[In the following essay, Fogle traces Drummond's poetic development from his early interest in the work of the Renaissance love poets to his mature religious and social verse.]

Drummond is generally regarded as a “professional” poet, that is, a poet who spent his life writing poetry. This impression comes partly from the fact that we know little else about him except that he did write poetry, and partly from the fact that the bulk of his poetry is considerable and we therefore assume that it must have taken him a long time to write it. But such an assumption is hardly borne out by the facts of his life. Actually, his serious efforts in poetry were confined to a period of from twelve to at most fifteen years of his relatively long life, and the greatest of his poems, the ones by which he is remembered today, seem to have been written in the brief span of two or three years. These facts are of considerable importance in helping us to determine Drummond's own attitude toward his art and his stature as a poet.

Close study of Drummond's poetry points clearly to the fact that the pattern of his development is the same in nearly all the forms of poetic expression that he employed—the sonnet, the madrigal, the song. The one possible exception would seem to be the epigram, which he used very little in the great middle period of his career. All the other forms, however, are to be found scattered through his work from his earliest productions to the real close of his serious poetic efforts, in 1623.

In his early years, beginning, perhaps, around 1610, he was the bright and eager disciple of the love poets of the Renaissance, adopting their devices and techniques, imitating their attitudes and posturings, and echoing their cries. In this period of his novitiate he was seriously striving to master the delicacies and intricacies of the poets, especially the sonneteers, of the Petrarchan school. This was the time when he “first beganne to reade, then Loue to write,” the time when he was captivated by the sweet conceits he found in profusion among the French and the Italian writers of the sixteenth century. In the jaunty lilt of his madrigals, the brittleness and ingenuity of his epigrams, and the halting superficiality of his early sonnets, he shows himself to be the poet of wit and conceit, a technician and craftsman, but hardly a poet of depth or feeling. He is an apprentice in the art, gleefully manipulating the tools and exploiting the devices he has discovered.

The poetry that Drummond wrote during this period is not the poetry by which he lives today. Taken alone it could appeal only to a curious, antiquarian interest. It achieves importance mainly from the fact that it stands as a prelude to work of much higher poetic merit. But the value of this early work to Drummond as a man and as a poet goes far beyond its value to us as readers of poetry. For one thing, it introduced Drummond to a literary tradition that was congenial to his temperament and talent, a tradition with which he could ally himself and through which he found the forms suitable for his own particular kind of poetic expression. His was a lyric gift, and the tradition offered him the sonnet and madrigal, forms admirably suited to displaying that gift. His taste was for an elaborate, ornate, yet highly stylized kind of beauty, which the tradition offered him in great abundance. By temperament, as we have noted, he was inclined toward the philosophical and moralistic in his reflections on life and love and beauty, and in the tradition he found a rich array of pseudo-Platonic ideas and imagery with which to clothe his thoughts. In this happy meeting of poet and literary tradition, Drummond's imitation of his revered models was also an exercising of his own native talents and an expressing of the thoughts and attitudes that were most natural to him. No other school of poetry could have offered critical theory and practice more beautifully suited to the poetic tastes and abilities of William Drummond.

A more tangible benefit that Drummond derived from this early period of study was a growing mastery of the literary English of the day. There had been a time when the gifted talents of men like James I, Henryson, and Dunbar had made the Northern dialects a dominant strain in the best poetry written in the Island. But from the early part of the sixteenth century Scottish poetry had been reduced to a thin trickle, whereas the literature of the South had been developing and refining its language through various stages, until by 1580 it was ready to convey the tremendous outpouring of inspired poetry that occurred during the next twenty or thirty years. By the end of the century, then, the language of London and the South had become the established literary language, and the Scottish dialect could only be regarded as provincial and unsuited to refined poetic expression. The influence of men like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Lyly was overpowering, definitive, and we find that Scotsmen with any literary pretensions adopted the language of the great Elizabethans. James VI had written more after the manner of Englishmen than of Scotsmen in his attempts at poetry. More important, perhaps, for Drummond, his uncle William Fowler had written sonnets and epigrams in the English manner. Robert Ayton, Robert Kerr, David Murray, and William Alexander, all friends of Drummond and the outstanding Scottish poets of the period, were writing, not in their native dialect, but in the language of the great English love poets. When Drummond came to write his own poetry he had this barrier of language. The choice had already been made for him; there was nothing to do but to accept the classical literary English as his medium. It must have required no mean effort for him to divest himself of all the provincialisms of his native speech. His manuscripts show something of the struggle he went through. The earliest poetry and the early letters that remain to us are strongly flavored with Scotticisms and Northern spellings, some of which he never did expunge from his writing. But during this early period of his poetic practice we can see the gradual clearing away of the distinctly native elements, until by the time he was ready to write his greatest poetry he used the language of the English poets with the utmost ease and control. It was this triumph over the difficulties of language that enabled Drummond to establish a lasting place for himself among the poets whom we still read with understanding and delight.

But, given a literary tradition in which he could move and breathe happily and a language of flexibility and verbal melody, Drummond needed something more to make the poet he was. It has something to do with his attitude toward poetry in general and his practice of it. It might be best described as a social tradition, the tradition of the gentleman-poet. His reading of the Courtier, the Arcadia, the Amadis, and the Civil Conversation had made him aware that one of the requirements of a true gentleman was that he be able to use language easily and felicitously, whether in prose or in poetry. The fashion of the time made it imperative that anyone of real social distinction should be able to turn out a neat bit of verse on occasion. This is one of the gifts that endeared Sir Philip Sidney to his contemporaries and made of him an exemplar of the Renaissance ideal gentleman. It was perfectly natural, then, that Drummond, given the opportunity to live the life of a gentleman, should turn to the writing of poetry as one of the graces and adornments of that life. This is not to say, of course, that the real reason for Drummond's writing poetry was the improvement of his social behavior; such a position would be merely a stupid attempt at oversimplifying the very complicated act of writing poetry. The social tradition surely did, however, influence his attitude toward his own writing of poetry. During his early years of study of the Renaissance love-poets, it was almost inevitable that he should be led to imitate them. He was reading them, not merely for the pleasure of the reading but for instruction as well. The instruction bore better fruit than, perhaps, even he hoped for, and during the years 1610 to 1613 he occasionally struck off a madrigal or epigram worthy of the masters he was following. With this training behind him, he was able to speak according to his own genius when he found something in his experience that needed saying. Then it was no longer a matter of a social convention or tradition, but a matter of urgent importance. The next ten years were the years of his greatest tensions and conflicts. The love affair with Mary Cunningham, ending tragically in her death, and the ensuing necessity for some kind of readjustment to the world and re-evaluation of life were the great experiences from which his best poetry sprang. Once those two great crises had passed into the resolution and relative calm of the Flowres of Sion, poetry became again in Drummond's life only a social adornment and a gracious exercise. He wrote numerous commendatory sonnets and inconsequential occasional pieces during the last twenty years of his life, but never again did he strike the fire and passion of his middle period. The social tradition that he inherited, then, cannot be said to “explain” Drummond's poetry, but it does help to explain his approach to the writing of poetry and his use of poetry as a social accomplishment after his inspiration had waned.

No clear terminal date can be established for this early period of Drummond's writing, but it would seem to be around 1612. The following year saw the publication of his first major production, Tears on the Death of Moeliades, a work which marks a new phase in his poetic development. With this poem Drummond enters into the period when his own experience becomes the matter of his song. He seems to have felt that the time of his trial and testing was over and that he was ready for bolder flights under the guidance of his own judgment and his own spirit. The forms he uses and much of the imagery and ornament are the same, but there is a noticeable deepening of tone, a richer blend of thought and feeling, which sets off the poetry of this period from that of his early years. Within the next two or three years, between 1613 and 1615 or 1616 he writes very nearly all the poetry by which his reputation as a lyric poet is secured. The immediate reason for this flowering of his genius was undoubtedly his love affair with Mary Cunningham of Barns.

Drummond, of course, does not say anything new about love. After all, the matter of love poetry does not change greatly from generation to generation, or even from age to age. The experience of human love remains fundamentally the same, no matter where or when it may be found. The individual touch is to be discovered in the manner in which that experience is expressed. But just here, critics have said, is where Drummond appears to be most conventional, most imitative and typical. Kastner, Ward, and others have devoted most of their study to finding sources and parallels for Drummond's ideas, figures of speech, images, and similes, and they have found very many indeed. It was inevitable that they should, for imitation and paraphrase were important parts of the deliberate method by which one wrote Elizabethan love poetry. Sidney Lee has pointed that out clearly enough in his Elizabethan Sonnets.¹ But both Lee and Kastner have been guilty of the same fault—that of assuming that a poem is explained away the moment a source has been found for it. They seem to lose respect for any poem that shows a close similarity in wording or idea to any other poem that preceded it. Such an attitude fails to take into full account the fact that the Renaissance love poet intended that his poetry should be a mosaic of the choice tropes and figures and conceits of the tradition. The real point of the game was to make that mosaic a harmonious and ingenious blend of color and pattern into a pleasing whole.

This is exactly what Drummond did when he wrote his great love sonnets and songs. Faced with the problem of expressing an experience that was deep and moving, he drew on the rich store of imagery and device provided by his wide reading of Renaissance poetry to give that expression suitable form and style. In this he was the craftsman, the technician carefully selecting the materials with which he would work. Drummond's chief excellence, the distinctive quality which gives his work an individual stamp, is the manner in which he combined his materials. In his hands the materials took on new life and new color. Into them he infused a spirit of conviction and intensity that is lacking in his own earlier work and in the average Elizabethan love sonnet. With a fine sense of beauty of form and melody he combined a sound judgment of the appropriate image for a particular idea. The result is poetry of clear lyric note and deep emotion that transforms the conventional and traditional into something that is new and alive and personal.

The age in which Drummond was writing was not an age greatly concerned with the beauties of nature. The poets' main interest was in man—his feelings, his fortune, his fate. Nature comes into the poetry of the period only incidentally, as a setting for human action and thought. Often there is a feeling of strangeness or even of hostility toward natural forces and toward certain features of the landscape, particularly mountains. But seldom is there a specific treatment of nature that would indicate any great love for or interest in nature for herself. References to brooks and fields and flowers are numerous enough in the pastoral poetry of the time, but they simply provide a highly idealized and stylized setting for the play of lovers. With few exceptions, it is an artificial and man-made nature that we see in the love poetry of the Renaissance.

Drummond does not depart far from the tradition in his references to nature, but there are definite allusions to specific feaures of the country in which he spent most of his life. He mentions several times the river Esk, which flowed by his door, and the Forth, which separated him from his love. In one sonnet he refers to Hawthornden as,

Deare Wood, and you sweet solitarie Place,
Where from the vulgare I estranged liue,
Contented more with what your Shades mee giue,
Than if I had what Thetis doth embrace:

But this is the language of Bembo on whom he was modeling the sonnet. One thinks that romantically beautiful Hawthornden would have called for some more personal description than this. Of the mountains near by he speaks in specific terms of “The whitest snows on aged Grampius face”; of “lofty Grampius, which with snow doth shine”; and of “sterne Grampius mists.” Veitch says that “No one in Scotish poetry before the time of Drummond had noticed snow on a mountain except with aversion.”² In Forth Feasting he shows a kind of fierce pride in his country and its people, a loving regard for its rivers and its mountains. In all these passages he gets closer to nature than is usual in the poetry of the period, and he gets closer to it with a spirit that is almost affectionate and kindly. But Drummond is not really a poet of nature. He does not choose nature, even the nature of his beloved Scotland, as a distinct and separate subject. One has the feeling that below the surface Drummond had a genuine appreciation of the natural beauty in which he lived and which provided him with a refuge from the world of men, but references to it are carefully subdued and repressed. It was not yet time for nature to parade as the subject of poetry.

With the death of Mary Cunningham, in 1615, comes another distinct period in Drummond's poetic development. After a few brief tributes to his dead mistress, he turns to more spiritual and religious matters. There is the conventional “renunciation” of his earthly love and a foreswearing of the life of this world for the life of the spirit. Religious, Drummond may have been; in fact sincere religious feeling breathes through many of these songs and sonnets. But the term “philosophical” must be applied with considerable reserve to Drummond's poetry. He is in no sense a systematic thinker. The ideas which he expresses are the result of his poetic imagination or of intelligent observation of life or of his reading about philosophy rather than of intellectual perception of ordered relationships and logical conclusions. In so far as he has a system of thought, it is the perfectly orthodox Christian view of man and the world. He uses certain philosophical, particularly pseudo-Platonic, terms and phrases that were widely current in the poetic vocabulary of the day. But these he adopts simply to clothe his observations with some dignity and impressiveness. The language he uses must never be taken to be an indication of Drummond's intellectual acumen. He uses it merely as a convenience, much as he had used the conceits and figures of the love poetry of the Renaissance. Drummond was drawn to “long thoughts,” and his imagination was stirred by the concepts of space and time, but his thoughts do not have the orderliness of a philosophy.

During this period from 1616 to 1623 there is a gradual tapering off of Drummond's poetry, both in quantity and in quality. In order to compose the Flowers of Sion, he takes most of the earlier poems of Urania makes minor emendations in them, and adds others of later composition. There is still some good poetry in the volume, but many of the longer religious pieces are forced and thin, and some of them are left unfinished. He seems almost to be forcing himself to write. But his religious ardor was not sufficient to inspire this verse with light and heat. By 1623 he is no longer the lyric poet of ease and grace and tuneful song; he is a gentleman who occasionally writes social verse.

The most recent considered critical judgment of Drummond's position in the hierarchy of English poetry was made by L. E. Kastner.

In one half roughly of his verse he may justly lay claim to a high rank as a poet of the school of imitation; he adapted, but his adaptations are impregnated with a charm essentially his own, and clothed in a form well-nigh impeccable. Nevertheless, even as an imitative poet, he cannot pretend to the highest rank; for that, his range is too limited, confined as it is to some hundred and thirty sonnets, about the same number of madrigals and epigrams, and less than a score of longer pieces. In his remaining poetic achievement Drummond is an imitator pure and simple, writing with a specific model before him, and producing verse which, distinguished as it is by exquisite diction and perfect craftsmanship, can nevertheless be regarded only as the exercises at vacant hours of a gifted poetic artist.³

Kastner's view, as has been suggested, is limited by the very fact that he has made such a thorough investigation of Drummond's sources and parallels. His work is a very important contribution to Drummond scholarship, but just because he is so keenly aware of foreign echoes and reflections in Drummond's poetry, he fails to hear the clear note that is Drummond's own. That Drummond was an imitative poet is true enough. This is particularly obvious in the earlier and later parts of his work. Even in his best poetry he states themes that are universally present in love poetry; and his manner is clearly allied with the school of the Renaissance Petrarchists. In adopting the traditional attitudes and mannerisms, however, he transforms them by the intensity of his own experience into something that is unique and individual. The appeal of Drummond is not to be explained by mere charm and well-nigh impeccable form. In his best poetry he achieves a purity of diction and an elevation of thought that place him clearly in the first rank of poets of the imitative school. At their very brightest moments, Sidney or Drayton may outsoar Drummond, but for sustained effort in the sonnet form in this golden age of the sonnet he is clearly surpassed only by the poet who surpassed them all, William Shakespeare.

Notes

1. [Sidney] Lee, ed., Introduction to Elizabethan Sonnets, I, [1904] ix-cx.

2. John Veitch, The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, [1887] p. 13.

3. [Kastner, L. E., ed. The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, with “A Cypress Grove,” I, xliii-xliv. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913.]