays out a boisterous impatience with its original. Such a poem, it is well to notice, stands amongst Googe's serious moralistic poems.

All the features of Googe's style assume their form from a single conviction about the relation of language and experience. The modern reader supposes that diction and trope are designed to release unique, startling perception of a personal order—

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table. …

And he expects something like this to happen in every phrase, so that the surface of the whole poem is a scene of multitudinous activity. Googe assumed otherwise. At strategic points, his diction will become cleanly literal and plain; there results a modulated power and hard clarity not available to any other kind of writing. He would have seen this in the poem which has been attributed to Cheke in the Miscellany:

Complain we may: much is amiss:
Two things prevail: money and sleight.
To seem is better than to be.

In Googe's hands such diction can give off a curiously caustic pathos:

So fareth man, who wanders here and there,
Thinking no hurt to happen him thereby. …

(From To Alexander Neville …)

But this diction is embedded in a context of figurative language which does not intend to present fresh perception: it directs the attention through implicit allusions to a venerable order of experience. The formulary phrases may run back through Petrarch to Horace, Virgil, the Greek Anthology, the Bible, and Homer. An example from the Miscellany will make the attitude clear. In #238 the poet asks his lady to pity him, even as Cressida pitied Troilus. He never glances at the outcome of that famous affair. He can see one section of Chaucer's tale in isolation—a paradigm. Beneath such a procedure is the conviction that meaning is not personal, unique, and difficult to reach; it lies in plain sight, in the texts of the tradition. There it awaits its realization in the poem being written in the sharp present. As Heywood put it,

This write I not to teach, but to touch, for why
Men know this as well or better than I …

However, when Googe wishes, he can take an old figure and spring it apart, letting in a burst of fresh feeling. The poem to Alexander Neville, for example, is built on the old trope of man as fish gazing upon the baited hook of woman's carnal beauty. We know the moral; one had better turn his eyes elsewhere. After an almost ferocious presentation of the attendant perils, Googe discriminates:

Neville, to thee that lovest their wanton looks:
Feed on the bait, but yet beware the hooks.

Furthermore, Googe can handle an original metaphor with great subtlety. In “Of Money” …, he has come to prefer money to friendship, “For friends are gone, come once adversity”; on the other hand,

Gold never starts aside …

Out of the negative phrasing, the scene appears momentarily and unforgettably: the well-off friend has just noticed his needy friend approaching with a request for a loan.

Googe does not distribute events over the entire poem. He takes up a set of apparently inert sticks of language—stock epithets, moral commonplaces, worn allusions—and deliberately suspends the motion of the poem while he stacks them up, line by line; at the crucial moment he lets the event occur and release a precise current of strong individual feelings. Two particularly fine examples are Going towards Spain and Coming Homeward out of Spain. The latter, incidentally, has Wyatt's “Tagus, farewell …” behind it.

In the stiff courtly convention, the subject and the attitudes are assumed at the outset to be complete; the poet is driven to use up the bulk of his poem in a skillful approach to the predetermined end. The approach is all, is essentially diversionary, and is likely therefore to be very busy, as in Sidney. Thought itself becomes entirely figurative, since the subject—the inaccessible lady, the reasonless agony of the lover—forbids examination. Googe works in the more pervasive convention of the language itself, heavy with its moralistic and literary accretions, in which thought is the authentic substance of the poem, and massive articulated forms sustain the weight of meaning and feeling.

I wish to discuss briefly one more example of Googe's poetry, by way of comparing it with an earlier poem of the same kind. First, the earlier poem:

Mine heartës joy, and all mine whole pleasaunce,
Whom that I serve and shall do faithfully,
With true intent and humble observaunce,
          You for to please in that I can truly,
          Beseeching you this little bill and I
                    May heartily with simplessë and drede,
                    Be recommended to your goodlyhead.

There is another stanza of the same, and then,

I write to you no more for lack of space,
But I beseech the only Trinity
You keep and save by support of his grace,
          And be your shield from all adversity.
          Go little bill, and say thou were with me
                    Of very truth, and thou canst well remember,
                    At mine uprist,(4) the fifth day of December.

“Without doubt,” R. H. Robbins writes, “the love epistle is the main conventional form during the fifteenth century.” The formulary rhetoric of this poem cannot accommodate particulars; the last line, as the poet indicates by dropping it down one space, lies outside of the poem, like a signature written across the bottom of a formal greeting card. Googe's poem, Of Mistress D. S. is likewise a love epistle, likewise heavily formulary in phrasing; but in the middle lines the private event appears, without a catch in the movement, firmly and unobtrusively. Issuing from the conventional context, the speaker's personal gratitude is gently moving.

IV

Evidently Googe wrote no more original poetry after publishing Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets. Between 1560 and 1565 he published in stages his translation of an anti-Roman Catholic diatribe, The Zodiac of Life, by “Marcellus Palingenius” (Pietro Angelo Manzolli). In 1570 he published another translation, The Popish Kingdom, by Thomas Kirchmayer (or “Naogeorgos”), with The Spiritual Husbandry of Thomas Naogeorgos appended. This was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. Later he published other translations. In his youth he had attended both Cambridge and Oxford, and had traveled in France and Spain. In 1574 he was sent to Ireland by Cecil, as provost marshal of the presidency court of Connaught. He died in 1594.

Notes

1. The first two are anonymous; the third is by Charles d'Orleans, who was taken prisoner at Agincourt and held in England from 1415 to 1440. The passage is a re-working of Chaucer's description of Criseyde, III, 1247-50.

2. George Puttenham's well known description.

3. rife: easily.

4. I.e., “when I arose this morning.”