Most critics find the temperate region confusing and prefer to operate either in the hot zone of poetry as communication (saying) or the cool zone of poetry as artefact (making). The recently dominant schools of Formalist criticism appear to have gone in the latter direction. But appearances are a little deceptive. The New Critics, it is true, left the author and his original audience so much out of account that they came to treat the work as a fairly simple machine, whose mechanism could be understood without reference to working procedures or conventions other than our own. Paradoxically, however, the Yale critics rebuilt the machine as a direct communication in current language. Naturally, for this to come off they had to concentrate on a particular canon. In Tudor poetry they wrote about Wyatt and the Sidney of Astrophil and Stella but neglected or disparaged the Arcadia, Spenser and Surrey. Surrey made a specially poor showing: his machines refused to disgorge much ambiguity, irony, or radical imagery; yet they paid out nothing very interesting in the way of plain statement either.

SURREY'S SIMPLE LOGIC

The consequence is a pretty wide agreement that if Surrey has virtues they are modest ones. Patricia Thomson (pp.205-6) speaks of his ‘harmonious listing’ of naturalistic details in ‘The soot season,’ clearly regarding ‘this simplest of structural formulas’—catalogue plus counterstatement in the manner of Serafino or Cariteo—as rather puerile. And Lever, who sees only ‘an attractive piece of descriptive verse’ (p. 42), contrasts the sonnet somewhat sharply with Petrarch's mythologically and metaphorically rich Zephiro torna (Canz. 310). In the English imitation, spring is simply ‘an agreeable natural phenomenon’ described in external visual terms that allow neither identification of nature and spirit nor indeed metaphor. As for structure, ‘it is not easy to find even a logical connection between the theme of the poem and the lover's mental state’ (pp. 43-4). Now these views seem to me so wide of the mark as to raise questions of criteria. Can it really be that earlier critics' high valuation of Surrey's poetry—‘worthy of a noble mind’ (Sidney); ‘sweet conceit’ (Peacham); ‘the first English classical poet’ (Warton)—can their valuation have rested on a liking for such jejune crudity as the modern interpretation implies? Or can we for our part have become insensitive to forms once appreciated? And, if there has been a change in the system of preferences, is it still possible to discover, at least, the qualities in Surrey that used to be so highly valued?

Writing in 1815, that good scholar G. F. Nott remarked the lexical precision of ‘The soot season’: ‘new repaired scale’, for example, exactly specifies the gradual renewal of a laminated fish-scale. But as Patricia Thomson is ready to point out, the poem's ‘minute’ natural history is in part mediated through literature. When we read ‘The swift swallow pursueth the flies small; / The busy bee her honey now she mings’ we should imagine a bird of the same feather as Chaucer's ‘swalwe, mortherere of the foules smale / That maken hony of floures freshe of hewe’.¹ To this instance of literary imitation, Emrys Jones adds others. Pamphilo Sasso's Zephiro spira e col so dolce fiato, itself a Petrarchan variation, contains items on Surrey's list. And traditional formulae from medieval English poetry (‘soot season’, ‘summer is come’), together with alliteration, provided the means to a playfully archaizing effect. A simple catalogue seems not very much to issue from all this artfulness. Is Surrey's logic truly as rudimentary as Serafino's? Our prejudice against the catalogue form makes us initially disinclined to notice fine structure in any work that uses it. But less unfavourably disposed readers may once have been able to follow Surrey's poetic logic easily and to see that the items of his catalogue are by no means random examples of spring phenomena.

The soot season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale:
The nightingale with feathers new she sings:
The turtle to her make hath told her tale:
Summer is come, for every spray now springs,
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale:
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings:
The fishes fleet with new repaired scale:
The adder all her slough away she slings:
The swift swallow pursueth the flies small:
The busy bee her honey now she mings:
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale:
          And thus I see among these pleasant things
          Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.

Tottel's Miscellany (1557)

One form of arrangement is pairing. It first appears in archaizing doublets: ‘bud and bloom’, ‘the hill and eke the vale’. And everyone must have noticed that the dove tells her tale to her mate, in implicit contrast to the speaker, who has no-one to tell his tale to—except, in the end, the reader. (The turtle-dove was a type of faithful love, or more specifically of love continuing faithful after loss.²) It is less obvious that all the events of spring are arranged in twos. The catalogue begins and ends with a brace of species of ‘fowls’, creatures that fly: nightingale, dove; swallow, bee. Between come a yoke of very closely related animals (hart, buck) and representatives of the two remaining broad kinds (fish, reptiles).³ The kinds of life are thus reviewed with maximum variety, in such a manner as to convey indirectly a universal pairing-off.

Some of the pairs are more suggestive of temporal stages. The initial formula ‘bud and bloom’ sets up a type of seasonal succession to which other pairs, even though widely sundered, conform. For example ‘Summer is come’ finds a successor eight lines later in ‘Winter is worn’. The latter phrase, however, ostensibly functions as an inverted repetition of the same statement; so that the effect is a suggestion of cyclical recurrence, sameness in difference. ‘Each thing renews’, as the title promises; but it does so by setting aside another old, worn, or decayed thing—‘old head’, ‘winter coat’, ‘slough’, ‘care’. In consequence the old and the new are simultaneously present.

The most beautiful instance of the pattern is an apparent exception to it: ‘The fishes fleet with new repaired scale’. The fishes are conspicuously plural not merely because ‘fertile be the floods in generation’ but in order to allude to Pisces, last of the winter signs. When the Fishes ‘fleet’ (wear) and Sol enters Aries, the first summer sign, winter is indeed worn.⁴ But just as Pisces is the last of the winter signs, so Libra, the ‘scale’, is the first—‘new repaired’. Even winter is no exception to the pattern of renewal. The sonnet's most obvious structural division, its octave, begins with the soot season and ends with Libra, the autumn equinoctial sign. Simultaneously, therefore, the movement runs forward from spring to Libra through the six summer signs and retrospectively from Pisces to Libra through the winter signs. The cycle is complete, so that the serpent which symbolizes that cycle can aptly follow.⁵

In the same spirit the hart is said to hang up old antlers rather than to grow new ones. The bee ‘mings’ (remembers) the new season's task but at the same time, by implication, remembers the honey of past seasons. And the migratory swallow, whose arrival signifies spring at one level, at another conveys the fleeting yet cyclical character of time itself:⁶ its swiftness is poignant to more than the flies. Thus the nature imagery shows new growth and generation as a remedy of time.

We also diminish Surrey's poem if we regard it as portraying natural renewal only, glozing over its ambivalent intimations of death. It works throughout towards the exquisitely balanced double paradox of the last line: ‘Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs’. The release of others from care is also a decay; his own sorrow is also a spring of life. But, since decays could be transitive, the line equally implies that care wastes him, and still his sorrow increases. Surrey claims to have seen joy and woe woven fine in the items catalogued, ‘among these pleasant things’; and critics have arbitrarily disallowed that claim. But an appeal to farther thought may reverse this by showing the grounds of the conclusion in earlier alternations of old with new, life with death, positive with negative statements. They can be seen, for example, in the six-year-old hart, for whom renewal means relief of a physical irritation, but also the laying aside of the equipment of his previous breeding season as a stag. Likewise in the serpent, who may be a symbol of eternity or a fatally poisonous adder.⁷ And the swallow's pursuit, which has the lethal swiftness of time itself, perhaps anticipates and catches the next line's item, to make him as much a murderer of bees as Chaucer's swallow. Here the personal application is strong: the bee, like the nightingale, readily functions as an emblem of the poet,⁸ in a context where other images are similarly applied (‘The nightingale … sings’: ‘The turtle … hath told her tale’). So it is a doomed bee-poet who remembers (‘mings’) honey and indeed mixes (‘mengs’)⁹ it; mingling poetic sweets with the bitterness of experience, or bitterness with the sweetness of spring. No less paradoxically, the nightingale, who is also an unhappy lover, pays attention to formal innovation and sings ‘with feathers new’ an imitation of Petrarch. Thus the eight-line cycle of life begins and ends with emblems of the poet. The ‘pleasant things’ between, his experiences, have a sad resonance. They are like clothing that will be put off, until at length winter is worn in a new sense altogether.

‘The soot season’ exploits the resources of language and associative imagery so intensively, to produce so rich a yield of condensed meaning, that it is unexpectedly hard to interpret. Contrary to what one supposed, discriminating sensitivity is needed to tune even the poem's signals, let alone their overtones. It would not be ridiculous, for example, to ask how, in view of the foregoing, we should think of the hart's ‘old head’: is it exactly auspicious, in this context of love complaint? The same difficulty, of knowing where to stop the critical enquiry (a difficulty which hardly arises with Wyatt), confronts us in Surrey's structural patterns. These arrangements of words, things and ideas cannot be dismissed as mere decorative ornament. But to say how intentionally and publicly they are meant is far from easy.

SCHEMES IN “WYATT RESTETH HERE”

We have a good chance to study Surrey's use of an unquestionably intentional scheme in ‘Wyatt resteth here.’ It may be natural to evoke the dead by description; but it was conventional in an encomium to praise by means of a blazon, a catalogue of virtues or other features.¹⁰ Surrey's structural idea is to combine a corporal blazon with the scheme of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, correlating them so as to suggest the virtuous endowment of a whole ‘manhood's shape’. In this he acknowledges a tradition that associated the Gifts with other sevenfold schemes, particularly systems of virtues (distinct from the theological and cardinal virtues); opposing vices; Beatitudes; and planetary deities. The commonest arrangement was that shown in the following table:

The Gifts were also associated with the seven Penitential Psalms; and we may guess that Wyatt's translation of these is alluded to not only in line 35, but in Surrey's choice of form.¹¹

1

W. resteth here, that quick could never rest:
          Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain,
And virtue sank the deeper in his breast.
          Such profit he by envy could obtain.

2

A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame:
          Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain,
As on a stith: where that some work of fame
          Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain.

3

A visage, stern, and mild: where both did grow,
          Vice to contemn, in virtue to rejoice:
Amid great storms, whom grace assured so,
          To live upright, and smile at fortune's choice.

4

A hand, that taught, what might be said in rhyme:
          That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit:
A mark, the which (unperfected, for time)
          Some may approach, but never none shall hit.

5

A tongue, that served in foreign realms his king:
          Whose courteous talk to virtue did inflame
Each noble heart: a worthy guide to bring
          Our English youth, by travail unto fame.

6

An eye, whose judgement none affect could blind,
          Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile:
Whose piercing look did represent a mind
          With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile.

7

A heart, where dread was never so impressed
          To hide the thought, that might the truth advance:
In neither fortune loft, nor yet repressed,
          To swell in wealth, or yield unto mischance.

8

A valiant corpse, where force, and beauty met:
          Happy, alas, too happy, but for foes:
Lived, and ran the race, that nature set:
          Of manhood's shape, where she the mould did lose.

9

But to the heavens that simple soul is fled:
          Which left with such, as covet Christ to know,
Witness of faith, that never shall be dead:
          Sent for our health, but not received so.
Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost:
The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost.

Tottel's Miscellany (1557)

The first Gift, in stanza 2, is explicitly ‘wisdom’. Wyatt's wisdom framed mysterious matter—arts, perhaps diplomatic secrets¹²—but also, the Spirit's mysteries framed Wyatt's wisdom. The hammers of mental creation worked continually (‘beat still’) in his head, where the hammers of a new creation may work still. The next Gift is characterized by evenness and balance of antithetic epithets and clauses: ‘stern and mild’; ‘Vice to contemn … virtue to rejoice’ (st.3). It is scientia, which bestows the virtue of temperance or measure: evenhede, equité. The measurableness consisted in balancing different virtues by the plumb-line of uprightness (cf. ‘to live up-right’) with the result of a harmony of soul commonly characterized as ‘patience under suffering’ (cf. ‘Amid great storms … assured’).¹³Intellectus or ‘wit’ (st.4) taught the hand ‘what might be said in rhyme’. Surprisingly as it seems at first, but aptly in view of Wyatt's role as communicator, the central item is his tongue (st.5), the organ assigned to Mercurius god of eloquence. It corresponded to the Gift of pietas and the virtue of amity or benignity, here manifested in the ‘courteous talk’ of Wyatt's virtuous ambassadorship.¹⁴ The conspicuous loyalty of this sovereign centre stanza (‘A tongue that served in foreign realms his king’) suits the secular meaning of pietas. But it also alludes to the pater noster Petition correlated with pietas: ‘Thy kingdom come’.¹⁵ The Gift of stanza 6 is explicitly ‘judgement’ (consilium); so that the juxtaposed ‘eye’ suggests the divine Eye of Judgement, as well as the seven eyes in the stone of Zechariah, itself considered a type of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost.¹⁶ In stanza 7, only recognition of the Gift involved (timor dei, ‘dread’) allows us to appreciate the primary meaning—not ‘Nothing scared him into covering up the truth’ but ‘His pious reverence was never of such a rigid stamp as to make him repress what might help truth's cause’. The vice opposed to timor dei was superbia, here alluded to in the denial that Wyatt's heart was ‘loft’ (proud) or given ‘to swell’. And the choice of ‘heart’ itself refers to the appropriate Beatitude, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit (heart)’. Finally Wyatt's body manifested ‘force’, the remaining Gift of fortitudo.

If the first emphasis in approaching ‘Wyatt resteth here’ must be on the generic indicators of the seven Gifts, the next is on the individuality of Surrey's treatment of the motif. The version of the scheme that Surrey traces in Wyatt's personality and in his roles as ambassador and poet is a much modified one. Here wisdom beats out works of fame, wit serves to teach in rhyme or overgo Chaucer. Surrey's departure from the extrinsic type even presents something of a problem, in respect of sequence. The order of Gifts, as is well known, hardly varied, so that the sequence of the poem at first seems oddly confused.¹⁷ What can have guided Surrey's dispositio?

The answer does not lie in the symmetrical pattern to which I have elsewhere drawn attention: stanza 2 manufacturing imagery ❙ 3 fortune ❙ 5 king ❙ 7 fortune ❙ 8 manufacturing imagery. That pattern, it is quite true, might be extended, to take in the correspondence of ‘heavenly’ in stanza 1 with ‘heavens’ in 9; or ‘visage’ (3) with ‘heart’ (7), implying Wyatt's frank simplicity. But such symmetries could easily have been combined with one of the conventional sequences of the Gifts. To understand the innovation that Surrey makes we have to look farther. Unexpectedly far beneath the poem's surface, in fact. The explanation lies not in any sequence of the Gifts themselves, but in that of the associated planetary deities. Usually the deities were associated with the Gifts according to their (Ptolemaic) order of proximity to Earth: Luna, Mercurius, Venus, Sol, Mars, Iupiter, Saturnus. Surrey's implied order of deities, however, is Saturnus, Venus, Iupiter, Mercurius, Mars, Luna, Sol. That is, the order of the days of the week, over which they preside—Saturday, Friday … Sunday.

Surrey may have had several purposes in rearranging the Gifts. The variation would have had the attraction of poetical novelty, besides the spiritual advantage of attributing yet another human scheme to the Spirit's Gifts. More to the elegiac purpose, the reverse order of the temporal sequence may allude to the process of decay that destroyed the mould of ‘manhood's shape. However, when the week of mortal life runs its course (‘the race that nature set’) it leads on to the eighth day of eternity (‘to the heavens that simple soul is fled’). This is expressed by the fine formal device whereby seven stanzas on Wyatt's manhood are themselves set within the context of ‘the heavens’ by the framing stanzas 1 and 9: the earthly seven of his ‘bones’ are comprehended by the heavenly nine of his ‘ghost’.¹⁸ However, this array is itself framed yet again by the addition of a couplet coda, bringing the line total of the whole poem to 38, the number of years of Wyatt's life. (We can be fairly sure that Surrey intended this, because of the familiarity of the precedent, Petrarch's 38-line Latin panegyric on his mother, who also died aged 38.)¹⁹ Throughout the poem runs the structural idea of alternation or interweaving of mutable with spiritual. In a series of reversals manhood's mutable shape is successively endowed with eternal gifts, realized and decayed by time, raised to the heavens, enclosed in the mortal terms of time, and commemorated in the perennial monument of a form outlasting Petrarch.

The reiterated antithesis becomes epitomized in the concluding couplet, which in consequence attains a concentrated force. Each word sounds, extraordinarily charged with significance. Jewel is the precious thing lost to men and shared between earth and heaven: it is the soul of Malachi 3.17 (‘they shall be mine … in that day when I make up my jewels’) lost through guilt; it is the ‘jewel of gold’ (Numbers 31.50) of the true offering, contrasted here with the mere gilt of those left unoblated; and it is the seven-eyed precious stone of the Spirit's Gifts (Zechariah 3.9). The interpretative problem becomes one of knowing how soon tact should curtail demonstration of the manifold wealth of possibilities of nuance.

THE EPITAPH ON CLERE

Density of texture, justness of language and unexpected structural intricacy again characterize the “Epitaph on Thomas Clere.” This moving poem is no doubt one of those which C. S. Lewis considered to have ‘permanent, though moderate, value’ (p. 234). Lever, who appreciates the ‘clang of steel’ in its strong opening, thinks that it anticipates ‘not so much the major poetry of the Elizabethans as that of the Augustans’ (p. 50). This notion of Surrey's poetry as neoclassical has since been developed and given substance by Emrys Jones in the fine Introduction to his edition; and many of his discriminating observations about the Virgil translation might be applied to the “Epitaph”: ‘The reader senses a continual striving after balance, parallelism, antithesis, symmetry, and pleasurable asymmetry. … Such writing can be said to possess “verbal beauty” in a way foreign to Chaucer, Lydgate, and Wyatt’ (p. xvii). Nevertheless, the architectural impression that Surrey's best poetry can give remains largely unaccounted for. Nor will it serve, with the Clere “Epitaph,” to speak of ‘thin strains’ or formal charms entailing ‘a loss of ordinary vitality’, and so excuse the critic the labour of analysis.²⁰ Here at least we have to do with a resonant and robust completeness of personal utterance.

Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,
          Clere of the County of Cleremont, though hight,*
          Within the womb of Ormonde's race thou bred,
          And sawest thy cousin crowned in thy sight.
Shelton for love, Surrey for Lord thou chase:
          Ay me, while life did last that league was tender:
          Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsall blaze,
          Laundersey burnt, and battered Bullen render:
At Muttrell gates hopeless of all recure,
          Thine Earl half dead, gave in thy hand his will:
          Which cause did thee this pining death procure,
          Ere summers four† times seven thou couldst fulfil.
          Ah Clere, if love had booted, care, or cost,
          Heaven had not won, nor Earth so timely lost.

Camden Remains (1605)

*[hight] high Camden
†[four] seven Camden

A predominant impression given by the “Epitaph on Clere” is of finely maintained gravity. Perhaps of formal gravity, although the formality is less the restraint of inhibition than the orderliness of contemplation. In retrospect, Clere's well-completed life seems (despite Surrey's partial denial) accomplished, firm in calm epitome. The reader may feel this in the lapidary definitiveness—‘pithy, quick and sententious’²¹—thought apt for epitaphs. But what he will surely feel, indeed appreciate from his earliest readings, is the ponderous force that the poem's many names bring to bear. From the first heavy rhythms of ‘Norfolk sprang thee’, the names have monumental weight, alabaster luminosity. It is they that embody the fullness of Clere's life, the extent of Surrey's loss. But how they acquire so much sepulchral portentousness proves harder to say. To speak of tension between the impersonality of place-names and the intimacy of personal names, or of the tone of the closure, will not satisfy for long. The means to a powerful effect seem obscurely simple and slight. What art is it the nature of this art to conceal?

Perhaps it is an art that structures names, for their profusion in so short a poem is remarkable. A model might be adduced, the epitaph on Virgil's tomb:

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.(22)

But if Surrey's idea had been only to catch this effect, he could have done it more economically—as in ‘From Tuscan came.’ And yet the “Clere Epitaph” gives no sense of being loosely constructed.

Taking the names as a point of departure, we may set out their sequence: Norfolk ❙ Lambeth ❙ Clere ❙ Cleremont ❙ Ormonde ❙ (cousin) ❙ Shelton ❙ Surrey ❙ Kelsall ❙ Laundersey ❙ Bullen ❙ Muttrell ❙ (Clere). We first think of determining the number and disposition of place names (lower case) and personal names (capitalized). But here we meet anomalies that draw attention to certain constituents. There is the conspicuously unnamed ‘cousin crowned’ (i.e. Anne Boleyn); there is a second occurrence of Clere in the couplet; and there is a pair of names very closely connected—‘Clere of the County of Cleremont’. Nevertheless, we have unambiguous totals: 4 distinct personal names, 7 place names. The next enquiry is whether this configuration matches any other. It does, as line 12 makes plain: ‘Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfil’. The conclusion seems reasonable that the “Epitaph” has 4 personal and 7 place names because Clere died in his 28th year.

However, the twelfth line itself calls for explanation: why should the age Clere failed to attain be given so particularly like this? No doubt it was convenient to avoid the metrically awkward ‘twenty-eight’. But the emphatic repetition of the factors 4 and 7 points to a less trivial reason. In number symbolism, the tetrad and the heptad carried well-established, clearly defined meanings, which function in the present context with considerable aptness.

Seven was universally known as the number of mutability; of the temporal sublunary world, as opposed to the eternal; and also (contradictorily) of the eternal sabbath. It was

The number of the unfixed fires of heaven;
And of the eternal sacred Sabbaoth.(23)

It was therefore very suitable for elegiac forms. Moreover, it had a strong association with the body, which turned out to have 7 internal members, 7 tissues, 7 visible parts, 7 orifices, 7 directions of movement, and the like.²⁴ No less familiarly, 4 was the number of Friendship, League, Alliance and Concord.²⁵ In fact, this meaning was so fundamental as to underlie the numeration of the elements and the seasons. Whether those meanings correlate with the poem's constituents must be our next enquiry.

In the case of the tetrad of concord, it soon appears that various social relations occur not merely as topics (‘Ay me … that league was tender’) but as the basis of formal organization of the epitaph, considered as a sonnet. John Fuller analyses its division as follows:

Clere's good connexions (related to Anne Boleyn) are presented in the first quatrain. His purely voluntary relationships (‘chase’ = ‘chose’) follow, in the second quatrain; and, arising from his association with Surrey, his selfless attention to the wounded Earl at the siege of Montreuil, leading to his death, occupies the third quatrain. There is logical development here: by contrast between the first and second quatrains and by example between the second and third. The points thus made are that whatever the status of one's birth one does not choose it, and that love and friendship are on the other hand a matter of choice, thought not of calculation.²⁶

To this we need only add that each quatrain of the octet presents two kinds of ‘league’. In the second, it is Clere's love for Mary Shelton and his friendship or squirely relation with Surrey himself: ‘Shelton for love, Surrey for Lord thou chase’. In the first, two distinct family connections are traced. ‘Clere of the Country of Cleremont’ honours the name that Thomas Clere received from his father—the male, dynastic relation. But ‘Within the womb of Ormonde's race’ insists on the maternal matrix of this Cleremont seed, and hence on the Howard connection that the poem amplifies. Padelford paraphrases: ‘Though of another house, the Howards claim you: you were born in Norfolk, your remains rest in our chapel, you had the blood of the Ormondes, a house united to ours by marriage’.²⁷ In other words, the 4 personal names imply 4 kinds of alliance, which is also the significance of the tetrad as a number symbol.

The place names represent in part the extent of Surrey's bond with Clere. Norfolk was the home of the Howards: the poet's father was Duke of Norfolk. And the last 4 place names allude to campaigns that Surrey and Clere shared. It was at the siege of Montreuil in September 1544, while caring for Surrey, that Clere received the wound from which he eventually (‘pining’) died, in the April of the following year. However, these are not the only ideas governing the choice of names.

The first two define the limits of Clere's bodily existence: Norfolk ‘sprang’ him; his corpse lies in Lambeth. Within these limits he lived the life whose relations and deeds the poem reviews. The next place name, Cleremont, comes in a phrase that unites place and person, material and spiritual aspects: ‘Clere of the Country of Cleremont’. As such it constitutes as it were a monad combining even and odd, material and spiritual—in contrast with the bodily dyad before it. The formulation ‘County of Cleremont’ also introduces the genealogical heritage on which English territorial claims in France were based. A more obvious representative value attaches to towns successfully besieged by the English: Kelsall in Scotland, Landrecy in the Netherlands, Montreuil and Boulogne debatably in France. Thus the place names divide into 3 concerned with family connections and 4 with campaigns; perhaps hinting at the common division of the heptad as a creative 3 + 4 (‘The critical and double-sexed seven … which three and four containeth jointly both’).²⁸ Specification of the number of ‘summers’, campaigning seasons, again introduces the tetrad. Thus 7 is not permitted the simple value of mutability which it often has in elegies. It is strongly offset by the tetrad of alliance, which in this solemn context may be taken to imply the Pythagorean quaternion of the soul, rather than merely the body's elements or complexions.²⁹

Besides these meanings, the numerical structure presents a further symbolism. Twenty-eight as the product of ‘four times seven’ has a precise significance in the present context. It is a perfect number, that is, one that equals the sum of its divisors (1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28). Because it neither exceeded its divisors nor fell short, a perfect number signified virtue: symbolically a desirable total for the years of a life. Now, perfect numbers were regarded as generated from terms of the even number series, arranged in pairs: 4, 8 ❙ 16, 32 ❙ 64, 128 ❙ … As a sixteenth-century arithmologist puts it, ‘each term has a fellow’ (‘vides quemlibet terminum habere socium’),³⁰ from which one is subtracted. The resultant pairs, multiplied, form the series of perfect numbers: 4 × 7 = 28; 16 × 31 = 496; 64 × 127 = 8128. … Hence Surrey's formation of 28 from its two factors 4 and 7 specifies its function as a perfect number. While intentional, however, this meaning is nevertheless ambiguous. If we take timely lost = ‘soon lost’,³¹ then the idea must be that Clere's death prevented him from making his life perfect. But if we take timely = ‘seasonably, aptly,³² then Clere may be thought of as achieving the perfection of virtue by the manner of his dying. In Biblical exegesis 28 denoted the dimensions of the Temple,³³ so that the completion of the spirit's dwelling would be meant—a point that adds force to Surrey's mention of a chapel as Clere's final place. Thus the “Epitaph” designed to embellish a building has itself an architectural proportion. As befits epigraphy, its significance partly lies in the arrangement of its visible words.

The formal sequence of the names may also have communicative value. Allowing for the special composite character of ‘Clere of … Cleremont’, the arrangement of place names (p) and surnames (s) is as follows: p p ❙ s-p ❙ s s s ❙ p p p p ❙ s. This could be seen as a form of the tetraktus, the Pythagorean creative principle whose terms 1, 2, 3, 4 add to 10 and so return to the divine unity. The monad, giving rise as it does to both even (material) and odd (spiritual) number-series, was regarded as simultaneously even and odd. In the same way the Clere-of-Cleremont term unites Surrey's odd (surname) series and even (place-name) series. That the tetraktus was called the fountain of number and virtue possibly throws light on ‘Norfolk sprang thee’. And the return of the tetraktus to unity in 10 finds echo in the repetition of Clere in the closure. Clere's virtue elevates him into a spiritual existence transcending spatial limits. However, the significance of the tetraktus as vinculum or bond of matter and spirit persists in the final couplet, in the implication of competing bonds, heaven and earth each desiring the beloved Clere.

We have still to account for the anomaly noted earlier, the unnamed ‘cousin’. Anne Boleyn had been executed after three years as Henry 8's consort, so that it might be thought tactless of Surrey, even writing four consorts later, to spell out the dangerous name. But then, it might be tactless to introduce Anne at all, if his purpose was to display Clere's good connections. One explanation is that Surrey's own connection with Clere was through the Boleyns. The argument of the “Epitaph,” which amplifies the bonds between Clere and the Howards, thus called for some mention of the Boleyns. But Surrey goes farther. He silently reaffirms the rank of Anne Boleyn, by according her a formal position of dignity. The ‘cousin crowned’ comes in the central position of sovereignty among the people mentioned: Clere ❙ Ormond ❙ (cousin) ❙ Shelton ❙ Surrey. This array does not conflict with any of the pattern traced earlier, since Anne is not actually named (except for the punning hint in ‘Bullen’).

I have deliberately pushed this interpretation farther than wisdom would have determined for a purely critical study. But the present aim is only to sketch loosely something of the range of possibilities for indirect meaning in Surrey's poetry. The difficulty it presents is not usually that of finding the primary meaning: we may well think the meaning of a poem such as the Clere epitaph lucid beyond dispute. The difficulty is rather to know how much nuance and structural reinforcement Surrey intended. Some formal structure must indubitably be intentional and ‘part of the poem’ in every imaginable reconstruction that we should call valid. But with the possibility of so much, doubts arise on several counts: the probability of an intention so complex; the possibility of excluding the critic's insidious creativity; the desirability, even, of completely intentional order. These problems are not necessarily accompaniments of high poetic value. But they are its common accompaniments. And their presence goes some way towards explaining why Surrey's poetry seemed so important to his successors. More than Wyatt's it offered models of indirection, of formal richness, of subtle recourses of form, of distinctively poetic inexhaustibility.

Notes

1. The parliament of fowls 353-4; Thomson 205.

2. See e.g. P. Valeriano Hieroglyphica 22.16 ‘Continentissima viduitas’ (Frankfurt 1614) 267.

3. For four-fold taxonomies of living creatures see P. Bongo Numerorum mysteria (Bergamo 1591) 202.

4. OED s.v. Fleet 9: ‘wear, fade’. Surrey puns however with fleet 1, 2, 4 = float, swim; cf. Winner and Waster 386 ‘fishes flete in the flode’. Fleet, spelled flete, is the reading of every early edn except the first, which has flote.

5. Tervarent col. 349 cites Martianus Capella and Servius; cf. C. Ripa Iconolgoa (Rome 1603) 482. Some authors connected the serpent specifically with the ecliptic: e.g. Macrobius Saturn. 1.9 and 19.

6. As in Keats To Autumn and Dylan Thomas Fern Hill.

7. Adder could still mean simply serpent (OED 1), though the restricted sense (‘small venomous serpent’, OED 2) was available.

8. See R. J. Clements Picta poesis (Rome 1960) 184-5; also 70, 82. The underlying idea is of gathering sweetness from flowers of past literature.

9. Mings was a common form of mengs = ‘mix, mingle, blend’ (OED s.v. Meng v.), so that ‘mings’ is a good pun.

10. On the blazon form see H. Smith Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. 1952) Index s.v. Blazons; H. Weber La création poétique au xvi^e siècle en France 2 vols (Paris 1956); and D. B. Wilson Descriptive Poetry in France from Blason to Baroque (Manchester 1967), with many refs. For the application to elegy, with lamentation dwelling on parts of the body in turn, cf. T. Moufet Nobilis, or a view of the life and death of a Sidney ed. V. B. Heltzel and H. H. Hudson (San Marino, Calif. 1940) 100ff. See also ch. 5 n.40 below.

11. E. Jones (ed.) Henry Howard Earl of Surrey: Poems (Oxford 1964) 124 notes the allusion to Wyatt's translation. For the Penitential Psalms correlated with Gifts, see R. Tuve Allegorical Imagery (Princeton, N.J. 1966) 92, 113. On the Gifts with their correlates see ibid. 85-102, 442 et passim; and R. Klibansky et al. Saturn and Melancholy (1964) 155-7, 163-7 and nn. K. K. Ruthven relates the amorous blazon to planetary gifts in AUMLA 26 (1966) 198-214.

12. OED s.v. Mystery¹ 11 5 c; Mystery² 2 c.

13. Tuve Allegorical Imagery 94-6. The present assignment of stanzas to Gifts corrects A. Fowler Triumphal Forms (Cambridge 1970) 102 n.1.

14. Tuve ibid. 94, 129, 139; also Klibansky 166 n. on Neckham's Gifts series. The tongue's assignement to Mercurius was commonplace: see e.g. Bongo 289.

15. Tuve ibid. 85.

16. On the stone, see ibid. 112; on the Eye of Judgment, E. Wind Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1968) 222ff., 232ff. The visionary plumbline and stone with eyes comes in Zech. 3.9 and 4.10 (‘they … shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth’).

17. For the order, and the few variants which correlation with other heptads gave rise to, see Tuve ibid. 92-3, 101; Klibansky 166.

18. See farther Fowler Triumphal Forms 101-2. The eighth day of the world week symbolized everlasting bliss, on the authority of St Augustine Epist. 55.9.17: ‘the eighth day will hold eternal blessedness: because that rest, which is eternal, is received from the eighth day, not ended by it. …’

19. Fowler Triumphal Forms 102 n.3 lists other exemplars of the tradition. On Petrarch's poem see E. H. R. Tatham Francesco Petrarca: The First Modern Man of Letters, vol.1: Early Years and Lyric Poems (1925) 192n. Petrarch announces his numerology explicitly: ‘versiculos tibi nunc totidem, quot praebuit annos / Vita, damus.’

20. ed. Jones pp. xi, xii.

21. G. Puttenham The art of English poesy ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge 1936) 56.

22. ed. Jones 129.

23. Du Bartas Divine weeks tr. J. Sylvester (1613) 361. See Fowler Spenser and the Numbers of Time (1964) 45-6, 248 n.; also V. F. Hopper in PMLA 55 (1940) 962ff.

24. Macrobius In somn. Scip. 1.6.77-82; see farther Fowler Numbers of Time 272.

25. ibid. 24-6; I. C. Butler Number Symbolism (1970) 123. The idea goes back to Plato Timaeus 32.

26. The Sonnet (1972) 16.

27. The Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey ed. F. M. Padelford (Seattle, Wash. 1928) 228. Padelford's genealogy should be treated with caution.

28. Du Bartas loc. cit. n.23 above; probably based on Macrobius In somn. Scip. 1.6.22-44 (ed. W. H. Stahl (New York and London 1966) 104-8), where 7 is a module of creation because of the structural value of its addends, esp. 3 and 4.

29. For the distinction, see Bongo 248. But Macrobius relates elemental concord to the Pythagorean tetraktus, at In somn. Scip. 1.6.41. On Milton's use of a not dissimilar structural pattern of 4 and 7 see A. Fowler in Silent Poetry (1970) 178.

30. Bongo 478; cf. Augustine Civ. Dei 11.30, and see M. Gardner Sci. Amer. 218 (Mar. 1968) 121.

31. OED s.v. Timely adv. 1.

32. ibid. 2.

33. Exo. 26 and 36. See Bongo 473.

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