SOURCE: Eriksen, Roy T. “Two Into One: The Unity of George Gascoigne's Companion Poems.” Studies in Philology 81, no. 3 (summer 1984): 275-98.

[In the following essay, Eriksen suggests that Gascoigne arranged the poems in his works in certain combinations to reflect various themes.]

George Gascoigne often combined and arranged his shorter poems into sequences or larger units of poetry, a compositional technique variously reflected in The Adventures of Master F. J., his poems written on given “theames,” his translation from Orlando furioso, and in the first Elizabethan sonnet sequences.¹ His companion poems, “Gascoignes good morrow” and “Gascoignes good nyghte” and the versification of Psalm 130, printed as such a sequence in The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575), had obviously been intended to function as such earlier in A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573).² These three religious lyrics, which originally had “verie sweete notes adapted unto them,” are unique among Gascoigne's sequential “inventions” in being designed to reflect the harmony inherent in God's two works of creation and salvation. As I have argued elsewhere, the metrical version of the penitential Psalm 130 to no little extent depends on Augustine's “Enarratio in psalmo cxxix” (Vulgata) for its elaboration of biblical imagery and use of particular rhetorical schemes.³ That poem is notable for its studied deployment of multiple anaphoras, varied line lengths, and rhymes to reinforce the idea of a resolution of spiritual discord. It is the purpose of this article to draw attention to the rhetorical organization the poet employs in “Gascoignes good morrow” and “Gascoignes good nyghte” when giving form to his praises to God. Even though these poems can hardly be said to match his best poetry in smoothness or tone of voice, they are remarkable for their textual structures, which permit form to accompany and reinforce theme—a formal tour de force that was later to appeal to Ben Jonson, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan. The latter, as I will later discuss, closely patterned his own companion poems, entitled “The Morning-watch” and “The Evening-watch,” on a formula similar to that employed by Gascoigne.

It is my contention that Gascoigne's companion poems—in their capacity as “worldly toys”—imitate God's plan of regeneration through structural analogies. As he refers to the meeting between God and man on the Day of Judgment, Gascoigne's phrases point to these parallels:

And of such haps and heauenly joys,
As when we hope to hold,
All earthly sights, all worldly toys,
Are tokens to behold.

“Gascoignes good morrow,” 33-6.

Elsewhere in the poem we discover that the “haps,” which are so crucial that everything on earth is found to prefigure them, are the basic Christian events climaxed by the meeting “face to face” on Judgment Day, when man must put on “immortalitie” (29-32). At this point Gascoigne echoes I Corinthians, 13:12 and 15:52-3, suggesting that his poetic “tokens” are patterned in accordance with the visible signs God left in His works for our understanding of what is invisible (Romans 1:20). In focusing on this doctrine of “signs” in lines 21-4 and 33-6, Gascoigne similarly invites us to consider how his own verbal signs display his subject.⁴

That poetry should contain the same harmony as musical compositions is a commonplace in the Renaissance. Gascoigne himself frequently makes such observations,⁵ but rarely as emphatically as Thomas Campion, who asserts that “the world is made by Simmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to Musick, and Musick to Poetry.”⁶ Campion here alludes to the ideological basis for the comparison of two arts—both of which are related to the music of Heaven. As Campion seems to suggest, poetry is less directly linked with that higher music than practical music, which “held its place in an interdependence with celestial harmony,”⁷ but “simmetry and proportion” in poetry stem from the same source. The central metaphor here is of course derived from Augustine's description of the world as God's pulcherrimum carmen (De civ. Dei, XI, 18): Augustine's main point is that the divine song or poem is put together according to a rhetoric of opposita or antitheta, that is, according to figures similar to those first described in classical rhetoric. (Augustine's examples, though, are from the Bible.) These rules were developed for creating a perfect periodos, or a thematically unified and cyclically arranged sentence which, in its most elaborate form, would include verbal repetitions to link its beginning, middle, and end.⁸ This is why a periodos could be taken to possess the same numerositas as the universe. Some of Augustine's works (e.g., De vera religione and De musica) present an aesthetic system that incorporates classical rules of composition into a distinctly Christian framework; the resulting poetic theory gained great prominence in the Renaissance.⁹ In this Christianized poetics the mimetic view entailed imitating not only the visible world but also (and especially) the ideal pattern which sustains it and gives it form. In the sixteenth century Torquato Tasso is a key figure in the development and practice of this redefined, Christian version of a basic aesthetic principle. Tasso favors antithetic, chiastic, and graded arrangements in his poetry, notably in La Gerusalemme liberata (1581), and he connects these textual structures explicitly with Augustine's metaphor when he writes that “the art of composing a poem resembles the plan of the universe, which is composed of contraries, as that of music is.”¹⁰

Recent scholarship has illustrated the degree to which many Italian and English poets applied these structural principles, but so far little has been done to examine English poetry prior to The Shepheardes Calender (1579) from what may be called a topomorphical point of view.¹¹ Yet, as I hope to show, the basic techniques practiced by Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton had already been tested on a large scale by Gascoigne, who—to quote Thomas Nashe—“first beate the path to that perfection which our best Poets haue aspired to since his departure; whereto he did ascend by comparing the Italian with the English as Tully did Graeca cum Latinis.”¹² If we try to compare “the Italian with the English,” can it be shown that Gascoigne's structural felicities reflect on Italian practice? Let us consider the case of Torquato Tasso.

Although Tasso explained his choice of stanza (the ottava) for La Gerusalemme liberata in terms of numerological symbolism,¹³ composition by number plays a subordinate role in his fashioning of larger textual segments. (Indeed, in the Renaissance numerology plays so modest a role in the compositional technique that it is entirely misleading to use the term “numerology” in reference to literary analyses of textual structures.) Chiasmus (recessed symmetry), antithesis, and graded arrangements are Tasso's preferred schemes of disposition; when comparing important episodes or events in his poem he often deploys carefully placed repetitions of rhymes and keywords to point a contrast or to draw a parallel. A good example of this technique is afforded by the precise correspondences which exist in La Gerusalemme liberata between Armida's perverted mass in x, 64-5 (stanzas 15-14 from the end of that canto) and the two stanzas where the crusaders receive absolution (xi, 14-15). The rhymes of x, 64 (/densa/chiare/mensa/care/dispensa/mare/) are echoed in xi, 14 (/l'altare/mensa/appare/accensa/care/pensa/) and reinforce the striking contrastive parallel between Armida, who assumes the role of the mythical witch and swineherd, Circe (x, 65-6), and Guglielmo, who as “Pastore” performs the role of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist (xi, 15).¹⁴ Italian poets repeat rhymes less readily, however, than their English followers, which surely is due to the polysyllabic nature of Italian; George Chapman condemned the language because of the supposed harshness of polysyllables.¹⁵ However, another possibility was to place reiterated words and phrases within the lines to mark points of structural importance.

In a treatise published in 1563,¹⁶ Girolamo Ruscelli examines an ottava by Giovan Andrea dell'Anguillara which affords a telling example of this technique. The stanza describes the elements, and all four are listed in each line, but in various sequences: (The numbers added in the margin indicate their order.)

1 2 3 4 Pria che 'l ciel fosse, il mar, la terra, e 'l foco,
4 3 1 2 Era il foco, la terra, il cielo, e 'l mare,
2 1 3 4 Ma 'l mar rendeua, e 'l ciel, la terra, e 'l foco,
4 1 3 2 Deforme il foco, il ciel, la terra, e 'l mare,
3 1 2 4 Ch'iui era, e terra, e cielo, e mare, e foco,
1 3 4 2 Doue era, e cielo, e terra, e foco, e mare,
3 4 2 1 La terra, il foco, e 'l mar era nel cielo,
2 4 3 1 Nel mar, nel foco, e ne la terra il cielo.

(I, ii, 1-8)

We observe how the poet in lines 1-3 establishes a symmetrical pattern, which consists of two interlaced chiasmus (/terra/foco//foco/ terra/cielo/mare//mare/ciel/terra/foco/). He then gradually disentangles (“deforme,” [4]) this pattern in lines four to eight to restore the original chaos. Ruscelli thinks the poet “fece con infinita lode la stanza, che oltre al modo di dir marauigliosamente la confusione del Caos, con la testura della stanza.”¹⁷ “The texture of the stanza,” as Ruscelli puts it, is designed to illustrate how the elemental forces are in conflict. As Marlowe was to put it in Tamburlaine's famous speech, they are “warring … for regiment.”¹⁸ To this must be added the observation that dell'Anguillara keeps within the restraints imposed by the ottava-form and honors a rule which Gascoigne was to formulate as follows: “Your inuention being once deuised, take heed that neither pleasure of rhyme, nor variety of deuice, do carry you far from it.”¹⁹ Dell'Anguillara adds an extra finesse, though, when he permits the stanza's first noun (“'l ciel” [1]) to become its final rhyme (“il cielo” [8]). This “witty” solution, which appealed to Chapman,²⁰ establishes a circular “frame” around his otherwise chaotic stanza, creating “un picciolo mondo” in the manner suggested by Tasso.

Tasso claimed that the principle of composition which turns a poem into a discorde concordia by analogy with the cosmos applies to all genres, and a number of recent studies of his compositional technique shows that he applied these principles in epic poetry when arranging entire episodes, a single stanza, or groups of stanzas.²¹ In England, Chapman refers to this structural ideal in his description of the way poetry works “all subjects exactly … / Till all be circular, and round as heaven.”²² His contemporary, Samuel Daniel, offers valuable, explicit information about the role of rhyme in the process of shaping a poem into “an Orbe of order and form.”²³ Daniel begins his Defence of ryme (1603) by defining rhyme:

it is likewise number and harmonie of words, consisting of an agreeing sound in the last silables of seuerall verses, giuing both to the Eare an Eccho of a delightfull report & to the Memorie a deeper impression of what is deliuered therein.

(pp. 7-8)

The phrase “a deeper impression” indicates that, like Sidney before him, Daniel considers rhyme not simply in terms of pleasing sound effects. He actually attributes more important functions to rhyme than modern readers have realized, for to him it is “comparable to the best inventions of the world” and begets “conceit beyond expectation” (p. 16). Then, too, a proper use of rhyme actually invests a poem with enargia, a quality Renaissance poets and theorists attributed to those literary artifacts which reveal harmony, order, and proportion.

Enargia requires glossing today. In his discussion of “ornament poeticall,” Puttenham explains that this term refers to the “glorious lustre and light” that unites the “outward shew” and the “inward working” of figurative language (III, iii, 142-3).²⁴ This twofold function of verbal ornament is identical with the double effect Daniel attributed to rhyme: the “delightfull report … to the Eare” and the “deeper impression … to the Memorie.” The key words in this context are Daniel's “report” in the sense of “repetition” and Puttenham's “glorious lustre and light,” a phrase which reminds us that lumen and lux were commonly used to denote a rhetorical figure. Enargia (illustratio) therefore refers to the impact made by the configuration of rhetorical figures (lumina) in a given text. Although Daniel begins his argument by referring to the effect upon the ear, his and Puttenham's other terms (“shew,” “lustre,” and “light”) and indeed the etymology of enargia, presuppose “that verbal vision is possible.”²⁵ Puttenham and Daniel both offer examples of how “figure breedeth … light” and “vertuous operation” (Puttenham) in poetry; but for convenience of illustration I shall turn to the latter's Platonizing description of how “the unformed Chaos” of the imagination may be “wrought into an Orbe of order and forme … by the divine power of the spirit.”²⁶

The terms Daniel employs to describe poetry characterized by a proper use of rhymes—“Orbe,” “girum,” “circuit,” and “periode”—all suggest that he favored cyclical textual arrangements. He implies that the method he advocates has been successfully practiced in “some” of his sonnets and he indicates that using it entails breaking up established, or rather expected, rhyme schemes. He also argues that a “manumission from bondage” is achieved when rhyme is reduced “in girum, and a iust forme” (p. 16). The sonnets Daniel alludes to are Delia, IX and XXXVIII, both of which have circular rhyme schemes and display various verbal figures. If we briefly consider Delia, IX, we observe that rhymes and key words are arranged to underline the mythological image (Sisyphus) placed at the center:

If this be loue, to drawe a weary breath,
Paine on flowdes, till the shore, crye to th'ayre:
With downward lookes, still reading on the earth;
The sad memorials of my loues despaire.
If this be loue, to warre against my soule,
Lye downe to waile, rise vp to sigh and grieue me:
The neuer-resting stone of care to roule,
Still to complaine my greifes, and none releiue me.
If this be loue, to cloth me with darke thoughts,
Haunting vntrodden pathes to waile apart;
My pleasures horror, Musiques tragicke notes,
Teares in my eyes, and sorrowe at my hart.
If this be loue, to liue a liuing death;
O then loue I, and drawe this weary breath.

The circular rhyme scheme (/breath/grieue me/releiue me/breath/) creates a verbal circuite which gives prominence to the sonneteer's never-ending hardships (“The neuer-resting stone of care to roule” [7]). Like the repeated rhyme words in “The Roundell or Spheare” quoted by Puttenham (II, xi, 98-9), Daniel's rhymes produce enargia. Gascoigne's poetic “tokens” should be seen as prompted by similar concern for the integration of inward and outward.

When Daniel compares his rhymed orbs to well-ordered rooms (p. 17), thus introducing architectural metaphors into his discourse, he provides a clue for a better understanding of Gascoigne's theory of rhyme. For Gascoigne clearly associated the idea of working from a plan—as in architecture—with his caveat against “rime without reason” in poetry:

my meaning is hereby that your rime leade you not from your first Invention, for many wryters when they have layed the platforme of their invention, are yet drawen sometimes (by ryme) to forget it or at least to alter it.

(Works, I, 469)

Gascoigne's skilful handling of this rule (and related formal issues) earned for him the splendid epitaph from E. K. that he was “the very chefe of our late rymers,”²⁷ and it is interesting to see that the laudatory poems prefaced to The Posies, in fact do praise “the golden ground, / Of Gascoigne's plat” (I, 27) and his ability “to shape in ryme” (I, 23). Moreover, the poetic homage includes the point that this apparent formal ingenuity did not prevent him from putting together (texare) religious lyrics which “harmonise” with Scripture (“sua themata texant, / Consona scripturis sacris” [I, 30]).

In terms of theme, however, “The good morrow” and “The good nyghte” do not strike us as particularly original in the modern sense of this word. Gascoigne frequently introduces half-quotes from and allusions to the Bible throughout his poems; but this evident reliance on scriptural commonplaces, couched in strongly alliterative and sometimes disappointingly plain verse, must not be allowed to obscure the fact that these poems mark an important stage in the development of devotional poetry. The companion poems present a pattern of meditation, a Christian “conduct-book,” which explains how to interpret “worldly toys” in anticipation of death. The choice of a complete diurnal cycle turns the poems into an emblem of the cycle of life and death, or indeed of time itself. It is worth recalling that Vaughan employed similar structural devices in “The Morning-watch” and “The Evening-watch.”²⁸

Today Gascoigne's companion poems seem almost morbidly preoccupied with man's preparations for death; but we should connect them with the tradition of the ars moriendi, and with treatises like Thomas Becon's astonishingly popular The Sicke Mannes Salue (1561).²⁹ Instead of merely providing deathbed advice, Becon addresses himself to the healthy and the ill alike. His praise of the “godly minded” Epaphroditus is typical:

For in you as in a cleare mirroure we behold our selues, and se what shall become of us hereafter. Of you as of a liuely scholemaster do we learne, how we shall behaue our selues, when God layeth the crosse on us. And we most humbly besech God to geue us like pacience and thankfulnes.

(fol. 279^v)

Gascoigne takes the same stance when he describes his “glasse wherein we may beholde / Eche storme that stoppes our breath” (“The good morrow,” 21-2), addressing himself first to those who “haue spent the silente nighte / In sleepe and quiet reste” (1-2) and later on to those suppressed by “care” (9) and “sickenesse” (10). The poem's first three stanzas summon these categories of men to praise God, inviting them to interpret sleep and human hardships as images of future death (“Our bedde the graue, our cloathes lyke molde, / And sleepe lyke dreadfull death” [23-4]). After this advice which today seems so depressing, stanza four presents more optimistic and consoling images; just as the night is conquered by the dawn, “so muste we hope to see Gods face, / At laste in heauen on hie” (29-30). Invigorated by this prospect, Gascoigne offers a six-stanza exegesis of “all earthly sightes,” seeing them as “tokens” of what to believe in and what to avoid. The catalogue of natural phenomena includes the day, the sun, the skies, the earth, the rainbow, misty clouds, the crow, and little birds. All occupy different levels in a typology of nature, where the sun in the sky is likened to “the Sonne of man” enthroned in heaven, and where “the carrion Crowe … the Deuill resembleth playne” (38-9, 57, 60). The “goonshot of beliefe” (64) with which we may overthrow the devil represents, I believe, an attempt to adopt the current Italian fashion of using firearms—cannons, bombshells, etc.—as emblems of prudence and heroic virtue.³⁰ To Gascoigne's contemporaries this image must surely have appeared less alien to the context in which it occurs than to modern readers, who have no similar association of ideas. (It is appropriate at this point, I think, to correct Ronald C. Johnson's claim that Gascoigne in the companion poems and in Psalm 130 “does not mention hell or evil,” but that he almost exclusively concentrates on realistic descriptions of physical death.³¹ It is true that death is very insistently present in these poems, especially in “The good nyghte,” but they certainly do not lack reference either to hell, the devil, or to sin.³²)

Each of the six stanzas (v-x) which expound the system of correspondences in nature leads logically on to the next, until we reach the concluding, tenth stanza of “The good morrow.” At this point Gascoigne leaves the rigid and repetitive pattern of similes which has dominated so far, turning instead from description in the present tense to prayer and to the imperative mood: “Lorde for thy mercie lende us myghte / To see that ioyfull daye” (79-80). He thus returns to the mood which dominates his admonition to “you” in stanzas one and two, but whereas the emphasis then was on man's “ioy to see the cheerefull lighte / That riseth in the East” (3-4), here it falls on the hope that “wee may still enioy that light, / Whiche neuer shall decaye” (77-8). Gascoigne thus repeats the poem's first image, but transposed as it were into a higher key. Similarly, the first couplet of “The good nyghte,”

When thou hast spent the lingring day in pleasure and delight,
Or after toyle and wearie way, dost seeke to rest at night,

returns to the first lines of its companion piece (“You that haue spente the silente nighte / In sleepe and quiet reste” [1-2]). This construction heralds an admonition to the Christian (“you”) at this point, too, but instead of inviting him “to prayse the heauenly King” (“The good morrow,” 8), Gascoigne now urges him to search his “secret thoughts” to see whether he has committed sins for which to ask forgiveness (5-6). This conjunction of the acts of praising and repenting draws attention to the theological commonplace, as expressed by Augustine, that “when we confess our sins, we praise the glory of God.”³³ And when Gascoigne in the spirit of I John, 1:18 warns the Christian against believing that he has done nothing “amisse,” or that his sins are slight, his indebtedness to Augustine's “Enarratio in psalmo cxxix” again is perceived. In his warning to the Christian who thinks he has “lived in perfect righteousness” and therefore “waiteth fruitlessly” for judgment, Augustine had stressed the point that “this life cannot be without sin”:

He therefore considering how many minute sins man daily committeth, if nothing else, at least by his thoughts and tongue, heeds how many they be; and if he heed how minute they be, he seeth that by many minute sins a great heap is produced.

(VI, 66)

For Augustine, then, “human weakness itself places man in the depth of sin so that it is highly appropriate to wake and to sing with the words of the psalmist: ‘Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord’” (Psalm 129:1). Gascoigne shares this concern for the accumulated burden of sins hidden in “secret thoughts” (5) and “daily deedes” (11), urging the poem's “you” to “beware and wake, for else thy bed, which soft and smoothe is made, / May heap more harm upon thy head, than blows of enemies blade” (15-16). The bedtime advice Gascoigne offers the sinner who, after confessing his sins, has found his “ease,” entails singing “soberly” about the scriptural connection between sleep and death (18-19).

This analogy is exploited in many religious works available to Gascoigne, but the context in which it occurs here suggests that the second half of “The good nyghte” (18-38) may have been inspired by Augustine's comment on the phrase “even unto night” (Psalm 130 (129):6). “How far,” he asks, is our soul to wait, and he provides the following answer:

Even unto night: until we die; for all our carnal death is as it were sleep. Thou hast begun to hope since the Lord rose again, fail not to hope until thou goest forth from this life.

(VI, 68)

Gascoigne focuses first on the analogy between sleep and death in a detailed and almost absurdly grotesque amplificatio, seeing “patterns to the pangs of death” (24) in the sleeper's “streking arms,” his “yauning breath,” “bed,” “sheetes,” “clothes,” “hungrie fleas,” and finally in the “Cocke” which wakes him up in the morning. The many correspondences he finds between sordidly realistic details in the individual's life and the life hereafter present thematic and structural parallels with the manifold correspondences considered in the last six stanzas of “The good morrow.” In these concluding stanzas Gascoigne listed the “tokens” God has distributed in nature, or in the macrocosmos, but in the sequel he pursues his search for “patternes” into the microcosmos, or the life of the individual, and in so doing illustrates what Vaughan later calls “the great Chime / and Symphony of nature” (“The Morning-watch,” 17-18).

In the last eight lines of “The good nyghte” (31-8) the poet connects the idea of rising from sleep with the hope of being resurrected after death, at the same time that he shows that he responds positively to Augustine's advice concerning the necessity of keeping constant vigil “until thou goest forth from this life.” The concluding couplets confidently summarize his hopes for the future:

Thus will I wake, thus will I sleepe, thus will I hope to ryse,
Thus will I neyther wayle nor weepe, but sing in godly wyse.
My bones shall in this bed remayne, my soule in God shall trust,
By whom I hope to ryse agayne from death and earthly dust.

(35-8)

While the first stanza of “The good morrow” had stressed the need “to prayse the heauenly King,” Gascoigne's persona can now sing, unaided and with confidence, about his trust in God. The style of his song is disenchantingly simple and plain. Gascoigne himself employs the phrase “to sing … soberly” about poetry which is deliberately and appropriately humilis as far as poetic diction is concerned. His lines acquire fluency and smoothness only occasionally where this would be appropriate (e.g., “The good morrow,” 25-32 and 65-80). Gascoigne checks even his typical metaphoric inventiveness, which appears briefly in phrases like “the goonshot of beliefe” (“The good morrow,” 64) and the suggestive “thy wading wyll maye trye, how far thy soule may sink” (“The good nyghte,” 14).

Although the style of these poems may fail to impress modern readers, Gascoigne nevertheless commands respect for the way in which he shapes the various stages of his poetic ars moriendi into a whole. In “The good morrow” the distribution of themes within the body of the text is signposted by his handling of the rhyme scheme, inviting us to consider the poem's formal aspects. The poem has ten stanzas, each consisting of eight iambic lines of four plus three beats—thus each stanza could be said to contain two ballad stanzas. This choice may seem somewhat disappointing, and Gascoigne was never to repeat it, but the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter had established the ballad stanza as the preferred poetic form for “Psalmes and Himpnes.”³⁴ On this point, therefore, Gascoigne complies with current practice. All stanzas have an a/b/a/b/c/d/c/d/ rhyme scheme, with the exception of the fourth stanza which has three rhymes only, grouped in a symmetrical pattern: /a/b/a/b/b/c/b/c/. That this sudden departure from the metrical norm displays no lack of skill nor constitutes a breach of the poem's rhyme-based “platforme of … inuention,” becomes evident upon considering the close relationship between theme and textual form in this stanza.

Gascoigne here attempts to compare the conquest of “deadly nyghte” by “heauenly daye” to the resurrection of man on Judgment Day:

Yet as this deadly nyghte did laste,
But for a little space,
And heauenly daye nowe night is paste,
Doth shewe his pleasant face:
So muste we hope to see Gods face,
At laste in heauen on hie,
When we haue chaung'd this mortall place,
For Immortalitie.

(23-32; my emphases)

The repetition of the same rhyme word “face” in consecutive lines (28-9) is a structural juxtaposition which literally mirrors the union “face to face” to which it alludes. We note, too, that the stanza has been given a chiastic textual form focused on its two central lines: the idea of “deadly nyghte” which did not last (25-6) balances the idea of a “chaung'd … mortall place” (31-2), thus completing the rhetorical retrograde formed by the words “heauenly,” “face,” “face,” and “heauen” (27-30).³⁵ In this way the texture and the greater art of this stanza (cf. the prominence given to the pentasyllabic “Immortalitie,” [32]), suggest its importance within the structure of “The good morrow.”³⁶ Gascoigne not only places his two references to the scriptural doctrine of signs on either side of the fourth stanza (21-4 and 33-6), he also makes it the focal point of a symmetrical rhyme structure which spans the poem as a whole. This structure is as follows (identical rhyme words are underlined):

stanzas	rhyme words/lines
I	nighte/1
	lighte/3
III	beholde/21
	molde/23
IV	space/26
	face/28
	face/29
	place/31
V	holde/34
	beholde/36
X	lyght/77
	myghte/79

If we consider the distribution of topoi in “The good morrow,” while bearing in mind this structure created by the repetition of identical rhyme words, we discover that the three formally similar stanzas which precede stanza four (i-iii) share one topos and that this is true also of the six stanzas which succeed it (v-x). The three initial stanzas focus on the sphere of man and see sleep as an image of death, while the six concluding stanzas concentrate on the sphere of nature and on daytime phenomena. The intervening fourth stanza which gives meaning to these exegetical efforts on the part of the speaker thus divides the poem into a graded sequence of three, one, and six stanzas, so that the poem displays the ratio of the diapason (1:2). Augustine had explained the crucial event described in this pivotal stanza—that man receives immortality through the intervention of Christ—in terms of this harmonious ratio:

For the death of the sinner, which deservedly comes from the necessary condemnation of God, has been taken away by the death of the Just Man, which comes from His will to show mercy, while His single death corresponds to our double death. This correspondence, agreement, consent, or whatever other word may be appropriate for describing how one is joined to two, is one of the greatest importance in every fitting-together of the creature. … It just now occurs to me, that which I mean by this co-adaptation is what the Greeks call harmonian (harmony).³⁷

Because Augustine argues that this consonantia … unum ad duo is appropriate to all kinds of creations, and not exclusively to God's two works of creation and re-creation, it is consequently highly appropriate that a poem which praises these works should exhibit this harmonious proportion. One of the poems prefaced to Gascoigne's Posies finds it praiseworthy that the “texture” of Gascoigne's themes agrees with Scripture (“sua themata texant, / consona scripturis sacris” [I, 30]) and this statement may perhaps be an allusion to Gascoigne's various ways of incorporating the diapason in the companion poems and in “Gascoignes De Profundis.”³⁸ What is certain, moreover, is that Gascoigne's verbal and structural “tokens,” the “outward shew” of “The good morrow,” so accord with its “inner substance” and theme that the poem displays enargia.

Historically, Gascoigne's poetic diapason belongs to a mode of composition which antedates Christianity and which probably originates in Greek, possibly Alexandrian, poetry. It is perhaps symptomatic that the earliest examples in Latin poetry are found in poems corresponding to the Alexandrian genre of the paraclausithyron, as in Ovid's Elegy, I, vi, and in epithalamia.³⁹ Two medieval poems of vastly different length, both of which display a similar graded structure, are Geoffrey de Vinsauf's “Luctus Ricardi” and Dante's La Divina Commedia.⁴⁰ The only Renaissance theorist who comes close to describing this particular structural refinement is Scaliger. In the Poetices (1561), he refers to numerical ratios to illustrate how “repetimus etiam per proportionem” (my emphasis),⁴¹ but if we turn to Renaissance poetry we will find that several major poets employed this technique. Two recent articles by Mother M. C. Pecheux and Sibyl Lutz Severance, respectively, show that Milton and Jonson created structural diapasons in their devotional poetry.⁴²

Gascoigne's choice of ten stanzas, grouped in a sequence of three, one, and six, is in theory no different from Ovid's distribution of lines in Elegy I, vi (48:2:24), and it is one which may have influenced the topomorphical structure of Spenser's Prothalamion.⁴³ However, Gascoigne seems to be the first English poet to combine two related poems with the two structures creating a diapason. “The good morrow” and “The good nyghte” are certainly complementary both in terms of theme and structure. The latter poem lacks nearly all of the “outward” ornaments which characterize its companion piece, but it possesses a well-balanced thematic structure in which the initial admonition to the Christian (1-18) exactly balances the Christian's song (19-36). The final couplet (37-8) is a coda in the form of a song within the song, which in turn is a song within the song which is the poem itself. Apart from these signs of thematic and narrative planning, the style is plain, its alliterations and occasional parallelisms (6-7, 19-20, and 35-6) being wholly within the framework of the couplet structure.

The apparent absence of verbal “lights” may be appropriate in a poem entitled “The good nyghte,” but because here we have to do with what Ben Jonson refers to as “the reverse” in a two-poem unit,⁴⁴ we should look for verbal figures which relate to the poem as a whole. For although the companion poems can be read as two separate works, the close integration of theme and form invites us to consider them jointly. Gascoigne himself groups them together, referring to them as “these good Morowe and good nyght,” when he lists the various poems which “haue verie sweete notes adapted vnto them.”⁴⁵ This could perhaps be taken to suggest that the same piece of music was intended for both, and the chosen verse form supports this interpretation: both are written in the same basic ballad metre. The great difference in graphic outline experienced upon considering the printed page is fictitious: a ballad stanza could be rendered either as a four-three-four-three-beat stanza or as a seven-beat couplet. When Gascoigne combines two four-line stanzas to form an eight-line configuration in “The good morrow” and compresses the same stanza to two seven-beat couplets in its sequel, it may be a conscious move to illustrate the thematic harmony between the two poems. While there is only one rhyme word per line in “The good morrow,” there are two in its companion poem, and the reverse applies—two lines in the former correspond formally to one line in the latter. This is a simple but nevertheless quite effective way of expressing the consonantia unum ad duo which the poems purport to praise. Gascoigne's skilful deployment of rhymes at the point of transition between the two poems encourages such a view.

The four last rhyme words of “The good morrow” (/lyght/decaye/myghte/daye/) are echoed in the first four of its sequel (/day/delight/way/night/). The final rhyme word of the first poem (“daye,” [80]) is identical with the first in the second poem (“day,” [1]) and the very phrase in which it occurs—“the lingring day”—reinforces the idea that “The good nyghte” continues where its companion poem left off: that is, in the contemplation of “dayly deedes,” (11). Here again Gascoigne seems deliberately to draw on rhyme to score a thematic point and to invest the passage in question with enargia as he lets his rhymes “linger” on, as it were. Moreover, one wonders if it could be a product of chance that the exact numerical center of the poems by line-count falls within this knot or nexus of identical rhymes, and that it coincides precisely with the only example in the poems of a prayer addressed directly to God:⁴⁶

Lorde for thy mercie lende us myghte
To see that ioyfull daye.

(79-80)

What is certain is that “The good nyghte” consists of thirty-eight fourteeners, which makes it fall two lines short of the “perfect” total of eighty half-lines in “The good morrow.”⁴⁷ In view of the fact that these are companion poems we would have expected forty fourteeners to match eighty half lines, so that the unexpected total of 118 half-lines must be the result of “conceit beyond expectation,” or what Gascoigne himself refers to as “construing” (“Gascoignes counsell to Douglasse Diue,” 64). He must have expected his readers to scrutinize his poetry in search of “deep” devices, and in view of his reputation among his contemporaries, I think we owe him the courtesy of honoring his advice. “If,” he says,

Thou chaunce to fall on construing, whereby some doubtes may grow,
Yet grant this only boone, peruse it twise or thrise,
Digest it well eare thou condemne the depth of my deuise.
And use it like the nut, first cracke the outward shell,
Then trie the kirnell by the tast, and it may please thee well.

(64-8)

This advice presupposes a literary climate where readers of poetry would focus all their attention on a text qua text so that they would meditate on the pattern presented on the printed page. To such attentive readers the graphic appearance of Gascoigne's printed poems would seem to give an added bonus. When considering the companion poems from this point of view, we cannot fail to notice that “The good morrow” appears less “black” than its accompanying piece on the page. Its shorter lines and the white spaces which separate its stanzas go well with its title, whereas the black and massive block of thirty-eight fourteeners may be said to provide a graphic expression of the theme of “The good nyghte.” This effect is admittedly less refined than the more familiar effects produced by Herbert's pattern poems, but it represents a kind of poetic “Augenmusik,” which also appealed to Vaughan. Vaughan's companion poems, “The Morning-watch” and “The Evening-watch,” exploit a similar opposition between an “airy” and a “compact” graphic outline. It may well be that this, too, was one of the devices Vaughan adapted from Gascoigne's companion poems. In “The Passion” Milton possibly alludes to this fairly unusual typographical effect when he wishes that “the leaves should all be black whereon I write” (34).⁴⁸ The reading technique which was cultivated to capture such effects and interpret various verbal signs reminds us of Andrew Weiner's view that “instructions for reading the scriptures might well form the basis of our study of the poetry Sidney is defending,” that is, we should pay attention to “the signs which may be imbedded in” the narrative.⁴⁹ If we examine the signs Gascoigne has imbedded in his texts, we shall see how “the outward shell” supports the claim that he intends us to read the companion poems as one unified poem, but this time the signs do not occur exclusively in rhyme position. Gascoigne has, it is true, forged a rhyme-link at the point of transition between the two poems; but when he encourages readers to connect the last part of “The good nyghte” with the first part of “The good morrow,” he does so more emphatically by repeating key images situated mainly within the lines.

The first indication that Gascoigne may have wanted to create what Daniel calls “an Orbe of order and forme,” surfaces when he repeats the rhyme words (/breath/death/) at the same time that he echoes the idea that sleep is an image of death and “a glasse wherein we maye beholde / Eche storme that stoppes our breath” (“The good morrow,” 21-2). In “The good nyghte” he puts it this way: “the yauning breath, which I to bedward use, / Are patternes of the pangs of death,” 23-4), thus drawing attention, so it seems, to the way in which he reiterates some of his images. Taking this clue for our starting-point, a close scrutiny of “The good nyghte” reveals that it incorporates three phrases from “The good morrow” (19 and 23). They are as follows: “My bed itself is lyke y^e graue” (27), “My clothes the moulde” (28), and “sluggishe sleepe” (33). It is worth noticing that these repetitions create a chiastic pattern, as does the reference to joyous resurrection which completes this pattern: the first stanza of “The good morrow” describes the Christian's “ioy to see the cheerfull lighte / That riseth in the East” (3-4) while its sequel concludes by echoing this expression of joy climactically—the speaker hopes “to ryse ioyfully, to Judgement at the laste” (34; my emphasis). The references to singing on these occasions reinforce the thematic movement from a description of the dawn to one which depicts the “dawn” of the resurrection of man. Thus “eche willyng wighte” is summoned by the persona of “The good morrow” (7), who urges all to “helpe me nowe to sing” (6), but this plea remains unanswered until we reach the inset song in “The good nyghte” (19-38). More particularly, the speaker displays the desired willingness only when we reach the very end of that song:

Thus will I wake, thus will I sleepe, thus will I hope to ryse,
Thus will I neyther wayle nor weepe, but sing in godly wyse.

(35-6; my italics)

This sudden focus on the persona's reformed will tells us that the sole instance of truly “godly” singing occurs in the concluding song within the song (37-8). This strategy of arranging song within song within poem accompanies the movement from the persona's address to his fellow men (“you”), via a meditation related to the collective “we” (“The good morrow,” 1-24 and 25-80), and then through yet another address, this time directed to an individual “thou” before the poems conclude with two songs in the first person singular, one within the other (“The good nyghte,” 1-18, 19-36, and 37-8). These parallel patterns seem to be designed to give added force to the probing journey into the Christian's conscience, to his quest for spiritual renewal or regeneration. It is possible that “the verie sweete notes” originally set to the companion poems further enhanced the “harmonious” solution of this quest, but concerning the precise nature of the relationship between poetry and music we can only guess.

What is certain is that the close integration of theme and formal elements in “The good morrow” and “The good nyghte” proves Gascoigne's ability to use rhyme creatively. Although each poem possesses a well-defined thematic and textual structure of its own, so that each is a poem in its own right, each nevertheless gains in depth and in importance when we perceive how they are subsumed into a greater unity. Together they constitute a carefully patterned meditation on how to die well, and in so doing they repeatedly insist that we interpret the signs (“tokens,” “shapes,” and “patternes”) they provide. Once we have penetrated the deceptively plain “outward shell” of the poems, we can appreciate the way in which Gascoigne distributes rhymes and key concepts to draw attention to the underlying topomorphic structure, or his “platforme of … inuention,” to use the poet's own term. He not only reduces rhyme “in girum” (Daniel's phrase), but he also exploits various other schemata verborum to create structural diapasons in tribute to divine harmony. The “consonantia … unum ad duo” which takes place when God and man meet “face to face” (“The good morrow,” 25-32) may also have inspired the ratio (1:2) which arises from Gascoigne's different deployment of the ballad stanza in the two poems. But more important than such examples of formal finesse is the manner in which Gascoigne so distributes topoi and reiterates verbal “tokens” that his materials combine to create, to use Marlowe's phrase, “one poem's period,”⁵⁰ a unified artifact where spatial design and linear movement act as complementary forces. The resulting poetic “orb” is one of the earliest sustained attempts to transfer Italian compositional techniques into Elizabethan verse, and although they constitute a hybrid form, “The good morrow” and “The good nyghte” make a major contribution to the kind of religious lyric which was later more elaborately developed in the poetry of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Gascoigne's “fair, order'd lights” (“The Constellation,” 1) succeed in producing enargia at the same time that they reflect what Mary E. Hazard calls “the central Renaissance concern for the re-integration of inward and outward, mind and body, reason and feeling, in post-lapsarian men.”⁵¹

Notes

1. For an approach to Gascoigne's “novel” which emphasizes its symmetrical design, see Alfred Anderau's challenging study George Gascoignes The Adventures of Master F. J.: Analyse und Interpretation (Bern, 1966), pp. 76ff. I would like to add that Gascoigne's short translation from Orlando furioso and his two sonnet sequences (in A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (London, 1573; Scolar Press reprint: Menston, 1970), pp. 294-5, 336-8, and 360-3), have rhetorical structures which reveal that Gascoigne considered each as one poem.

2. Only the introductory sonnet to Psalm 130 and its title appear in A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (pp. 372-3). The reason for the omission of the psalm itself is probably a misunderstanding on the part of the printer, who may have seen the introductory sonnet and the psalm as two separate poems and therefore suppressed one, the wrong one, in order to avoid exceeding the advertised “good rounde vollume” of one hundred poems (flowers). The three religious lyrics are printed in sequence in the “Flowres” section of The Posies (1575), see The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, 2 vols., ed. J. W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1907-10), I, 55-62.

3. “Typological Form in ‘Gascoignes De Profundis,’” pp. 1-20 (forthcoming in English Studies).

4. This doctrine of signs was firmly established in the works of Origen and Augustine and became one of the basic elements of medieval theology and aesthetic thought. Alan of Lille's often-quoted verses succinctly state its basic metaphors: “Omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est in speculum, / nostrae vitae, nostrae sortis, / nostri status, nostrae mortis / fidele signaculum” (see John Steven's exposition of these verses in Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches (London, 1973), p. 27. It is important to note, I think, that at the root of a word like signaculum is signum, which among other things signifies a rhetorical figure and a star. By implication, then, the created universe is like a book adorned with rhetorial figures.

5. See for instance Gascoigne's discussion of “Ceasures” in Certaine notes of Instruction (Works, I, 471) and the lively account of the way in which music influenced his poetry in “The Griefe of Joye,” iv, 13-28 (Works, II, 550-3).

6. Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poetry (1602), I quote from The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (London, 1969), p. 293.

7. Diana Poulton, John Dowland (London, 1982), p. 195.

8. See Heinrich Lausberg's treatment of the periodos, “die vollkommenste Vereiningung mehrer Gedanken in einem Satz,” in Handbuch der Literarischen Rhetorik, 2 vols. (München, 1973), I, 458. Useful classical and Renaissance accounts are: Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, ed. J. H. Freese (London, 1926), III, ix, 386-95, and Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (Lugduni, 1561), IIII, xxv, 197a-8a.

9. Maren-Sofie Røstvig has defined and discussed the impact and persistence of this structural aesthetic in a number of articles, e.g., in “Ars Aeterna: Renaissance Poetics and Theories of Divine Creation,” in Chaos and Form, ed. Kenneth McRobbie (Winnipeg, 1972), pp. 101-19, and “Structure as Prophecy: The Influence of Biblical Exegesis Upon Theories of Literary Structure,” in Silent Poetry, ed. Alastair Fowler (London, 1970), pp. 32-72.

10. Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. M. Cavalchini and I. Samuels (Oxford, 1973), p. 78.

11. As I define it, the term topomorphics and its cognates refer to the study of literary artifacts, where poets have arranged their themes (topoi), or textual segments devoted to particular topoi, according to a predetermined plan or conceptual form (morphe). This method may apply to individual textual segments within a work, to groups of such segments, or to the whole configuration of all constituent segments in a work. Poets often combine an overall plan with individually patterned segments, as is the case in “Gascoignes De Profundis,” such segments then usually holding a particularly important theme or episode. For a fuller account see M.-S. Røstvig's article “The Topomorphical Approach” in the forthcoming Spenser Encyclopedia.

12. The Works of Thomas Nashe, 3 vols., ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1910), III, 319.

13. Discourses on the Heroic Poem, p. 201.

14. Fredi Chiappelli comments upon Tasso's use of chiasmus and antithesis in “Struttura inventiva e struttura espressiva nella Gerusalemme liberata,” ST, XV (1965), 5-33. For Tasso's use of graded arrangements (the diapason), see M.-S. Røstvig, “Canto Structure in Tasso and Spenser,” SSt, I (1980), 177-200. For an exposition of Tasso's rhyme technique in relation to his aesthetic ideal of “mixed unity,” see Roy T. Eriksen, The Forme of Faustus Fortunes (diss. Oslo, 1983), pp. 7-24.

15. In his poem “To the Reader” prefaced to The Iliads, Chapman compares English to French and Italian:

    Our Monosyllables, so kindly fall
    And meete, opposde in rime, as they did kisse:
    French and Italian, most immetricall;
    Their many syllables, in harsh Collision,
    Fall as they brake their necks. …

    (86-90)

    I quote from Poems, ed. P. B. Bartlett (New York, 1941), p. 394.

16. Del modo di comporre in uersi nella lingua italiana (Vinegia, 1563), pp. 42-3. Do we discern an echo of Ruscelli's title in the title of Gascoigne's Certaine notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English? It is worthy of notice that Gascoigne says that he wrote his notes for the benefit of an Italian.

17. P. 43.

18. Tamburlaine's famous speech (Part One, II, vi, 12-29) on the human “frame” composed of warring elements possesses a similar circular structure; see Eriksen, The Forme of Faustus Fortunes, pp. 210-14.

19. Works, I, 466.

20. Chapman imitates dell'Anguillara's dance of the elements in “Hymnus in Noctem,” 36-49 (Poems, pp. 20-1). Røstvig analyzes Chapman's use of a circular verbal pattern in this particular passage, see “‘Figures and Numbers’: On the Poetics of George Chapman,” in Dikt og Idé, ed. Sverre Dahl (Oslo, 1981), pp. 91ff.

21. See above at note 14 and also Andrew Fichter, “Tasso's Epic of Deliverance,” PMLA, XLIII (March, 1978), 265-74.

22. The lines occur in the “Epistle Dedicatorie” (120-3) to The Iliads (Poems, p. 387). They belong within a large textual segment which, as Røstvig has pointed out, has been given a circular verbal pattern in order to reinforce its description of “circular, and round” poetry (123), see “‘Figures and Numbers’: On the Poetics of George Chapman,” p. 95.

23. A Defence of ryme (1603), in Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartoes, 14, ed. G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh, 1966), p. 16.

24. The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), eds. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1970).

25. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979), p. 29.

26. A Defence of ryme, p. 16. Daniel's terms call to mind Ficino's description of the creation: “although in the beginning the matter of this world lay a formless chaos without the ornament of forms, attracted by innate love, it turned toward the Soul and offered itself submissively to it, and by the mediation of this love, it found ornament, from the Soul, of all the forms which are seen in this world; and thus out of a chaos was made a world”; Commentary on Plato's Symposium, trans. S. R. Jayne (Columbia, Missouri, 1944), p. 129. We note that Ficino, too, employs rhetorically colored language when discussing the creation (cf. “the matter of this world … without the ornament (ornamentum) of forms”).

27. I quote from E. K.'s comment on Gascoigne's skill in The Shepheardes Calendar (London, 1579), “Nouember glosse” (Sig. 48^r).

28. Vaughan's companion poems are close enough in terms of theme, phrasing, and partly also in choice of formal effects to suggest direct influence, even though Gascoigne rarely achieved the swift smoothness of Vaughan's style. In “The Morning-watch” Vaughan reverses the modes as found in “The good morrow,” when he makes lines 1-18 hymnic and shifts to meditation or petition in 19-33. Similarly, the changing voices in “The good nyghte” (“Thou” and “I”) become a dialogue between “Body” and “Soul” in Vaughan's “The Evening-watch.” Vaughan, too, creates a structural pun on the diapason by a clever disposition of rhymes: when we add the line totals of the two poems (33 and 16), we find that the seventeenth (and central) line of “The Morning-watch” occupies the pivotal position of a diapason of 16: 1: 32 lines. Moreover, its rhyme (“Chime”), which occurs in a self-referring passage (“Thus all is hurl'd / In sacred Hymnes, and Order, The great Chime / And Symphony of Nature” [16-18]), crops up again in the concluding couplet of “The Evening-watch” (“time” [15] and “Prime” [16]). We note that Vaughan italicizes the two rhyme-words which hold the structurally important positions within his diapason of visible signs. I have used The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1957), pp. 424-5. Vaughan's adherence to the Augustinian doctrine of ascent from the visible to the invisible is a well-established fact that sets up a clear ideological link between his poetic practice and Gascoigne's (see L. L. Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton [New York and London, 1964], pp. 17ff.).

29. N. L. Beaty offers a most useful account of this work in The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven and London, 1970), pp. 108-56.

30. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 108-12.

31. R. C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York, 1972), p. 70.

32. Gascoigne mentions hell in “The good morrow,” 72 and “Gascoignes De Profundis,” 4, the devil in “The good morrow,” 60 and 63, and sin in “The good nyghte,” 14.

33. Expositions on the Book of Psalms, 6 vols., trans. Members of the English Church (Oxford, 1847-57), IV, 387.

34. Gascoigne defines two kinds of ballads in Certaine notes of Instruction (Works, I, 471) adding that “the long verse of twelue and fourteene sillables, although it be now adayes used in all Theames, yet in my iudgement it would serue best for Psalmes and Himpnes” (I, 473).

35. Tasso adorns the stanza which describes Mount Olivet (La Gerusalemme liberata, XI, 10), the scene of the sacrificial ceremony in which the crusaders re-establish the link between God and themselves, with a similar rhetorical pattern, focused on the anaphoric repetition of “Monte” (10, iv-v). This stanza occupies the exact middle of the epic poem by stanza-count (968-1-968).

36. Gascoigne favors a poetic style which displays an unusually high degree of monosyllables (see Certaine notes, § 5; Works, I, 468), sometimes creating special effects by the variation of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. After a barrage of monosyllables, he may end a stanza emphatically with a choice word like the pentasyllabic “Immortalitie.” Similar instances occur in “Gascoignes De Profundis,” 12, 55, and 85, and should not be seen as examples of “Inkehorne” terms (Works, I, 468).

37. The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, 1970), pp. 133-4. Augustine goes on to relate this concept of harmony to Pythagoras' experiment with “a properly-adjusted monochord” (p. 134). Another striking instance of this symbolism occurs in his exposition of Psalm 58. 7 (Expositions on the Book of Psalms, IV, 94).

38. I refer to the unexpected doubling from four initial anaphoras in VII, 1-4 to eight in VIII, 1-8, which accompanies the described appeasement of “our discorde” (VIII, 4). Gascoigne briefly mentions Augustine's mixed attitude to music in The Grief of Joye (IV, xvi, 7).

39. Ovid's Elegy I, vi recounts how a lover complains before the beloved's closed door. The poem falls into two main sections (1-48 and 51-74), separated by a distich (49-50). In the first section the lover still hopes to gain entrance but it ends, like his hope, when he wrongly thinks he hears the door open: “Fallimur, an verso sonuerunt cardine postes, / Raucaque concussae signa dedere fores?” (49-50; my italics). This false beginning precedes the final section where he has no hope (“quam longe spem tulit aura meam;” 52). Ovid adorns the different stages of his graded thematic arrangement partly with repeated homeouteleuton (in 1-2, 24-5, 47-50, and 73-4), partly with repetitions within the lines (in 1-2, 49-50, and 73-4). Also, we note the witty pun (typical of Ovid) on poetico-musical terminology in the pivotal distich. Paradoxically, Augustine was to draw on the imagery of the paraclausithyron in his passionate quest for union with God: “quibus quasi manibus invisibilibus ad invisibilem ianuam pulsatis, ut invisibiliter vobis aperiatur, et invisibiliter intretis,” Psalmus CIII. i (104:1) in Enarrationes in psalmos, 3 vols., eds. D. E. Dekkers and I. Fraipont (Turnholti, 1956), III, 1474. Similarly, this genre influenced poems like Geoffrey de Vinsauf's “Sanctae Crucis querela” (Poetria nova, III, 469-507), a prosopopeia which recalls the door's complaint in Propertius' Elegy, I, xvi. For the octave proportion in epithalamia, see Alastair Fowler (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 159-60. I quote Geoffrey de Vinsauf's text from Ernest Gallo, The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague and Paris, 1971), which also provides an excellent translation of de Vinsauf's text.

40. The “Luctus Ricardi,” Poetria nova, III, 326-67, consists of three sections: an apostrophe to England and praise of King Richard (326-35), a warning that death will overcome even the strong (335-47), and, finally, a recognition that God alone can foretell the future with a list of de casibus “exempla” (347-67). Within this graded arrangement of 10:12:20 lines, the references to fate (i.e., Providence) and the way in which day must turn into night divide the poem into a second graded sequence where line 339 is the pivot: “Nubila fata diem, ducentque crepuscula noctem (my emphases). This line is echoed in the two last lines: “nox et vicina diei. / Haec aliena docent, sed te tua fata docebunt” (365-6; my italics). Additionally, the sequential repetition of words at 330-2 (speculum, columna, fulmen) and at 340-2 (rumpetur speculum, rupta columna, cessabit fulminis ictus) reinforces the pivotal character of line 339.

    La Divina Commedia is too comprehensive a subject to be considered in a footnote, but it should be remarked that the prophetic and transitional canto, where we witness the final purification of Dante before he begins his ascent to the Paradiso (Purgatorio, 33), divides the epic into a graded sequence of 66:1:33 cantos. The rhetorical and thematic “circle” of the Paradiso has been fully documented, but similar thematic and verbal repetitions link the opening terzine of Inferno 1 and the concluding terzine of Purgatorio 32, the link being their strong emphasis on allegorical beasts encountered in a “selva oscura.” I intend to discuss this structural enactment of what Dante himself calls “la prima cagion” at more length elsewhere.

41. Poetices libri septem, III, xli, 313.

42. Mother M. C. Pecheux, “‘At a Solemn Musick’: Structure and Meaning,” SP, LXXV (1978), 331-46; and Sibyl Lutz Severance, “‘To Shine in Union’: Measure, Number, and Harmony in Ben Jonson's ‘Poems of Devotion,’” SP, LXXX (1983), 183-99.

43. See the entry “George Gascoigne” in the forthcoming Spenser Encyclopedia, where the graded arrangement of “The good morrow” is compared to those of Spenser. Prothalamion, too, exhibits a pivot (VII) with fewer rhymes arranged symmetrically. Alastair Fowler first pointed out that “the proportion between the (poem's) zodiac-garlands is 6:3 or 2:1, that is, the harmonious proportion of the octave conventional in epithalamium division.” Conceitful Thoughts (Edinburgh, 1975), p. 75.

44. Ben Jonson's poem “The Ghyrlond of the blessed Virgin MARIE” has a matching poem of equal length entitled “The Reverse on the backe side.” The Works of Ben Jonson, 11 vols., eds. C. H. Herford, P. and E. Simpson (Oxford, 1947), VIII, 412-14.

45. A Hundreth sundrie Flowres, p. 372.

46. If we apply this approach to Milton's “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” which similarly have slightly different totals, 152 and 176 lines respectively, we discover that the apostrophe to “Melancholy” occupies the textual center: “But hail thou Goddess, sage and holy, / Hail divinest Melancholy,” “Il Penseroso,” 11-12. The Poems of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1961), p. 24.

    Another example is found in Philippe de Vitry's two-part motet “Garrit Gallus-In nova fert-Neuma,” where the apostrophe in lines 18-20 (“O Gallorum garritus doloris”) holds the textual center. I quote the text from James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence (New Haven and London, 1981), p. 108. The author discusses de Vitry's multiple uses of the 3:2 proportion (pp. 107-10).

47. Just for the record, and because Gascoigne glances in the direction of divine numbers in his version of Psalm 130, it is perhaps worth noting that the numbers eighty and thirty-eight, found in the poems' line totals, traditionally were associated with meanings relevant to the themes of Gascoigne's poems. Referring to Luke 16, Pietro Bongo tells us that the number eighty means the resurrection of the Lord; Mysticae numerorum significatione liber (Bergamo, 1585), p. 122. According to Augustine's opinion in Tractatu 17 in Iohannem, so Bongo informs us, the number thirty-eight refers equally well to feebleness and sluggishness as to the delivery from such weakness (“At vero quomodo praesens numerus ad languorem magis spectet, quam ad sanitatem accurate docet Aurelius Augustinus” [p. 89]). We remember Gascoigne's phrase “when sluggishe sleepe is paste, / … hope I to ryse ioyfully” (The good nyghte,” 33-4).

48. The Poems of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1961), p. 13. In this context it is perhaps worthwhile considering the possibility that “On the Morning of Christs Nativity,” “The Hymn,” and “The Passion” originally were planned as a sequence with a graded frame.

49. “Moving and Teaching: Sidney's Defence of Poesie as a Protestant Poetic,” JMRS, II (1972), 277.

50. Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, V, ii, 169, The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford, 1971).

51. “An Essay to Amplify ‘Ornament:’ Some Renaissance Theory and Practice,” SEL, XVI (1976), 21.