SOURCE: Wallerstein, Ruth C. “The Style of Drummond of Hawthornden in its Relation to his Translations.” PMLA 48, no. 4 (December 1933): 1090-107.

[In the following essay, Wallerstein analyzes Drummond's translations of Petrarch, Tasso, Marino, and others, focusing on the style of his translations and how these authors influenced Drummond's own writing.]

William Drummond of Hawthornden is as much a translator as an original poet. This Mr. Kastner has shown in detail in the copious notes to his edition of the poet and in several special articles.¹ He translated and adapted from a large number of Italian and French poets, as well as some Spanish and some neo-Latin writers. Yet his work, read as a whole, has a very individual note and charm of personality that unify it and give it distinction. This was not due to similarity in his sources. The poets whom he translated were widely varied in tempers and styles—so much so that some of them have made their idiosyncrasies felt in the work of other English poets and have started particular streams of influence. It is of interest to draw together all the translations and adaptations from each of the French and Italian poets, Drummond's principal sources, and make a detailed comparison of style, to see what particular contribution each made to Drummond's style, and how far we find in him Petrarchism, Marinism, and so forth. By this series of contrasts we shall be able first to define these influences more exactly. And this definition is of interest, incidentally, not only for Drummond, but for other poets such as Donne and Crashaw. Second, we shall see the particular style of Drummond emerging from among the various source poets and taking on its integral character.

1

To begin with Petrarch. Any such series of sonnets and madrigals on the story and psychology of love as Drummond wrote is obvious Petrarchism. It is the individual detail of style and temper that we need to examine. Drummond used some dozen poems of Petrarch. Thus “Sonnet iv, Part I,” of Drummond² is a translation of Petrarch Sonetti e Canzoni in Vita di Madonna Laura, Parte Prima, Sonetto cxxvi.³ Petrarch opens with the severely stated and bitter contrasts of feeling that have been the voice of cleft mankind since the “Odi et amo” of Catullus:

Amor mi sprona in un tempo ed affrena,
          Assecura e spaventa, arde ed agghiaccia,
          Gradisce e sdegna, a sè mi chiama e scaccia,
Or mi tene in speranza ed or in pena;
D' error sí novo la mia mente è piena.

The power both of thought and style lies in the bare concentrated statement. In its form there is marked antithesis, constantly repeated; but rhetorically it is held in notable check. It never stiffens into the pattern of the line, and thought and feeling sharply dominate style. The imagery hardly strikes us as imagery, but like Hamlet's “To be or not to be” speaks with the note of a rich observer of life shaping his thought in terms of the life about him. In Drummond, the imagery, in the artifice of the statement, at once leaps into prominence:

Faire is my Yoke, though greuious bee my Paines,
Sweet are my Wounds, although they deeply smart,
My Bit is Gold, though shortned bee the Raines,
My Bondage braue, though I may not depart:

and thence into the elaborately wrought figure of Arabia's bird, “Made quicke by Death.”

If we examine the difference of temper, the change in lyric quality which at once controls this difference of imagery and is created by it, we find that in Petrarch there is an intense, direct, and realistic analysis of passion, and that in Drummond this yields to the definition and analysis of a philosophical situation or concept, namely, the general idea of sharp and poignant contrast. His imagery serves as the figure or diagram of this concept, and not as the direct voice of emotion. In Petrarch, the imagery presents to us the outer world illuminated by passion, and it measures the voltage of the passion by the stretch of landscape revealed; in Drummond, the imagery becomes itself the stuff of thought and leads on the analysis. He defines his theme by elaborating each image as a symbol in and for itself. Thus, though his imagery is abundantly detailed and much more elaborate than that of Petrarch, he is abstract in thought where Petrarch expresses intense personal experience. Moreover, there is a notable shift in the style of the imagery itself. The active and passionate verbal statement of Petrarch grows static and picturesque in the nouns of Drummond and the contrast is sustained by the adjectives of quality or sentiment. This intellectualization is furthered by the flow of the expression. Both in the choice, and in the placing and form of statement, of these adjectives, the rhetoric is emphasized. It is molded to the pattern of the line:

Faire is my Yoke, though Grieuous bee my Paines, …

In keeping with this development is Drummond's conclusion; he leaves Petrarch's ultimate lament, and substitutes the epigrammatic gathering up of his own theme.

Poi, quasi maggior forza indi la svolva,
          Conven ch' altra via segua, e mal suo grado
          Alla sua lunga e mia morte consenta.
Thus every Way Contentment strange I finde,
But most in Her Rare Beautie, my rare Minde.

“Sonnet viii” in Drummond⁴ is an expansion of the first six lines of Petrarch's “Sonetto cxiii, Parte Prima.”⁵ In style the two have little in common. Petrarch's simple description, stilled to the quiet of the scene it describes, suggest to Drummond an elaborate mythological description.

Or che 'l ciel e la terra e 'l vento tace,
          E le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena,
          Notte 'l carro stellato in giro mena,
          E nel suo lette il mar senz' onda giace;
Now while the Night her sable Vaile hath spred,
And silently her restie Coach doth rolle,
Rowsing with her from Tethis azure Bed
Those starrie Nymphes which dance about the Pole,
While Cynthia, in purest Cipres cled, …

Again we note the picturesque elaboration of figure, and the abundance of adjectives. The four lines of Petrarch contain one adjective; Drummond's five lines, five adjectives and one adverb. It is beside the point to speak here of influences other than Petrarch on this style of Drummond's, although the pervasive influence of Spenser in the whole sonnet is obvious. What is noteworthy is that Drummond again puts aside the severe style and the severe psychological analysis of Petrarch for a quite different effect of his own.

“Sonnet lv,”⁶ which adapts Petrarch's “Sonetto xcv, Parte Prima,”⁷ illustrates the same love of mythology and storying in Drummond. It has its own tapestried charm; but again to secure this effect it eschews the acute definition of passion which leaves Petrarch's style concentrated and rapid. In the conclusion of this sonnet appears again the shift toward rhetoric noted in connection with our first example. Though Drummond uses the Italian octave, he chose the epigrammatic couplet to conclude:

Sarò qual fui, vivrò com' io son visso,
Continuando il mio sospir trilustre.
Affections Print my Minde so deepe doth proue,
I may forget my Selfe, but not my Love.

“Sonnet ix”⁸ shows again the shift to a floriate statement, to a fanciful embroidering of mythology that has in it more savor of wit than of feeling. It derives from Petrarch's “Sonetto xlii, Parte Prima,”⁹ but it draws on Passerat, Hymne de la Paix,¹⁰ to turn “primavera candida e vermiglia” through “Zephire seul souffloit de qui la doulce haleine / Frisoit mignardement les cheueus de la plaine,” to “The Zephyres curle the greene Lockes of the Plaine.”

One more translation from Petrarch requires discussion, that of Petrarch's Sestina vii, Parte Prima,¹¹ in Drummond's “Part I, Sextain i.”¹² In the sestina as a whole, as in the sonnets examined, Drummond shifts from the analysis of passion to an embroidering of theme. A careful comparison of the first two stanzas in each suggests a further important point. The English words are briefer than the Italian. Thus 46 key words in Petrarch give 102 syllables, whereas the 58 key words in the parallel passage in Drummond give 75 syllables. If then Drummond copies Petrarch's form and follows closely the outline of his development, the briefer English words leave a large part of the pattern to be filled in. For this Drummond turns again to picturizing detail and myth, charming in itself, but drawing the imagination away from the central theme.

Nè tant' erbe ebbe mai campo nè piaggia,
Quant' ha il mio cor pensier ciascuna sera.
So many Leaues not prostrate lie in Woods,
When Autumne's old, and Boreas sounds his Warres,
As my rent Mind …

Stanza two is notable and characteristic for making explicit the epigram or moral sentiment implicit in Petrarch:

Di dì in dì spero omai l'ultima sera,
          Che scevri in me dal vivo terren l'onde,
          E mi lasci dormir in qualche piaggia:
          Che tanti affanni uom mai sotto la luna
          Non sofferse, quant' io: sannolsi i boschi
          Che sol vo ricercando giorno e notte.
Why should I beene a Partner of the Light?
Who crost in Birth by bad Aspects of Starres,
Haue neuer since had happie Day nor Night,
Why was not I a Liuer in the Woods,
Or citizen of Thetis Christall Floods,
Than made a Man, for Loue and Fortunes Warres?

In this explicit definition, Drummond again somewhat generalizes the very personal experience of Petrarch's poem.

To sum up, we may say that Drummond in his translations of Petrarch rests on his source for theme and for the general field of objects from which images are drawn, but that there is a very marked shift in temper, for he is more interested in embroidering the general sentiment of a theme than in analysis of emotion. In detail of style the tendency of this temper is apparent in four points. First, he likes what is rich in story, worked out in elaborate descriptive detail. Secondly, as part of this descriptive elaborateness, he uses an abundance of adjectives, some of which emphasize a tone of sentiment. And this tone is enhanced, thirdly, by his tendency to the explicit statement of a reflection or moral. And in the fourth place, he underlines this explicit formulation by the rhetoric of double adjective and of line pattern.

2

From Torquato Tasso Drummond translated two very different types of things, lyrics of passion, and witty trifles of madrigal built on the Anacreontic conceit. Of the former the most important and beautiful is Tasso's O vaga tortorella. The pellucid glow of Tasso is equally beyond Drummond's reach and outside his desire. In Tasso the whole poignant experience and wide suggestion rest in the inner imaginative truth which has selected the facts and evoked them into a perfect and simple sphere. Of this amplitude in little there is nothing in Drummond. His version is marked first by many adjectives, which diffuse the feeling, “Io piango” becoming “I … sende foorth these smooking Grones,” and the season merely implied by the context in Tasso becoming “the gaudie Spring.” In general, Drummond's statement is explicit and literal and turns the haunting presence of nature in Tasso into the picturesque elaboration of the pathetic fallacy and the conventional lace frame of the world surrounding grief and love.

Misera vedovella,
Tu sovra il nudo ramo
A pie del secco tronco io la richiamo
Ma l' aura solo e 'l vento
Risponde mormorando al mio lamento.(13)
Vnhappie widow'd Doue,
While all about do sing,
I at the Roote, Thou on the Branche above,
Euen wearie with our mones the gaudie Spring.
Yet these our Plaints we do not spend in vaine,
Sith sighing Zephyres answer vs again.(14)

In several of the sonnets of Tasso which Drummond translated Tasso himself uses more elaborate imagery than Petrarch. And these Drummond translates more closely. The intellectual forward drive of these figures is, however, somewhat dispelled or transmuted into fancifulness by Drummond through the more floriate detail with which he fills out the lines. One example will illustrate this.

Collei, che mille eccelsi imperi ha reso
Vili, et egualli a le piú basse arene,
Del mio male hor si vanta e la mia pene
Conta, e mia chiama da' suoi strali offeso.(15)
Shee who high Palmie Empires doth not spare
And tramples in the Dust the prowdest King,
Let her vaunt how my Blisse Shee doth impaire
To what low Ebb she now my Flow doth bring.(16)

And where thought and figure become metaphysical in Tasso, Drummond leaves him. In this sonnet just cited, a sudden sense of the mystery of life, working under the veil of fact, pierces through the figure. Tasso passes from the picture of the octave cited in the last four lines to the sudden cry:

Dunque natura, e stil cangia, perch' io
Cangio il mil rio in pianto? hor qual piu chiaro
Presagio attende del mio danno eterno?

Thence he returns to the final figure with a winged passion that absorbs its oddness: Weep sad soul a river that shall be the Cocytus of my Hell. Drummond in place of this cry simply elaborates the figure of the octave:

Let Her count how (a new Ixion) Mee
Shee in Her Wheele did turne, how high nor low
I neuer stood but more to tortur'd bee:
Weepe Soule, …

Such passages in general Drummond either omits or passes lightly over.

The other group of translations from Tasso consists of a number of little madrigals built on the Anacreontic conceit. In these originals the play of wit is already dominant. The translations are very close, although Drummond is apt to be slightly more elaborate in detail—partly we may surmise from the exigencies of syllables, partly no doubt from taste. Drummond's “madrigal xxxiii”¹⁷ is less subtle in statement or pattern than Tasso's “Ne i vestri dolci baci”¹⁸ from which it comes, but the point is not worth quotation. And “Madrigal xxxi”¹⁹ may be noted for its more explicit statement of the epigram, Tasso's “Tel zanzaretta fiera,”²⁰ becoming “So this prowde Bee (at home [perhaps] a King)”; and his “O mirabil guerriera,” “O Champion strange as stout!” It may be noted in regard to the explicit and rhetorical epigram that Drummond derived a number of his madrigals from neo-Latin epigrams in which such a style is current.

To sum up: Compared with the intellectual mordency of Tasso, as in comparison with the psychological analysis of passion in Petrarch, Drummond's poetry again shows his love of floriate statement, his turning each figure into a tiny illumination, with the richest color of its sentiment in the adjective, combined with a tendency to explicitness and general sententiousness. And these qualities subdue both sources to the hue of Drummond's own plaintive sentiment and delicate grace.

3

By far the largest number of Drummond's translated poems are taken from Marino. Marino abounds in figure; and what one notices first in the Drummond poems from Marino is Drummond's delight in these figures. In several cases it is just the curious figure that he takes. Thus in the sonnet “In vaine I haunt,”²¹ Drummond takes from Marino one figure, “Desio … Ei novo Zeusi a l'oriente tolto / l' oro, l' ostro al' aurora, i e raggi al sole,”;²² “Desire (alas) Desire a Zeuxis new, / From Indies borrowing Gold, from Westerne Skies / Most bright Cynoper.” And the sonnet “If Heauen, the Starres, and Nature, did her grace”²³ is built up from one conceit of Marino's, “L' ostro schietto al' Aurora, il latte tolse,” and so forth.²⁴ And in the madrigal “A Dedale of my Death”²⁵ Drummond seizes the suggestion for the conceit of the opening line from Marino's “Fabro dela mia morte.” Indeed, he takes nothing from Marino but what is filled with curious figure. But the effect is different. To point out certain general qualities in Marino will sharpen what we have to say on particular poems. Drummond in translations from Petrarch and Tasso is notably picturesque. Marino is never picturesque; he lacks sensuous richness in his figurative detail, though in his patterns he builds elaborate and powerful aesthetic effects. Though Marino differs from Tasso in general as the mind working in toward the centre of an idea differs from the mind solving cross-word puzzles, yet like Tasso's his definition is strongly intellectual or intellectualized, this intellectualization residing very strongly in his figures. Thus he sometimes compares his subject to a figure totally unlike it in imaginative connotation because of some likeness of function or mode of operation apparent to reason or fancy. For example, “Quella, che resse di mia vita il freno, / Colà poggiata, ond' era dianzi uscita.”²⁶ In such a poet as John Donne comparisons of this sort gain their power because he seizes on the common central organic aspect in subject and figure so that the analysis of the figure takes you to the imaginative centre of the thought. But in Marino, the aspects of both subject and figure may be peripheral and accidental to each other, and neither carries the other beyond the abstraction chosen for the high light. Even in his simple figures of sense the element of grotesqueness is often so strong that the two sense elements seem known and compared by their chemical properties rather than by the sensuous or emotional impression, and the statement of detail is terse as a formula; this terseness, indeed, is their great power. In artistic harmony with this intellectualization is Marino's pattern. His pattern is notable for conscious subdued artifice of phrase, and of order, often interrupted and with intersticed parts, that outlines this phrase. This skilled artifice is characteristically illustrated in the sonnet “O del Silenzio figlio.”

O del Silenzio figlio, e della Notte,
          padre di vaghee imaginate forme,
          Sonno gentil, per le cui tacit' orme
          son l' alme al ciel d' Amor spesso condotte;
Or, che' 'n grembo a le lieve ombre interrotte
          ogni cor (fuor che 'l mio) riposa, e dorme,
          l' Erebo oscuro, al mio pensier conforme,
          lascia ti prego, e le cimerie grotte,
E vien col dolce tuo tranquillo oblio,
          e col bel volto, in ch' io mirar m' appago,
          a consola il vedovo desio.
Ché, se 'n te la sembianza, onde son vago,
          non m' è dato goder, godrò pur io
          de la morte, che bramo, almen l' imago.(27)

It is the perfect melody for the sophistication, the detached yet deliberate savoring of the emotions, with mockery just around the corner, that Marino offers us.

In intellectual conceiting Drummond sometimes adds to Marino. The little madrigal “To Chloris”²⁸ enlarges four lines of Marino, by conceiting elaboration of the figure of the storm and then by new figure.

Ascolta, come freme, e quai minaccia
          Pruine, o Thirsi il Ciel turbato, e 'l vento:
          Stringimi oimè, ch' io tremo, e 'l mio spauento
          Refugio altro non ha, che le tue braccia.(29)
See Chloris, how the Cloudes
Tilte in the azure Lists,
And how with Stygian Mists
Each horned Hill his giant Forehead shroudes,
Ioue thundreth in the Aire,
The Aire growne great with Raine,
Now seemes to bring Deucalions Dayes againe;
I see thee quake, come, let vs home repaire,
Come hide thee in my Armes,
If not for Loue, yet to shunne greater Harmes.(30)

And in the sonnet “Come forth, come forth, yet blest triumphing bands” Drummond introduces the figure,

Preserue this sacred Blood, which Earth adornes,
Gather those liquide Roses from his Thornes,(31)

in place of some of the more detailed figure of the sacrifice which did not suit with his tradition of religious expression.

The most extended elaboration is in the posthumous poem titled by Kastner The Woefull Marie, imitated from Marino's Stabat Mater. A detailed comparison of Drummond with his original shows interestingly his method and feeling. Marino's poem is a canzone of 25 stanzas.³² This becomes in Drummond a poem of fifteen stanzas.³³ Drummond follows the outline of the source, with large omissions. His imitation, however, is not, even where he uses Marino, a stanza for stanza translation as in the case of the sestina from Petrarch. Five stanzas of Marino are wholly omitted—the fourth, sixth, eighth, thirteenth, twenty-second, and twenty-fourth; several others, the fifth and eighth, offer only bare suggestion; and the content of others is greatly simplified. The material which Drummond omits contains in the first place grotesquely unreal figure, as stanza four:

Ma da la luce pura
De' due stellanti giri,
E da spessi sospiri
Rotta pur l' ombra oscura
A gli occhi suoi souente
Offeria la spettacolo dolente.

Then he leaves out material which dwells over long on the physical detail of the passion, of a sort which rapidly passes the bounds of taste in Marino, as the thirteenth stanza:

Di sete aspra, & amara
Oimè, ueggio languirti,
Nè pur mi lice offrirti
Qual dele poppe già, l' urne degli occhi.

Drummond's distaste for both this sort of detail and the exaggeration is shown not only here, but also in his choice of selections for imitation among Marino's religious sonnets. And in most of stanza seventeen he leaves out material presenting an emotional or doctrinal view evidently repugnant to him. Marino's play upon situation is intricate and extended, his description terse. Drummond's description is floriate. Thus in the first stanza “Sola fra suoi più cari” becomes “Midst a blubbred band / Of weeping virgines,” and “Sconsolata Maria / Qual tortorella vedoua languia,” opens into,

Like to a plaintfull Nightingale did stand,
          That sees her younglings reft before her eies
          And hath nought else to guarde them but her cries.

Stanza six, for the sake of the elaboration of the first four lines, sacrifices the contemplative severity of Marino in stanza ten:

How blamed 's thy face, the glorie of this All!
How dim'd thyne eyes, loade-starres to Paradise!
Who, as thou now wert trimm'd a sacrifice,
Who did thy temples with this crown impale?
Chi d' atro sangue ha tinto
          Quegli occhi (oimè) quel viso
          Specchi di Paradiso?
          Chi quelle chiome ha cinto
          Di duri aghi pungenti,
          Già coronate in Ciel di stelle ardente?

And stanza seven again sacrifices this note for the flower, “My milke thee fed, as morning dewe the Rose.” Stanza eight, finally, selects only one detail of Marino's twelfth, in order to elaborate that one. Drummond is infinitely more charming but somewhat centrifugal.

The paradoxical reflection in Marino, which so rapidly becomes intellectually grotesque, Drummond diminishes. On the other hand he several times elaborates the explicit moral sentiment, as in stanzas three and nine and in the much more elaborate statement of stanza five for Marino's nine:

O mio (poscia riprese)
          Figlia, de la paterna
          Bellezza imago eterna,
O my deare Lord and Sone! Then see began:
Immortall birth! though of a mortall borne,
Eternall Bontie-which doth heauen adorne,
Without a Mother, God; a father, Man:

One example will serve to show how grotesque unreality—an unreality reached in Marino by seeing the whole situation, in truth, as an intellectual abstraction the terms of which are literally defined—turns in Drummond to dramatic simile real in imaginative suggestion. Marino's stanza five appears only in two lines of Drummond's four.

Di qualunque scorgea
Tormento in lui più grave,
Fatto un fascio soave
Intorno al cor s' hauea
E pallidetta essangue
Spargea per l' altrui piaghe il proprio sangue.
                              Her hue did change,
Her life (as if shee bled his bloud) turnd less:

Throughout, Drummond enlarges and really first creates the concrete personal human drama of Mary's grief. The passage in stanza seven I have already noted, and stanza eight, too, gives a much more dramatic realization of Mary's remembrance and seventeen, of the angel's coming. The fact that to Marino the whole is essentially an intellectualization, which he exaggerates to bring back flavor—combined with his lack of taste—results in the melodrama of horrid detail of his twenty-first to twenty-third stanzas, which Drummond in lines seventy-seven and -eight subdues to his own tone by handling as a general concept,

Griefe, if thou canst not, come cruel squadrons, kill
The Mother, spare the sonne, he knowes no ill;

The poem is not one of Marino's notable works. Where it is most powerful, its power lies in the terse force of the ideas presented emerging from the chemical formula of the picture:

O mio (poscia riprese)
Chi costà ti sospese,
Chi t' ha sì concio, o quale
(Tua no) sì grave fu colpa mortale?

Drummond's poetry lies in the pathos of Mary's figure and in the plaintive sentiment.

But more frequently it is the simplicity and openness of effect in Drummond that impress us on comparing him with Marino. Here too Drummond unfolds his figures in floriate and picturesque effect with abundance of adjectives; and though the figures remain grotesque or quaint, where they are most successful they are re-lyricized. This is well illustrated in such sonnets as “Sleep, Silence Child,”³⁴ from Marino's “O del Silenzio;” “Of mortall Glorie ô soone darkened Raye!” from Marino's “O d' humano splendor breve baleno”:

Quella, che resse di mia vita il freno,
          Colà poggiata, ond' era dianzi vscita,
          Et al gran Sol, di cui fù raggio, vnita,
          Il Ciel di gloria, e me di doglia ha pieno.(35)
Loe in a Flash that Light is gone away,
Which dazell did each Eye, Delight each Minde,
And with that Sunne (from whence it came) combinde,
Now makes more radiant Heauens eternall Day.(36)

or “Thrise happie hee, who by some shadie Groue”³⁷ from Marino's “Felice e ben chi selua ombrosa.”³⁸ Except in one or two Anacreontic bits such as the madrigal “of her Dog,”³⁹ Drummond avoids the bad taste of Marino; and one or two of the drily sophisticated bits of society verse are turned into pleasant madrigals. A most characteristic example is the madrigal “Of Phillis,” which carries off its figure most charmingly by the simple realism rising into natural effervescence which replaces the intellectualized style of the original:

Mentre Lidia premea
dentro rustica coppa
a la lanuta la feconda poppa,
i' stava a rimirar doppio candore,
di natura e d' amore;
né distinguer sapea
il bianco umor da le sue mani intatte,
ch' altro non discernea che latte in latte.(40)
In Peticote of Greene,
Her Haire about her Eine,
Phillis beneath an Oake
Sate milking her faire Flocke:
Among that strained Moysture (rare Delight!)
Her Hand seem'd Milke in Milke, it was so white.(41)

In form of statement also Drummond is simple. Both in rhetoric and pattern he is open and direct, these elements of his style harmonizing with and completing the lyric freshness. He is sometimes, as already noted, less incisive than Marino, but more poignant and more charming. The greater explicitness of the statement, sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes descriptive, and the filling of the line with contrasting adjectives which we noted in the comparison with Tasso, show here too. The concepts thus rendered explicit, however, are those of sentiment and thus sustain the note of simple feeling most marked in the contrast with Marino. One or two illustrations show these points. In the religious sonnet from which I have already quoted⁴² amid the symbolism comes the direct line,

Beholde his pallide Face, his Eyes which sowne,

Finally, we may take “O del Silenzio figlio” of which we have already cited the original, to sum up all these impressions:

Sleepe, Silence Child, sweet Father of soft Rest,
Prince whose Approach Peace to all Mortalls brings,
Indifferent Host to Shepheards and to Kings,
Sole Comforter of Minds with Griefe opprest.
Loe, by thy charming Rod all breathing things
Lie slumbring, with forgetfulnesse possest,
And yet o're me to spred thy drowsie Wings
Thou spares (alas) who cannot be thy Guest.
Since I am thine, O come, but with that Face
To inward Light which thou art wont to show,
With fained Solace ease a true felt Woe,
Or if deafe God thou doe denie that Grace,
Come as thou wilt, and what thou wilt bequeath,
I long to kisse the Image of my Death.

We feel keenly in this comparison the simple rhetoric and verse pattern of Drummond, the enlarging and making concrete of description and sentiment, the increase of scope which results from all these.

4

The remaining thirty-odd translations from Cardinal Bembo, Belli, Castiglione, Luigi Groto, Guarini, Guglia, Mauritio Moro, Lodivico Paterno, and Sanazarro do not require much comment. They follow tendencies already noted. Those from Moro, like a few from Marino, attempt without much interest the sophisticated social trifle; the translations are close but execute the step and vanish into the wings with less precision. The chief things from Guarini show Drummond more happily himself. Choosing madrigals of epigrammatic terseness, Drummond elaborates them into little dramatic scenes, with explicit reflection. One example may serve, Lillas Prayer.

Se vuoi ch' io torni a le tue fiamme, Amore,
          Non far idolo il core
          Nè di fredda vecchiezza,
          Nè d' inconstante, e pazza giouanezza.
          Dammi, si puoi, Signore,
          Cor saggio in bel sembiante,
          Canuto amore in non canuto amante.(43)
Loue, if thou wilt once more
That I to thee returne,
(Sweete God) make me not burne
For quiuering Age, that doth spent Dayes deplore:
Nor doe not wound my Hart
For some unconstant Boy,
Who ioyes to loue, yet makes of Loue a Toy:
But (ah) if I must prooue thy golden Dart,
Of grace O let mee finde
A sweet young Louer with an aged Mind.
Thus, Lilla pray'd, and Idas did replie
(Who heard) Deare haue thy wish, for such am I.

It is again in the things which allowed more flowered elaboration, built upon reflection and feeling, that Drummond finds his own style and communicates his own feeling. The greatest among the group are those from Paterno and Sanazarro. The plaintive, passion-touched reflection of Sanazarro may give us our last examples. Here as elsewhere, Drummond is more detailedly concrete and mythological than his original, and in this his seventeenth century English quaintness holds. Birds in the spring woods become “Amphions of the trees.” In the “Hymne of the Passion,” he sacrifices for surface color the solemn and quiet concentration of his original.

Per te volser in croce esser a affissi
          Questi piè, che solean premer le stelle:(44)
Those feet which once must trade on golden Starres,
For thee with nailes would bee pierc'd through and torne.(45)

But in the sonnets, if he eschews the more driving contemplation and analysis of the world, he wins the grace of his pictures, the plaintive charm of his sentiment.

5

The effect observed in regard to the Italian translations is repeated for the French, though it is seen from new facets because of different qualities in the sources. The most accomplished poems in this group are those from Desportes. In several of the originals Desportes' power lies in the logical clarity and drive of the demonstration, as in the Sonnet “Las! que me sert.” This close, somewhat arid, reasoning Drummond deliberately drops, choosing instead the flowered fancy, although as Kastner has shown⁴⁶ and as we have indicated in speaking of Marino, the debased Petrarchism of Desportes and Ronsard in its tasteless conceits had little to tempt Drummond. Thus he shifts Desportes'

Puisque le miel d' amour, si comblé d' amertume,
N' altère plus mon cœur comme il fit autrefois,(47)

to the more central,

Too long I followed haue on fond Desire,
And too long painted on deluding Streames,(48)

Where Desportes' force lies in the closeness of his reasoned statement of a particular situation, Drummond works away from this to the more general reflection. And where Desportes goes into the note of general reflection, Drummond takes him up and enlarges him. It is in this that he is most successful in working from Desportes. His reflections have less biting drive than Desportes' in statement, but far more philosophic and suggestive scope, as one example will show:

Si j' ay moines de pouvoir, plus j' ay de cognoissance,
Si ma vie est bout immobile aux malheurs
Si mon feu se nourist dans les flots de mes pleures,
Si la fin d'un travail d'un autre est la naissance …(49)
If crost with all Mis-haps bee my poor Life,
If one short Day I neuer spent in Mirth,
If my Spright with it selfe holds lasting Strife,
If Sorrowes Death is but new Sorrowes Birth?
If this vaine World bee but a sable Stage
Where slaue-borne Man playes to the scoffing Starres, …(50)

On the whole he is not as happily stimulated by the dryer note of Desportes as by the more lyric, sensuous, and profound Italians.

From Passerat he took several epigrammatic things, on the whole closely rendered. To one such he gives his lyric twist by a personal detail flashed with a certain “metaphysical” turn into a formal conceit: Boy do not bring a flambeau, for I am lighted by the fire of Cupid,

Le grand vent & la pluye à la torche peut nuire;(51)
A Sigh, or Blast of Wind
My Teares, or Droppes of Raine,
May that [the torch] at once make blinde;(52)

Into his translation of the charming pastoral “débat” of Passerat he weaves the sort of descriptive detail already noted.

In the originals from Ronsard he had the more generally “Petrarchist” thing, the simple and far-flown list of beauty's figures. The image in Ronsard is extreme and dry, and Drummond does not push it further but makes it slightly more floriate and narrative, and in so doing restores to the poems their own kind of reality. The long “Hymn to the Fairest Faire” based upon Ronsard's Hymne de L'Éternité belongs to so different a type of poetry that we shall not here consider it in detail. Ronsard's poem is an elaborate baroque mosaic of dry myth worked out in a dialectical diagram. Drummond, in his poem, gives expression to the amplest philosophical side of his nature. In generalizing his figures he subtilizes them, and in enriching them, gives them symbolic and imaginative sweep of which I find no trace in the original.

Day-liuers wee rememberance doe losse
Of Ages worne.(53)

That is touched with imaginative passion and derives its spirit elsewhere, though it borrows its outline from Ronsard.

6

If by comparison with Petrarch and Tasso Drummond loses in intellectual and passionate profundity, his own clear note of sentiment and of explicit reflection takes distinct shape. This reflective power gains in scope and significance as we compare him with Marino, Desportes, Ronsard, and others. This brings up the question of Drummond's temper in the not translated verse, and of formative influences other than the French and Italian poets. Drummond's work is one in spirit. The qualities of thought and feeling, the turns of style which have defined themselves in our comparison of him with his French and Italian masters, strike us also in the untranslated work. Nor is there any evidence that he formed himself in the “translations” and then carried over into the “original” work the manner thus formed. So far as we have any evidence, he was producing both kinds of work at the same time. This paper cannot go into a detailed analysis of these independent poems; to pick them up anywhere is to illustrate this oneness. Briefly, we may note in “Sonnet lii of Part One”⁵⁴ the mingling of a general reflective note with the plaintive note of personal feeling; in “Sonnet xi” or “xxviii”⁵⁵ of Part One, the tapestried style, quaint and picturesque at its least organic, at its most organic, sensuous with the imaginative spirit held in suspense, and giving off the thin but certain essence of the lyric cry. One notable thing perhaps offers a key to Drummond's abundant translation. Despite his sweet openness and spontaneity, often at its most gracious in these poems, Drummond's gift was not bounteous and lacked initiative. The independent sonnets lack shape, lack felicity in defining their theme within the sonnet form. To give organic shape to the sonnet idea, he needed external stimulus. It is in spirit that he is most original and organic.

Among the foreign sources noted by Kastner are also many poems and many lines, some embedded in the foreign translations, from Sir Philip Sidney and some from Spenser. Into their more general influence and temper this paper cannot go. That Drummond flowered under the sun of their “sweet new style” as it shaped the Renaissance for England still leaves distinct his relation to his Italian and French sources and the light this throws on his own individual quality. The abundance in him of elaborate, quaint, and curious figure suggests at first glance a very strong influence of Marino modifying the general stylistic influence of Petrarch, but our closer examination does not sustain this impression. Certainly in part his excessive love of figure sent him to Marino, but rather perhaps to a quarry than to a master. Perhaps if he turned more to Marino than to Petrarch or Tasso, it was because material from Marino left him more to do. As one gathers up the effect of all the translations from sources so distinctive and so varied, Drummond's own temper stands out again and again, shaping his style: (1) his floriate and plaintive tone, his love of expressed sentiment, or moralized reflection, of possible epigram; (2) his great explicitness of thought and statement which is the other facet of his reflectiveness—an explicitness which on the side of style gives abundant qualifying adjectives of sentiment, concrete detail, myths not merely alluded to but briefly storied, particularized figure that almost becomes symbolism and makes every doer a Daedalus; (3) the direct simple evolution of thought—with its simple flowing melody—never heightened into an elaborate or suspended pattern of the whole as his sources frequently are, but not infrequently marked by the rhetoric of the double adjective and its half emergent epigrammatic antithesis.

Notes

1. The Poetical Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden With A Cypresse Grove. Edited by L. E. Kastner (Edinburgh and London, 1913). L. E. Kastner, “The Scottish Sonneteers and the French Poets,” MLR, iii (1907-08), 1-15. Idem, “The Elizabethan Sonneteers and the French Poets,” MLR, iii (1907-08), 268-277. Idem, “Drummond of Hawthornden and the French Poets of the Sixteenth Century,” MLR, v (1910), 40-53. Idem, “Drummond of Hawthornden's Indebtedness to Sir Philip Sidney,” MLR, vi (1911), 157-164. Idem, “On the Italian and French Sources of Drummond of Hawthornden,” MLR, vi (1911), 462-470.

2. William Drummond of Hawthornden, op. cit., i, 5.

3. Francesco Petrarca, Rime. con l'interpretazione di Giacomo Leopardi e con note inedite di Eugenio Camerini, (Milano, n. d.), p. 175.

4. Drummond, op. cit., The First Part, i, 7.

5. Petrarch, op. cit., p. 166.

6. Drummond, op. cit., The First Part, i, 48.

7. Petrarch, op. cit., p. 154.

8. Drummond, op. cit., The Second Part, i, 61.

9. Petrarch, op. cit., p. 212.

10. Jean Passerat, Poésies Françaises (Paris, 1880), i, 94.

11. Petrarch, op. cit., p. 221.

12. Drummond, op. cit., i, 18.

13. Torquato Tasso, Le Rime, a cura di Angelo Solerti, ii (Bologna, 1898), 439.

14. Drummond, op. cit., The Second Part, i, 63.

15. Tasso, Scielte delle Rime, 1582, p. 26. cited in Drummond, Ed. Kastner, i, 192.

16. Drummond, op. cit., The First Part, i, 30.

17. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 113.

18. Tasso, Le Rime, a cura di Solerti, ii, 366.

19. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 112.

20. Tasso, Le Rime, a cura di Angelo Solerti, iv (Bologna, 1902), 237.

21. Drummond, op. cit., Sonnet xix, The First Part, i, 23.

22. Giambattista Marino, Poesie Varie, a cura di Benedetto Croce (Bari, 1913), p. 102.

23. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 129.

24. Marino, Rime, (Venetia, 1602), Part i, p. 202; cited in Drummond, ed. Kastner, i, 239.

25. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigall i, The First Part, i, 17.

26. Marino, Rime (1602), Part i, p. 146; cited in Drummond, i, 207.

27. Marino, a cura di Croce, p. 104.

28. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 128.

29. Marino, Rime (1602), Part i, p. 88, cited in Drummond, i, 238.

30. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 128.

31. Ibid., The Second Part, Vrania, i, 88. Cf. Marino “Vscite vscite a rimirar pietose,” Rime (1602), Part i, p. 195, cited in Drummond, i, 222.

32. Marino, La Lira: Rime del Cavalier Marino (In Venetia, M.D.C. liii), Parte Seconda, p. 371.

33. Drummond, op. cit., ii, 215.

34. Drummond, op. cit., Part One, i, 7.

35. Marino, Rime, (1602), Part One, p. 146; cited in Drummond, i, 207.

36. Drummond, op. cit., Part Two, i, 51.

37. Ibid., Part Two, i, 90.

38. Marino, Rime, (1602), Part One, p. 188; cited in Drummond, i, 224.

39. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 110.

40. Marino, Rime, a cura di Croce, p. 70.

41. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 106.

42. See p. 1098.

43. Giovan Battista Guarini, Rime (1598), p. 112b; cited in Drummond, i, 233, Drummond, op. cit., Madrigal xliii, i, 117.

44. Jacopo Sannazaro, Opere (Padova, 1723), p. 405; cited in Drummond, ii, 334.

45. Drummond, op. cit., Flowres of Sion, ii, 15.

46. Kastner, “Drummond of Hawthornden and the French Poets of the XVI century,” MLR v (1910), 40-53.

47. Philippe Desportes, Œuvres, ed. Michiels (Paris, 1858), “Sonnets Spirituels,” iii, 505.

48. Drummond, op. cit., ii, 8.

49. Desportes, op. cit., iii, 507.

50. Drummond, op. cit., Part One, i, 30.

51. Jean Passerat, Poésies Françaises, ed. Blanchemain (Paris, m. dccc. lxxx), ii, 48.

52. Drummond, op. cit., Madrigals, i, 114.

53. Drummond, op. cit., Flowres of Sion, ii, 46.

54. Ibid., i, 45.

55. Ibid., i, pp. 8, 28.