SOURCE: Cummings, Robert. “Drummond's Forth Feasting: A Panegyric for King James in Scotland.” The Seventeenth Century 2, no. 1 (January 1987): 1-18.

[In the following essay, Cummings examines Drummond's Forth Feasting as an example of the panegyric verse form. The critic maintains that Drummond innovatively modified the “ethical obligations” of the panegyric form in order to address his philosophical ideas about the monarchy.]

‘His censure of my verses was that they were all good … save that they smelled too much of the schools, and were not after the Fancie of the tyme … yett that he wished, to please the King, that piece of Forth-Feasting had been his own.’¹ Jonson, quoted here by Drummond, probably meant not that he would have wished himself to flatter James, but only that the fluidity of Forth Feasting would certainly have gratified the ear of a king, of whose taste he in fact thought little. But the poem's poise consists in more than hallucinatory fluency, in managing the techniques of what James in his Reulis calles ‘Flowing’.²Forth Feasting solves with marvellous tact the peculiar problems of occasional panegyric. On this account it survives a more radical revolution of taste than that promoted by the fancy of Jonson's time. The Professor of Universal History in Georgian Edinburgh, Lord Woodhouselee, calls it ‘one of the most elegant panegyrics ever addressed by a Poet to a Prince’.³ Pope's incidental theft from it of phrases for the Pastorals is already recognised; with Thames's splendid celebration of a politically awkward British Peace in Windsor-Forest, he signals a more considerable deference to its elegant triumph over intractable material.⁴

Forth Feasting celebrates King James's return to Scotland after an absence of almost fifteen years. On 15 May, 1617, the Earl of Wintoun entertained the King at Seton. On that occasion Drummond's poem was presented to the king along with a set of Latin hexameters by John Gelly of Gellistane.⁵ The immediate circumstances of its presentation make it most readily categorised as panegyric, and the standard notion of panegyric gives us a lever on understanding its intentions: that is, the poem immediately becomes problematic—for viewed from a conventional understanding of the kind, Drummond's purposes are quite opaque. ‘Panegyric’, says Scaliger, ‘is a speech of praise given in front of a large audience’.⁶ The notion of the large audience, whether or not imaginary, will normally define its purposes. At its simplest, the panegyric typically describes a model of virtue and recommends aspiration to it. By presenting its subject with an ideal version of himself in front of a large audience it blackmails him—or even gratifies him—into embracing the ideal. In either case it requires of its subjects conformity to an ideal publicly declared. The ideal is itself public. Outside the mercenary courtly tradition, but even there, and even with academic poets bound to text-book prescriptions, praise of the ruler necessarily articulates the values of the poet's culture. Panegyric projects as its real subject not a person but the desirable condition of political power. It may apparently be disengaged from specific persons: Buchanan's Genethliacon (1566) or birthday-ode for the infant James proposes a programme for Scotland as much as its king, William Alexander's Paraenesis (1604) for Prince Henry carries propaganda for empire. Re-attached to particular persons, some thoughts ring awkwardly: Daniel's Panegyrike Congratulatorie (1603) for King James is too intelligently preoccupied with political issues to work as a poem of praise.⁷ Poets are supposed to pretend that the subjects of panegyric conform to their desires, and Daniel does not quite. As it happens Jonson had limited tolerance of such pretence. Though he advised those who would counsel princes that they abstain from ‘insolence, or precept’, to Drummond he confided that: ‘he heth a minde to be a churchman, and so he might have favour to make one Sermon to the King, he careth not what thereafter sould befall him, for he would not flatter though he saw Death.’⁸ But Drummond, though obviously tempted by the pretence that the king is as he would wish him, contrives not to betray his own deeper values. He does this by eliminating contentious matter from view.

While staying with its formal obligations, Drummond has liberated himself from the ethical obligations of panegyric. Its topics—borrowed as Kastner indicates from Ronsard—at his hands become oddly pointless, merely Parnassian.⁹ Such are the constraints on James that such virtues as he can actually exercise are not exercisable to any advantage. Even the praise of James as rex pacificus is complicated by the dispraise of warlike kings (lines 229-246), so that the effect is oddly diffuse; the climactic celebration of James's fame (lines 301-334) is confusingly couched as prophecy.¹⁰ The idealisation does not constitute a model. For Drummond royal virtues are mystical, and they are expressed symbolically—a point carried in his quotations from praises of James's grandfather by Ariosto and Ronsard in the History of James V.¹¹ In Forth Feasting royal virtues are apprehended in the observation of transformed reality (lines 1-32, 101-16, 255-84). The representation of joy takes over from the representation of what might make a good king. The writing up of public joy has a special rhetoric, one which Gelly's Latin poem may show itself more adept in, or more inclined to—but it modulates easily into something that sounds intensely personal, diverted from public kinds of relevance. The imaginative stuff of the poem is Drummond's own response to an occasion. That he impersonates a river underlines the special absurdity of the enterprise at an ethical level.

The praise then is gratuitous. The poem is not after all an attempt to redirect the way things go; it makes requests that the poet recognises cannot be met. By making an impossible claim on the royal affection—that the king remain in Scotland and ‘long, long haunt these bounds’ (line 349)—Drummond implicitly resigns his status as a political poet. The effective acknowledgement of the ethical ‘impossibility’ of its demands (the king ‘by honour drawn’ (line 391) will return to his Thames) makes the resignation explicit. This resignation of serious political intentions makes the poem, in a quasi-technical sense, profoundly unethical: it makes no appeal that can be acted on, and becomes instead an exhibition of passion. Panegyric, whose status as a model of what poetry is to a large extent explains the prominence of the ethical in explanations of poetry, is here deprived of its ethical base: ‘feasting’ replaces ethically informed praise. This is eccentric, but it is not unprecedented. Puttenham calls panegyrics ‘carols of honour’ and specifies their aim not as paraenetic or hortatory but ‘ordained … for the comfort and recreation of many’.¹² The king's visit supplied an occasion which might stimulate an appropriate sense of comfort. Drummond would almost certainly have shared with Puttenham a notion of poetry that identified it with pleasure rather than persuasion—with inducing feeling rather than guiding ‘us by the hand to action’. This last phrase is Jonson's, and the ambiguity in his recommendation of the poem—if he had wanted to please the king he would have written it—derives partly from his distrust of a poetic which prefers pleasure over utility. Conventionally, making moral points requires that the poet ingratiate himself; but such a view allows pleasure only a secondary and ingratiatory role. The roles of pleasure and utility are however reversible. They seem reversed, for example, in Puttenham. And Fracastoro, whose work Drummond certainly knew, writes of the poet's ultimate aim as seeking the utmost beauty of expression of which a given subject is capable. The poet's object of imitation becomes ‘an ideal of expression, a way of writing’.¹³ In such a critical context practical notions of usefulness are exiled to the margin.

II

It is worth reflecting on the constraints which encouraged Drummond's revisionary manipulation of the habits of panegyric. Panegyric of the ruler, we have said, would not conventionally treat a personality and treats instead what a culture takes as the desirable conditions of power. Drummond's difficulty in this poem is not where the commentators usually put it, with the king's person, of which (as his satirical epigrams witness) he was well enough aware.¹⁴ It is with the circumstances of the culture out of which he speaks, with the exigencies of his time and place. Some he can simply avoid: the vagaries of the economy may not be his poetic business. But the poem would have hoped, so to speak, to have cast itself as courtly panegyric. And there is no court out of which to speak, or one only in the attenuated sense in which, in Jonson's poems, Penshurst or Durrants (Wroth's estate) are ‘crowned’ by the king's brief presence.¹⁵ There is for Drummond no culture that will sustain a courtly voice. This fact determines the special character of the poem. Its importance is not just that subjects of praise throng the court (a fact on which, for example, Spenser's poetic enterprise relies, or indeed Jonson's in his own later phase) but that the court is the readiest focus of the cultural identity on which public poetry relies. In Drummond's Entertainment of King Charles (lines 15-18; Kastner, II, 118), the Genius of Caledonia reappears only for the King:

This Kingdom's Angel I, who since that day
That ruthless Fate thy parent reft away,
And made a star, appear'd not any where,
To gratulate thy coming, saving here.

It may also be the case that, for the moral character of panegyric to be at all effective, the poet requires a group to whom his ‘carol of honour’ might be ethically intelligible—and who would be recognised as ethically competent by his addressee.¹⁶ In the absence of this kind of like-mindedness, panegyric celebration amounts to no more than something done in holiday spirit. Significantly for this point, in the Entertainment of King Charles—in most respects an ethically more confident celebration than Forth Feasting—the reverse of the arch at the entry to Edinburgh is dedicated Hilaritati Publicae (Kastner, II, 121).

The failure of confidence in courtly culture is by no means specific to Scotland. But the nervousness that attends it is exacerbated in Scotland because there those (such as Drummond himself) who would have wished its survival are disappointed by the spontaneous removal of the court. Jenny Wormald remarks on the survival of a literary culture out of the court in castles like those of William Mure of Rowallan, or of Drummond himself: ‘But it was diffused and uncertain’.¹⁷ For such people the alternative sources of national cultural consciousness would not have been convincing, or would not have been attractive. Mure might have found comfort, and after 1617 apparently did, in his religion—which becomes the vehicle of this mature poetic personality. Williamson has identified Scottish cultural identity even at this date, as until recently it still might have been, with Presbyterianism.¹⁸ To the eirenical and episcopalian Drummond, who identified Presbyterianism with faction and advantage-seeking, it afforded no focus at all. Allowed that the King was actively promoting a contrary ecclesiastical policy (shortly to be published as the Five Articles of Perth), he could hardly even here have pretended that it might.

The inferior possibilities of the Scottish contribution to British culture were diminished further by the fact that in 1603 the Scots meet English culture in—as Williamson puts it—its most ‘excited’ state. Scottish high culture, like Polish or Czech or Hungarian high culture, flourishes for a while in an international metamorphosis, and that at a time when English Latin culture is marginal. But its courtly vernacular is Southern English, and the best known of Scotland's vernacular poets—William Alexander, Robert Ayton, William Fowler—live and die in London.¹⁹ Their continued presence there follows on the king's promotion, on an unprecedented scale, of southern literary culture. Drummond himself clearly thinks of British culture in mainly English terms. He wrote to Drayton à propos Hart's possible publication of a projected third part of PolyOlbion: ‘How would I be overjoy'd to see our North once honoured with your Works, as before it was with Sidney's; tho' it be barren of Excellency in it self, it can both love and admire the Excellency of others’.²⁰

Edwin Muir writes of Scotland in the mid 1930's as ‘a country which is becoming lost to history’.²¹ Muir supposes also that what history it had was of frustrated aspiration to nationality—there is a sort of history, but not one that belongs to anyone, because there is no people for it to belong to. Expressions of these aspirations tend easily to fantasy: the Scots are a chosen people, because they are Jacob's people (conceitedly, because they are James's).²² Attempts to secure history are anxiously romantic: the Scots are ancient (whereas, gratifyingly, English pretensions to antiquity have been exploded by Polydore's humanist scholarship). But their national antiquity, as well as being fantastic and romantic, is only an accident of their kings' antiquity. The identity of the people is wrapped up in their ruler. Scotland is represented as a country which has for two thousand years obeyed a line of kings fathered by the legendary Fergus. ‘Hos sequeris non ordine rupto’, says Gelly (line 207): the line is continuous till now. Drummond likewise (lines 205-6) boasts of James's ancestry as longer than any in Europe, though awkwardly: ‘By just descent thou from more kings dost shine / Than many can name men in all their line’. He seems more comfortable with this mythology, and certainly makes more use of it, in the Entertainment of King Charles; but what he really thought of it cannot be known. Drummond's annotated copy of Boece is lost. Albion's Scotland, projected to rival Warner's poem on England, remains an imaginary book in his library.²³

Because the supportive mythologies are so exclusively royal, the cultural barrenness is aggravated by something like a sense of hurt. The removal of the royal presence and its attendant system of patronage is read as betrayal. Even as James left, Ayton's Panegyric wondered at a king's desertion of his people, and the failure of his love for them: ‘Is Scotland vile?’ (lines 232-33). James had promised to return every three years, but nothing in the interval, says Gelly's poem (line 64), ‘answers to your promises’. Drummond makes the point more sweetly (lines 76-8):

… darkness and a cloudy night,
Did freight our breasts with sighs, our eyes with tears,
Turn'd minutes in sad months, sad months in years.

The sources of healthy culture are in consequence locked up. Philanax writes to the absent king of Arcadia (Arcadia 1.4): ‘Let your subjects have you in their eyes; let them see the benefites of your justice dayly more and more’. Drummond himself, in prose, makes the Bishop of Aberdeen plead for the ransom of James I: ‘how well soever Governours and Vice-Gerents Rule the Commonwealth, yet is that Government but as the Light of the Moon or Stars in absence of the Sun, and but Representations of Shadows for real Bodies.’²⁴ But the temporary presence of King James, and later of King Charles, can effect no recuperation of the culture. It produces only ravishment and wonder—an experience that is only aesthetic.

Courtly culture was so strong in England as to be regarded as creating an imbalance: it had to be officially inhibited by proclamation—and unofficially by the cult of the country house.²⁵ The shock of losing the court seems to have deprived Scotland of the confidence that would have allowed it to maintain a healthy provincial culture. The imbalance in Scotland remained unchecked: the myth of metropolitan London as a source of wealth and health may be a predominantly Scottish one. For Drummond it was perhaps additionally informed by what in the South would have been an unfashionable and absurd identification of London and the Spenserian Cleopolis. Seton, where Drummond delivers his poem, has on its own account no value. It is not reckoned like Jonson's Penshurst an ideal economy, not like Marvell's Appleton House a source of cultural revival. At its best it might be like Carew's Saxham a retreat. History is evidently not going to be rewritten out of this place. In fact, since Seton was the stronghold of the Catholic party in Scotland it might have been.²⁶ But such revolutionary possibilities could not be appropriately invoked, and were not desirably invoked. On the contrary, both Drummond and Gelly represent Seton's vitality as wholly dependent on the royal presence. Its possibilities are unrealised except transitorily as a courtly centre. Gelly (lines 182ff) represents the Seton family's virtues in terms of a blood tie with the Stuarts, and of its loyality to them. The house's virtue is that it once lodged James often. It happiness now is that James is ‘a stranger to London, and here with our penates’ (lines 191-2). In other words, the house now fulfils itself and achieves its happiness only in a rare event, one indeed suspected to be unrepeatable. James had last stopped at Seton on his way south in 1603, coincidentally to watch a funeral.²⁷

In Drummond's poem James achieves the miraculous transformation of a desert landscape (lines 99-100):

As portraits raz'd of colours use to be
So look'd these abject bounds deprived of thee.

But there is nowhere, he goes on, ‘Which thine abode could not most happy make’ (line 112). The energies which the poem celebrates are generated by the king: he makes it possible that the rivers hear him—flumina senserunt ipsa, as the epigraph has it. Seton itself is not mentioned in Drummond's poem. But, in this matter different from older Elizabethan poems of praise, the modern Stuart panegyric is supposed in the first instance to celebrate an occasion—the king at Seton—not, except implicitly, a mission. It can therefore take its occasion for granted. The Entertainment of King Charles belatedly revives an Elizabethan mode, based on descriptive fictions, and then stiffly. The particularity of the event in Forth Feasting, its unfictitious and (despite the prosopopeias) its unmythical character, moves the poem towards a kind of intimacy. The poet and his addressee share a sense of where they are, and an understanding of what is really possible. James is never quite incorporated in the sun as Elizabeth is in the moon. It is the 15th May 1617, the landscape has revived after a long winter. The fact is quite personal; and the more so since for Drummond the house at Seton has had metaphorically wintry associations. Its chapel contained the tomb—for which he wrote an epitaph—of his kinsman James Drummond, the first husband of Lady Isabel Seton, who presumably secured this royal commission for him.²⁸ It is a place appropriate for elegies. Drummond recognised well enough the fragility of Seton's courtliness, although he cannot but feel he would not have minded it. Drummond would have welcomed his merely colonial status. Provincialism was his vocation: even in the more ostentatiously public Entertainment of King Charles, he personates the moon-struck Ionian shepherd Endymion.

No mission is celebrated. Panegyric conventionally celebrates the past and present deeds of its subject. Conventional expectations oblige it to take account of history. But Forth Feasting, in common with other modern panegyric, and in common particularly with Gelly's, complicates its own character by obliging itself so firmly to the occasion it celebrates—James's visiting Seton on a Spring day. It concerns a situation, and not a pattern of situations. That is, it fails to acknowledge the complications of history. For James, says Drummond, Fortune ‘Rent her sail and broke her wheel’ (line 134). For James the messiness of history was suspended (lines 127-28):

Scarce wast thou born, when, join'd in friendly bands
Two mortal foes with other clasped hands.

James is regularly celebrated as the Peace-maker. Even before the Union, he could be promoted as the reconciler of Scottish troubles.²⁹

But history was moving to a peculiarly messy phase. This need not much have concerned Drummond, despite his continental connexions, and no one knew the Thirty Years War would shortly break. But the moment would probably have been recognised as crucial by Gelly, whose connexions and whose usual residence were continental.³⁰ His last known poem before this for James was an epithalamium for the Elector Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth, published not in London or Edinburgh but in Heidelberg. Speaking now in a Catholic household to a Protestant king, the father of the Winter Queen, he approaches the great subject with caution. He casts James as a new Neptune, one to whom history has given power over land and sea, one providentially made arbiter of Europe (lines 214ff). But from this vision even Gelly withdraws. He turns instead to what he pretends to think of as James's more considerable domestic virtues. The solution to the European problem, it turns out, is simply to follow the British model. In Gelly's poem, the British people devotedly hang on their Prince's exemplary piety. Made amenable by their devotion, they follow him in their prayers, ‘non vi’, non carcere, flammis / Obtrusus' (lines 259-60). This is not a vision to be taken seriously. James's example certainly did not suffice, and he was not prepared to enforce a peace in Europe—a refusal which deeply disappointed the Englishmen with whom Drummond's poetical affiliation most obviously lies. When Wither wrote his Epithalamion for the Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine he hoped ‘that from your blessed loins shall come / Another terror to the whore of Rome’ (lines 191-92). The more militantly Protestant party hoped for British intervention on the Elector's behalf. But when in 1619 the Ambassador from the Palatinate requested his help, James—only wittily—cast himself as the aged Latinus supplying prudential checks on the virtuous fury of Turnus.³¹

This marks a triumph of provincialism for which Drummond might have been grateful. Jonson's Epistle to a Friend (a poem probably written only three years after this of Drummond's) talks of ‘vicious ease’ as the alternative to war; in the middle of the Thirty Years War (1638) Drummond inscribed in his rebuilt house at Hawthornden an advertisement of the benefits of ‘honestum otium’. Forth Feasting enlarges itself not in contemplating troubled Europe, but a fantastically conceived and far-away America—where, like Horace's Phoceans in Epode XVI, the Scots can escape present turbulence and indulge an extravagant appetite for splendours.³² Even so, the enlarging moment in the poem is brief.

III

Drummond, unlike Horace, has no satire in his heart. He has calculated a disengagement from political relevance and transferred the lachrymose eroticism of his love sonnets to a foreign kind. The mode may in fact match the circumstances; or rather the situation may give focus to what would normally be a dangerously sentimental mix. The king is welcome, and the poem should celebrate his benign power; but since the king is not or will not be entirely present, since he is present in no politically important sense, Drummond refuses the obligations of a strictly panegyric mode in favour of the constraints or opportunities of a mixed mode which includes erotic and elegiac strands. Under more pressure than poems customarily are to compromise its official intentions, Forth Feasting reflects on its own imaginative sources.

The erotic strand is probably more obvious, but in a diffuse way. The elegiac strand is more specifically invoked. I quote an earlier poem, Tears on the Death of Moeliades (lines 71ff):

When Forth thy nurse, Forth where thou first didst pass
Thy tender days (who smil'd oft in her glass
To see thee gaze), meand'ring with her streams,
Heard thou had left this round, from Phoebus' beams
She sought to fly, but forced to return
By neighbour brooks, she gave herself to mourn …

Formally speaking, Forth mourning is answered by Forth feasting.³³ The griefs provoked by James's departure are like those appropriate to Henry's death. So, in Forth Feasting (lines 83ff):

The Muses left our groves, and for sweet songs
Sat sadly silent, or did weep their wrongs:
Ye know it meads, ye murmuring woods it know,
Hills, dales, and caves, copartners of their woe;
And ye it know my streams, which from their eyne
Oft in your glass receiv'd their pearled brine …

What was lost in Henry is regained in James. The past heroisms of Troy and Rome are matched by Henry (Tears on the Death of Moeliades, lines 61ff); the glories of Arthur and of English kings are, rather awkwardly, overmatched by James (Forth Feasting lines 313ff). But the only temporary character of James's residence makes the poem no real answer at all. It is proper then that Drummond should have tied Forth Feasting to the sentimental mode of the earlier poem, one of ambiguous celebration, or praise frustrated by the fact of loss.

Elegists might customarily pretend they approach the occasion of death reluctantly; some kind of deprecatory gesture is widely perceived as appropriate. The event is unwished: ‘O Heavens’, Drummond's Tears on the Death of Moeliades begins, ‘then is it true that thou art gone?’ From some such point elegies commonly, and this is no exception, become searches for an appropriate subject. They look, that is, for an occasion to celebrate; but in human terms the pathos of things prevents their ever reaching it. Elegies depend for their sentimental force on our recognition of the human insignificance of the comforts they offer. By contrast Forth Feasting seems in flight from its subject. The occasion to celebrate is given, but the poem so presents it as to make emphatic the point that the king will go away again. Elegies propose that their real subject is eternal life, but never quite convince us of it. Forth Feasting, whose proposed subject is the return of the king, actually implies that its real subject is his loss.

Jacobean panegyric may accidentally have in an exaggerated degree an elegiac strain. In poems on the accession of James the proper balance between grief and joy is frequently disturbed. Some English poems on the accession of James double as elegies on Queen Elizabeth.³⁴ The happiness at James's accession is supposed to counter grief at Elizabeth's death, but the poignancy of the death may not in the event be cancelled. In Scotland a similar, though more decisively regretful, effect derives from the fact that the occasion for celebration (James's accession) is identical with an occasion for sorrow (James's departure for London). Typically, Scottish poems on the accession of James somehow accommodate this experience of loss. In Thomas Craig's short elegiac piece on James's departure in 1603 (beginning ‘Dulcis amor populi’), it is the dominant tone:

Triste solum sine Sole, suo sine Principe cernam,
          Nunc verum a Graeco nomine nomen habes.

Living in a sunless world of shadows, Craig resigns his Muse. Ayton's Panegyric of 1603 represents the crowds rejoicing at their king's success, but—in what is apparently a true reflexion of popular feeling—

                    … subito se gaudia motu
In luctus vertere graves, dum pondus amoris
Accendit vigilem trepido sub pectore curam,
Ne perdat commune bonum …
                    … metuit semper qui diligit, et quod
Mente capit, cupit ante oculos ut semper oberret.

(208ff)

(joys straightway turned to heavy griefs as the weight of their love stirred in their fearful breasts a lively apprehension that they should lose their common good- … Who loves well fears much: what we have taken to our hearts we wish never to lose from our eyes).

Gelly borrows those sentiments and some of the wording near the beginning of his panegyric on James's return (lines 75ff):

Aut aliquis teneros languor gravis occupat artus
(Pessima semper amor metuit …
          … semper timet qui diligit omnis,
Quodque capit, cupit ante oculos atque ora tenere).

(heavy weariness seizes on my enfeebled joints. Love ever fears the worst … whoever loves well fears much: what a man desires he would have always before his eyes).

This is preliminary to the glad tidings of the king's return, but Gelly's rhetoric, accidentally perhaps, requires the repetition of these apprehensions: ‘No basement, no rooftop, no window is without a spectator’ (137); but it is only while they can, which is briefly, that they enjoy the sight of their king ‘their eyes can never be sated with gazing’ (130). They never will be. The Scots, like nestlings waiting for the mother-bird, are fed only as the sun sets—‘Hesperias Phoebo labente sub undas’ (line 173). Gelly makes nothing of what might have been read as the ominous approach of night. In Drummond's poem the tendency to fear the worst, to play on frustration, since it is confirmed by the debt to the elegy on Prince Henry, is much stronger. Drummond's poem, which pretends to be a positive response to sorrow, can only attempt it in a minor mode.

Forth Feasting insists on its own generic constrainedness. Drummond's prefatory sonnet calls the poem ‘hoarse and lowly’. This may be disingenuous, but it is not pointless. George Lauder's memorial poem, included in the 1711 Works, calls it ‘high and hardy’, and this, importantly, it might have been. Gelly's poem invokes Phemonoe, ‘the priestess who first sang in heroic song’, and declares James's deeds to be worthy of ‘Virgil's song’, or the ‘Argive poet's’ (lines 155, 272-73): such notes might properly be called ‘high and hardy’. That they are so is probably a consequence of their not being English, since Latin can pretend to speak out of a culture uncomplicated by modern doubt. Latin also speaks to a culture which expects cliché, discounting difficulties of sentiment. English on the other hand is, notoriously, incapable of heroic postures. Drummond personates a river, and almost at the end of the poem he makes her available for scrutiny: ‘wrapt in a watchet gown / Of reeds and lilies on my head a crown’ (lines 379-80). This places the singer in a way at once suprising and exact. Like the song of the precious hours to whose skill the king's memory is committed at the end of the poem, Drummond's poem characters the king's name ‘in starry flowers’. This phrasing suggests at once its slightness, and its fragmentariness.

The flowingness seems only a function of the verse. It covers a tapestry of essentially epigrammatic conceits—such as the tabula rasa of the landscape without the king (lines 99-100), or the Fates spinning threads of gold (lines 117-18), and of extravagant detail, most wonderful of which must be the ‘Antarctic parrots’ (line 376) which a revived Scotland will offer its king.³⁵ The poem seems to sustain an obsession, but its sequaciousness is illusory. The Baroque exaggerations of the prologue—the phoenix causing the Nile to wonder, or the entranced priests of Serapis to rave (lines 25-32), still sound in details which might be only domestic—like rain falling on dry earth or shades cooling pilgrims (lines 73-74). The phoenix, the rain, the shades—they are all meant to be James. But, importantly, the identity of these images with the king is not convincing: James is not the obsession. Drummond's fancy is caught by accidents. The resonant amplification of the details builds on the margins of what is relevant to James's status as a king. The poem's major imaginative effort is away from its official point.

Mure of Rowallan has no confidence in the efficacy of his verses for the king when he came to Hamilton: his solitary Muse retires ‘Unused abroad to haunt such pompous throngs’.³⁶ Heroic panegyric, he implies, depends specifically on the presence of the king. It is a corollary of this that in the absence of the king the heroic style fails. Mure wants not to write what he thinks of as trivial poetry now that the king is here, but in the king's absence his muse had apparently accustomed herself to the trivial. A muse practised in erotic poetry is unexpert in heroic poetry. Drummond makes no fuss, but in effect he writes a love poem—even if it gestures toward sublimation into something else. That is, he writes as if he could not escape the limitations to which the royal absence has habituated him. ‘Where are the kings who routed all confusion’, writes Auden (in Logos and Kairos):

The bearded gods who shepherded the spaces …
The nymphs and oracles have fled away.

In Drummond's poem they are not quite gone. An oracular Proteus promises a future in which Americans will raise statues of gold to King James (lines 319ff). But the prophecy is circumspectly reported: ‘If grey-haired Proteus' songs the truth not miss …’. The poem is dominated by its nymphs rather than by Proteus. The king's return has brought them back. At the beginning of the poem they are commanded to strew the ‘springs and grots with lilies fair’ (line 46), and at the end ‘the wanton wood-nymphs of the verdant spring / Blue, golden, purple flowers shall to thee bring’ (lines 369-70). The king's return has had power only for this. The displacement permits the possibility that Drummond should celebrate a pacific king; but it also draws the poem away from its heroic possibilities. The voice in the poem is itself that of a nymph, revived by a hope of seeing her lord again.

Forth Feasting goes about as if to answer an elegy, even if it never in fact manages to. It hopes to celebrate the re-union, after long separation, of a loving people and their king. Re-union is the real subject projected. Kastner asserts that Drummond takes nothing but a model for his title from Marino's Tebro Festante, a poem on the installation of Pope Leo XI (who, perhaps poignantly, died less than a month later). He may also have taken—Marino's panegyric is printed among his epithalamia—an epithalamic conception of panegyric, welcome as conventionally enabling a style which might serve instead of the heroic.³⁷ Epithalamia were, after all, fashionably written as river poems, twice over with the authority of Spenser: in the Prothalamion and in the Marriage of Thames and Medway in Book IV of The Faerie Queene, itself probably a reworking of an Epithalamium Thamesis. Camden's fragmentary De Connubio is another famous example.³⁸ In this context, a more particular consideration offers itself. Drummond may have projected a river epithalamium for the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine (almost every one else did), for whatever reason abandoned it, and reworked it in Forth Feasting. Drummond's epithalamium would have answered his elegy on Prince Henry as, for example, Chapman's Hymn to Hymen (written for the Princess Elizabeth) answers his Epicedium for Prince Henry. Chapman explicitly relates the joyful marriage poem to the mournful funeral one: ‘Sing … Bright Hymen's torches, drunk up Parcae's tears’. Likewise Wither in his Epithalamion ‘lately grieved / More than can be expressed or well believed’, retires into solitude until called out by Aeolus's announcing ‘A match concluded, ‘twixt great Thame and Rhine’.³⁹ To be sure, the marital metaphor is appropriately enough invoked to express a king's relation to his people: ‘I am the husband’, says James himself in the speech to his first Parliament in 1603, ‘and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife’.⁴⁰ No origin in a properly epithalamic poem is required for Forth Feasting But the sentimental cast of Drummond's poem, which is not true of Gelly's, suggests that marriage is treated as more than a metaphor. Something more like an allegory, even if it is never resolved into anything like political coherence, is sustained by the pressure of the sentiment.

Indeed this remains the case though Drummond's adaptation of epithalamic topics has been fairly drastic. In Gelly's poem too the domestic metaphor surfaces as a simile. Scotland is like a wife whose husband has gone to sea (lines 159ff):

                                        trepidat formidine conjunx
Sola relicta toro, cunctosque alicunde reversos
Inquirit solers, cum nunc rumore sinistro
Naufragus in mediis effuses creditur undis,
Nunc superesse neci, et vesci vitalibus auris.
Spemque metumque inter dubiss redit ille …
Accurrens collo circumdare bracchia conjunx
Exanimata cadit, voxque intercepta salutem
Laetitia negat

(The wife left alone in her bed trembles with fear. She asks after her husband from every returning traveller. Sometimes she believes him shipwrecked and overwhelmed by the waves, sometimes she thinks he has survived and still enjoys the life-giving air. She is caught between hope and fear. But when she sees him return, running to embrace his neck she falls in a faint. Her voice breaks off with happiness and denies its own greeting).

But Gelly's ‘tristes amantes’, his ‘mourning lovers’, as he calls them (line 70), are rewarded. Drummond's are not. The reunion of king and people is not allowed to come off. The very refusal of the obvious way with the metaphor turns the marital analogy into an issue.

Drummond's adaptation is not in the direction expected: the Forth is, so to speak, only a mistress. Long devotion and greater lover does not count in her favour. As a poet Drummond gives himself the position not of an epithalamic master of ceremonies, but of one of Ovid's unhappier heroines. The possibility of permanent reunion turns to something only regretfully reflected on:

Ah! why should Isis only see thee shine?
Is not thy Forth as well as Isis thine?

But Isis has him. As the poem closes, Drummond imagines the king's ‘dewy hairs’ dried ‘with hers of gold’. Like a jealous wife Isis questions him about his fare, his sports, his absences, she ‘chides perhaps thy coming to the north’. In fact she did not have to. In The Vision of Delight, Jonson's Christmas masque for 1617, James's return to London makes a December revelation of the Spring, and so absolutely satisfies all the best desires of his southern subjects that there is no suspicion of complaint. Drummond's Forth, like an unsuccessful rival, can only ask to be remembered: ‘Loathe not to think on thy much-loving Forth’. She can hardly ask to be loved. The river speaks here on behalf of a nation already resigned to its ruler's absence. She talks in the hopeless or resigned accents not so much of a Penelope, as—among Ovid's heroines—of Dido, or Oenone, or Ariadne.

This overstatement makes obvious my main point, that the poem is afflicted by a sort of generic derangement. Drummond in this poem is widely supposed to have embraced the model of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue.⁴¹ But he cannot be so much committed to it as ‘embrace’ suggests. The poem runs to something like prophetic strain, it makes promises—it hopes in the words of its prefatory sonnet to be ‘Aurora to some bright sun’. James himself believed a promised dream of peace already come true: ‘I thought the people were never so happy as in my time … it was to be thought, that every man might sit in safety under his own vine and his fig tree’.⁴² Every epoch, says Michelet, dreams its successor. The two decades which followed the outbreak of the Thirty Years War were to be remembered by Clarendon in terms of such a dream, for him a memory. But it was only a dream, and despite James's biblical echo it came in an image only vapidly pastoral, devised with attention more to its pleasant machinery than its symbolic resonances. Drummond the man, though he was to live with the consequences of its fragility, might have wished for no more. By what are supposed to be the conditions of the genre, the poem he wrote should certainly have affected to require more. Virgil's Messianic eclogue has to break with strictly pastoral habits in order to qualify as panegyric. Drummond's poem, to meet its occasion with any kind of honesty, has to disown heroic ambitions. It also has to acknowledge the illusory character of the images that substitute for them. The danger with prophetic poetry is that it is always in danger of being overtaken by its subject. The promises of Birthday poems may always, if only briefly, be thought of as possible. The promise whose future fulfilment Drummond's poem celebrates is already broken—and so recognised. It may always have been supposed so. Mure of Rowallan confessed it a mystery that the king had returned at all.⁴³ Drummond's poem recognises that the king will not stay in Scotland. He will return to London, effectively for good. The poem has then to be elegiac—in the sense that it is obliged to celebrate a disappointed possibility—as Tears on the Death of Moeliades has to (and other elegies for Henry). But it is elegiac in the other sense too, that it celebrates a frustrated passion.

Notes

1. Conversations with Drummond, 98-100, in Ben Jonson, edited by C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, I (Oxford, 1925), Appendix 1. At Conversations with Drummond, 376-77, Jonson reports that James thought Taylor as fine as any poet in England. And Warner, he said (36-37) had ruined Albion's England with Jacobean additions.

2. Reulis and Cautelis, chapter 3, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), I, 218.

3. William Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee quoted in John Nichols, The Progresses, and Magnificent Festivities of James VI and I (1828), III, 307.

4. The debt at Autumn, 43-46 is noted by A. Joly, William Drummond de Hawthornden (Lille, 1934), p. 56.

5. Nichols, Progresses, III, 307. Details of the Scottish journey are given in pp. 245-389. Literary material relating to it was collected by John Adamson, the Principal of Edinburgh University, as Τά Των Μουsων Ει'sοδια and a sequel 'Εξόδια published together in 1618 by the Edinburgh printer Andrew Hart.

6. J. C. Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (Lyons, 1561), p. 161 (III.cix). The Coronation poems listed by Nichols, Progresses, I, xxxviiff supply evidence of the emphases. There is a good brief account of royal panegyric in Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 156-57. The traditions of late Roman panegyric are magisterially covered in Sabine G. MacCormack's Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981); her account of the imperial adventus is immediately relevant. The standard treatment of panegyric in the Renaissance is O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, 1962).

7. The hortatory dimension insisted on by Quintilian, Institutes, III.iv.14. At its crudest the ideal is generosity and the expectation of reward, as perhaps in Drayton's ‘too forward’ To the Majesty of King James, 167-74: ‘But from thy Court (O Worthy) banish quite / The foole, the Pandar, and the Parasite … Set lovely Vertue ever in thy view, / And love them most, that most her doe pursue’. Jonson, Timber, 107-15 (in Herford and Simpson, VIII), advises that princes' counsellors abstain from ‘insolence, or precept’. On Daniel's failure with the Panegyricke see Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel (Liverpool, 1964), p. 90.

8. Conversations with Drummond, 330-32. The passage is discussed by Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), p. 221. The royal Directions to Preachers soon silenced even the sermon: see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, Wisconsin, 1984), pp. 97-100.

9. All quotations from Drummond's verse are modernized from L. E. Kastner, The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden, Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1913). Kastner notes resemblances between Ronsard's Bocage Royale, 1.151ff and Forth Feasting, 135-144, and between Bocage Royale 1.210ff and Forth Feasting, 145-78. Drummond's representation of mourning (Forth Feasting, 83ff) may recall, though less specifically, Ronsard's reminiscence of the death of Charles IX at Bocage Royale, 1.271ff.

10. On James as rex pacificus see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd (Manchester, 1981), p. 21. The most elaborate account of James's virtues is in the lunatic Thomas Ross (or Rose), Idaea, sive De Jacobi … Regis Virtutibus Enarratio (1608). Drummond preserved a copy of his ‘libel’ to the effect that all Scotsmen should be expelled from England: see R. H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1971), Item 1389.

11. The Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1711), p. 115.

12. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, edited by Gladys Wilcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), 1.23. Drummond owned a copy of the Arte: MacDonald, Item 888. The phrase ‘guiding us by the hand’ quotes Timber, 2399.

13. Girolamo Fracastoro, Naugerius sive de Poetica Dialogus in Opera Omnia (Venice, 1555). Drummond's copy, not recorded by MacDonald, is in Glasgow University Library: Hamilton BC5-a.14. There is a facsmile edition-translation of the Naugerius by Ruth Kelso (Urbana, Illinois, 1924). See also Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961), pp. 726-27.

14. On James's deficiencies see Drummond's epigrams on the five senses, given as For the King, in Kastner, II, 196-99. F. R. Fogle, A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden (New York, 1952), p. 143 discusses the issue.

15. See To Penshurst, 76ff, and To Sir Robert Wroth, 23ff. I take the metaphor of ‘crowning’ from Alastair Fowler's discussion of the former passage in Conceitful Thought (Edinburgh, 1975), p. 125. See also David Norbrook, Politics and Poetry in the English Renaissance (London, 1983), pp. 190-91.

16. Cp. Puttenham, Arte, 1.7 on princely patronage.

17. Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community; Scotland 1470-1625 (London, 1981), p. 193.

18. A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), passim. On the importance of Presbyterianism for Mure of Rowallan, see Helena Shire, Song, Dance, and Poetry of the Court of James VI (Cambridge, 1969), p. 208.

19. See Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, pp. 129-30, on the attempt by David Hume of Godscroft to establish the identity of Scottish English. The so-called Castalian enterprise collapsed even before James moved South, and the abandonment of Scots by Ayton and James himself only confirms it.

20. In a letter of 10 December 1618: see B. H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and his Circle (Oxford, 1941), p. 181. Waldegrave published an Arcadia in 1599.

21. Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (London, 1935), p. 4.

22. John Stewart of Baldynneis uses the Jacobean conceit in Ane Schersing out of Trew Felicitie, stanzas 96ff. On Scottish pretensions to antiquity see Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness. Cp. Drayton's scepticism on the English side To the Majesty of King James, 139-40: ‘Since Brute first reigned, (if men of Brute allow) / Never before united until now’. In the Entertainment of King Charles Mercury presents the King with the standard company of 107 Scottish kings ‘brought from the Elysian fields’.

23. MacDonald, Item 1402.

24. Works, p. 1.

25. See J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford, 1974), Nos 23 (1603) and 85 (1608). A now large literature on country house poetry takes its starting point from G. R. Hibbard, ‘The Country-House Poem of the Seventeenth Century’, JWCI, 19 (1956), 159-77. See especially Alastair Fowler, ‘Country House Poems: The Politics of a Genre’, The Seventeenth Century, 1 (1986), 1-14. A late Scottish variant, really an early Augustan gallery piece, is discussed by Michael R. G. Spiller, ‘The Country House Poem in Scotland: Sir George MacKenzie's Caelia's Country House and Closet’, SSL, 12 (1974), 110-30.

26. See Robert Seton, An Old Family (New York, 1899), p. 76.

27. See Nichols, Progresses, III, 306.

28. Given among the posthumous poems in Kastner, II, 202. It begins, ‘Instead of Epitaphs and airy praise’.

29. See Daniel's Panegyric, stanza 43. It is already the burden of Buchanan's Genethliacon of 1566: ‘cohibe pacalis olivae / Fronde comam, repara flammis foedata, ruinis / Convulsa, et pulso cole squalida tecta colono’ (lines 6-8).

30. On Gelly see John Durkan, ‘The Early History of Glasgow University Library’, Bibliotheck, 8 (1977), 116. His identified works are a piece of ecclesiastical polemic, Programmatis Quevilliani contra Adrianum Behotum Archidiaconum Apologia (La Rochelle, 1605), a congratulatory volume for Wolfgang Mayer, 'Ηχω sυνήδομενη (Basel, 1611), an Epithalamium et Gratulatio for the wedding of Frederick and Elizabeth (Heidelberg, 1613), the Fausta Acclamatio for James I's visit to Scotland (Edinburgh, 1617), and a treatise on ophthalmic disorders contributed to the Disputationes Medicae published by Genathius (Basel, 1618-31). He is not among the poets collected by Arthur Johnston in the Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum (though a letter to Drummond's brother-in-law John Scot of Scotstarvet concerning his Epithalamium suggests an earlier intention to that effect: see NLS MS 17.1.9, f. 208). Dr Durkan tells me privately that he would identify him with the John Joly who appears as a graduate of Edinburgh in 1601 and then at St Mary's College, St Andrews in 1603. Having apparently at first designed a career in the Church, he changed to medicine, graduating at Basel in 1613. The Burgh Records of Glasgow for 1627-28 note his being summoned (as Dr Jolie) to treat the minister Robert Scott: see Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1876), I, 365 and 479. According to David Craufurd's History of the University of Edinburgh (1808), p. 101, he was assessor for a Chair at Edinburgh in 1625.

31. See C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (London, 1957), p. 83. The Calendar of State Papers (Venice) records that James was reluctant to help Savoy in 1617 because he was determined to go to Scotland. The drift of affairs on the continent was hardly obscure: C. P. Clasen The Palatinate in European History (Oxford, 1966), pp. 21ff argues that Frederick's accepting the Bohemian crown was the logical conclusion of decades of militant anti-Catholic policy. It seems also to be the case that James harboured royal ambitions for Frederick: see Carola Oman, Elizabeth of Bohemia (London, 1938), p. 88, noting the Spanish Ambassador's report. Oman cites also James Maxwell's Princess Elizabeth's Happie Entrie (1612) as representative of the tone of Protestant imperialism: Frederick was to be the new Constantine, substituting in this for the dead Prince Henry. Maxwell was probably contemporary with Gelly at Edinburgh University. See also Letters and Document Illustrating the Relations between England and Germany at the Commencement of the Thirty Years War, edited by S. R. Gardiner, Camden Soc. 1865.

32. So with Jove's speech in the Entertainment of King Charles. Drummond possessed a copy of William Alexander's An Encouragement to Colonies (1624): MacDonald, Item 697. Cp. J. W. Bennett, ‘Britain among the Fortunate Isles’, SP 53 (1956), 114-40; and see Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd, p. 32. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 220, doubtfully identifies New World enterprise with Protestant militancy.

33. One of Drummond's copies of the second impression of his Poems (1616), bound with Forth Feasting, and presented to Edinburgh University in 1624, contains an engraved plate of the lying-in-state of Prince Henry (MacDonald, Item 766). The prominence of the plate encourages the sense that the whole volume may be construed as memorial.

34. See for example Richard Mulcaster's In Mortem Serenae Reginae Elizabethae (1603). A whole Cambridge volume is made on this principle: Threno-thriambicum (Sorrow's Joy). Ayton's Panegyric may be distinctively explicit. George Thomson's Silva on James's entry into London works in the English way, but allowing more to the transforming power of the royal presence. His Anacephalaeosis is unambigously buoyant. So is the Hodaeoporicon of Drummond's brother-in-law John Scot of Scotstarvet. Scottish popular grief at James's departure was apparently widespread. Nichols' Progresses, I, 59 quotes to this effect T. Millington's True Narration of the Entertainment of his Royal Majesty, from the Time of his Departure from Edinburgh (1603). Ronsard introduces into his praise of Henri III a reminiscence of the death of Charles IX (271ff—a passage Drummond borrows 83ff)—but the effect is subordinate.

35. The conceit of the Fates is taken from Martial 6.3. Drummond repeats it in the Entertainment of King Charles. The Antarctic parrot is of course only Amazonian. A portrait at Dunse Castle, County Berwick, shows Lady Isabel Seton with a ‘love-parrot’ (Psittacus Amazonicus) on her arm: see Seton, An Old Family, p. 106.

36. See The King's Majesty come to Hamilton (1617) in Works, edited by W. Tough, Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1898).

37. Angelo Borzelli, Storia della Vita e delle Opere di Giovan Battista Marino (Naples, 1927) has the fullest bibliography. He conjectures that the 1605 publication of the poem was lost. It was published twice in 1608 and frequently thereafter. The Venice 1624 and some subsequent editions mark it as belonging in the fourth part of the Epithalami. I cannot trace when originally, or how, this classification was established.

38. See Variorum Spenser Minor Poems, II, 667ff. The Epithalamium Thamesis has been recognised since Upton as probably surviving in Faerie Queene 4.11. For Camden's river epithalamium, and a full account of the genre, see G. B. Johnson, SP, 72 (1975), Texts and Studies: Poems by William Camden, pp. 89ff. Fragment IV, line 20 has ‘caeruleo gremio’ which in Holland's translation (line 23) becomes ‘watchet lap’ which may be picked up by Drummond. Other examples of river epithalamia are Leland's Cygnea Cantio (1545), and Vallans's Tale of Two Swans (1590). Wither's metonomy for the Palatinate marriage, a ‘match … 'twixt great Thame and Rhine’ should be read in this context. Likewise Ayton's sonnet ‘Fair famous flood’, which makes of the Tweed a new ‘conjoiner’ of royal diadems.

39. Donne's procedure in the matter of writing his epithalamic sequel contrasts stongly.

40. The Political Works of James I, edited by C. H. McIlvain (New York, 1965), p. 272. See also Earl Wasserman, ‘The Domestic Metaphor in Astraea Redux’, ELN, 3 (1965), 106-11.

41. On the resemblance with Virgil's Eclogue IV Joly, p. 56, cites Grierson and Elizabeth Nithie. He adds its resemblance to Eclogue V.

42. The King's Majesty come to Hamilton, 73-74: ‘What Load-stone strange had such attractive force / To draw thee homeward to these Northern parts’. James in a famous letter from Newmarket to the Privy Council of Scotland, 15 December 1616 (quoted in Nichols, Progresses, III, 309) compares himself to a salmon drawn to his native river.

43. In the Speech to the Parliament of 1621, echoing 1 Kings 4.25: see Parliamentary History, I.