Henry Constable

“ You best can judge the wrongs that she hath done,
That she hath done, the motive of my pain,
Who whilst I love doth kill me with disdain.
[Pg 19]
IV
These plaintive verse, the posts of my desire,
Which haste for succour to her slow regard,
Bear not report of any slender fire,
Forging a grief to win a fame's reward.
Nor are my passions limned for outward hue,
For that no colours can depaint my sorrows;
Delia herself, and all the world may view
Best in my face where cares have tilled deep furrows. ”

“ Say that she doth requite you with disdain;
Yet fortified with hope, endure your fortune;
Though cruel now she will be kind again;
Such haps as those, such loves as yours importune.
Though she protests the faithfullest severity
Inexecrable beauty is inflicting,
Kindness in time will pity your sincerity,
Though now it be your fortune's interdicting.
For some can say, whose loves have known like passion,
"Women are kind by kind, and coy for fashion." ”

“ To thee my sighs in verse I sacrifice,
Only some pity and no help to gain.
Hear then, and as my heart shall aye remain
A patient object to thy lightning eyes,
A patient ear bring thou to thund'ring cries;
Fear not the crack, when I the blow sustain.
So as thine eye bred mine ambitious thought,
So shall thine ear make proud my voice for joy.
Lo, dear, what wonders great by thee are wrought,
When I but little favour do enjoy!
The voice is made the ear for to rejoice,
And your ear giveth pleasure to my voice. ”

“ Did make the honour of the fall the more.
For who gets wealth, that puts not from the shore?
Danger hath honours, great designs their fame,
Glory doth follow, courage goes before;
And though th'event oft answers not the same,
Suffice that high attempts have never shame.
The mean observer whom base safety keeps,
Lives without honour, dies without a name,
And in eternal darkness ever sleeps.
And therefore, Delia, 'tis to me no blot
To have attempted though attained thee not. ”

“ All unawares a goddess chaste I find,
Diana-like, to work my sudden change.
For her, no sooner had mine eye bewrayed,
But with disdain to see me in that place,
With fairest hand the sweet unkindest maid
Casts water-cold disdain upon my face.
Which turned my sport into a hart's despair,
Which still is chased, while I have any breath,
By mine own thoughts set on me by my Fair.
My thoughts like hounds pursue me to my death;
Those that I fostered of mine own accord,
Are made by her to murder thus their lord.
[Pg 21]
VI
Fair is my love, and cruel as she's fair ”

“ So many eyes die with one look's disdain,
Go, seek the honour that doth thee pertain,
That the Fifth Monarchy may thee befall!
Thou hast such means to conquer men withal,
As all the world must yield or else be slain.
To fight, thou need'st no weapons but thine eyes,
Thine hair hath gold enough to pay thy men,
And for their food thy beauty will suffice;
For men and armour, Lady, care have none;
For one will sooner yield unto thee then
When he shall meet thee naked all alone. ”

“ Tell all the beams of your divinity;
Which praise to you and joy should be to me,
You living by my verse, I by your sight;
I by your sight, and not you by my verse,
Need mortal skill immortal praise rehearse?
No, no, though eyes were blind, and verse were dumb,
Your beauty should be seen and your fame known;
For by the wind which from my sighs do come,
Your praises round about the world are blown. ”

“ Here have I summed my sighs. Here I enrol
How they were spent for thee. Look, what they are.
Look on the dear expenses of my youth,
And see how just I reckon with thine eyes.
Examine well thy beauty with my truth,
And cross my cares ere greater sums arise.
Read it, sweet maid, though it be done but slightly;
Who can show all his love, doth love but lightly.
[Pg 17]
II
Go, wailing verse, the infants of my love,
Minerva-like, brought forth without a mother;
Present the image of the cares I prove,
Witness your father's grief exceeds all other. ”

“ Delia, my heart hath learned out of those eyes.
[Pg 36]
XXI
If beauty thus be clouded with a frown,
That pity shines no comfort to my bliss,
And vapours of disdain so overgrown,
That my life's light wholly indarkened is,
Why should I more molest the world with cries,
The air with sighs, the earth below with tears,
Since I live hateful to those ruthful eyes,
Vexing with untuned moan her dainty ears! ”

“ Love, sith by fire murdered my heart was found,
Adjudgèd them in tears for to be drowned.
[Pg 111]
VI Of several complaints of misfortune in love only
Wonder it is and pity is't that she
In whom all beauty's treasure we may find,
That may unrich the body and the mind,
Towards the poor should use no charity.
My love has gone a begging unto thee.
And if that beauty had not been more kind
That pity, long ere this he had been pined;
But beauty is content his food to be.
O pity have when such poor orphans beg!
Love, naked boy, hath nothing on his back ”

“ Th' abortive bastard of a coward mind!
The lightfoot lackey that runs post by death,
Bearing the letters which contain our end!
The busy advocate that sells his breath,
Denouncing worst to him, is most his friend!
O dear, this care no interest holds in me;
But holy care, the guardian of thy fair,
Thine honour's champion, and thy virtue's fee,
The zeal which thee from barbarous times shall bear,
This care am I; this care my life hath taken.
Dear to my soul, then leave me not forsaken!
[Pg 135]
VIII
Dear to my soul, then, leave, me not forsaken! ”

“ Think not, sweet Delia, this shall be thy shame,
My muse should sound thy praise with mournful warble.
How many live, the glory of whose name
Shall rest in ice, while thine is graved in marble!
Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed,
Unburied in these lines, reserved in pureness;
These shall entomb those eyes, that have redeemed
Me from the vulgar, thee from all obscureness. ”

“ It was probably in a mood like this that the poet turned from his devotion to an earthly love and began to write his "Sonnets in honor of God and his Saints." In this group, as in the other, he expresses that passion for beauty characteristic of the renaissance, but here he shows the lack of a clear conception as to where the line should be drawn between earthly and heavenly beauty. In Constable we see the new revelation barely emerging from the darkness, the human hand reaching out in art toward the divine, but not knowing how to take and hold the higher in its grasp. ”

“ With dark forgetting of my care return,
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth;
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow;
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day's disdain. ”

“ Daniel's sonnet series has been by many regarded as the prototype of Shakespeare's. It is true that several of Daniel's themes are repeated in the cycle composed by the greater poet. The ideas of immortality in verse, the transitoriness of beauty, the assurances of truth, the humility and the woes of the lover, the pain of separation and the comfort of night thoughts, shape the mood of both poets. ”

“ For when the sun hath our horizon got,
Venus herself doth shine no more, God wot,
Than the least star that takes the light from his.
The poor in beauty thus content remain
To see their jealous cause revenged in thee,
And their fair foes afflicted with like pain.
Lo, the clear proof of thy divinity;
For unto God is only due this praise
The highest to pluck down, the low to raise!
[Pg 169]
VI To his mistress, upon occasion of a Petrarch he gave her, showing her the reason why the Italian commenters dissent so much in the exposition thereof
Miracle of the world! ”

“ Who whilst I burn, she sings at my soul's wrack,
Looking aloft from turret of her pride;
There my soul's tyrant joys her in the sack
Of her own seat, whereof I made her guide.
There do these smokes that from affliction rise,
Serve as an incense to a cruel dame;
A sacrifice thrice-grateful to her eyes,
Because their power serves to exact the same. ”

“ The Wiltshire Avon is the proud brook that flows southward by Wilton, "where Delia hath her seat." If it may seem in any degree unfitting that Daniel should address language so glowing as is found in the Delia sonnets to a lady who is established as the head of a household with husband and sons about her, attention may be called to the fact that the sonnets, though they are characterised by warmth of feeling and extravagance of expression, do not contain one tainted line. Posterity must justify what Daniel in proud humility said of himself ”

“ And calm the tempest which my sighs do raise;
Pity and smiles do best become the fair,
Pity and smiles shall yield thee lasting praise.
Make me to say, when all my griefs are gone,
Happy the heart that sighed for such a one!
[Pg 64]
XLIX At the Author's going into Italy
Ah whither, poor forsaken, wilt thou go,
To go from sorrow and thine own distress,
When every place presents like face of woe,
And no remove can make thy sorrows less! ”

“ But since these cross effects hath fortune wrought,
Dwell, heart, with her; eyes, view her in my thought!
[Pg 127]
[The Sonnet numbered IX is by Sidney, and is found in the Certaine Sonets printed in the 1598 edition of the Arcadia.]
X
Hope, like the hyaena, coming to be old,
Alters his shape, is turned into despair.
Pity my hoary hopes, Maid of clear mould!
Think not that frowns can ever make thee fair.
What harm is it to kiss, to laugh, to play?
Beauty's no blossom, if it be not used. ”

“ In some of Petrarch's nobler flights Daniel does not follow; the higher teachings of love are not revealed to him, the step from human to divine he does not take; yet in the main, the features of the earlier poet re-appear in Daniel's verse, as they do in most of his fellow-sonneteers, including Shakespeare.
It is also not best to give too much weight to the opinion that Shakespeare has been over-influenced by Daniel in the adoption of the quatrain and couplet structure. The whole period from Wyatt to Shakespeare shows a slow and steady mastery of the native over the foreign tendency. ”

“ But this sonnet tells us little except that "wishèd fortune" had once made it possible for him to see her in all her beauty of roses and lilies, stars and waves of gold: but this might have happened if he had once seen that beauteous lady pass along [Pg 89] the street in the queen's glittering train. Other sonnets to or about the Lady Rich are equally uncommunicative; and if the ill-starred Penelope Devereux is the one alone that Constable loved, Time has shut the secret tightly in his heart and will not give it up. ”

“ Lest they themselves should not know what to say;
And that thou mayst be loved as much as praised,
My heart thou mayst lend them which I gave thee."
The last of Constable's sonnets in the edition of 1592 is this dedicatory address:
"My mistress' worth gave wings unto my muse
And my muse wings did give unto her name,
So, like twin birds, my muse bred with her fame
Together now do learn their wings to use.
And in this book, which here you may peruse,
Abroad they fly, resolved to try the same
Adventure in their flight; and thee, sweet dame,
Both she and I for our protection choose ”

“ The main theme, the cruelty of the Fair, is the same as that of Petrarch. Daniel follows this master in making the vale echo with his sighs, in appealing to her hand and cruel bosom for mercy, in recounting the number of years he has worshipped her and honored her with sonnets on which he is depending for immortal fame, in upbraiding her for her devotion to the mirror rather than to him, and for ensnaring him with the golden net of her hair and [Pg 5] transpiercing him with the darts from her crystalline eyes. ”

“ If we take the sonnets of both poets as criterion, the careful Daniel uses twice as many rhyme colours as Shakespeare, while Shakespeare repeats rhymes twice as often as Daniel. If double rhymes find less favor with the captious, we admit that Daniel has a third more than Shakespeare has, but again Shakespeare uses twice as many rhymes on syllables with secondary stress as does Daniel, and Shakespeare's bad rhymes are as bad as Daniel's and more frequent. ”

“ The face is modern and complex. This accomplished lady received at Wilton the most distinguished people of her time. Her guests included Spenser, Raleigh, probably Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, Sir John Harrington, Dr. Donne, and many more; and the Countess's Pastoral Dialogue in Praise of Astraea was probably written in honour of a visit from the Queen herself. It would perhaps be strange if the young poet did not surround the personality of this fascinating patroness with a romantic halo and feel that his poetic fame was linked with hers. ”

“ His father's conquests wept, lest he should leave
No kingdom unto him for to subdue:
So shall thy mother thee of praise bereave;
So many hearts already she hath slain,
As few behind to conquer shall remain.
[Pg 164]
SONNETS FROM THE MANUSCRIPT EDITION, NOT FOUND IN THAT OF 1594 I Of the sudden surprising of his heart, and how unawares he was caught
Delight in your bright eyes my death did breed,
As light and glittering weapons babes allure
To play with fire and sword, and so procure
Then to be burnt and hurt ere they take heed,
Thy beauty so hath made me burn and bleed ”