The Poetry
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
Ralegh's was not a mind that considered too curiously in poetry, that worried intricate and subtle problems or often took wing on flights of high imagination. He takes broad and general themes and paints with a broad brush. ‘Joy’ and ‘woe’ are precise enough emotions for him, and ‘sweet spring’ and ‘parched ground’ definite enough images. He chooses the time-honoured commonplaces, the transitoriness of life, the instability of happiness and the impermanence of youth, Time the destroyer, the vanity of desire, love betrayed, corruption in society. It is not for novelty or originality, for brilliance of wit, for the excitement of unconventional concepts, for the recondite, that we turn to Ralegh's poetry; it is for his emphatic, compelling, echoing, re-expression of traditional wisdom.
And what he has to say is all of a piece. In many ways, all Ralegh's poetry is a flowing—a revision and reordering, a working towards the writing of one great poem (so nearly achieved in ‘Cynthia’). As he rehearses the old sentiments in a new articulation, his memory prompts with phrases and images from former poems. In ‘Cynthia,’ the re-use of poetry written before becomes a deliberate effect. The refrain of ‘Farewell to the Court’ is ‘Of all which past, the sorrow only stays’. In ‘Cynthia,’ he writes:
Twelve years entire I wasted in this war,
Twelve years of my most happy younger days,
But I in them, and they now wasted are—
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.
So wrote I once …
It is not in the poetry alone that there is the reappearance of what was said elsewhere. The History of the World repeats this same notion of obliterated joy. The seventh age of man is like to Saturn, ‘wherein our days are sad and overcast, and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth’. ‘A poesie to prove affection is not Love’ says:
Desire himself runs out of breath,
And getting doth but gain his death.
.....Desire attained is not desire,
But as the cinders of the fire.
So, in the ‘Instructions to his Son,’ it is affirmed that ‘the Desire dieth when it is attained and the Affection perisheth when it is satisfied’.
There are many examples of this trick of repetition, which gives a pleasing harmony to Ralegh's writings—but the most striking is in the well-known ‘last poem’, written, according to tradition, in his Bible the night before his execution. Ralegh had written, how many years before we do not know, a poem which had begun in his most light-hearted manner about a maiden specially manufactured by Nature for Love, as Spenser's witch produced the false Florimell for her son. The maiden was all of snow and silk and wantonness and wit but, alas, she was given a heart of stone, so Love must die for her whom Nature gave him. But along comes Time, with hands of rusty steel, and pays out the hussy for her hard-heartedness by robbing her of her beauty. In the last stanza, Ralegh, moved to ponder on the way Time destroys all beauty, suddenly turns with some indignation against the monster:
O cruel Time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who, in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days.
Now, as he awaits his death, these lines come into his head and as he transcribes them he transforms them into a moving epitaph which closes with a recognition of that which transcends and overcomes the mutations of Time:
Even such is Time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
And from which earth, and grave, and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.
There is great consistency not only in what Ralegh says, but in his style. ‘Style’, of course, is not something to be detached from a poet's writing to be discussed by itself. Style is expression, is the form of a work, is the means by which a poem says what it does say. The only fruitful discussion of style is really in the analysis of individual works of art, as an explanation of how successfully the poet had made the spirit flesh, by words, images and rhythm and so on. But it is possible and legitimate to talk about some characteristic habits of Ralegh.
Most obvious is the ‘solid axiomatical vein’, to use Oldys's phrase. Everywhere one finds the emphatic statement, the injunction or admonition in which, with a downright simplicity of diction, Ralegh enforces a traditional truth. The habit had been his from the beginning: the first extant poem that we can date, in commendation of Gascoigne's Steele Glas, lives by its ‘axiomatic’ sentences:
For whoso reaps renown above the rest
With heaps of hate shall surely be oppress’d.
The tendency to be insistent, urgent, dogmatic or peremptory spreads throughout the poetry, whether a traditional truth or a piece of homely advice is to be given. The poem ‘Conceit begotten by the eyes’ is built upon blunt assertions; that fine lyric recently added to the canon, ‘Feed still thyself thou fondling with belief’, is a series of ironical remonstrances. Sometimes these statements stand singly, designed to have an explosive force; more often, they come together to build up a cumulative, incantatory effect. Like his prose, Ralegh's verse is nearly always a building-up; he is rarely a poet from whom single lines can be detached for admiration, the fineness being not in the part but the whole. ‘The Lie’ is an excellent example of this; it is a surging and compelling progress of imperatives and incisive accusations. ‘The Advice’ only achieves poetic force by its reiteration through three stanzas of the same notion:
Many desire, but few or none deserve
To win the fort of thy most constant will;
Therefore take heed, let fancy never swerve
But unto him that will defend thee still.
For this be sure: the fort of fame once won,
Farewell the rest, thy happy days are done.
It is the habit of exclamation that is the cause of one of Ralegh's favourite cadences: a plangent four-syllable phrase, followed by a caesura and a six-syllable resolution.
Time wears her not, she doth his chariot guide
Farewell false love, the oracle of lies
What hath he lost, that so great grace hath won?
O hopeful love! my object and invention
But although it is easy to pick out a recurrent cadence like this, no complaints can be made against Ralegh for monotony in his rhythms. His skill in achieving special effects by variety of cadences is one of his claims to importance as a poet. Compare, from ‘Cynthia’,
No pleasing streams fast to the ocean wending
in which the sound itself flows like the streams, or the languorous line:
Each living creature draweth to his resting
with the abruptness of:
But love was gone. So would I, my life were!
or the leaping quality of:
But that the eyes of my mind held her beams
or the ‘onomatopoeic’:
No more than when small drops of rain do fall
Upon the parched ground by heat updried.
or the adagio of:
As to the dead, the dead did these unfold.
Simplicity of diction, going with plain obviousness of imagery, is everywhere Ralegh's distinction. Many of the most powerful and dramatic points in ‘Cynthia’ are made with a stark austerity of vocabulary:
All droops, all dies, all trodden under dust
She is gone, she is lost—she is found, she is ever fair!
The thoughts of passed times like flames of hell
Kindled afresh within my memory …
Which till all break and all dissolve to dust
Joys under dust that never live again
This unornamented grace of language will be apparent in nearly every quotation to be made. But it is important to remember that so far as general simplicity and ease of style go, Ralegh is two poets. In his more private poems, he is turbulent and impulsive and leaps the gates of grammar and logic: in his more public poems there is a carefully ordered lucidity of argument and syntax. A host of examples of the elliptical jumble of the private poem will be found in ‘Cynthia’.
The simplicity of his words and diction must not tempt us to think of Ralegh as a kind of ‘natural’ poet, scorning the figures of rhetoric and the poetic devices of his time. In some passages of ‘Cynthia’, where there is an elaborate patterning of invocation, of apostrophe, of repetition and so on, it is easy for the reader to grasp that Ralegh is obeying conventional rhetorical practices. But it is not so easy to grasp that the whole of Ralegh's poetry is obedient to these practices. ‘Rhetoric’ now has a frightening sense of artificiality about it. The age insisted that a poet should have a thorough grounding in rhetoric: we, with the theories of the Romantic period between us and the Elizabethans, inevitably think that this indicates a false attitude to poetry. We suppose rhetoric to be a garment of poetic diction and false contrivances by which the most prosaic statements could be turned into poetry. In fact, the Renaissance theorists acknowledged as readily as any Romantic poet that there was something divine, something never to be acquired by taking pains, in the inspiration which came to poets. But they argued that it took labour and learning and skill to fashion a poem; as Sidney put it, ‘the highest flying wit must have a Daedalus to guide him.’ Spontaneous utterance was ill-considered utterance: the arts of poetic discourse were taught to help poets achieve that very different thing, the air of spontaneous utterance. Ralegh's ‘Cynthia’, for example, seems an unstudied outpouring of heart-struck injuries, but it is, instead, a palmary example of the careful control of language and argument which made ‘art’ seem like ‘nature’. In her recent book, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language, Sister Miriam Joseph has shown how thoroughly Shakespeare imbibed and employed the techniques of expression advocated in his day by the rhetoricians. His later poetry has not discarded the devices, but has made them so much a part of itself that the triumph of art which perfectly conceals art has been achieved: we praise Shakespeare's later poetry for its ‘naturalness and spontaneity’—we should praise it for its art. So it is with Ralegh:
When she did well, what did there else amiss?
When she did ill, what empires could have pleased?
No other power effecting woe or bliss,
She gave, she took, she wounded, she appeased.
This stanza is as thorough-going an employment of conventional rhetorical techniques as the much less seemingly spontaneous lines:
O hopeful love, my object and invention,
O true desire, the spur of my conceit,
O worthiest spirit, my mind's impulsion,
O eyes transpersant, my affection's bait,
O princely form, my fancy's adamant,
Divine conceit, my paines acceptance,
O all in one, O heaven on earth transparent,
The seat of joys and loves abundance.
Rhetoric was effective expression, and the ‘figures’ no more than codifications of quite ‘natural’ modes of speaking.
It is, of course, very hard to say anything to the purpose about Renaissance rhetoric and its relations with poetry in a brief discussion. The subject is large, highly technical and very difficult; it is excellently treated by Miss Rosemond Tuve in her important book, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, and a reader who wants a proper understanding must turn to that book or to Sister Miriam Joseph's work. But one important implication must be understood or much of the value of Ralegh's poetry will be lost. ‘Rhetoric’ suggests ‘stating a case’. Rhetoric is essential to the poet because poetry is communication: poetry is a means of persuading, of arguing of putting a point of view, of explaining an idea. Nearly all Ralegh's lyrics can be seen to be carefully fashioned arguments; they state a case by using whatever devices of rhetoric are applicable to poetry and the particular needs of the poem. The modern reader who comes to poetry expecting ‘pure emotion’ has much to unlearn and much to learn before he can accept Elizabethan poetry on its own terms. His reward may be that he will discover the Elizabethans to have understood poetry better than any succeeding age. But even if he cannot agree, he must remember that in the best Elizabethan verse, the poetic afflatus provided only the raw material: rhetoric disciplined this raw material into words, images, figures, arguments worthy the high purpose of poetry.
One remarkable feature of Ralegh's verse is the way in which, in his choice of images, he avoids what is remote, subtle or far-fetched. Powerful writer though he is, Ralegh is a plain man's poet: his fancy lingers by the experiences of everyday life, the permanent, the factual. Time and again he draws his metaphors and similes from the sun, dust, fire, blood, the sea, fruit, the shepherd's flock. Some images stand out because they are unusually specific and fanciful, yet in another poet they would seem plain enough. Such an image is in ‘Cynthia’, when the poet calls memories of the past the ‘sorrow-sucking bees’ of his sad heart; another is in ‘The Lie’, where the court ‘glows and shines like rotten wood’. It is possible that one has quite enough in Ralegh of fruit falling from the tree and fading flowers, but the great advantage of his simple imagery is that its appeal is immediate: the reader does not dwell on the picture or the idea within the simile or metaphor and so lose the argument of the passage. Images are meant to enforce attention to the meaning of a poem or a passage in a poem and not distract it: Ralegh's images, never startling and rarely unexpected, succeed in this.
It is in keeping with the broad and plain imagery that the verse should contain many simple personifications. Almost from a medieval allegory is such a picture as this:
And at my gate Despair shall linger still
To let in Death, when Love and Fortune will.
‘Desire’ runs out of breath, ‘Oblivion’ lays him down on Laura's hearse, ‘Mercy’ is fled to God which Mercy made.
Briefly to sum up a brief account, Ralegh's verse always returns to the same few themes, most of which can be included within the single title, ‘Mutability’. He dispenses traditional morality, painting bold colours with a firm hand, his manner imperative and insistent. Although his language and imagery are very simple and direct, generally free from ‘Petrarchan’ excesses, his work is nevertheless obedient to the rhetorical requirements of his day. Paradoxically, this ‘plain man's poet’ can, in poems of a more private kind, be almost intolerably difficult.
THE LYRICS
Ralegh's major lyrics are all didactic, imparting a sage's experience of life. They vary greatly in their mood, from sombre to flippant, avuncular to homiletic, but in one way or another all are concerned with Love and Time.
An attack on a false conception of love is found in ‘Conceit begotten by the eyes’, a fine lyric that is in a way another answer to Marlowe, if we think of the latter's lines:
The reason no man knows, let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes:
Where both deliberate, the love is slight—
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
Ralegh's poem sternly begins:
Conceit begotten by the eyes
Is quickly born and quickly dies;
For while it seeks our hearts to have,
Meanwhile there reason makes his grave.
‘Conceit’ is a fancy which has to do only with the emotions and outward appearances, and it leads only to ‘affection’, that is to say, infatuation or mere passion. Love of this sort, which has nothing to do with the mind and the judgment, has no real root and no stability. It betrays its meretriciousness in that, unlike true love, the possession of its object brings not joy but disgust and its own death.
Affection follows Fortune's wheels,
And soon is shaken from her heels;
For, following beauty or estate,
Her liking still is turned to hate.
For all affections have their change,
And Fancy only loves to range.
Desire himself runs out of breath,
And getting, doth but gain his death;
Desire nor reason hath nor rest,
And blind doth seldom choose the best;
Desire attained is not desire,
But as the cinders of the fire.
The poem ends with scorn for those poets who pretend that this irrational infatuation is ‘perfect love’:
As if wild beasts and men did seek
To like, to love, to choose alike.
False love is also shown up in ‘The Advice’. Beneath the heavy and prudent injunctions lies a distinction between lust, the ephemeral desire that seeketh only self to please, and more permanent emotion.
A similar distinction, between a fickle and unconstant emotion and real love, is sharply drawn in ‘‘Walsingham’. This is the most haunting and magical of Ralegh's poems. It is based upon an old ballad, snatches of which Ophelia sings in her madness. In rewriting it, Ralegh has lost none of its savour. Besides its own intrinsic value, the lyric is important as a kind of summing-up of ‘Cynthia’; it expresses with terse power the anguish of rejection, the complaint against the changeableness of one kind of love and the belief in the unchangeableness of another, which ‘Cynthia’ describes at length. The whole poem is worth quoting.
‘As you came from the holy land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?’
‘How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one
As I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?’
‘She is neither white nor brown
But as the heavens fair,
There is none hath a form so divine
In the earth or the air.’
‘Such an one did I meet, good Sir,
Such an angel-like face,
Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear,
By her gait, by her grace.’
‘She hath left me here all alone,
All alone as unknown,
Who sometimes did me lead with herself
And me loved as her own.’
‘What's the cause that she leaves you alone
And a new way doth take,
Who loved you once as her own
And her joy did you make?’
‘I have loved her all my youth,
But now old, as you see,
Love likes not the falling fruit
From the withered tree.’
‘Know that love is a careless child
And forgets promise past;
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.
His desire is a dureless content
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair
And is lost with a toy.’
‘Of women-kind such indeed is the love,
Or the word ‘love’ abused,
Under which many childish desires
And conceits are excused.
But true love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning:
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.’
In this poem the themes of Love and Mutability are united. The last stanza hints at something which has the power to outgo and withstand Time. True love, firmly rooted in the mind as well as the emotions, enduring in spite of all vicissitudes and tribulations, is explained in ‘Cynthia’ to be a man's ‘cause of being’. By this unquenchable love for the ‘angel-like’ beings of the earth (with all their infidelity), the soul takes ‘immortal kind’.
Others of the major lyrics have a predominant strain of de contemptu mundi, stressing that it is not the material world, changeable, troublesome, untrustworthy, specious, that demands the mind's attention and heart's devotion. ‘What is our life? a play of passion’ is an extended comparison of life to the theatre and stresses the unimportance and evanescence of all that we are involved in in this ‘short comedy’ of our lives:
Thus march we playing to our latest rest—
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.
Every material enticement and physical joy that youth offers to youth in Marlowe's ‘Come live with me and be my love’, Ralegh in his rejoinder points out to be under the tyranny of Time; to imagine that happiness abides in them is to be ‘in folly ripe, in reason rotten’.
It is worth nothing that although Ralegh, when he is in this mood, wishes to inculcate a disregard for earthly glories and turn men's eyes to realities beyond the material world, he can also portray with perfect sympathy the pathos of man's helplessness against the wrackful siege of battering days. He can be angry with Time as well as despise its power. The speed with which he can turn from chiding those who can look no higher than the passing shows of the world to a mood of pity and regret that all on earth is a prey to ineluctable time is well seen in the stanza I have quoted earlier from ‘Nature that wash’d her hands in milk’. The elegiac note which suddenly appears at the end of the poem is all the more poignant because it is so unexpected.
The best poem de contemptu mundi is probably ‘The Lie’. This is like a series of relentless swordthrusts. It proclaims how all on earth is corrupt and tainted. Here are a few stanzas:
Go soul the body's guest
Upon a thankless errand:
Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant.
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
Say to the Court it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the Church it shows
What's good, and doth no good.
If Church and Court reply,
Then give them both the lie.
Tell men of high condition,
That manage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
Their practice only hate;
And if they once reply,
Then give them all the lie.
Tell zeal it wants devotion,
Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it meets but motion,
Tell flesh it is but dust;
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.
Tell age it daily wasteth,
Tell honour how it alters;
Tell beauty how she blasteth,
Tell favour how it falters;
And as they shall reply,
Give every one the lie.
So when thou hast, as I
Commanded thee, done blabbing,
Although to give the lie
Deserves no less than stabbing,
Stab at thee he that will,
No stab thy soul can kill.
The ending note of the poem is the same as that of the epitaph, ‘Even such is Time’; in both places Ralegh hints at the faith which puts the perturbations of earthly change into their proper perspective:
And from which earth, and grave, and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.
Shakespeare's treatment of Love and Time in his Sonnets has as its summation the similar assurance:
So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then.
I have suggested, in mentioning the importance of rhetoric, that a pouring forth of the emotions was not what Ralegh's age thought poetry. It is very hard to find a single lyric of Ralegh's which is a simple record of personal feeling, although many are written in the first person and often speak of the poet's grief. In explaining why the ‘I’ of such poems—and (later) of ‘Cynthia’—is not to be taken as Ralegh, nor the emotions expressed literally his, it may seem I am doing him disservice and detracting from his sincerity as a poet. Sincerity in Elizabethan poetry is very generally misunderstood. There is, for example, the question of plagiarism. Ralegh's sonnet ‘Like to a hermit poor in place obscure’ is, like so many sonnets of the period, borrowed from a continental source—here, from Desportes. If the borrowing is so extensive as to be virtually a translation (as here), it is a common reaction to dismiss the work as a ‘literary exercise’; if the borrowing is more of an idea, or a conceit only, the poet is accused of false sentiment and insincerity. But Elizabethan poets had not been nurtured on the belief that to be true to oneself was to be quite different and independent from anyone else. The Elizabethan dramatist was an unrepentant ‘plagiarist’ if he found in an old story a fitting vehicle for something he wished to express. So the sonneteer went to the continental masters to find suitable expressions of his own thoughts and moods; more often, since no-one had then conceived the notion that a lyric should be a confession on oath, he went to the continental sonnet to find thoughts which he considered worthy to be enshrined in his own language.
In this particular sonnet I think it was Ralegh's own personal feeling which led him to the French poem; as he translates it, he makes departures from the original which make it more akin to what we may imagine to have been Ralegh's own mood. The resulting poem is neither a literary exercise nor insincere: it is a rendering into verse of certain notions, found in a French model, for which Ralegh felt some personal sympathy.
The ‘sincerity’ of the love-lyrics presents other problems. Two of them (‘The Excuse’ and ‘Our passions are most like to floods and streams’) stand out among Ralegh's rather morose poetry for their good-humour and gaiety, but the field is neither big enough nor good enough for a long discussion. What has to be remembered is that these poems, like so many Elizabethan love-lyrics, subordinate ‘truth’ to two things: complimenting the mistress and ‘proving’ by ingenious logic that the poet loves the mistress. This compliment or this proof is the purpose of the poems; they must not be frowned upon because they fail to live up to requirements not of their age.
What normally happens in Ralegh's personal poems (including ‘Cynthia’) is that the ‘I’ in the poem becomes generalised. The poet ‘transmutes his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal’, to use Mr. Eliot's phrase. ‘Even such is Time’ is not merely a cry from the heart, but a reflection on ‘the human condition’. It seems to me that to show how a poet enlarges a statement about himself into something more general is not to show him being insincere. I shall take one lyric to show the relation between the speaker and the poet, and also to show something of the rhetorical organisation of a lyric. It is in Ralegh's own handwriting in the Hatfield House manuscript:
My body in the walls captived
Feels not the wounds of spiteful envy,
But my thralled mind, of liberty deprived,
Fast fettered in her ancient memory,
Doth naught behold but sorrow's dying face;
Such prison erst was so delightful
As it desired no other dwelling place,
But time's effects, and destinies despiteful,
Have changed both my keeper and my fare;
Love's fire and beauty's light I then had
store,
But now close kept, as captives wonted are,
That food, that heat, that light, I find no more.
Despair bolts up my doors, and I alone
Speak to dead walls, but those hear not my moan.
The poem is a prisoner's complaint, and Ralegh was indeed a prisoner when he wrote it: it is almost certain that the poems in this manuscript belong to the period in 1592 when Elizabeth's displeasure with Ralegh for his marriage sent him to the Tower (see p. 99). But the prisoner is speaking of lost love, not the lost regard and favour of the Queen. Ralegh has generalized his particular emotion: not the dismissed Captain of the Guard, but the universal lorn lover speaks. Personal grief inspires the poem, but again, the purpose of the poem is not to describe personal grief, but to explore the difference between real and apparent constraint, on the basis of an extended image of the prison.
First he states that stone walls do not a prison make: his body does not suffer from his present restraint—it is his mind that is suffering, fettered as it is to the memory of one who formerly loved him. But it is not because his mind is in bondage that he is now so wretched, since it has long been the servant of her he loves, and he had formerly found in that mental servitude a perfect freedom. No: the rigours of his present imprisonment lie in a mental servitude without the warmth of affection returned. He is like a prisoner who does not object to his cell, as such, but finds the cold and darkness intolerable. Not bodily restraint, not the restraint of the soul in being devoted, but the helplessness of loving one who repudiates him is the true deprivation and entombment. It is this despair that ‘bolts up my doors’; his beloved's hard-heartedness and refusal to yield to entreaty are the walls which shut him in.
It is therefore not enough to label this poem a poem of private emotion. It is that and more than that: it becomes generalized when the dismissed courtier becomes the rejected lover, and it is made objective when an emotional state becomes the subject of intellectual analysis.
The most highly polished of Ralegh's lyrics are the occasional poems, commendatory or obsequial. They were the only poems destined for the public and for posterity. The best are the epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney and the first of the two poems in commendation of The Faerie Queene. The epitaph on Sidney has simplicity, grace, dignity and restraint and conveys a sense of the public's loss; hardly one of the great English elegies, it yet succeeds where so many have embarrassingly failed by its unpretentiousness and its refusal to invent a personal grief where one was not apparently deeply felt. A poem that is, however, among the greatest of its kind in English is the ‘Vision upon this conceit of the Faerie Queene’:
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn, and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen,
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen,
For they this Queen attended, in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse;
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce
Where Homer's sprite did tremble all for grief
And curst th’ access of that celestial thief.
Pictorial vividness is not necessarily a criterion of good poetry but this sonnet is a ‘vision’, and it is a tribute to Ralegh's success that he has, like an Elizabethan miniaturist, presented in a mere fourteen lines, each detail sharp in small compass, the dream-world the medieval allegorists loved to invent. The sonnet moves in stately fashion as befits its ‘regal’ subject, and the variation in the pauses, the playing off of the rhythmic unit of the line against the rhythmic unit of the phrase are both contrived more subtly than we normally find they are: the alliteration, too, is much less obtrusive and more effective than usual. The vocabulary and imagery have that power of simplicity and directness that is Ralegh's great strength. One cannot be very sure about the extent to which the vowel sounds have been consciously arranged but certainly pleasing effects are achieved; there is, for example, the linking of an end-rhyme, ‘seen’, with the medial ‘Queen’ in the next line, and it is hard to believe that it was by accident that the chiming of the vowels came about in these two lines:
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce.(1)
The ‘Petition to Queen Anne’ is an occasional poem, though not a ‘public’ poem. It is a late and mature work and we are lucky to possess what is almost certainly an earlier draft, ‘My day's delight, my springtime joys foredone’, which helps us to see how Ralegh tightens up his work in revision. Although the final version is undoubtedly an improvement, much of worth has been excised. A brief statement takes the place of a 24-line development of one of Ralegh's favourite themes—the inconstancy of friendship, that alters when it alteration finds:
Moss to unburied bones, ivy to walls
Whom life and people have abandoned,
Till th’ one be rotten, stays, till th’ other falls,
But friendships, kindred and love's memory
Dies sole, extinguished, hearing or beholding
The voice of woe or face of misery.
The ‘Petition’ itself has more dignity than some of Ralegh's appeals for restoration of liberty; he concentrates more on the person he is addressing than on himself, and avoids the more querulously personal note as he talks of the submersion of truth, the decay of mercy, the fickleness of friendship and so on. There are some fine lines: one has that simplicity and obviousness, almost toppling over into banality, which is so often found in Ralegh and can be so effective in its context:
For what we sometimes were, we are no more
The last of the lyrics to be considered is perhaps the best-known of all, ‘The passionate man's pilgrimage, supposed to be written by one at the point of death’. Actually, it is only the first few and last few lines that are well-known and often quoted:
Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage,
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.
.....And this is my eternal plea
To Him that made heaven, earth and sea:
Seeing my flesh must die so soon
And want a head to dine next noon,
Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread,
Set on my soul an everlasting head;
Then am I ready like a palmer fit
To tread those blest paths which before I writ.
If the lines that fall between these two passages were more often read, Ralegh's authorship might sometimes be questioned. But even in the lines quoted, is there not a feeling of strangeness? The lovely image of the scallop-shell is unusually fanciful and decorative for Ralegh, and perhaps less functional than is usual with him. And in the last lines, though Ralegh could have joked as well as anyone about his expected decapitation, the wit of ‘and want a head to dine next noon’ is foreign to him. It is too grotesque and bizarre, and belongs to a school of poetry which was not Ralegh's. The same may be said of the punning in the lines about Christ as attorney:
Who pleads for all without degrees
And He hath angels—but no fees.
Throughout the poem, both the religious sense and the imagery seem most unlike Ralegh. It is not that the poem is wholly concerned with salvation through Christ's redemption—I have argued that Ralegh's religion is orthodox enough—but that the sense of personal relationship with Christ and the emotional response to the Atonement, which are at the very heart of the poem, are things not found anywhere else in Ralegh's work. Could he have written:
Blood must be my body's balmer
where ‘blood’ is the pilgrim's blood and perhaps Christ's blood, given once as a ransom for mankind, and given again in the Eucharist? Ralegh generally seems averse to dwelling upon mysteries—even if he believes in them. As for the personal note, take the lines:
Christ pleads his death, and then we live:
Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader,
Unblotted lawyer, true proceeder;
Thou movest salvation even for alms.
The imagery is everywhere at one with the religious tone: to some it will suggest a member of the Roman rather than of the Protestant church:
I’ll bring them first
To slake their thirst,
And then to taste those nectar suckets
At the clear wells
Where sweetness dwells
Drawn up by saints in crystal buckets.
‘Nectar fountains’, ‘milken hill’, ‘the holy paths’—
Strewed with rubies thick as gravel,
Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors,
High walls of coral and pearly bowers,
—could Ralegh's pictorial fancy or his devotion flow in these images? It is not only the presence of a foreign type of imagery but the absence of the expected type that puzzles me in this poem. Lines which do not speak against Ralegh do not speak unhesitatingly for him. Such lines are:
My staff of faith to walk upon
My soul will be a-dry before,
But after, it will ne’er thirst more.
Although the diction is often simple enough to be Ralegh's, the rhythms are unusual—particularly the rocking rhythm of the following couplet:
Then the holy paths we’ll travel,
Strew’d with rubies thick as gravel
Another foreign note is struck in the rather naive sociability of the poem at one point:
And by the happy blissful way,
More peaceful pilgrims I shall see
That have shook off their gowns of clay
And go apparel’d fresh like me.
I’ll bring them first
To slake their thirst …
Ralegh generally addresses his poetry with some sternness to his audience—or to himself. This friendly spirit, this we, rather than I or you, seems a little outside Ralegh the man and the poet.
The poem is one that, in spite of unevenness and occasional silliness, has great beauty and richness of feeling and sparks of magnificence. It first appeared as an appendage to Daiphantus, by ‘An.Sc.’ in 1604, but, as Miss Latham remarks, a ‘strong manuscript tradition’ assigns it to Ralegh; there is no evidence of any other author. Every artist may produce a work quite unlike all his others, and Ralegh may have stepped outside himself to write this, but I like to think that evidence may come to light to support my strong impression that the author is not Ralegh, but another who lay under the shadow of the scaffold.
“The Ocean to Cynthia”2
The Composition of the Poem
At Hatfield House there was found in the 1860's a manuscript in Ralegh's handwriting containing a poem of 522 lines headed ‘The 21th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’, a fragment entitled ‘The end of the bookes, of the Oceans love to Scinthia, and the beginninge of the 22 Boock, entreatinge of Sorrow’.3 There is also the enigmatic ‘If Cynthia be a Queen, a princess, and supreme’ and the sonnet ‘My body in the walls captived’. That Ralegh had written a poem of some consequence to Elizabeth as ‘Cynthia’ had been well-known before this discovery. The evidence, apart from a reference of Gabriel Harvey's to ‘Sir Walter Ralegh's Cynthia’, came from Edmund Spenser. When Ralegh went to look after his estates in Ireland in 1589, it was commonly rumoured that he had left the Court in disgrace; the hectic tone of his denials of this rumour add to rather than diminish our feeling that the Queen was indeed ‘in the frown’. While he was in Ireland, Ralegh became a friend of Spenser, who has left in his poem of courtly compliment, Colin Clouts Come Home Again, a record of an intimacy that eventually led to Ralegh's introducing Spenser and his Faerie Queene to Elizabeth.
A ‘straunge shepheard’, says Spenser, chanced to find him out:
Himselfe he did ycleepe
The shepheard of the Ocean by name,
And said he came far from the main-sea deepe;
He, sitting me beside in that same shade,
Provoked me to plaie some pleasant fit;
And, when he heard the musicke which I made,
He found himselfe full greatly pleasd at it.
Yet, æmuling my pipe, he tooke in hond
My pipe, before that æmuled of many,
And plaid thereon (for well that skill he cond),
Himselfe as skilfull in that art as any.
He pip’d, I sung; and, when he sung, I piped,
By chaunge of turnes, each making other mery …
.....His song was all a lamentable lay
Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard,
Of Cynthia the Ladie of the Sea,
Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.
And ever and anon, with singults rife,
He cryed out, to make his undersong:
‘Ah my loves queene, and goddesse of my life,
Who shall me pittie, when thou doest me wrong?’
..... Right well he sure did plaine
That could great Cynthiaes sore displeasure
breake,
And move to take him to her grace againe.
Ralegh's ‘Cynthia’ is mentioned elsewhere by Spenser: in the prefatory stanzas to Book Three of the Faerie Queene, Spenser thus addresses his ‘Dredd Soveraigne’:
But if in living colours and right hew
Thyselfe thou covet to see pictured,
Who can it doe more lively, or more trew,
Then that sweete verse, with Nectar sprinckeled,
In which a gracious servaunt pictured
His Cynthia, his heavens fayrest
light?
That with his melting sweetnes ravished,
And with the wonder of her beames bright,
My sences lulled are in slomber of delight.
Again, in one of the sonnets ‘to Various Noblemen, &c’ prefixed to his epic, Spenser says to Ralegh:
Yet till that thou thy Poeme wilt make knowne,
Let thy faire Cinthias praises bee thus rudely showne.
The dedication to Colin Clout is dated 1591, and although the poem was not published until 1595, there is no reason to suppose that the references to Ralegh were changed after the original composition and before publication. The first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590. All Spenser's remarks presumably refer, therefore, to poetry or a poem that Ralegh had written or was writing when he was with Spenser in 1589. This poetry is addressed to the Queen and extols her but also complains of her harshness. It had been influential in restoring Ralegh to the Queen's favour, apparently by 1591.
It seems most improbable that this poem is the poem we possess: our ‘Cynthia’ has no ‘undersong’, and there is hardly sufficient praise of Elizabeth in it to make it safe for the aspiring Spenser to recommend it to his sovereign as a true and lively picture of her. Our ‘Cynthia’begins with the ‘twenty-first book’, and although that does not necessarily mean that the earlier material has been lost. Again, of all periods that are likely to have inspired the intense emotion which permeates the extant book, none is more suitable than a period well after Spenser's references, the period of imprisonment, in utter disgrace, following Ralegh's marriage in 1592. This later date is made even more probable if we suppose that all the Hatfield House poems belong to the same period; ‘My body in the walls captived’ can refer only to a period of imprisonment.
Miss Latham has suggested that ‘Cynthia’ was a ‘cumulative poem, written over a period of years, and that the “lamentable lay” which Spenser heard, and which was provoked by the events of 1589, was no more than the latest instalment.’ This is a very attractive notion, and it is possible, if the earlier ‘Cynthia’ consists of a series of laments and rhapsodies, that we can lay our hands on some of them. Earlier writing to the Queen is quoted or invoked in the surviving Book (ll. 45-6, 123-131, 344-355)4 and there are four extant lyrics which may well have formed part of a sequence to the Queen.
Three of these poems are sonnets: ‘Prais’d be Diana's fair and harmless light’, ‘Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expired’ and ‘Those eyes which set my fancy on a fire’. It is very likely indeed that Ralegh joined in the vogue for sonnet-sequences in order to express his devotion to the Queen. The second two quatrains of the first sonnet (it is irregular in form) are of the very stuff of the later ‘Cynthia’—the adoring part of it, at least:
In heaven Queen she is among the spheres,
In aye she mistress-like makes all things pure;
Eternity in her oft change she bears,
She beauty is: by her the fair endure.
Time wears her not, she doth his chariot guide;
Mortality below her orb is placed,
By her the virtue of the stars down glide,
In her is virtue's perfect image cast.
‘Those eyes which set my fancy on a fire’ is a perfectly conventional sonnet of praise and is just the sort of poem that Ralegh might be referring to in the Hatfield Book when he says:
Out of that mass of miracles, my Muse
Gathered those flowers, to her pure senses pleasing;
Out of her eyes, the store of joys, did choose
Equal delights, my sorrows counterpoising.
The third of these lyrics, the very moving ‘farewell to the Court’ (‘Like truthless dreams’) has its undersong, ‘Of all which past, the sorrow only stays’, and this is quoted again in the Hatfield Book with application to new disillusionment. Its theme is a central ‘Cynthia’theme: the bitter insistence that happiness and joy are blotted out as though they had never been by the woe that inevitably follows them; the heart cannot store them and pay dividends in the later time of sadness; joy is only a ‘truthless dream’. Edmund Gosse (The Athenaeum, January 1886) suggested that this poem had in another version formed part of the early ‘Cynthia’.
‘Feed still thyself thou fondling with belief’, from the 1593 anthology The Phoenix Nest, is a recent candidate for admission to the Ralegh canon, and is perhaps the most convincingly Raleghan poem of the group disinterred from The Phoenix Nest by recent scholarship. In intensity it is at a level with ‘The Lie’. It is a savage ‘struggling from love's subjection’ and recalls one striking mood of the later ‘Cynthia’, the metre of which it shares. The poet bitterly accuses himself for having pursued a love that could only come to grief, for still clinging by the old attraction even when it has brought him to unhappiness, for persuading himself, in ‘dreams of wish and vain desire’, that all is not lost, for making little of the humiliation he has endured at his mistress' hands, and for complaining of fortune when his own wilfulness and blindness are to blame. Whether or no this lyric does form part of the early ‘lamentable lay’ it is surely inspired by Ralegh's hatred of himself for being so at the mercy of his devotion to the Queen even when she has slighted him.
It is suggested, then, that the extant poem to Cynthia belongs to 1592, when Ralegh was in the Tower, and that the poetry to the Queen mentioned by Spenser belongs to an earlier date, and that though much of it has been lost, fragments of it may exist among Ralegh's lyrics and sonnets.5
Obstacles and Conventions
In ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’, one who is wretched in having lost the affection of a mistress he has long served with intense devotion, dwells painfully on his sorrow, laments the happiness that has gone and meditates on the vicissitudes of love and fortune. The poem is a fevered elegy, obscure, turbulent and erratic, with the incoherence almost of delirium in the flow of its thought. There is nothing like it elsewhere in Elizabethan poetry.
Some of the difficulties and obscurities are due, in all probability, to the fact that the poem is not in its final state. In our manuscript, Ralegh is transcribing an earlier draft (Latham, 1951 edition, p. 124) and he is clearly making changes as he copies, but that the transcript cannot represent the poem in a finished state is obvious both from the appearance of the manuscript and from internal evidence. There are a good many ink-marks which must be tokens of dissatisfaction, or reminders to revise. The uneasy word ‘groans’ in l. 285 is marked for alteration, and so is the ambiguous ‘my love was false’, in l. 465.
Any printed version which divides the poem up into the quatrains of which it is composed will show at a glance how many times a quatrain is left uncompleted, sometimes leaving a sentence uncompleted also; four times, a metrically otiose line has crept in. These are loose ends that could have been quickly tidied up. Sometimes the irregularity has occurred because lines have been erased, and nothing substituted to complete the rhyme-scheme (e.g. l. 331). Ralegh has realised that the metre has gone wrong at 150-4, and has made two strokes in the margin to mark the error. There is one rather interesting example of significant irregularity in the stanza form. From l. 376 the poem mounts in a sustained march to the great climax of 408-415, on the theme of:
A love obscured but cannot be forgotten,
Too great and strong for Time's jaws to devour.
At line 400 he states that nothing that happened to Cynthia could alter his devotion:
Which never change to sad adversity,
Which never age, or nature's overthrow,
Which never sickness or deformity,
Which never wasting care or wearing woe
If subject unto these she could have been …
Which never words or wits malicious,
Which never honour's bait or world's fame
Achieved by attempts adventurous,
Or aught beneath the sun or heaven's frame,
Can so dissolve, dissever or destroy—
The four dots and the rule drawn across the page are from Ralegh's manuscript. Repetition of initial words in successive lines is one of Ralegh's favourite figures: it is the interruption of the figure by the fifth line of the quotation that strikes the reader almost before he notices the interruption of the quatrain rhyme-scheme. What is more likely than that Ralegh, transcribing his lines, saw that he had been carried away and had contradicted an earlier remark (183-192) that his love was superior to the ravages of Time, and, on a more material level, had made certain of offending the Queen he sought to appease by suggesting that she was liable to the decay of old age? Poetically and politically, he had stumbled, and a line is hastily inserted with a mark to remind him to return to the passage later to find a way of ‘perishing the thought’ without interrupting the flow of the verse.
A larger interpolation is the passage 193-200. Ralegh has been exalting Cynthia in the highest terms:
A spring of beauties which time ripeth not—
Time that but works on frail mortality,
.....Blossoms of pride that can not fade nor fall
Then, suddenly, a note of bitter sarcasm not found elsewhere appears:
These were those marvellous perfections,
The parents of my sorrow and my envy;
Most deathful and most violent infections:
These be the tyrants that in fetters tie
Their wounded vassals, yet nor kill nor cure
But glory in their lasting misery
That as her beauties would our woes should dure,
These be the effects of powerful empery …
Again the dots are Ralegh's. It seems possible that Ralegh stopped at this point and asked himself if he had not given rein to too much bitterness. He leaves a space in the manuscript and starts again with one of his rare capital letters, leaving unerased the passage just quoted: the next line in the poem follows in sense not ‘These be the effects of powerful empery’ but the earlier ‘Blossoms of pride that can nor fade nor fail’:
Yet have these wonders want which want compassion,
Yet hath her mind some marks of human race,
Yet will she be a woman for a fashion,
So doth she please her virtues to deface.
And he continues in this strain for nine lines more. This is better: he has excised the rancour and substituted a very satisfying paradox of Cynthia's having both the virtues of a goddess and the fickleness of a woman. But perhaps Ralegh is uncertain of the rightness of this second version also, is undecided whether at this point he should criticise Cynthia at all, for the poem takes up again (213), with a capital letter in the manuscript once more:
But leave her praise, speak thou of naught but woe,
Write on the tale that Sorrow bids thee tell
.....Describe her now as she appears to thee,
Not as she did appear in days foredone.
By no stretching of terms can either of the two passages which follow ‘Blossoms of pride …’ be called praise. Both passages may have been intended for excision, and ‘But leave her praise …’ intended to follow the superb hymn that ends with the ‘blossoms of pride’ line.
The chaotic syntax must often be the mark of an unfinished poem. Every reader will find passages where sentences are left hanging in the air, verbs without subjects, subjects without verbs, relative clauses with no possible antecedents, all of which can only be loose ends.
Again, there are images which do not obey the rules of decorum and logical aptness that Ralegh normally adheres to so excellently. For example, lines 132-3 are unrelated, the quatrains before and after being complete:
And as the icicles in a winter's day
When as the sun shines with unwonted warm,
So did my joys melt into secret tears,
So did my heart dissolve in wasting drops
He is speaking of earlier and slighter miseries caused by Cynthia's frowns and goes on to compare his later and greater despair to the floods that come from the melting of great snows. Both the sense and the metre in the ‘icicles’ comparison are incomplete. Does this betoken uneasiness with the image? It involves the suggestion that Ralegh's heart is like an icicle in temperature, and, more important, it relates Cynthia's access of displeasure to the increased warmth of the sun. By contrast and much more fitly, Cynthia's displeasure in line 106 is compared to the setting of the sun. The ‘icicles’ image may give an exact sensory impression, but it is out of keeping with the needs of the poem; the metrical and grammatical uneasiness probably indicates Ralegh's dissatisfaction. The marks in the manuscript against line 132 presumably indicate that something was to be changed.
Finally, there is the whole question of tone and mood. We have just seen Ralegh making modifications in the poem: I am sure there would have been many more before the poem would have been submitted to the affronted Queen. Just as he tempers the sulks and grumbles in producing the finished version of the ‘Petition to Queen Anne’, so, I think, the strident emotion of some parts of the ‘Cynthia’ Book, would have been toned down.
If we accept the suggestion that the poem is unfinished, we must clearly make reservations in our criticism, bearing in mind that we have before us poetry being created, and not a finally completed work of art.
The reader will often find himself baffled by the general obscurity of ‘Cynthia’ (as opposed to incidental obscurities in the sense). We are left very much in the dark about the course of the relationship Ralegh is talking about; there is an entire absence of clear external references, and many allusions to incidents in the ‘love’ between Cynthia and the Ocean, which are clearly important, are left quite unexplained. Although undoubtedly the air of mystery which hangs over the whole poem tends to lower its value for us, it is no good blaming Ralegh for a failure of communication. The poem was intended for Elizabeth to see, and perhaps for Ralegh's most intimate circle. They would have had no difficulty in understanding what all the poem was about. We are eaves-droppers and have no right to grumble if we cannot follow the conversation of those we overhear. As communication, ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ does not need to be clearer to the general public than a private letter is. Ralegh is not guilty of deliberate mystification.
It will also be a fault to expect that the emotions and sentiments described in the poem will necessarily be those experienced by Ralegh in ‘real life’. The poem is an appeal for restoration; it is the presentation of a case, a piece of oratory designed to make a queen relent. The desire for self-revelation, the wish to portray feelings accurately, do not inspire the poem. Indeed, the literal truth about Ralegh's feelings need not come into the poem at all: he is not in a court of law, and he may flatter and exaggerate as he likes. More important still, what Ralegh says is governed by certain conventions of poetic address.
First among these conventions is the praise of the Queen. The story of the poets' hymning of Elizabeth is an astonishing one6 and the reader of Elizabethan poetry who cannot forget the actual figure of the ageing and capricious Queen or who seeks for what is sometimes too narrowly called ‘sincerity’ is likely to find himself thoroughly bewildered. The Queen is a beautiful virgin, the object of every poet's passion; she is a goddess to be worshipped, the ideal of beauty and chastity, a queen of shepherdesses to be courted, she is the sun and the moon. The reasons for worshipping the virgin queen like this are not simple. Partly, there is the simple flattery by the poet who seeks advancement. Then, in an age which saw in a monarch a representative of God upon earth, a being raised by nature above other beings as the sun was raised above the stars, there was a natural tendency towards a more devout kind of compliment to royalty than we think fitting now (although we can see debased forms of the attitude in the glorification of dictators). Again, we must not forget how sincere was the devotion and gratitude of Englishmen to a queen they recognised to be above the ordinary greatness of monarchs. Finally—and of course, perhaps simultaneously with all these—the hymning of this woman who was queen and virgin was also the hymning of perfection. Royalty and chastity were mystical conditions, and Elizabeth becomes their symbol: a poem about Elizabeth slides easily into a discussion of abstractions. To an age that moved comfortably in the realms of allegory, ‘translatio’, emblem and symbol, the virgin queen becomes a convenient focussing-point for abstract discussions of love, chastity, piety or beauty—and in a Protestant country almost takes the place of the Blessed Virgin.
‘Nowhere,’ writes E. C. Wilson, ‘is there such a subtle blending of all these types of idealisation and motives for praise as the fragment of Ralegh's ‘Cynthia’ reveals.’ The language Ralegh uses about the qualities of Cynthia is not used on oath: it is rhapsodic utterance in a conventional and accepted mode.
There is another, rather thin, garment of ‘other-speaking’ in the use in the poem of the pastoral convention. Although shepherds and their flocks do not crowd the poem, the allegorical note is enough to make the personalities of the poem—the poet and his queen—less particular: the pastoral always generalises.
Next, the poem is concerned with the passion of sexual love: a lover speaks about his former mistress, about his attraction to her, the bliss of affection returned, the misery of the loss of love. In all this, the poem bears no relation to fact. There have been those who have explained the intimacy between Queen and courtier on sexual grounds, but they have no shred of evidence. Ralegh's real emotions were those of the courtier who had enjoyed the favours of his Queen and then had forfeited them: the emotion he describes is that of the disappointed lover. It should also be noted that Ralegh takes the language of the love he describes from the medieval convention of ‘courtly love’, the code originating with the troubadours. Ralegh is a humble vassal like all the lovers in ‘amour courtois’; he worships his mistress, who is so far above him, in humility and silence. She is great and powerful, perfect in mind and beauty; the lover is willing to undertake the most arduous tasks that can be imposed upon him and, however disdainful his mistress may be, he remains unswervingly faithful. We are at least two removes from the pangs Ralegh actually suffered, when we read of the course of his ‘love’.
As a poem, then, which shares every tendency to hyperbole found in poetic addresses to Queen Elizabeth; which talks about a love that never existed and borrows its notion of love from a poetic convention; which is designed in the first place to move pity rather than to speak truth; it may well seem that ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ is a piece of vast hypocrisy and rodomontade. Actually, the successful translation of emotions into accepted conventions does not make the poem less ‘genuine’. So far as its main aim was concerned, Elizabeth and Ralegh's hearers would have applauded the transmutation, and they could easily read the ‘key’ to the underlying truth. And we, who read the poem at this distance of time, can see that in idealising rather than saying ‘this is just how I feel’, Ralegh has raised his poem from the introspection of a particular individual to a level where his words can be generally interesting. Step by step we are removed from the private worries of Sir Walter Ralegh, lately relieved of his duties as Captain of the Guard and imprisoned in the Tower, and we almost forget, as we read the poem, that he and Elizabeth of England ever existed. ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ is important to us because it contains, irrespective of who wrote it, a most moving account of the state of deprivation, a profound analysis (for all the conventions) of the power and nature of love and a comment on mutability that is too impressive to be ignored.
Commentary
Since the poem is very hard to follow, I make no apology for commenting on it at some length. From the start, we are plunged into a kind of waste-land of the spirit. Mr. T. S. Eliot's Waste Land is a very different thing from Ralegh's, but it is interesting to note the similarities in the images the two poets use to convey the sense of aridity and sterility. Both poets use juxtaposition: Eliot has his lilacs in the dead land, Ralegh his fair flowers amid the brinish sand. There are broken images in Eliot to go with Ralegh's broken monuments; Eliot's dead tree gives no shelter; Ralegh sits alone under ‘healthless’ trees. Both make rich use of the image of dust, and both find twilight a useful image for the same kind of mood—Eliot has his
violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime …
Ralegh's setting is
when after Phoebus is descended
And leaves a light much like the past day's dawning,
And every toil and labour wholly ended,
Each living creature draweth to his resting …
Even the theme of the withholding of the life-giving waters is used by Ralegh.
The poem opens with death; the verse moves sombrely and slowly to speak of the death of the poet's joys and the death of the mind that must speak of those joys. So numbed is he by sorrows, that he cannot, as he would wish, use ‘sweeter words’ and ‘more becoming verse’. This is the well-known rhetorical device of disclaiming rhetoric—here for the purpose of magnifying the effect of his grief. In fact, of course, the simple words which he pretends are all he can muster are absolutely right and becoming. What could be more effective than the plainness of
Joys under dust, that never live again?
It suggests irrevocability as more elaborate phrasing would not. The same power is in the heavy monosyllabic tread of
As to the dead, the dead did these unfold.
where the repeated ‘d’ gives a strange funeral-march air. Absolute simplicity marks the opening lines (‘The idea but resting of a wasted mind’ is the only sophisticated line); the images too are very plain: dust, wounds, hearse, fallen blossoms, the cinders of extinguished fires.
The hint of ‘the blossoms fallen, the sap gone from the tree’ is taken up and developed in the next section (16-36), when the poet amplifies the description of his death-like condition by contrasting it with the happiness he has been deprived of. Past bounty and present dearth are emphasised by a string of ‘nature’ images, fecundity and sterility being flung together in a series of antitheses. As, for example, in
Lost in the mud of those high-flowing streams
All in the shade even in the fair sun days
At times the antithetical balance is elaborate:
From fruitful trees I gather withered leaves
And glean the broken ears with miser's hands,
Who sometime did enjoy the weighty sheaves—
I seek fair flowers amid the brinish sand.
Here the first and last lines repeat the ‘bounty-dearth’ antithesis, and between these are two lines each of which expresses a half of the antithesis.
With line 37 the poem turns suddenly and startlingly from loss and despair to a hymn of adoration to Cynthia (the cause of his despair), a hymn that invokes the aid of the rhetorical high style he had so shortly before denounced. This unannounced and radical switch in the thought and mood of the poem is not carelessness: the effect is powerful and was presumably studied. We see the conflict and confusion in the mind of the sufferer—though rejected and cast down and desolate, he is still filled with thoughts of the greatness of the creature who loved him and the greatness of their mutual passion. This greatness has power to fire him even in his distress. There is also irony; to be so carried away by ecstasy increases the pathos when we know his forlorn state: ‘Whom Love defends, what fortune overthrows?’ he cries unthinkingly. Finally, this illogical new direction gives the poem the effect it is meant to give, of a solitary musing, where the thoughts succeed each other not as in rational discourse, but as in day-dreams.
The poet goes on to recall in general terms the blessed days of Cynthia's favour, when she inspired his every action. So he is led to recall one particular instance which I quote not only for a biographical interest, but also because the passage excellently illustrates the difficulty of parts of the poem:
The honour of her love, love still devising,
Wounding my mind with contrary conceit,
Transferred itself sometime to her aspiring,
Sometime the trumpet of her thought's retreat;
To seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory,
To try desire, to try love severed far,
When I was gone she sent her memory
More strong than were ten thousand ships of war
To call me back, to leave great honour's thought,
To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt,
To leave the purpose I so long had sought,
And hold both cares and comforts in contempt.
The next section of the poem (69-103) again begins very abruptly with no bridge from the preceding section, and this time the abruptness has no special virtue. This whole section is one long sentence building up by simile on simile to a climax, and is an excellent example of the ‘cumulative’ power of Ralegh's verse. The poet explains that love cannot suddenly cease to be, there is an impetus which carries it on even after the death-blow has been given; he tells how, his energy deserting him, he is trying to hold fast to the dying passion and enshrine it in verse before it is a nothingness. He compares this growing numbness to a ‘body violently slain’ which ‘retaineth warmth although the spirit be gone’, to the earth deserted by the summer sun, ‘producing some green, though not as it hath done’, and to a millwheel, ‘forced by the falling stream’, which
Although the course be turned some other way
Doth for a time go round upon the beam,
Till wanting strength to move, it stands at stay.
The great image of twilight closes the story of him who
Alone, forsaken, friendless on the shore,
With many wounds, with death's cold pangs embraced,
Writes in the dust as one that could no more,
Whom love and time and fortune had defaced,
Of things so great, so long, so manifold,
With means so weak (the soul even then departing)—
The weal, the woe, the passages of old
And worlds of thought described by one last sighing;
As if when after Phoebus is descended
And leaves a light much like the past day's
dawning,
And every toil and labour wholly ended
Each living creature draweth to his resting,
We should begin, by such a parting light,
To write the story of all ages past
And end the same before th’approaching night.
(Part of the appeal of these last lines is adventitious: we cannot help looking to the time ahead when Ralegh does really begin to write ‘the story of all ages past’ in the gathering gloom of his last years in the Tower.)
All the images in this long sentence are rich in suggestion. Not only do they convey the notion of the gradual cessation of motive power or spirit, but they also help to illustrate other aspects of the poet's condition. The body has been violently slain as Ralegh's happiness was violently curtailed; the earth, ‘in cold winter days’ deserted by the ‘life-giving sun’, brings in nature imagery once more to describe the sterility of his spirit, and the image also equates the Queen with the sun; the turning away of the life-giving water of love is implied in the image of the diverted mill-stream; the twilight image again brings in the sun-queen parallel. The lower layers of parallelism in these images are not recondite: Ralegh always makes it easy for the reader to grasp not only the leading purpose of an image but the subsidiary purposes also.
The next few stanzas continue to describe his past love: absence could never lessen its force. With line 120 it may appear that a connected narrative is about to commence:
Twelve years entire I wasted in this war,
Twelve years of my most happy younger days,
But I in them, and they now wasted are—
Of all which past the sorrow only stays.
But this poem never starts: it is always about to relate the whole great tragedy, but then is pulled aside into a digression. Then we reach a point at which we realise that the whole story has, piecemeal, been related and there is nothing more to do except bring the poem to a close. So here the last line of the quatrain, quoted from an earlier poem, recalls the occasion of writing that poem, and Ralegh turns aside to dwell on that past anticipation of present misery; this digression leads him on to an entirely new subject, and thus capriciously the meditation pursues its unpredictable course.
Lines 143-173 are a moving description of the first reactions of the poet to being dismissed by Cynthia. ‘Furious madness where true reason lacked’ gave way to settled misery as he strove to cast out from his heart his love for the woman who had so cruelly served him:
And as a man distract, with treble might,
Bound in strong chains, doth strive and rage in vain
Till, tired and breathless, he is forced to rest,
Finds by contention but increase of pain
And fiery heat inflamed in swollen breast,
So did my mind in change of passion
From woe to wrath, from wrath return to woe,
Struggling in vain from love's subjection.
.....I hated life and cursed destiny,
The thoughts of passed times like flames of hell
Kindled afresh within my memory
The many dear achievements that befell
In those prime years and infancy of love,
Which to describe were but to die in writing.
This section ends with a ‘signpost’ pointing forward to the theme of unremoving, unalterable devotion (implied in the rhapsodies to Cynthia already sung). He could not banish his affection:
Ah, those I sought but vainly to remove,
And vainly shall, by which I perish living.
He reminds himself (173-180) that reason, holding before his eyes the transitoriness of all earthly things, should have warned him that passion must decay as beauty decays—but what has Time to do with the timelessness of his passion or the divinity of Cynthia? His verse swings into the rhythm of one of those ascending chants of praise he excels in:
A beauty that can easily deceive
Th’ arrest of years, and creeping age outclimb,
A spring of beauties which time ripeth not—
Time that but works on frail mortality—
A sweetness which woe's wrongs outwipeth not,
Whom love hath chose for his divinity,
A vestal fire that burns but never wasteth,
That looseth naught by giving light to all,
That endless shines each where and endless lasteth,
Blossoms of pride that can nor fade nor fall.
The image of the ‘vestal fire’ is rich and lovely; it suggests worship of a goddess, the virginity of Elizabeth, and light which shines with undiminished brightness, though shared out to all, brings in once more the suggestion of the sun. The stanzas which follow this passage, I have already discussed (pp. 104-5), suggesting that they are not fully worked into the poem.
The next section (221-298), containing some of the finest writing in the poem, is an odd amalgam of generalised statement on the nature of love with some obviously personal reminiscences. Line 219 is the keynote:
In love those things that were, no more may be.
He starts with an elaborate comparison: love is like a dammed-up river:
a stream by strong hand bounded in
From nature's course.
But this artificial lake, finding a small rent in the bank, makes a channel for itself and then bursts out into its old course as a river, blotting out the work of years in a moment:
Such is of women's love the careful charge,
Held and maintained with multitude of woes—
Of long erections such the sudden fall;
One hour diverts, one instant overthrows,
For which our lives, for which our fortune's
thrall,
So many years those joys have dearly bought,
Of which when our fond hopes do most assure,
All is dissolved, our labours come to naught,
Nor any mark thereof there doth endure.
There is a great bitterness in these lines and those following, which tell how past achievements and service do him no good now, but there also emerges a thought which takes the edge off the bitterness. To dam a stream is to go against ‘nature's course’; like a stream, love can never be still but would always be flowing; it is unnatural to try to hold it fast. For a moment the poet accepts the necessity of change. Underlying his misery is the recognition that love must change and pass on, since nothing in nature stays fixed and immutable:
All droops, all dies, all trodden under dust.
By the use of images of the seasonal death of fruit and flower, he suggests a feeling of acquiescence with the inevitable rhythm of birth, growth and death in time:
As Time gave, Time did again devour.
So he finds consolation, that the passing of love is like the passing of all things. Because of this sense of inevitability, his very gloomiest sentences take on a light that makes them more affirmations than denials:
With youth is dead the hope of love's return,
Who looks not back to hear our after cries.
If anyone is to blame, it is himself for thinking to build on a happiness he should have known must decay.
And yet—and yet! ‘I powerless was to alter my desire’, ‘my love is not of time’. The poet's love, his affection, is unchanging. True love, such as he feels, in spite of the suffering it brings, is yet the quintessence of existence, that which purifies and gives meaning to our lives. Shared affection may decay in time, but real devotion like his endures through all. His revenge for Cynthia's betrayal could not be hate, for love is not love that alters when it alteration finds:
Erring or never erring, such is love,
As while it lasteth scorns the accompt of those
Seeking but self contentment to improve.
From line 318, such is the turmoil of the thought—whether intentional or not—that it is hard to make useful divisions of the poem into sections any further. A certain self-pity creeps in (319-326): in spite of this long and great passion, Cynthia has been as severe as a stranger. What is the point of complaining? the damage is done:
The limbs divided, sundered and a-bleeding
Cannot complain the sentence was uneven.
Lines 344-349 are a hymn of adoration to Cynthia, apparently taken from an earlier part of ‘Cynthia’ (‘Such didst thou her long since describe, yet sighing’), repeated here with some sarcasm. And he adds:
But what hath it availed thee so to write?
She cares not for thy praise, who knows not theirs,
It's now an idle labour and a tale
Told out of tune that dulls the hearers' ears.
He continues complaining of Cynthia's injustice until line 376, when there is another of those sudden changes of mood. The poem has been quietening down, the anguish turning to lethargic melancholy. Now, with the sudden:
Yet greater fancy beauty never bred
the smouldering fire blazes again. From being querulous, he takes wing on the memory of the greatness of her he loved, the greatness of their mutual passion and the undeviating fidelity of his own affection:
A love obscured but cannot be forgotten,
Too great and strong for Time's jaws to devour
.....These thoughts, knit up by faith, shall ever last,
These, Time assays, but never can untie.
The sustained flow of the poem from 376-415 is really most compelling. Nothing ‘can so dissolve, dissever or destroy The essential love’, the memories will always be with him:
and remain
Of my sad heart the sorrow-sucking bees.
Lines 416-461 continue to explore the quality of this love that causes suffering and at the same time gives a meaning to life. Dull sublunary lovers' love would have ceased with the wrongs he has received, for the objective of their love is only delight; it
Stays by the pleasure but no longer stays.
But his love has a spiritual quality:
But in my mind so is her love enclosed
And is thereof not only the best part
But into it the essence is disposed …
O love (the more my woe), to it thou art
Even as the moisture in each plant that grows,
Even as the sun unto the frozen ground,
Even as the sweetness to th’ incarnate rose,
Even as the centre in each perfect round,
As water to the fish, to men as air,
As heat to fire, as light unto the sun—
O love! it is but vain to say ‘thou were’,
Ages and times cannot thy power outrun:
Thou art the soul of that unhappy mind
Which, being by nature made an idle thought,
Began even then to take immortal kind
When first her virtues in thy spirits wrought.
From thee, therefore, that mover cannot move,
Because it is become thy cause of being.
His love is at the centre of his heart ‘till all break and all dissolve to dust’—even if it at times is like a poisoned arrow, eating away his earthly happiness. The justification of this paradox that love both wounds and gives life is an imaginative one that poetry and not exegesis can express.
This wave of idealistic excitement breaks suddenly. He stops short with a gesture of despair:
But what of those, or these, or what of aught
Of that which was, or that which is, to treat?
The broken rhythm of the lines well impresses on the reader the sudden disappearance of the motive force which has driven the poetry along in the previous 80 lines. The speaker continues with the bitterest lines, a cynicism the more bitter as the immediately preceding idealism has been ecstatic:
What I possess is but the same I sought,
My love was false, my labours were deceit.
No less than such they are esteemed to be—
A fraud bought at the price of many woes,
A guile, whereof the profits unto me—
Could it be thought premeditate for those?
He is suggesting, though the last line suggests incredulity, that happiness in love is always a will-o’-the-wisp.
After these two extremes of idealism and bitterness, the poem finds its equilibrium in a kind of exhaustion of passion, a mood of defeated resignation (474). The verse moves with a sad dignity to:
On Sestus shore, Leander's late resort,
Hero hath left no lamp to guide her love,
and the mournfulness brings the poetry almost to a dead stop in the middle of a line:
She is gone, she is lost …
But the very finality of the words quicken him to rebellion and he denies them as soon as he utters them, and the line becomes a strange presentation of the whole paradox of this strange poem:
She is gone, she is lost—She is found, she is ever fair!
Sorrow draws weakly where love draws not too;
Woe's cries sound nothing but only in love's ear—
Do then by dying what life cannot do.
Some have taken this as the turning point of the whole poem, but it is not so. His denial is a momentary, irresistible ejaculation, expressing the division in his mind that has been present throughout the poem. A coal glows white hot and then dies to an ember and the poem continues with the settled unhappiness that had preceded the outburst. The important addition to the poem (not change) which the cry makes lies in the line, ‘Do then by dying what life cannot do.’ His love still exists, but its object is no longer found perfectly in the woman who has been inconstant; although the earthly love was necessary, although it enables his spirit ‘to take immortal kind’, it does not provide lasting satisfaction and fulfilment; he will not find that fulfilment now until after death. The poet was talking about death before the interruption of ‘She is found, she is ever fair!’, and as he resumes the theme, death becomes not only the relief from suffering it had been but also an aspiration to unqualified joy. ‘She is found’ does not mean that Cynthia has relented; it means the image he once found and fixed his devotion to in Cynthia is still present—but not in Cynthia or in any earthly woman—‘Do then by dying what life cannot do.’
In the closing stanzas there is a fine dignity:
Unfold thy flocks and leave them to the fields
To feed on hills or dales where likes them best
Of what the summer or the spring-time yields,
For love and time hath given thee leave to rest.
.....Thus home I draw as death's long night draws on,
Yet every foot, old thoughts turn back mine eyes.
The deeply-moving conclusion starts with affirmation and ends in perplexity:
To God I leave it, who first gave it me
And I her gave, and she returned again
As it was hers. So let His mercies be
Of my last comforts the essential mean.
But be it so or not, th’ effects are past:
Her love hath end, my woe must ever last.
It is far better that Ralegh ends his extraordinary poem with a gesture of helplessness than an affirmation—say, of the neo-platonic idea expressed or hinted at in ‘Do then by dying what life cannot do.’ For it was not the purpose of his poetry to present tidy systems and neat philosophical answers to the problems of existence. He presents paradoxes, and hints at their solutions. ‘Cynthia’ is one vast paradox—so paradoxical at times that it almost degenerates into muddle. He both loves and hates; love brought and brings both sorrow and joy; love dies, love does not die; it was at least worth loving, it was folly ever to have loved; he tries hard to find some solution, lights on the possibility of a woman's love being a preparation for a higher love—but that does not lessen the bitterness. What other conclusion can there be other than the simple expression of fact?
Her love hath end, my woe must ever last.
An important footnote to ‘Cynthia’ is the fragment of the next Book, ‘entreating of Sorrow’, which follows on in the Hatfield Manuscript. It runs to only 21[frac12] lines, in tercets, and consists of a short statement of the poet's woe followed by an elaborate image. It is the image that is important. The poet is abandoned by Cynthia and others have taken his place in her affection. In this rejection and new-gathering, Cynthia is like the sun, which nurtures young growing things, then leaves them to die while it fosters a new brood, its own power remaining constant and unaffected by the succession of growth it both observes and causes. Cynthia is, then, the sun:
Which sees the burial and birth of all else,
And holds that power with which she first begun:
Leaving each withered body to be torn
By fortune and by times tempestuous,
Which by her virtue, once fair fruit have born,
Knowing she can renew and can create
Green from the ground and flowers even out of stone
By virtue lasting over time and date …
The analogy of sun and monarch is, of course, traditional. From one aspect, this image is a ‘praise’ of Queen Elizabeth and exalts her power and brilliance. The power that is talked of is not, however, merely the life-giving power. With greater realism than is often found among those who address their sovereign, Ralegh extends the comparison, and attributes to Elizabeth that part of the cycle of the sun's activity which causes death in the living organism after it has been brought up to maturity and fruition. In ‘Cynthia’ Ralegh many times used the image of the sunset or winter to describe the withdrawing of the Queen's favour. But they were particular images for particular purposes. Here the whole cycle of birth, growth and decay—of acceptance, favour and rejection—is attributed to Elizabeth as a necessary quality of her power. She must create, she must destroy, she must then create new things. And the importance of the vision is this. In ‘Cynthia’ there was conflict in the poet's mind between Cynthia as divine, beneficent, life-giving perfection and Cynthia as a cruel woman, discarding those whom she had loved as fickle women do. But now this discarding is seen as a vital part of her sun-like, superhuman nature. She is all-great and life-giving, like the sun; she is still all-great when she destroys and takes new creatures to foster. Ralegh affirms what he was at one point working towards in ‘Cynthia’, that the mutability of the Queen's affection is part of the mutability of all things growing on earth. But he is able also still to retain the feeling of the Queen's omnipotence. Without feeling any the less misery for his having been abandoned, he can see abandonment as part of an inevitable process of change which must be acquiesced in, since it is the governing principle of continuance in life. Of course, if one looks too literally at the notion, it is absurd in that the supersession of Ralegh by Essex in Elizabeth's favour has nothing to do with the continuance of England. But it has already been pointed out that literalism hardly enters into poems about the Queen; we must be prepared to accept higher and abstract imaginative levels. Ralegh comes to recognise a necessary mutability in human relations; though he suffers, he must not repine—there is some order and meaning in the cycle of change. There is a faint tinge of the consolation for suffering that is found in tragedy. It is perhaps this consolation that Ralegh means in the strange image with which the poem breaks off:
Leaving us only woe which, like the moss
Having compassion of unburied bones,
Cleaves to mischance and unrepaired loss.
For tender stalks …
Notes
-
In talking about the value of vowel sounds one has to take into account not only the differences of Elizabethan pronunciation from our own, but also the special differences of Ralegh's ‘broad Devonshire’.
-
The problems concerning Ralegh's ‘Cynthia’ poetry are admirably and succinctly reviewed by Miss Latham in the introduction to her 1951 edition of the poems, and the reader who wishes for a fuller survey of the facts behind Ralegh's most considerable poetic work than is contained in the following review should turn to her account.
-
I for a long time accepted Miss Latham's contention (1951 ed., p. 122) that the numerals must be ‘11th’ and ‘12th’, because the ‘th’ is clear and because Ralegh would be likely to work to a scheme of twelve books to a long poem. But further examination has brought me back to the old reading: it is hard to think the first digit is anything but 2. Mr. I. A. Shapiro informs me (supporting J. P. Gibson, Review of English Studies, 1928, p. 340) that ‘21th’ would be a common way of writing ‘one and twentieth’.
-
In six passages in the Hatfield Book, each line in the manuscript commences with a marginal mark, thus=. Miss Latham (1951, p. 126) suggests that these marks are like the inverted commas which call attention to rhetorical passages. But since all three passages which openly hark back to earlier writing are thus marked, it seems to me probable that they always denote quotations by Ralegh from his former poetry, perhaps the early Cynthia.
-
Since this chapter was written, there has been an interesting addition to the story of Cynthia. At the back of his notebook (see pp. 48 and 147), Ralegh has inscribed a most lovely lyric which is a kind of envoy to the Cynthia cycle:
Now we have present made
To Cynthia …
See facsimile, with transcript and notes by G. Seddon, Illustrated London News, February 28, 1953.
-
See E. C. Wilson, England's Eliza (1939).
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The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh
The Large Landscape: A Study of Certain Images in Ralegh
