Michael Drayton

“ Dumb is the message of my hidden grief,
And store of speech by silence is increased;
O let me die or purchase some relief!
Bounteous Fidessa cannot be so cruel
As for to make my heart her fancy's fuel!
II
How can that piercing crystal-painted eye,
That gave the onset to my high aspiring.
Yielding each look of mine a sweet reply,
Adding new courage to my heart's desiring,
How can it shut itself within her ark,
And keep herself and me both from the light,
Making us walk in all misguiding dark,
Aye to remain in confines of the night? ”

“ With thine eyes kindling that Celestiall flame,
By those reflecting Sun-beames of thy beautie.
Here Chastity that Vestall most diuine,
Attends that Lampe with eye which neuer sleepeth;
The volumes of Religions lawes shee keepeth,
Making thy breast that sacred reliques shryne,
Where blessed Angels, singing day and night,
Praise him which made that fire, which lends that light.
Amour 6
In one whole world is but one Phoenix found,
A Phoenix thou, this Phoenix then alone:
By thy rare plume thy kind is easly knowne,
With heauenly colours dide, with natures wonder cround. ”

“ The spirit, when it to God-ward doth inflame:
These of the soul the several functions be,
Which my heart lightened by thy love doth see.
TO THE SHADOW
XIII
Letters and lines we see are soon defaced
Metals do waste and fret with canker's rust,
The diamond shall once consume to dust,
And freshest colours with foul stains disgraced;
Paper and ink can paint but naked words,
To write with blood of force offends the sight;
And if with tears, I find them all too light,
And sighs and signs a silly hope affords. ”

“ He is so sedulously regardful of the truth of history, or what he takes to be such, that he neglects the poet’s prerogative of making history, and rises and falls with his model like a moored vessel pitching in a flowing tide. When his historical authority inspires, Drayton is inspired accordingly; when it is dignified, so is he; with it he soars and sings, with it he also sinks and creeps. Happily the subject is usually picturesque, and old Holinshed at his worst was no contemptible writer. ”

“ But thou whose pen hath like a packhorse served,
Whose stomach unto gall hath turned thy food,
Whose senses like poor prisoners, hunger-starved
Whose grief hath parched thy body, dried thy blood;
Thou which hast scornèd life and hated death,
And in a moment, mad, sober, glad, and sorry;
Thou which hast banned thy thoughts and curst thy birth
With thousand plagues more than in purgatory;
Thou thus whose spirit love in his fire refines,
Come thou and read, admire, applaud my lines! ”

“ Light Sonnets hence, and to loose Louers flie,
And mournfull Maydens sing an Elegie
On those three Sheffields, ouer-whelm'd with waues,
Whose losse the teares of all the Muses craues;
A thing so full of pitty as this was,
Me thinkes for nothing should not slightly passe.
Treble this losse was, why should it not borrowe,
Through this Iles treble parts, a treble sorrowe:
But Fate did this, to let the world to knowe,
10That sorrowes which from common causes growe,
Are not worth mourning for, the losse to beare,
But of one onely sonne, 's not worth one teare. ”

“ Those curlèd locks which thou wast wont to twist
Unkempt, unshorn, and out of order been;
Since my disgrace I had of them no list,
Since when these eyes no joyful day have seen
Nor never shall till you renew again
The mutual love which did possess us twain.
XLIX
You that embrace enchanting poesy,
Be gracious to perplexèd Corin's lines;
You that do feel love's proud authority,
Help me to sing my sighs and sad designs.
Chloris, requite not faithful love with scorn,
But as thou oughtest have commiseration;
I have enough anatomised and torn
My heart, thereof to make a pure oblation. ”

“ Be it not seen in either of our brows,
That we one jot of former love retain;
Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,
When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death ”

“ And dispossess my heart of all his hope!
You ought with just revenge to punish miss,
For unto you the hearts of men are ope.
Injurious Fates, that hardened have her heart,
Yet make her face to send out pleasing smiles!
And both are done but to increase my smart,
And entertain my love with falsèd wiles.
Yet being when she smiles surprised with joy,
I fain would languish in so sweet a pain,
Beseeching death my body to destroy,
Lest on the sudden she should frown again.
When men do wish for death, Fates have no force;
But they, when men would live, have no remorse. ”

“ Thy hallowed temple only is my heart.
TO THE CRITICS
XXXI
Methinks I see some crooked mimic jeer,
And tax my Muse with this fantastic grace;
Turning my papers asks, "What have we here?"
Making withal some filthy antic face.
I fear no censure nor what thou canst say,
Nor shall my spirit one jot of vigour lose.
Think'st thou, my wit shall keep the packhorse way,
That every dudgeon low invention goes? ”

“ Cleon is rough, inclined to be rude and scoffing, totally without tact, even where his mistress is concerned. Lalus remembers her upbringing and her tastes; he makes no unnecessary or ostentatious display of wealth; his gifts are simple and charming, while Cleon's are so grotesquely unsuited to a swain, that it is tempting to suppose that Drayton was quietly satirizing Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd. Lirope listens gravely to the swains in turn, and makes demure but provoking answers, raising each to the height of hope, and then casting them both down into the depths of despair ”

“ But to the Battell cheerefully to rise,
And be victorious, for that day at hand,
He would amongst them for the English stand.
The dawne scarse drewe the curtaines of the East,
But the late wearied Englishmen awake,
And much refreshed with a little rest
Themselues soone ready for the Battaile make,
Not any one but feeleth in his breast,
That sprightly fire which Courage bids him take,
For ere the Sunne next rising went to bed,
The French by them in triumph should be led. ”

“ My sighs shall tell to her my sad designs,
My painful pen shall ever sue for grace
To help my heart, which languishing now pines;
And I will triumph still amidst my woe
Till mercy shall my sorrows overflow.
XXX
The raging sea within his limits lies
And with an ebb his flowing doth discharge;
The rivers when beyond their bounds they rise,
Themselves do empty in the ocean large;
But my love's sea which never limit keepeth,
Which never ebbs but always ever floweth,
In liquid salt unto my Chloris weepeth,
Yet frustrate are the tears which he bestoweth. ”

“ Drayton, like Sidney and Daniel and Shakespeare, draws freely upon the general thought-storehouse of the Italianate sonneteers: time and the transitoriness of beauty, the lover's extremes, the Platonic ideas of soul-functions and of love-madness, the phoenix and Icarus and all the classic gods, engage his fancy first or last; and no sonnet trifler has been more attracted by the great theme of immortality in verse than he. ”

“ But the main inspiration, as it is the main theme, of the Polyolbion is the glory and might and wealth, past, present, and future, of England, her possessions and her folk. Through all this glory, however, we catch the tone of Elizabethan sorrow over the 'Ruines of Time'; grief that all these mighty men and their works will perish and be forgotten, unless the poet makes them live for ever on the lips of men. Drayton's own voluminousness has defeated his purpose, and sunk his poem by its own bulk. ”

“ My heart the anvil where my thoughts do beat,
My words the hammers fashioning my desire,
My breast the forge including all the heat,
Love is the fuel which maintains the fire;
My sighs the bellows which the flame increaseth,
Filling mine ears with noise and nightly groaning;
Toiling with pain, my labour never ceaseth,
In grievous passions my woes still bemoaning;
My eyes with tears against the fire striving,
Whose scorching gleed my heart to cinders turneth ”

“ Unkind in kindness, murdering while she saveth.
XLV
Mine eye bewrays the secrets of my heart,
My heart unfolds his grief before her face;
Her face—bewitching pleasure of my smart!—
Deigns not one look of mercy and of grace.
My guilty eye of murder and of treason,—
Friendly conspirator of my decay,
Dumb eloquence, the lover's strongest reason!—
Doth weep itself for anger quite away,
And chooseth rather not to be, than be
Disloyal, by too well discharging duty;
And being out, joys it no more can see
The sugared charms of all deceiving beauty. ”

“ Spenser or Dryden would have escaped from the difficulty in a manner more in accordance with epic precedent by representing Henry’s action as the effect of a divine vision. Edward the Third or the Black Prince would have risen from the grave to urge him to renew and complete their interrupted and now almost undone work; or the ghosts of chiefs untimely slain would have reproached him with their abandoned conquests and neglected graves. Drayton has merely taken the story as he found it, without a thought of submitting its dross to the alchemy of the re-creative imagination of the poet. ”

“ This last Nymphal, though designedly an epilogue, is probably rather a warning than a despairing lament, even though we conceive the old satyr to be Drayton himself. As a whole the Nymphals show Drayton at his happiest and lightest in style and metre; at his moments of greatest serenity and even gaiety; an atmosphere of sunshine seems to envelope them all, though the sun sink behind a cloud in the last. ”

“ That thus my life in seas of woe is crossed?
Doth any live that ever had such hap
That all their actions are of none effect,
Whom fortune never dandled in her lap
But as an abject still doth me reject?
Ah tickle dame! and yet thou constant art
My daily grief and anguish to increase,
And to augment the troubles of my heart
Thou of these bonds wilt never me release;
So that thy darlings me to be may know
The true idea of all worldly woe.
XXIX
Some in their hearts their mistress' colours bears ”