Chapter 3

Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night, Brother to death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my languish, and restore the light; 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.

LII

Let others sing of knights and paladins, In agèd accents and untimely words, Paint shadows in imaginary lines Which well the reach of their high wits records; But I must sing of thee and those fair eyes Authentic shall my verse in time to come, When yet th'unborn shall say, Lo, where she lies, Whose beauty made him speak that else was dumb! These are the arks, the trophies I erect, That fortify thy name against old age; And these thy sacred virtues must protect Against the dark and time's consuming rage. Though th'error of my youth in them appear, Suffice, they show I lived and loved thee, dear.

LIII

As to the Roman that would free his land, His error was his honour and renown; And more the fame of his mistaking hand Than if he had the tyrant overthrown. So Delia, hath mine error made me known, And my deceived attempt deserved more fame, Than if had the victory mine own, And thy hard heart had yielded up the same. And so likewise renowned is thy blame; Thy cruelty, thy glory; O strange case, That errors should be graced that merit shame, And sin of frowns bring honour to the face. Yet happy Delia that thou wast unkind, Though happier far, if thou would'st change thy mind.

LIV

Like as the lute delights or else dislikes As is his art that plays upon the same, So sounds my Muse according as she strikes On my heart-strings high tuned unto her fame. Her touch doth cause the warble of the sound, Which here I yield in lamentable wise, A wailing descant on the sweetest ground, Whose due reports give honour to her eyes; Else harsh my style, untunable my Muse; Hoarse sounds the voice that praiseth not her name; If any pleasing relish here I use, Then judge the world her beauty gives the same. For no ground else could make the music such, Nor other hand could give so sweet a touch.

LV

None other fame mine unambitious Muse Affected ever but t'eternise thee; All other honours do my hopes refuse, Which meaner prized and momentary be. For God forbid I should my papers blot With mercenary lines with servile pen, Praising virtues in them that have them not, Basely attending on the hopes of men. No, no, my verse respects not Thames, nor theatres; Nor seeks it to be known unto the great; But Avon, poor in fame, and poor in waters, Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seat. Avon shall be my Thames, and she my song; No other prouder brooks shall hear my wrong.

LVI

Unhappy pen, and ill-accepted lines That intimate in vain my chaste desire, My chaste desire, which from dark sorrow shines, Enkindled by her eyes' celestial fire; Celestial fire, and unrespecting powers Which pity not the wounds made by their might, Showed in these lines, the work of careful hours, The sacrifice here offered to her sight. But since she weighs them not, this rests for me: I'll moan myself, and hide the wrong I have, And so content me that her frowns should be To m'infant style the cradle and the grave. What though my Muse no honour get thereby; Each bird sings to herself, and so will I.

LVII

Lo here the impost of a faith entire, That love doth pay, and her disdain extorts; Behold the message of a chaste desire That tells the world how much my grief imports. These tributary passions, beauty's due, I send those eyes, the cabinets of love; That cruelty herself might grieve to view Th'affliction her unkind disdain doth move. And how I live, cast down from off all mirth, Pensive, alone, only but with despair; My joys abortive perish in their birth, My griefs long-lived and care succeeding care. This is my state, and Delia's heart is such; I say no more, I fear I said too much.

REJECTED SONNETS

[The following four sonnets were Numbers 3, 10, 12 and 16 in Newman's edition of 1591. They do not appear in any other editions.]

I

The only bird alone that nature frames, When weary of the tedious life she lives, By fire dies, yet finds new life in flames, Her ashes to her shape new essence gives. When only I, the only wretched wight, Weary of life that breathes but sorrow's blast, Pursue the flame of such a beauty bright, That burns my heart, and yet my life still lasts. O sovereign light, that with thy sacred flame Consumes my life, revive me after this! And make me, with the happy bird, the same That dies to live, by favour of thy bliss! This deed of thine will show a goddess' power, In so long death to grant one living hour.

II

The sly enchanter when to work his will And secret wrong on some forespoken wight, Frames wax in form to represent aright The poor unwitting wretch he means to kill, And pricks the image framed by magic's skill, Whereby to vex the party day and night; Like hath she done, whose show bewitched my sight To beauty's charms, her lover's blood to spill. For first, like wax she framed me by her eyes, Whose rays sharp-pointed set upon my breast Martyr my life and plague me in this wise With ling'ring pain to perish in unrest. Nought could, save this, my sweetest fair suffice, To try her art on him that loves her best.

III

The tablet of my heavy fortunes here Upon thine altar, Paphian Power, I place. The grievous shipwreck of my travels dear In bulgèd bark, all perished in disgrace. That traitor Love was pilot to my woe; My sails were hope, spread with my sighs of grief; The twin lights which my hapless course did show Hard by th'inconstant sands of false relief, Were two bright stars which led my view apart. A siren's voice allured me come so near To perish on the marble of her heart, A danger which my soul did never fear. Lo, thus he fares that trusts a calm too much; And thus fare I whose credit hath been such!

IV

Weigh but the cause, and give me leave to plain me, For all my hurt, that my heart's queen hath wrought it; She whom I love so dear, the more to pain me, Withholds my right where I have dearly bought it. Dearly I bought that was so slightly rated, Even with the price of blood and body's wasting; She would not yield that ought might be abated, For all she saw my love was pure and lasting, And yet now scorns performance of the passion, And with her presence justice overruleth. She tells me flat her beauty bears no action; And so my plea and process she excludeth. What wrong she doth, the world may well perceive it, To accept my faith at first, and then to leave it.

[This sonnet was Number 8 in Newman's edition of 1591, is found in the editions of '92 and '94, but was omitted thereafter.]

V

Oft and in vain my rebel thoughts have ventured To stop the passage of my vanquished heart; And shut those ways my friendly foe first entered, Hoping thereby to free my better part. And whilst I guard the windows of this fort, Where my heart's thief to vex me made her choice, And thither all my forces do transport, Another passage opens at her voice. Her voice betrays me to her hand and eye, My freedom's tyrant, conquering all by art; But ah! what glory can she get thereby, With three such powers to plague one silly heart! Yet my soul's sovereign, since I must resign, Reign in my thoughts, my love and life are thine!

[The following two sonnets appear for the first time in the second edition of 1592, where they are marked 31 and 30, the 30 being evidently a misprint for 32. They are not found in later editions.]

VI

Like as the spotless ermelin distressed Circumpassed round with filth and lothsome mud, Pines in her grief, imprisoned to her nest, And cannot issue forth to seek her good; So I invironed with a hatefull want, Look to the heavens; the heavens yield forth no grace; I search the earth, the earth I find as scant, I view myself, myself in wofull case. Heaven nor earth will not, myself cannot make A way through want to free my soul from care; But I must pine, and in my pining lurk Lest my sad looks bewray me how I fare. My fortune mantled with a cloud s'obscure, Thus shades my life so long as wants endure.

VII

My cares draw on mine everlasting night, In horror's sable clouds sets my life's sun; My life's sweet sun, my dearest comfort's light Shall rise no more to me whose day is done. I'll go before unto the myrtle shades, T'attend the presence of my world's dear; And there prepare her flowers that never fades, And all things fit against her coming there. If any ask me why so soon I came, I'll hide her sin and say it was my lot. In life and death I'll tender her good name; My life nor death shall never be her blot. Although this world may seem her deed to blame, The Elysian ghosts shall never know the same.

DIANA

BY

HENRY CONSTABLE

HENRY CONSTABLE

The sonnet-cycle in the hands of Henry Constable seems to have been in the first place rather a record of a succession of "moment's monuments" than a single dramatic scheme, even an embryonic one. The quaint preface found in the Harleian transcript of the _Diana_ shows this, and at the same time tells what freedom was at that period allowed in the structure and dove-tailing of a sonnet-cycle. It is as follows:

"The Sonnets following are divided into 3 parts, each parte contayning 3 several arguments and every argument 7 sonets.

"The first parte is of variable affections of love: wherein the first 7 be of the beginning and byrth of his love; the second 7, of the prayse of his mistresse; the thyrd 7, of severall accidents hapning in the tyme of his love.

"The second is the prayse of perticulars: wherein the first 7 be of the generall honoure of this ile, through the prayses of the heads thereof, the Q. of England and K. of Scots; the second 7 celebrate the memory of perticular ladies whoe the author most honoureth: the thyrd 7 be to the honoure of perticulars, presented upon severall occasions.

"The thyrd parte is tragicall, conteyning only lamentations: wherein the first 7 be complaynts onlye of misfortunes in love, the second 7, funerall sonets of the death of perticulars; the last 7, of the end and death of his love."

The four sonnets to that distinguished "perticular," the King of Scotland, seem to have won for the author a great deal of fame, for Bolton mentions one of them as a witness to his opinion that "noble Henry Constable was a great master in English tongue, nor had any gentleman of our nation a more pure, quick, or higher delivery of conceit." The King himself the poet is said to have met personally when on his propagandist tours in Scotland; for Constable was an ardent Roman Catholic, and spent most of his life in plots for the re-establishment of that faith in England. Among the other "perticulars" addressed, the Queen is of course bounteously favoured, and a number of ladies of her Court are honoured; the series therefore lacks all pretense of unity. In fact, the title of the 1594 edition declares that the "excellent conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable" are "augmented with divers quartorzains of honourable and learned personages;" and Sidney has been found to be one of the "honourable and learned personages" whose works were laid under contribution to make the book; but since the whole first and second decades are the same as in the earlier volume by "H.C." which contained also the King James sonnets attributed by numerous contemporaries to Henry Constable, and since as yet, beside the ten by Sidney, no more of the sonnets have by antiquarian research been traced to their sources in the mazes of Elizabethan common-place books, it seems but fair to leave the _Diana_ of 1594 in the hands of Constable. All three books, the '92 and '94 editions and the manuscript volume, show a like taste for orderly arrangement not found in general in the sonnet-cycles.

Constable was a Cambridge man and was thirty years old when the _Diana_ was first printed. He lived until 1613 and bore an excellent reputation in his day. He was the friend of Ben Jonson, who speaks of his "ambrosaic Muse," of Sidney, Harington, Tofte, and other literary men. If toying with the sonnet in _Diana_ seems to indicate a light and trifling spirit, we have to yield that with Constable as with Fletcher the graver matters of state policy formed the chief interest in life to the author. In Constable's case the interest was religious and the poet was personally a man of devout feeling. Writing from the Tower, where for a time he was detained, he says, "Whether I remain in prison or go out, I have learned to live alone with God." At the conclusion of the third part of the Harleian Miscellany transcript, the author says: "When I had ended this last sonnet, and found that such vain poems as I had by idle hours writ, did amount just to the diametrical number 63, methought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ the remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter." 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. These sonnets are as "conceitful" as the others, but the collection illustrates an early effort to turn the poetic energy into a new field, to broaden the scope of subject-matter possible in sonnet-form. The poet was evidently a close student of the sonnet-structure. He used the Italian and the English form in about an equal number of cases but he experiments on a large variety of rime-arrangements besides.

As to the personality honoured under the name of Diana, there seems to be much obscurity. From the sonnet _To his Mistress_, we learn that though he addresses several he loves but one.

"Grace full of grace, though in these verses here My love complains of others than of thee, Yet thee alone I loved, and they by me, Thou yet unknown, only mistaken were."

So he loved her, it seems, while she was "yet unknown," something quite possible in the sonneteer's world: and her personality, though shadowed under various names, is to the poet a distinct conception. To the honour of being this poet's inspirer, there are two claimants; one the Lady Rich, the Stella of Sidney, the other the ill-fated Arabella Stuart. It is noteworthy that the only one of all the sonnets addressed personally to particular ladies that is retained in the edition of 1594, is one to Lady Rich. 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 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.

The other guess is but little nearer to certainty. During the years that Constable was pursuing his shadowy schemes, Arabella Stuart was an object of admiration and of political jealousy; the house where she lived was constantly spied upon, her very tutors were suspected, the wildest schemes were formed upon her royal connections, and it would not be strange if the heart of our poetical zealot turned toward this star of his cause. We may be sure that he would not have been averse to a clandestine meeting, for in writing to that arch-plotter, the Countess of Shrewsbury, Arabella's doting grandmother, he says: "It is more convenient to write unto your Ladyship, than to come unto you or to make any other visits either by day or night till I have further liberty granted me;" besides this, the Earl of Shrewsbury was distantly related to Constable's family, and this fact of kinship may have opened the way; while his sonnet to the Countess intimates that his heart had been touched by some beauty in her Venus' camp. If not Arabella, who could this be?

"To you then, you, the fairest of the wise, And wisest of the fair I do appeal. A warrior of your camp by force of eyes Me prisoner took, and will with rigour deal, Except you pity in your heart will place, At whose white hands I only seek for grace."

As before, the sonnets addressed to Arabella give no definite information. The first is in the usual strain of praise, and closes:

"My drift was this, Some earthly shadow of thy worth to show Whose heavenly self above world's reason is."

The second is as follows:

"Only hope of our age, that virtues dead By your sweet breath should be revived again; Learning discouraged long by rude disdain By your white hands is only cherishèd. Thus others' worth by you is honourèd. But who shall honour yours? Poor wits, in vain We seek to pay the debts which you pertain Till from yourself some wealth be borrowèd. Lend some your tongues, that every nation may In his own hear your virtuous praises blaze; Lend them your wit, your judgment, memory, 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; I by my vow, and she by farther right Under your phoenix (wing) presume to fly; That from all carrion beaks in safety might By one same wing be shrouded, she and I. O happy, if I might but flitter there Where you and she and I should be so near."

The value of this author's praise, however, is somewhat impaired by the extravagances in certain sonnets where, for instance, he honours a lady whose soul, he says, was "endued in her lifetime with infinite perfections as her divine poems do testify," when she on earth did sing poet-wise angels in heaven prayed for her company, and when she died, her "fair and glittering rays increased the light of heaven;" where again he calls on the Countess of Essex to revenge the death of her first husband, Sir Philip Sidney, upon the Spanish people by murdering them _en masse_ with her eyes, and where he calls the Countess of Shrewsbury "chieftain of Venus's host," and places her crowned in heaven beside the Virgin Mary. Constable's zealous publisher was not far wrong when he claimed that in this poet "conceit first claimed his birthright to enjoy," and since we do not find either in the sonnets to Lady Rich or in those to Lady Arabella any special tone of sincerity that leads us to have confidence in our conjecture, we shall be compelled to leave this puzzle unsolved.

DIANA

UNTO HER MAJESTY'S SACRED HONOURABLE MAIDS

Eternal Twins! that conquer death and time, Perpetual advocates in heaven and earth! Fair, chaste, immaculate, and all divine, Glorious alone, before the first man's birth; Your twofold charities, celestial lights, Bow your sun-rising eyes, planets of joy, Upon these orphan poems; in whose rights Conceit first claimed his birthright to enjoy. If, pitiful, you shun the song of death, Or fear the stain of love's life-dropping blood, O know then, you are pure; and purer faith Shall still keep white the flower, the fruit, and bud. Love moveth all things. You that love, shall move All things in him, and he in you shall love.

RICHARD SMITH.[A]

[Footnote A: Richard Smith was the publisher of the 1594 edition of the _Diana_.]

TO HIS MISTRESS

Grace full of grace, though in these verses here My love complains of others than of thee, Yet thee alone I loved, and they by me, Thou yet unknown, only mistaken were. Like him which feels a heat now here now there, Blames now this cause now that, until he see The fire indeed from whence they causèd be; Which fire I now do know is you, my dear, Thus diverse loves dispersèd in my verse In thee alone for ever I unite, And fully unto thee more to rehearse; To him I fly for grace that rules above, That by my grace I may live in delight, Or by his grace I never more may love.

TO HIS ABSENT DIANA

Severed from sweet content, my live's sole light, Banished by over-weening wit from my desire, This poor acceptance only I require: That though my fault have forced me from thy sight Yet that thou would'st, my sorrows to requite, Review these sonnets, pictures of thy praise; Wherein each woe thy wondrous worth doth raise, Though first thy worth bereft me of delight. See them forsaken; for I them forsook, Forsaken first of thee, next of my sense; And when thou deign'st on their black tears to look, Shed not one tear, my tears to recompence; But joy in this, though fate 'gainst me repine, My verse still lives to witness thee divine.

THE FIRST DECADE

I

_Only of the birth and beginning of love_

Resolved to love, unworthy to obtain, I do no favour crave; but, humble wise, 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.

II

_An excuse to his mistress for resolving to love so worthy a creature_