[In the following essay, Ure provides an overview of Raleigh's court poetry.]

When Sir Walter Ralegh paid a visit to Edmund Spenser in the autumn of 1589, a few months after Spenser had acquired his castle and estate near Cork, he was a man who had already created his own legend. He was perhaps the most brilliant figure at the brilliant court, hated and courted for his pride and power, already a sea captain, an empire-builder, and an Irish landowner. Spenser has left us an idealized account of their poetical intercourse in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. They read each other's poems. Spenser reports that the poem which Ralegh had to offer was

                                                  a lamentable lay,
Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard,
Of Cynthia the Ladie of the sea,
Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.

(163-6)

The poem of Ralegh's that Spenser refers to in these lines, and elsewhere, is the long work, perhaps originally there were twenty or more books of it, which Ralegh wrote in praise of Queen Elizabeth, and of which only one unfinished book is now extant. Unfinished as it is, it is still Ralegh’'s most considerable poetical relic. At Kilcolman Castle another poem, which is also unfinished, was read in the autumn of 1589; this, of course, was Spenser's own offering, the first three books of The Faerie Queene, which were to appear in print the following year, and were to carry in the printed version a commendatory sonnet by Ralegh himself. We can now follow to the end the episode of Kilcolman Castle. We have Spenser's word for it that when Ralegh's time came to leave and he had to go back from the Irish peat-beds to the dangerous and glittering court in London, he persuaded Spenser to accompany him and try his luck in court once again:

He gan to cast great lyking to my lore,
And great dislyking to my lucklesse lot:
That banisht had my selfe, like wight forlore,
Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.
The which to leave, thenceforth he counseld mee,
And wend with him, his Cynthia to
see.

The two poets travelled back to England together across Ralegh's domain, the wide wilderness of waters that was the Shepherd of Ocean's element. But in little over a year Spenser was back at Kilcolman, having lost many illusions about his aptitude for court favour; and Ralegh's career, in the many years that remained to him, was to take on an increasingly ghastly aspect until the shameful moment, twenty-eight years later, when King James cut off his head to please the Spanish ambassador.

The episode at Spenser's Irish castle and its poetical interludes are perhaps the pleasantest glimpses we have of Ralegh, although the scarlet thread of his political ambition runs through even that. It would be easy to draw false inferences from the episode. Both men were old acquaintances, both were conscious proponents of the English Protestant Renaissance; both were engaged on ambitious poems dedicated to and in large measure about their sovereign, and both were hoping by such means to advance their fortunes in the state. Yet, if we set their poetry side by side, what strikes us is not the likeness but the difference. Ralegh must have been as fully aware as anybody else alive in his time that he was living in the Age of Spenser. But he was not a Spenserian. It is not simply that The Faerie Queene demands a lifetime's study, while you can, if you wish, read through all Ralegh's poems in an afternoon—there are not more than forty in the canon, and all of them, except for the five hundred lines of Cynthia (his poem to the Queen, or, rather, what survives of it), are quite short. The differences go deeper than that.

Writing poems to and about the court and the Queen is often the compositional centre in the work of both men. But Spenser, although he touched the fringes of preferment and hoped to enjoy more of it, writes essentially as an outsider. Because of this, he was able to see the brilliant and perilous working of power as a whole. In The Faerie Queene he was able to convey a sense of the court as only a part of the nation, a sense of the existence of the nation itself. When he addresses the Queen, the tone is distant, humble, and yet proud. He is the inspired Bard of England speaking to England's Sovereign, and both are servants of something greater than themselves. ‘Queen of Love’, ‘Prince of Peace’, he calls her, ‘Great lady of the greatest isle’:

Dread Soverayne Goddesse, that doest highest sit
          In seate of judgment, in th’Almightie's
stead,
          And with magnificke might and wondrous wit
          Doest to thy people righteous doome aread,
          That furthest Nations filles with awfull dread …

(Faerie Queene, v, Prologue 11)

But the court is Ralegh's own ground, and, when it proves to be a quicksand, the poems that reject it have a note of personal feeling which is not present when Spenser writes of his retirement from it. Ralegh's note can be one of savage disassociation—his own world has betrayed him and that is hard to bear—as in the obsessive rhythms and brutal anaphora of ‘The Lie’:

Say to the Court it glowes
          and shines like rotten wood,
Say to the Church it showes
          whats good, and doth no good.
If Church and Court reply,
          then give them both the lie.
Tell men of high condition,
          that mannage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
          their practise onely hate:
And if they once reply,
          then give them all the lie.

This theme of the rejection of the court is a traditional one. It is used by Sidney in his ‘Disprayse of the Courtly Life’, and many poems on the subject will be found in Tottel's Miscellany and the other anthologies that preceded the work of the major Elizabethan poets. But in the ‘The Lie’ it has a personal force that is a long way from a merely theoretical contempt of the world epitomized by the court. And what is savagery in this poem can be transformed in Ralegh's other poems into a throbbing clamour of personal regret and sadness of spirit, as though Ralegh could not see further than his own disappointments. We know from his prose writings that in actuality he could see much further. As a man, he had as keen a sense of the nation and of the world beyond it as Spenser; but he keeps all that out of his poems. Therefore his great poem of disappointment, the five hundred lines of Cynthia, Ralegh's counterpart to The Faerie Queene, is a very private poem. When Ralegh addresses his sovereign, the convention which he adopts is quite different from the one employed by Spenser. Spenser plays the role of the vassal-bard, Ralegh that of the rejected lover. The analogy between the courtier out of favour and the dismissed lover is pressed home until it becomes a sharp lament over a waste land and a wasted life:

From fruitfull trees I gather withred leaves
And glean the broken eares with misers hands,
Who sometyme did injoy the waighty sheaves
I seeke faire floures amidd the brinish sand.

The praise of Elizabeth with which the poem is charged has this personal note too. Of the two ways in which Elizabethan poets were most accustomed to celebrate the Queen, as a sovereign divinity or as a virtuous mistress, Ralegh naturally chose the latter. It is what we would expect of an insider. Spenser himself made the point in the induction to the third book of The Faerie Queene.There he tells the Queen that, with his humble quill, he is only writing at a distance from her living colours; if she wishes to see herself rightly pictured in her true beauty, let her turn to Ralegh.

Ralegh's own compliment to Spenser is also interesting. It occurs in the form of a sonnet printed in 1590 in commendation of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. But it is interesting not so much because it conveys Ralegh's opinion of that great work as because of its own magnificence. It is one of the best of Ralegh's poems, and one of the greatest of Elizabethan sonnets:

Methought I saw the grave, where Laura lay,
Within that Temple, where the vestall flame
Was wont to burne, and passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tombe faire love, and fairer vertue kept,
All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:
At whose approach the soule of Petrarke wept,
And from thenceforth those graces were not seene.
For they this Queene attended, in whose steed
Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras
herse:
Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,
And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse.
                    Where Homers spright
did tremble all for griefe,
                    And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

In some ways, this sonnet might be by a contemporary of Wyatt and Surrey; in others, it belongs very much to the era of Sidney and Shakespeare. Ralegh has taken the ancient topos of the great new poet outdistancing and outshining the classical giants. For its time, his diction is a little old-fashioned—the groaning ghosts and bleeding stones take us back to Tottel's Miscellany. But, on the other hand, the ordering of the sentences, the wonderful planning of the sonnet as a whole (a feature on which Sir Edmund Chambers remarked) are signs of the new flowering of poetry in the 1580s and 1590s. Yet, magnificent though the sonnet is, it is also puzzling. It celebrates the appearance of a great new work of art, yet it has a tragic rather than a joyous air. Jonson, who used the same topos when he praised Shakespeare in the first Folio, was able to impart an air of jollity, of bell-ringing, fireworks, and water music to the occasion. That is much nearer the note we expect when a theme of this kind is handled. Ralegh's welcome to Spenser is, by contrast, very dark. He seems more moved to pity by the fate of the displaced poets than pleased because a new one has outclassed them. His sonnet is constructed so that all the force of feeling gathers into the sestet, on Petrarch's weeping soul, and on ‘Oblivion laid him down on Lauras herse’: a magnificent conceit, but too grim and ghastly for the occasion, as though Michelangelo's ‘Night’ had suddenly been glimpsed at the heart of the revel. And by the two concluding lines we are irresistibly reminded of that grand thief Satan climbing up into God's fold in the third book of Paradise Lost. Indeed, it has long seemed likely that Milton did borrow from this sonnet when he wrote his own sonnet ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’; but Milton's sonnet is concerned with his vision of his dead wife, and the tragic tone is fitting.

There is, therefore, a faint air of miscalculation about Ralegh's poem, of emotion in excess of its object, of a man being more serious than he really intends to be. It is probably foolish to suggest that there was something in the commonplace of the displaced poet that went too near to Ralegh's heart. For displaced poet did he too easily read displaced courtier? However this may be, it is true that the tragic note, the note of fear and betrayal, which seems to make such an indecorous intrusion on this gay occasion, is recurrent in Ralegh’'s extant verse. We can observe this tone—one might almost call it an obsession—at work in such a poem as ‘Nature that washt her hands in milke’. In this poem it has the effect of producing a new, sombre, and fearful poem out of the old shell of what was originally a gay and pretty one. The poetic toy suddenly turns into a weeping funeral verse, and we see the skull beneath the skin. Ralegh describes in the first stanzas how nature took snow and silk at love's behest and made from them a fair but heartless girl. With that pretty fancy, such as it is, the poem might well have seemed complete. But then Time comes on the scene:

But Time which nature doth despise,
          And rudely gives her love the lye,
Makes hope a foole, and sorrow wise,
          His hands doth neither wash, nor dry,
But being made of steele and rust,
Turnes snow, and silke, and milke to dust.
The Light, the Belly, lipps and breath,
          He dimms, discolours, and destroyes,
With those he feedes, but fills not death,
          Which sometimes were the foode of Joyes;
Yea Time doth dull each lively witt,
And dryes all wantonnes with it.
Oh cruell Time which takes in trust
          Our youth, our Joyes and all we have,
And payes us but with age and dust,
          Who in the darke and silent grave
When we have wondred all our wayes
Shutts up the story of our dayes.

There is no question here of emotion in excess of the object, or inappropriate to it, and we have come a long way from Spenser. Spenser was often plangent about the ruins of Time, but he had none of this shrinking horror, and for him, in the end, Time itself was only an aspect of revolving change.

It is tempting, indeed, to take these stanzas as an index of Ralegh’'s modernity as compared with Spenser's antiquity. Was Spenser unable to sound this note because of his share in the large-eyed innocence of an earlier, golden world; because he was a man who died before the Elizabethan adventure ran aground in the shallows of Jacobean disappointment and anti-climax? In these three stanzas, it might be argued, there is reflected the true voice of Jacobean feeling, of Hamlet by the graveside, of Vindice and the poisoned skull in The Revenger's Tragedy, all that melancholy and malcontentism which is supposed to have invaded literature at the turn of the century. ‘Nature that washt her hands in milke’ could be used as a handy symbol of the transition from Elizabethan to Jacobean, the delicate art of its first portion and the disgusted disrelish of the second straddling the two worlds of The Faerie Queene and Hamlet. Other evidence for Ralegh’'s transitional status could be brought into court in the form of his most celebrated poem, the ‘Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd’ (if it is indeed by Ralegh—we have only Izaak Walton's word for it). Christopher Marlowe's song, to which Ralegh’'s poem is an answer, ‘Come live with me and be my love’, is the perfection of pastoral innocence, of uncorrupted and uncourtly pleasure. The reply said to have been devised by Ralegh is another of his savage reminders of mutability, an utter refusal to dream:

Thy gownes, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soone breake, soone wither, soone forgotten:
In follie ripe, in reason rotten.

Here, perhaps, Jacobean disillusion deliberately flouts the Elizabethan hope.

Yet the argument would be a very weak one. What we are listening to, in the last three stanzas of ‘Nature that washt her hands in milke’ or in the ‘Nymph's Reply’, is not Jacobean disaccord. It is an altogether older note: an echo of the sententious mournfulness of the 1570s. The anthologies of that period, which are the chief repositories of such verse as has survived from the earlier years of Elizabeth Tudor, are full of poems which contemplate the ghastliness of the grave, the swiftness of time's passage, or the vanity of youthful love. ‘My youthfull partes be played’, they never tire of saying, ‘And I must learne to die’:¹

To earth the stout, the prowd, the ritch shall yeeld,
The weake, the meeke, the poore, shall shrowded lye
In dampish mould, the stout with Speare and Sheeld
Cannot defend himselfe when hee shall dye.(2)

Or:

Hope for no immortalitie, for welth will weare away,
As we may learne by every yeare, yea howres of every day …
Then rage of stormes done make all colde which somer had made so
Wherefore let no man put his trust in that that will decay, [warm
For slipper welth will not continue, pleasure will weare away.
For when that we have lost our lyfe, & lye under a stone,
What are we then, we are but earth, then is our pleasure gon.(3)

Spenser, too, can write like this, but it is not what we chiefly remember about him. He moved away from gazing at the ruins of Time, finding the Heavenly Jerusalem more interesting. Another glance at the contrast between Ralegh and Spenser will strengthen the argument that Ralegh is more affected by post-medieval melancholy than by Jacobean disillusion. It is a true generalization about Spenser to say that he is one of the great pioneers of the rich, splendid, and decorated style, despite his many qualities of sageness and sobriety. Ralegh, although he, too, has touches of gold, mainly practises the plainer style, the sententiousness and lack of adornment characteristic of Spenser's predecessors. The contrasting ways in which each poet mourned in verse the death of their mutual friend, the great Sir Philip Sidney, illustrate this. Spenser adopts the creamy elegance of the pastoral guise; Sidney becomes Astrophel the shepherd boy:

For he could pipe and daunce and caroll sweet,
Emongst the shepheards in their shearing feast:
As Somers larke that with her song doth greet
The dawning day forth comming from the East.
And layes of love he also could compose,
Thrise happie she, whom he to praise did chose.

Astrophel, ll. 31-36

Untimely slain while hunting the boar, like Adonis, Astrophel too is transformed into a flower. Spenser marries Ovidian legend with Christian fancy, for in another part of the poem the dead soldier's soul lies in paradise on beds of lilies, roses, and violets, ‘like a newborne babe’. This is Spenser's way.

Ralegh’'s is very different. Critics have noticed how each stanza of his sixty-line poem on the death of Sidney reads like something carved on stone. The lines are plain, stern, lapidary. They use their big, uncompromising words without concealment or reservation, words such as ‘virtue’ or ‘honour’, names such as ‘England’ or ‘Flanders’; it is not Astrophel who is being laid to rest but ‘the right Honorable Sir Philip Sidney, Knight, Lord Governor of Flushing’:

Backe to the campe, by thee that day was brought,
First thine owne death, and after thy long fame;
Teares to the soldiers, the proud Castilians shame;
Vertue exprest, and honor truly taught.
What hath he lost, that such great grace hath woon,
Yong yeeres, for endles yeeres, and hope unsure
Of fortunes gifts, for wealth that still shall dure,
Oh happie race with so great praises run.
England doth hold thy lims that bred the same,
Flaunders thy valure where it last was tried,
The Campe thy sorrow where thy bodie died,
Thy friends, thy want; the world, thy vertues fame.

This note of marble gravity is common enough in Ralegh's extant poetry for it to be safely regarded as characteristic of him. We meet it again, for example, in ‘The Advice’, a strange poem, ostensibly a warning to a virgin to beware of those who would betray her. But it resembles the sonnet to Spenser in its excess of strength and tragic sound. It is almost as though half the poet's mind was on power, not love; on the betrayed statesman as much as on the betrayed girl. This ambiguity is characteristic of Ralegh, and ambiguities of one kind or another must torment every judgement of Ralegh's poetry as of his personality.

The ambiguities indeed, deserve the final emphasis. Ralegh’'s greatest poem is ‘The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage supposed to be written by one at the point of death’. It is his greatest poem, but his least characteristic. So uncharacteristic is it that his authorship of it has often been questioned, although it has as good authority for being admitted to the canon as many others. Much of what has been said here about Ralegh is denied by this poem. ‘The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage’ is a vision of death and judgement, but it is not one of a stern or mournful kind. The heaven that the poet imagines is a florid and baroque place of nectar fountains and milky hills, diamond ceilings and bowers of pearl. As well as its wealth of golden imagery, it is charged with a combination of humble joy and metaphysical with which is found nowhere else in Ralegh. Its vision of the judgement of the soul marvellously combines the continued witty image with the heart-felt prayer. It speaks of

          heavens bribeless hall
Where no corrupted voices brall,
No Conscience molten into gold,
Nor forg’d accusers bought and sold,
No cause deferd, nor vaine spent Journey,
For there Christ is the Kings Atturney:
Who pleades for all without degrees,
And he hath Angells, but no fees.
When the grand twelve million Jury
Of our sinnes and sinfull fury,
Gainst our soules blacke verdicts give,
Christ pleads his death, and then we live,
Be thou my speaker taintless pleader,
Unblotted Lawer, true proceeder,
Thou movest salvation even for almes:
Not with a bribed Lawyers palmes.

If this is Ralegh, it is a Ralegh whom Spenser never knew. And by a strange irony, it is a Spenserian Ralegh, which turns upside down the usual contrast between the two poets. In this poem Ralegh draws close to Spenser in his vision of heaven (which resembles the Red Cross Knight's vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the first book of The Faerie Queene) and in the allegoria of the soul-as-pilgrim, which is emblematized in the Spenserian manner.

To consider Ralegh's poetry, therefore, is to conclude upon an enigma. He was thoroughly enigmatic to his contemporaries, and since his death he has had a dozen incompatible reputations. The Shepherd of Ocean who piped so pleasantly to Spenser in his dark little Irish tower was to Sir Edward Coke a damnable atheist, a traitor with a Spanish heart.

Ralegh doth time bestride,
He sits ’twixt wind and tide,
Yet up hill he cannot ride
For all his bloody pride.
He seeks taxes in the tin,
He polls the poor to the skin,
Yet he swears ’tis no sin.
          Lord, for thy pity!(4)

The mischievous Machiavel of the anonymous rhymester⁵ was the same man as the liberal historian and champion of liberty devoutly admired by the seventeenth-century parliamentarians. The grotesque lover whom Shakespeare may have caricatured in the person of Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost is the paragon of Elizabethan gallantry who used to figure in the school history books. But one reputation is increasingly firm: he ranks ever better amongst the minor poets of his time and was lucky in his muse, if in nothing else.

Notes

1. [Punctuation and spelling have been slightly modernized in some of the quotations. The standard edition of Ralegh’'s Poems is edited by A. M. C. Latham (London, 1951). There is an introductory study by Philip Edwards (London, 1954), and a study of his thought by E. Strathman (New York, 1951). The standard biography of Ralegh is by William Stebbing (Oxford, 1899).]

   ¹

   A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578 (ed. H. E. Rollins, Cambridge,Mass., 1926). p. 44

2. Ibid., p. 99.

3. Tottel's Miscellany (1557-87) (ed. H. E. Rollins, Cambridge, Mass., 1928), vol. i, p. 153.

4. Quoted in E. Thompson, Sir Walter Ralegh (London, 1955), p. 151.

5. Poetical Miscellanies (ed. Halliwell, Percy Society, 1845), pp. 13-14.