[In the following excerpt, MacDonald surveys Drummond's life and literary career, arguing that although he is often considered an “unfashionable” poet, Drummond is still worth studying.]

Drummond of Hawthornden, it could be argued, was the best poet Scotland produced between Douglas and Ramsay. Certainly he ranks higher than any other Scot of the seventeenth century, and looking south, he holds his own as one of the superior craftsmen of his age. Yet his work has been much neglected, and since the root of this neglect lies in the obscuring prejudices of fashion, it is not too late now to seek a remedy.

Drummond suffered from the times he lived in, from the want of a cultural centre in Scotland and the civil wars that came with the English connection. His early poetry, preferring European models, invited unfavourable comparison with the metaphysical innovations of England; his enlightened commentaries on history and politics were silenced by the realities of extremism. After his death his works continued to be unfashionable: his poetry out of date, his prose controversial and a little too self-righteously correct. His first biographer, Bishop Sage, in 1711, rescued Drummond for the cause of Toryism, and claimed him as a patriot and an upholder of monarchy.¹ David Masson, in his Victorian biography,² emphasized the romantic poet, and in our time, French Rowe Fogle has made a sentimental tragedy of the young Scot in love.³

The real Drummond, in addition, has been obscured for other reasons. Regarding him as one of the first traitors to the Scots language—for he began writing in English very early on—the modern Scot may have had the feeling that neglect was the kindest fate for such a case. His famous Conversations with Ben Jonson earned him only a place at the coattails of that poet. Lastly, his extraordinary extant literary remains, his library and his collection of manuscripts,⁴ may in a way have done something to shadow his reputation: with so extensive a record of his life's interests at hand, attention has been diverted a little from the actual product of these interests.

The aim of this volume is to restore a balance. By setting out a selection of his best work, both poems and prose, and by reminding the reader to judge this work as it is, for what it is, we hope to foster an appreciation of Drummond's real worth. His work needs setting in its historical context: before we approach it we must understand the traditions and conventions within which he worked. If we do not, we will end up with yet another imaginary Drummond.

William Drummond was born in 1585, the son of a minor official at the Scottish court. The family owned the lands of Hawthornden near Lasswade in Midlothian. Drummond was sent to the Tounis College (Edinburgh University) where he studied in Latin the usual university subjects of his time: a great deal of Aristotle (logic, natural science, metaphysics), theology and humanities. He graduated in 1605. He then went travelling, first to London, and afterwards to France where he stayed some two years. At the University of Bourges he attended lectures in civil law, though it is doubtful whether he ever seriously intended to qualify himself in the profession. He visited Paris, and in the time he was abroad and in London on the way home, he bought many books, beginning then his large collection of literary works in French, Italian, English and Spanish. His father died in 1610, and Drummond succeeded as laird. As far as we know, he never left Scotland after this date; and indeed, apart from visits to his brother-in-law Sir John Scot, in Fife, he seems to have spent most of his time at Hawthornden.

Drummond began writing seriously sometime after 1611, and in 1613 at the age of twenty-eight published his first poem, a formal lament for the death of Prince Henry, the heir to the thrones of England and Scotland. His sonnet sequence, his next work, seems to have been more or less complete in 1614, and was published in its finished form two years later. In 1617 he wrote another occasional poem, this time for the return of James VI to Scotland. In 1623 he published his last major poetical work the Flowres of Sion, and added to it a prose meditation, A Cypresse Grove, itself probably written some years before.⁵

There is then a gap in Drummond's literary activity. He produced an “entertainment” for the welcome of Charles I to Edinburgh in 1633, and was probably by that time at work on his history of Scotland. The history was however a lengthy project—there are several scroll copies in the Hawthornden MSS—which began as the civil war approached to take on a political tone, but he did not see it published. In his last years he turned directly to polemics, and produced a number of tracts and satires on the civil troubles, all of them unpublished, but some perhaps circulated in manuscript. He died in 1649.

Of Drummond's private life we know little. His biographers speak of him as leading a retiring life among his books and music; his books have largely survived and there is a record in his manuscripts of his interest in madrigals. He probably played the lute. In his thirties he took a mistress, and by her had three natural children; one son Ludovick lived to maturity. At the age of forty-five Drummond married and fathered nine children: his diary or “Memorialls” records their births, christenings, illnesses and burials. A daughter, Eliza, and two sons survived him.⁶

These few facts suggest something of Drummond's character: he had no taste for public life, he was studious, retiring, solitary. His portraits suggest a melancholic:⁷ in his youth this may have been a reflection of his poetic stance; in old age the civil wars were the more immediate cause. He fell into poverty and debt, took to the law courts, became dependent on protectors such as the Earl of Perth. His last unpublished letters show him as irascible, querulous and self-righteous, a man whose pride made it difficult for him to accept a condition of dependency.⁸

As a young man he had formed a quite definite literary persona. He cultivated the image of the poet as a lonely, pensive figure, a “romantic,” wandering alone by the river Esk while the nightingale sang in the woods around.⁹ On the rebuilding of his house at Hawthornden he inscribed the words “ut honesto otio quiesceret” above the door,¹⁰ and indeed attempted to repose there in honest leisure for the rest of his days. He took great pride in his calling of poet, and (at least in his dreams) aimed high.

The most extraordinary and most revealing evidence of this vision of the artist as a young poet lies buried in his manuscripts. There in rough draft is a eulogy, or rather, the notes for a eulogy, in which he compares himself to Orpheus, and his verses to the songs angels sing in heaven. “Δρουμμονδος” [that is, Drummond] … describing earthly Beautye and love … left all other of the Muses of Albion behind him … Now writing of heavenlye beauty and love and praising the eternal king of this universe he hath over-runne and out-matched himselfe … If Albions language were by tyme to perish it … should be preserved by thes … noble poems,”¹¹ This effusion must refer to his divine poems, Flowres of Sion. It was only fancy, but it does mark the humanistic Petrarchan tradition he saw himself in: he is among the immortals, and notably, he is one of the Muses of Albion.

There is in the production of his poems however an attention to detail, a caring for excellence, for the right word and the look of the book, that is evidence of his superior concept of poetry itself. His poems were put out by the Edinburgh printer, Andrew Hart, and considering the limitations of Hart's press, they are what we might call today prestige productions, tastefully printed with nice ornaments, plenty of white paper, and elegant cuts. They came in several issues, and Drummond revised between printings. He had several copies gilt bound for gift presentations to special acquaintances, and seems on the whole to have devoted much time (and probably money) to having everything done right.¹²

His self-image as a poet clearly matured with him, for by 1633 and his production of the entertainment for the King's visit, he was the unofficial Scottish poet laureate, a gentleman ready to advise the Town of Edinburgh on matters poetical, literary or cultural. He had earned his honour long before, and indeed the best mark of his ability is not such official recognition, but the very real reputation he had established amongst his fellow writers. His friendships with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, though expressed in formal terms, were based on mutual admiration: Jonson may have been gossipy and irreverent in the “Conversations” but he respected Drummond's work. With his fellow Scots he was on a more familiar footing: he corresponded with Sir William Alexander, Sir Robert Kerr and others at the court, and though there is a note in the letters from Drummond of deference to his friends' high rank, there is no condescension in theirs to him.¹³ He was too a corresponding member of King James's psalm-versifying school, and with Alexander and Kerr shared a realistic understanding of their leader's prerogative.¹⁴

What motivated Drummond in the larger sense, what inspired his sense of quality in its various forms, was the humanistic spirit which he found first in the classics and later diffused in the vernaculars. His formal education was in the usual way scholastic; his inclinations and self-learning were for belles-letters. In the Hawthornden MSS is the detailed evidence of his real enthusiasm for literature: he kept lists of the books he bought, and copious notes of the books he read.¹⁵ He took first to English romances, Sidney's Arcadia and Lyly's Euphues, and later turned to French with the Amadis and d'Urfé's Astrée. He read widely in the English poets of the day, then systematically in French and Italian, and by the end of his apprenticeship he had mastered Spanish. His ambition was to embrace the best of European vernacular literature, to be as familiar with Bembo as Ronsard, with Garcilaso as Du Bellay, with Daniel as Tasso. He read anthologies and encyclopaedias, handbooks and commentaries; commonplace books, and courtesy books. He had had some formal training in classical letters; he kept up his Cicero and Quintilian. As he read he learned. He took direction from Castiglione or Pasquier: how to behave, what to read. His poetry and prose are evidence of his industry, for they are a distillation of some of the best work of an age; a purification in their own form of two hundred years and more of artistic convention, and everywhere distinguished by the high ideals of humanism. Drummond was one of the most European of writers, a man for whom national boundaries had no meaning and formed no obstacles.

His interests were catholic. In 1608 in Bourges he attended some plays put on by an Italian commedia dell'arte company, and afterwards stayed to watch a longer season performed by a rival French troupe. He took copious notes of the performances, giving accounts of the prologues, the plots and even the players, incidentally thus providing us with original information on the early French theatre.¹⁶

Enjoying his ‘honest repose’ at Hawthornden he picked up the courtly pastimes of his poet-uncle, William Fowler. Fowler had left his manuscripts sprinkled with anagrams (among them Danismerca/Canis Merda—a joke against his employer and patron, Queen Anne of Denmark). Drummond composed dozens more, many witty, many scurrilous. In Wariston he found Un Vrai Sot, from Ihon Smith, Shit on Him. To get anything from these now we have to remember the almost mystic, sometimes superstitious significance given to the power of the word, with the idea that a secret but real meaning lay concealed within. In his wife's name Drummond found the imperfect anagram Beth Lovely and Gay (from Elizabeth Logan) and turned himself into a Spanish cavalier, Don Gemma de Muravill, alias Don Murmidumilla.¹⁷ He was interested too in impresas, those mottos and emblems of the aristocracy and literati, and wrote an essay defining their art to his kinsman, the Earl of Perth.¹⁸

His own memory he nursed along with notes on every subject; he was a collector, a hoarder, a kind of literary squirrel who saved anything that came his way. One volume of his manuscripts he labelled Democritie. A Labyrinth of delight or worke preparative for the apologie of Democritus. Containing pasquills apotheames impresas anagrames epitaphes epigrames of this and the late age before. Named for the laughing philosopher, this collection has dozens of what Drummond's son later characterized as “mirrie jests”:

At Oxford a professour having put on a new gown, and some about saying it was too short, answered let it alone, it will be long enough ere I get an other.

King James loosing a stagge at hunting and meeting a man with a syde beard cryed hee had found wher the stagge was and willed the mans beard by his footemen to be searched.

When King James went to see his Queene Anne to Denmarke and was tossed by the windes on the sea, sundrye of these attended him, perplexed with the tempestes desired earnestly hee would turn his course homeward againe. But when they could not prevaile, a merry disposed gentleman said, apperingly his pricke was touched with a magnet, it would not stand but toward the north.¹⁹

The epigrams are much the same. Sir Jocelyn Percy, the Elizabethan courtier, is credited with

The Queen is to make two knights of the Garter
The one is a greate foole the other a greater farter.(20)

This sort of thing must have circulated in manuscript, or was passed about by word of mouth. (Many of Drummond's stories were given him by Jonson). King James is the subject of many witticisms, Sir Edward Dyer, Sir Francis Raleigh, Sir Francis Bacon, John Donne and Tobie Matthew appear in others. Hawthornden may have been far from the court, but it was not entirely cut off.

Drummond had other closet pursuits. There is the enigma of his patent in 1627 of some sixteen frightful inventions of war, each dignified with an appropriate classical title. These included machine guns, a salt-water converter, and a perpetual motion machine. Drummond's description of the “Elephant” is typical of the rest:

A sort of machine, not unlike the Helepolis of the ancients, or rather the Helepolis itself adapted to modern warfare, and both for storming forts, and defending the same; by the help of which, in sieges of towns, rapid approaches may be made to an inner fortification. … This machine, on account of its likeness to that part of a fortification which is commonly called the Cavalier, and because it carries several soldiers and is moveable, may be named Προβοληaινητος, vulgarly The Elephant, or The Cavalier Errant.²¹

It is hard to believe that such schemes ever got further than his library, for his interests were literary rather than practical.

Occasionally the outside world touched him. As he grew old he developed an interest in genealogy, and did research on the family name for his noble relation the Earl of Perth, and in the same line of business advised the Marquis of Douglas how to protect his reputation. He seems too to have corresponded with the Marquis of Montrose, who in 1645 led the royalist army, and there was some talk of his pamphlets (particularly the “Irene”) being used to help the royalist cause. But it all came to nothing.

My last impression is of the recluse, an embittered, impoverished man in a world apparently gone mad, his fine humanist ideals and civilized interests threatened by sectarian self-interest and civil strife. One of his last writings before his death in 1649, a half-finished prophetic satire in very rough draft, epitomizes his mood. Called the Amauria (the land of obscurity), and modelled vaguely on More's Utopia, this piece describes a land “latlie turned most part Mad.”²² Sailing north towards this Scotland are men from Anticyra (England) bearing a cargo of hellebore (the herb that cures madness). They are met on landing with a number of “apparitions:” various Amaurians (Scots) exposed in their madness, worshipping (like the Israelites) a “calfe anant” (the Covenant), an object looking like gold but made of paper. They see other apparitions—civil wars, the beheading of “some of the wisest” Amaurians, and the beheading of the king himself by “his owne subjects.” The manuscript ends in obscurities; it was in any case unpublishable, and probably even dangerous to write.

This concludes my account of Drummond's varied interests. I have presented them in some detail in the belief that they are part of the necessary background to an understanding of his work. He was essentially in his ambitions and culture a Renaissance man. He took all learning as his province; his very instincts were ultra-national. If we celebrate him now as a Scottish writer, it is as a Scot who was by election a writer of the world.

Ben Jonson's opinion of Drummond's poems, that “they were all good … save that they smelled too much of the schooles and were not after the Fancie of the tyme,” has an air of finality to it that has impressed generations of critics.²³ Drummond was a Petrarchan, and the new wave of poetry, led by John Donne and Jonson himself, was not Petrarchan. The fashion of the early seventeenth century was what we now call metaphysical.

This was, however, only the English “Fancie,” for continental poets developed in another way, no “strong lines” or analytical concerns, but a preoccupation with style and ornament, with decoration almost for its own sake. This movement has been called the baroque, or mannerism, or marinism (after its chief practitioner, the Italian poet Giambattista Marino); it was, whatever Jonson said, very much a “Fancie of the tyme.”²⁴ Jonson was an insular Englishman, well-trained in classical literature but not very familiar with French, and knowing less of Italian and Spanish.²⁵ Drummond on the other hand was a European, an internationalist by temperament. He was also probably the best read poet of his day, and although his own work was based in an eclectic way upon “the schooles” (the French Pléiade, the Italian Petrarchans), he was far from ignorant of current literary developments. We could, in fact, make a case for Drummond, in his fondness for Marino—then at the height of his fame—being as well aware of fashion as Jonson and Donne. But Drummond's taste was not for “strong lines,” and his “Fancie” was not an English one.

The essence of Drummond's writing is in its appeal to the senses. His poetry delights the ear and pleases the eye; its phrases are decorative, its rhythms musical.

On this colde World of Ours,
Flowre of the Seasons, Season of the Flowrs,
Sonne of the Sunne sweet Spring,
Such hote and burning Dayes why doest thou bring?(26)

He likes the sound of words, and the sound they make together. He is a master of harmony, delicately varying cadence; he plays with rhythms and makes of his verse melodious patterns. There is a fluidity in his work that seems effortless (though we know it was worked for):

Sound hoarse sad Lute, true Witnesse of my Woe,
And strive no more to ease selfe-chosen Paine
With Soule-enchanting Sounds, your Accents straine
Unto these Teares uncessantly which flow.(27)

The songs and madrigals of the early poems are light and contrived, the sonnets weighty and measured, while the later religious verse becomes sonorous.

His poetry too was designed to catch the eye: it is marked by its decorative quality; it is colourful, fanciful, exotic. Drummond liked the unusual word and the obscure epithet; he collected them and displayed them like rare flowers. He enjoyed ornament for its own sake, and his work is full of the most elaborate toys. Adjectives such as “diamantine” and “sinople” appear, the sun “ensaffrons” the sea, God we find characterized as “the first and only Fair.” His use of classical epithets and allusion is extensive. The sun is Phoebus or Apollo, the moon Cynthia or Phoebe, Venus the Acidalian queen, the Cyprian star or half a dozen other names, the rainbow is called Iris and the north wind Boreas. This was standard practice for poets working in the late Petrarchan convention, yet Drummond's employment of the epithet seems based not only on decorum but on a delight, both poetic and scholarly in rare and strange coinage.

Phoebus arise,
And paint the sable Skies
With azure, white and Red:
Rowse Memnons Mother from her Tythons Bed,
That Shee thy Cariere may with Roses spred. …(28)

As a prose writer Drummond exploits the same sensual talents and indulges the same fondness for ornament. In his best piece, A Cypresse Grove, his rhetoric is elaborate yet masterful. Employing all the tricks of Elizabethan copious style, balance, antithesis, gradation, he constructs a complex set of variations on a theme, meditating on the commonplace of death and the vanity of the things of this world. As in his poetry, his technique depends not so much upon the logical development of argument, but on repetition and exploration of kindred topics, a kind of rhetorical fugue that precisely matches the solemn subject. The appeal is as much to the ear as to the mind:

Now although Death were an extreme Paine, sith it comes in an Instant, what can it bee? why should we feare it? for while wee are, it commeth not, and it beeing come, wee are no more. Nay, though it were most painefull, long continuing, and terrible-uglie, why should wee feare it? Sith Feare is a foolish passion but where it may preserve; but it can not preserve us from Death, yea, rather Feare maketh us to meete with that which wee would shunne, and banishing the Comfortes of present Contentmentes bringeth Death more neare unto us: That is ever terrible which is unknowne; so doe little Children feare to goe in the darke, and their Feare is increased with Tales.²⁹

Both his prose and his poetry should be read then, or better heard, as sensual delights. Drummond has earned his reputation for sweetness and charm, and rather than depreciate these qualities, we should enjoy them.

His range as a writer is not large. The bulk of his poetry is in the Petrarchan tradition, which by Drummond's time had developed conventions of an extra-ordinary complexity and artificiality. His immediate models were not Petrarch himself, but a considerable number of contemporary and near-contemporary writers, Scottish, English, Italian, French and Spanish.³⁰ His poetry, in a sense, represents a distillation of the best work of the Petrarchan movement.

His first published piece, Teares on the Death of Moeliades—his formal epitaph for the untimely death of Prince Henry—is an accomplished exercise using the conventional motifs of the pastoral lament. The emphasis is on extravagant decoration and hyperbole, accepted and expected according to the usual decorum of the genre: Moeliades (Prince Henry), a paragon of virtue and valour, is dead, and all the world mourns, the rivers, the flowers all weep, the sun, the moon show grief, even the gods stop their business:

Chaste Maides which haunt faire Aganippe Well,
And you in Tempes sacred Shade who dwell,
Let fall your Harpes, cease Tunes of Joy to sing,
Discheveled make all Parnassus ring. …(31)

Safe in heaven, Henry's ghost looks down on earth.

Perhaps the most characteristic element in Teares is the couplet which serves as a refrain. It is musical, and it is exotic:

Moeliades sweet courtly Nymphes deplore,
From Thuly to Hydaspes pearlie shore.(32)

Probably before Teares was published in 1613, Drummond had begun writing love poetry; songs, sonnets and madrigals in the Petrarchan mode. His first attempts may have been made as early as 1609, when he was twenty-three; written in Scots, they are prentice work modelled on the Castalian school of the Scottish court:

Quhen the great God gave first this breath to man
Alas to keepe quhy gave he him a laue
And threatnd pains to make him stand in aw. …(33)

And so on. King James was in England; his courtiers would henceforth write as Englishmen. Drummond was friendly by now with Sir William Alexander, whose sonnet sequence Aurora had been published in 1604, and so identifying himself with the current change to English usage, Drummond conscientiously, if not always successfully, endeavoured to erase Scotticisms from his verse.³⁴ Of course, except for some English rhymes his pronunciation remained Scottish, and so read his poems achieve simple and vigorous effects too often denied to them in an English reading.

His Poems came out in a trial edition in 1614, and were corrected and added to for the edition of 1616. Advertised (in imitation of his favourite author Marino) as “Amorous, Funerall, Divine, Pastorall,” and divided into “Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals,” the poems should be regarded as not so much a collection of specimen verse as a related whole. In conventional Petrarchan fashion they celebrate the poet's love of his mistress—Drummond called himself Damon, and his love Auristella—her death, and his undying devotion. Drummond here went a little further, and taking the later development of the convention, rounded out his work with “poems spiritual,” a set of meditational pieces on the vanity of life and the consolations of Christianity. In their first form these last poems were titled Urania; afterwards they became in a much more elaborate form Flowres of Sion. I thus regard these two works, the Poems (1616) and Flowres of Sion (1923) as two parts of a whole, designed as such and to be read as such.

They are both variations on a set of themes. The poet, as is usual in the convention, adores his mistress. She is a remote and ethereal figure, to be glimpsed in her pastoral Arcadia, a nymph by the river, a favourite of nature and favoured by the gods. Her eyes outshine the sun, her hair is more golden than the finest gold, her cheeks outblush the dawn and her lips put to shame the deepest rose, in short, she is perfection, while, he, as her lover, suffers the torments of hell, and neglected by her cruelty his groans silence the cooing doves; he is on fire, he swoons, he weeps. As Petrarch had celebrated his Laura Drummond hymns his Auristella, and after her poetic death laments his loss and gradually subdues his passion in a reflective melancholy. This mood naturally evolves into consideration of the transitoriness of our span on earth and the rewards of the life hereafter.

The experience is conventional more than autobiographical. In reality Drummond had his love, a Euphemia Cunningham, and she did die, and no doubt if his love for her was sincere he did regret her death. Yet to see his Poems as a “little history of love” is absurd: the feelings expressed by the poet are conventionally exaggerated, the experiences imaginary, and the poetic mistress herself is a fiction. The most telling proof of this is that Drummond completed his “poems funerall” at least a year before Miss Cunningham's death.³⁵

One must avoid in reading Drummond's work the romantic compulsion to insist that the artist express real feeling, that is, one must not claim that only art that is written from and relates to a personal experience is valid. To make this mistake is to dismiss, or to misinterpret, most of Renaissance art: to judge Jonson as a one or two poem poet (“On my first Sonne,” “My Picture left in Scotland”) and Donne as a chameleon of emotion and a posturing fraud.

We should too in the matter of originality be careful not to impose modern articles of faith on seventeenth-century practice. Drummond was an exceptionally derivative poet; modern scholarship has conclusively demonstrated that he borrowed, translated, paraphrased and imitated a wide number of writers, using the considerable resources of his reading as a mine for both his poetry and his prose. The list of his sources and models is long: Fowler and Alexander, Spenser, Daniel and Sidney, Du Bellay and Du Bartas, Tasso, Guarini and Marino, Garcilaso and Granada. Every country from Scotland to Spain is represented; hardly an author of note (Shakespeare, Montaigne, Ronsard, Bembo) cannot be cited for some passage or other.³⁶ Yet here again our attitude should be one of caution. Imitation in Drummond's day was encouraged by most authorities, and extensive borrowing was practised by most poets. Drummond may at times have overstepped the mark, but there was nothing that he touched that did not receive his own modifying imprint. He took what he needed, and transformed what he took. The synthesis seems unified, distinguished by Drummond's own decorative instinct, a collage that becomes more than all its parts.

In his notebooks one can see how he worked. He wrote out excerpts from his reading, translating if necessary into English. He made notes of decorative epithets, explained to himself obscure references, took account of rhymes, alliterations and rhetorical devices. From Jonson's masque Hymenaei, for instance, he marked down the rhymes “wast, past, tast, cast, last,” (as a reminder of English rather than Scots pronunciation?) and noted especially the epithet “the bright Idalian starre” (as Jonson explained in his notes, this was Venus).³⁷ The charge of excessive imitation cannot be entirely discounted, but it should be modified by an understanding of seventeenth-century practice.

There is an overriding fondness in Drummond's work for the melancholic humour, and he is happiest when he is sad. His Poems are at their best when they are most sombre, and one can mark a mood of increasing confidence in those of the second part, the “poems funerall.” This mood is at its most assured in the Flowres of Sion, which indeed form a climax to the two works. Here Drummond's favourite subjects, love of solitude, contemptus mundi and contemplation of the Christian solution, are presented as the solemn music of meditation. The language is weighty and often florid; there is the same attention paid to the sound of words. In the sonnets Drummond sometimes indulges himself in Italianate elaborations; read in isolation they may seem extreme and even grotesque, yet in the context of the whole they make their own effect. The Magdalene's hair is described as

These Lockes, of blushing deeds the faire attire,
Smooth-frizled Waves, sad shelfes which shadow deepe,
Soule-stinging Serpents in gilt curles which creepe,
To touch thy sacred Feete doe now aspire.(38)

The wit here is in the language, rather than the conceit, but wit there is, not so very far removed from that of the contemporary metaphysicals.

The five madrigals in Flowres lighten the heavy tread. Two in particular seem especially delicate: “The Permanencie of Life” and “The World a Game.” These are naked emblems, morals without pictures (but far superior to anything done by Whitney, Wither or Quarles).

This world a Hunting is,
The Pray poore Man, the Nimrod fierce is Death,
His speedie Grei-hounds are,
Lust, sicknesse, Envie, Care,
Strife that neere falles amisse,
With all those ills which haunt us while wee breath.
Now, if (by chance) wee flie
Of these the eager Chase,
Old Age with stealing Pace,
Castes up his Nets, and there wee panting die.(39)

In all, I believe that the Flowres are the best of Drummond's verse. The justly admired sonnet “For the Baptiste,” with its witty climax

Who listned to his voyce, obey'd his crye?
Onelie the Ecchoes which hee made relent,
Rung from their Marble Caves, repent, repent.(40)

or the equally fine “Content and Resolute” have a fine rhythmic weight to them. The whole work has an architectural splendour, and with the possible exception of the incomplete “Shadow of the Judgement,” which concludes the set, should be seen and read as one.⁴¹ The variety of forms, from the sonnets which act as foundation, to the madrigals as ornament, to the expansive hymns which carry the eye upwards towards God, should be seen as a complete design, a cathedral in verse. Here, as in the Poems, we should not look for narrative (though there is a formal progression based on the life of Christ and the Christian response), but instead see the Flowres as variations on conventional religious themes.

The remainder of Drummond's poetry does not amount to much. Jonson praised his Forth Feasting—written to celebrate the return of King James to Scotland—but probably for politic considerations.⁴² Of its kind, it is well done, a judicious mixture of hyperbole and courtly advice.

No Guard so sure as Love unto a Crown⁴³ the Scottish river tells her king—a conventional piece of wisdom which however seems to have been chosen by James as the subject for a court debate. (In a letter to Sir William Alexander, Drummond hastened to substantiate his argument and refute the Machiavellian contrary that kings must rule by fear.)⁴⁴ Here as later in his dealing with the monarchy Drummond takes a conservative line. In his verse written to welcome King Charles to the city of Edinburgh in 1633 (The Entertainment) he again reminds his monarch of his duty, quite sharply, this time:

True Honour shall reside within thy Court,
Sobrietie, and Truth there still resort,
Keepe promis'd faith thou shalt, Supercheries
Detest, and beagling Marmosets despise,
Thou, others to make rich, shalt not make poore
Thy selfe, but give that thou mayst still give more;
Thou shalt no Paranymph raise to high place,
For frizl'd locks, quaint pace, or painted face. …(45)

Of his posthumously published verse, some satires deserve to be distinguished from the rest. The lines “A Character of the Anti-Covenanter, or Malignant” show Drummond's other side: no more the Petrarchan lover or pastoral Damon; instead a harsh, satirical ironist of spleen. These and other pieces are close to the tradition of Scottish flyting. None is cruder or more virulent than the hitherto unpublished “To Kite,” a lampoon of some unfortunate woman whose sexual appetites were excessive.⁴⁶

Towards the end of his life Drummond turned to history and politics, and reflecting the troubled times, his writing is often bitter in tone and disillusioned in mood. Gone is the Stoical, neo-Platonic and Christian resignation of A Cypresse Grove, gone the reflective melancholy, gone the indulgent meditation, and in their place we find impassioned pleas for reasonableness and half-cynical demands for moderation.⁴⁷ His long and derivative History of Scotland is undistinguished as history, but it is notable for a number of Livian political speeches whose subject is toleration of religion and moderation in government. Written during the 1630's, these are clearly topical. The History was unpublished in his lifetime, as were his political pamphlets, and these too show the same concern for sanity in a time of civil disturbance, a time indeed when

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

I find these pieces brave and dignified, echoing the more catholic and humanistic sentiments of an earlier age.

In his critical opinions as in his political life, Drummond was a conservative. He thought Petrarch the best and most exquisite poet on the subject of love; he admired Sidney and Alexander. Daniel he liked for sweetness in rhyming, Drayton for his Poly-Olbion, and Sylvester for his translations of Du Bartas. John Donne he thought second to none among the “Anacreonick Lyricks,” that is, the non-Petrarchan love poets.⁴⁸

He had a very firm idea of what poetry was, based on a theory of classical and Renaissance tradition: decorum in genre, subject and execution. He was out of sympathy with poetry that did not seem to conform with this tradition; the work of Donne probably, and Malherbe. His letter to Dr Arthur Johnston makes this clear. Poesy endures, he says, though

In vaine have some men of late [Transformeres of
evrye thing) consulted upon her reformation, and
endevured to abstracte her to Metaphysicall Ideas,
and Scholasticall Quiddityes, denuding her of
her own Habites and those ornamentes with which shee
hath amused the World some thousand yeeres.

Not an innovator himself, Drummond understood very well the traditions of poetry.

Notes

1. John Sage was co-editor, with Thomas Ruddiman, of the collected edition of Drummond's Works (Edinburgh, 1711).

2. Drummond of Hawthornden: the Story of his Life and Writings (London, 1873).

3. A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden (New York, 1952).

4. See my The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1971).

5. See L. E. Kastner, The Poetical Works of William Drummond, Scottish Text Society, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1913), Vol. I, for bibliographical information.

6. See The Library, pp. 11-13.

7. See Kastner, Vol. II, for an iconography.

8. Based on unpublished evidence in the Hawthornden MSS.

9. In a dedication accompanying the gift of some poems to George Preston of Craigmillar Drummond wrote “Read these verses bred under the calme shades of your landes and written to the notes of the solitarie Nightingal on the bankes of the Eske. …” Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2061, f. 131r.

10. The full inscription is given by Masson, p. 289.

11. Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2061, f. 146r.

12. See The Library, p. 22.

13. Drummond's correspondence is printed (clumsily) in the Works (1711). Other letters were printed from the Hawthornden MSS by David Laing in Archaeologia Scotica IV (Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1857).

14. In 1620 Alexander wrote to Drummond to report on the latest progress: “I Received your last Letter, with the Psalm you sent, which I think very well done: I had done the same, long before it came, but he prefers his own to all else, tho' perchance, when you see it, you will think it the worse of the Three. No Man must meddle with that Subject, and therefore I advise you to take no more Pains therein. …” Works (1711), p. 151.

15. See The Library, pp. 143-4, pp. 228-31.

16. R. H. MacDonald, “Drummond of Hawthornden: the Season at Bourges, 1607,” Comparative Drama, IV (1970), 89-109.

17. Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2061, f. 74r, MS 2063, f. 65r, and elsewhere.

18. See his essay on impresas and anagrams, Works (1711), pp. 228-9.

19. Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2060, f. 68r, f. 63r, f. 25v.

20. Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2060, f. 16v.

21. Masson, pp. 156-61.

22. Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2066, ff. 70-71.

23. Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1925), I, 135.

24. Drummond was not the only writer in English to be influenced: Crashaw also took Marino for a model.

25. After recording the opinions of Jonson on various Italian and French poets, Drummond remarks “all this was to no purpose, for he neither doeth understand French nor Italianne.” Herford and Simpson, I, 134.

26. Madrigal vi, Poems (The First Part).

27. Sonnet xxviii, Poems (The First Part).

28. Song ii, Poems (The First Part).

29. A Cypresse Grove, in this edition p. 157.

30. See the “Notes on the Poems and Prose” for a summary of information on Drummond's sources.

31. Teares on the Death of Moeliades, ll. 97-100.

32. Teares, ll. 119-20.

33. From an unpublished sonnet, Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2062, f. 156v.

34. See Kastner's notes.

35. See R. H. MacDonald, “Drummond of Hawthornden, Miss Euphemia Kyninghame, and the Poems,” MLR, LX(1965), 494-9.

36. For a discussion of this question see my chapter on Drummond as a writer in The Library, pp. 22-31. My summary of the theory of imitation is accurate, I believe, although my tone is harsh and disapproving, and I think, unfair to Drummond's own merits.

37. Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2060, f. 294v. Drummond found much esoteric information in the notes printed with the work of Jonson and Ronsard. He also used handy poetical references works like the Epitheta and the Officina of Ravisius Textor.

38. Sonnet xii, Flowers of Sion.

39. Madrigal iv, Flowres of Sion.

40. Sonnet xi, Flowres of Sion.

41. Sonnet xxiv, Flowres of Sion.

42. “Yett that he wished to please the King, that piece of Forth-Feasting had been his owne.” Herford and Simpson, I, 135.

43. Forth Feasting, l. 246.

44. Hawthornden MSS, N.L.S. MS 2062, ff. 237-40.

45. Jove's speech, The Entertainment, in this edition p. 134.

46. See Satirical Verses, v.

47. For a discussion of Drummond's political opinions see Thomas I. Rae, “The Political Attitudes of William Drummond of Hawthornden,” in The Scottish Tradition: Essays presented to R. G. Cant, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 132-46.

48. See the “Character of Several Authors,” in Works (1711), p. 226.