Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry

Patrick Cheney

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405169547
• eBook ISBN: 9781444396553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry combines close readings of individual poems with a critical consideration of the historical context in which they were written. Informative and original, this book has been carefully designed to enable readers to understand, enjoy, and be inspired by sixteenth-century poetry.

• Close reading of a wide variety of sixteenth-century poems, canonical and non-canonical, by men and by women, from print and manuscript culture, across the major literary modes and genres
• Poems read within their historical context, with reference to five major cultural revolutions: Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the modern nation-state, companionate marriage, and the scientific revolution
• Offers in-depth discussion of Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Isabella Whitney, Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Mary Sidney Herbert, Donne, and Shakespeare
• Presents a separate study of all five of Shakespeare's major poems - Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, 'The Phoenix and Turtle, ' the Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint- in the context of his dramatic career
• Discusses major works of literary criticism by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Helen Vendler

Part I

1500–1558
Reading Early Tudor Poetry
Henrician, Edwardian, Marian

1

VOICE

The Poetic Style of Character
Plain and Eloquent Speaking

There were … two styles available – the plain and the ornate.

Thom Gunn, “Introduction,” Fulke Greville 18

The structure of all poetry is the movement that an active individuality makes in expressing itself. Poetic rhythm … is the chart of a temperament.

Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry,” Cook 132

[P]oetry itself begins in those situations where the voice has to be raised.… The voice has to be raised.

James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry 7–8

Poetic voice is a miracle of creation, subject to analysis yet rarely to explanation. Consider, for instance, one of the most moving short poems in the English language, perhaps written in the opening years of the sixteenth century:

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.

The poetic voice here is crystal clear, yet a mystery. The poem has come down to us in manuscript, by an anonymous author, written in 1503 or perhaps a bit later. The language is simple and lucid, deploying only two polysyllabic words (“Western” and “again”); and the rhyme scheme, a quatrain with a single rhyme, abcb, is so basic as to be nearly invisible, yet it rings climactically. The poem also tells a clear story: a speaker, out in a storm, suffers from wind and rain yet prays to “Christ” to embrace his love, back in his (or her) bed “again.” The poem does not specify gender, and thus we can read the speaker as either male or female. We have time for only a single reading, but students might wish to revise the following interpretation, which identifies a male speaker in the embrace of a female beloved. In either case, the voice of the poem is so riveting that we don’t have to think much about it.

Indeed, reading poetic voice here seems to require no work at all. Yet that is to the poem’s credit. We can immediately enjoy the utterance, and experience its poignancy. Perhaps we need do no more. Yet something about the poem calls us back, takes us inward: the haunting eloquence compels us to read again (and again). For instance, something doesn’t quite add up; I find myself wanting to know why. Upon inspection, the relation between the first two lines is elliptical, rather than logical. The poem feels passionate, yet exhibits acute thought; it is an artifact of passionate thinking. Yet such an oxymoron pinpoints what we called in the introduction the sublime: a form of heightened poetry that does not aim to persuade or civilize but rather to astonish and transport.

The first line addresses the “Western wind,” and asks a question, “when will thou blow?” Yet the second line does not answer; instead, it intensifies the wind, from “rain” to pelting “rain.” It is precisely in the ellipsis between the two lines that much of the power resides; the absence of rational speech seems to reproduce the chaos of the storm. Even the question is illogical: caught in a storm, why would the poet ask the wind when it will blow? The question has the force of an exclamation: O Western wind, thou will blow! Only poetic speech can capture the violent eloquence of this wind.

The speech is poetic on several counts. Line 1, for instance, seamlessly combines no fewer than four major rhetorical devices practiced by sixteenth-century schoolboys as part of their humanist curriculum (more on this in a minute). The easiest to spot is alliteration, as the poem’s first four words in a modern edited version all begin with the letter “w.” Yet a second device emerges as well, through the comma (one form that a caesura or syntactical pause can take), dividing the four words into two parts, creating a sense of balance: “Western wind, when will.” Yet belying the balance, the meter of this opening phrase is emphatic, as if agitated, beginning with an initial trochee (a stressed syllable and an unstressed one), “Western,” followed by a spondee (two stressed syllables): “when will.” Even the last two syllables of the full opening trimeter line (three metric units or six syllables) are emphatic and agitated, for they form a second spondee: “thou blow.” The sense of exclamation in the first line, then, contradicts the question form that the line takes, perhaps imitating a whirlwind of energy. Is the wind natural, or psychic, even divine?

The narrator may seem to be caught realistically in an actual storm, but, as we have hinted, he brings to his turmoil considerable education. He is particularly educated in the art of rhetoric, the classical art of persuasion, epitomized for the sixteenth century in Cicero, the Roman champion of political liberty speaking inside an imperial frame. In England, the sixteenth century is the first to formally institute the wide-scale recovery of classical rhetoric for the purpose of training boys to function dutifully to the state. The opening two lines combine two further rhetorical devices, known as apostrophe and prosopopeia. The poet relies on apostrophe by addressing the Western wind; he relies on a modified version of prosopopeia by personifying that wind (modified because the wind does not itself speak) – addressing it as a person, as if it were human, able to hear his voice. The word “prosopopeia” is Greek for “making a mask,” and is an ancient device for drawing attention to the literariness of speech, the fictive making of a poem. By personifying the wind, the poet draws attention to his own making of the verse, and alerts his reader to its literary nature: this is not a meteorology report. The fact that the Western wind rhetorically wears a poetic mask tells us that the poem is really about personhood, the self, human consciousness, and identity – a topic to which we will return. Rhetorical handbooks of the English Renaissance discuss apostrophe and prosopopeia together, indicating their close relationship, and suggesting that a self-consciously created voice draws attention to its own fabrication. By combining apostrophe with prosopopeia, then, the poet of “Western wind” formalizes the making of poetic fiction itself.

The second line has attracted much admiration, and rightly so. The word “small” can mean “thin,” and the word “can” can mean “gan” (began), but the repetition of “rain” is a final rhetorical device, known as antistrophe (the repetition of a closing word in a phrase): “the small rain … down can rain.” The repetition has the fine rhetorical effect of pounding, as does the meter of the trimeter line: an initial iamb, “The small” (an unstressed syllable and a stressed one), followed by two spondees: “rain down can rain.” It does not rain; it howls. Yet the most astonishing feature of the opening two lines lies in a paradox: even though the human who is the subject of the fiction is present only through his voice, he appears utterly naked – exposed to the raw elements. One thinks of King Lear caught out on the heath, a “poor, bare, fork’d animal” (King Lear 3.4.107–8), thundering his speeches sublimely to the tempest that pelts him, and taking off his royal clothes to “expos[e]” himself to “feel what wretches feel” (3.4.34). All the more striking here, then, that the prospect of relief comes in the form of a different kind of nakedness: the nakedness of a man in bed with a woman, safe, indoors, together.

In the introduction, we noted that poetic figuration tends to be allusive figuration. Might we also want to look into what it means to write a poem addressing the “Western wind”? As it turns out, the Greeks personified the west wind as Zephyrus, and both Virgil (Georgics 1.43–4) and Ovid (Fasti 5.195–224) identify the figure with the coming of spring and renewal after autumn and death, depicted when Zephyrus rapes the nymph Cloris, who metamorphoses into the goddess Flora – a myth famously depicted in Botticelli’s Primavera and used by Spenser to open Prothalamion. In English literature, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” is famous for using the figure as a symbol of death, to be turned into a figure of renewal, but also of the poet’s prophetic power of renewal: “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: / … / Be through my lips to unawakened Earth / The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (57–70). Once we know something about the West Wind in the literary tradition, we can see how the concluding two lines of the early sixteenth-century lyric anticipate Shelley with a two-part structure of natural death followed by poetic renewal.

At the same time, since the poet is simultaneously anonymous and oblique, we cannot be certain that he intends an allusion to the tradition of the West Wind. We have, then, a clear occasion for invoking the term “intertextuality” in its original poststructuralist sense, because it allows us to see the poem simply as connected to other poems (past as well as future) without assigning “intentionality” to the “author.” Even so, the presence of intertextuality allows us to define “poetic voice” more formally: it is often directly the voice of the poet, sometimes of his or her speaker-narrator (often not identical with the poet), in dialogue scenically with either an auditor who is present or sometimes just the reader, and in dialogue poetically with the voices of the literary tradition, articulating a point of view or a stance on reality, and thus a more or less fully realized poetic character. Because the topic of our poem is the “Western wind,” it might be more than fanciful to account for the poem’s renown by seeing it finally as a figure for the creation of poetic inspiration (a link made available in the OED’s first example under “inspiration”).

If the first two lines of the poem form an apostrophe to a classical figure, the West Wind, the concluding two lines form a prayer to the figure of the Christian Messiah. In these lines, the natural world of the personified storm metamorphoses into the artful world of the bedroom, and the full return of the human: “my love … my arms … I … my bed.” Yet the prayer to “Christ” has the feel of an expletive, a breathlessly expressed hope, even a fantasy, the urge of wish fulfillment: “if my love … were in my arms.” Yet she isn’t. The storm’s violent embrace of the poet in all his nakedness prompts him to dream of a happier embrace with his beloved, openly sexual.

The Christian prayer, then, is thrillingly erotic. The seamless fusion of Christian love between God and man, on the one hand, and sexual love between man and woman, on the other, intimates a robust candor that differs radically from Petrarchism, which features a coy game of sensitive modesty ending in unrequited love. On the eve of Petrarchism in England – that is, within a few years of Wyatt bringing the Italian poet across the Channel – love poetry looks quite different than it will, exhibiting an erotic naturalist realism that will soon give way to Petrarchism’s allegorical courtly game and lament.

In sum, the realism of “Western wind” is fundamentally that of the human voice, expressed through learning and art, a rhetoric that reveals an authorial character, or persona: gentle amid his suffering, understating the power of nature rather than hyperbolical in his outrage (like Lear), yet emphatic in his Christian prayer for sexual union as a form of freedom from torment by the natural world – is this a poem about the exposed loneliness of the human caught in the natural world? Or is it a poem about the power of the human voice to call on the reserve of poetry to protect the self through a return to the warmth of touch with a beloved person: “Christ, if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again”?

“Western wind” challenges a tidy narrative about the development of modern English poetry in the sixteenth century. Well before Skelton self-consciously claims to institute the modern English “laureate” or national poet, and years in front of the breakthrough metrical experiments of Wyatt and Surrey, an unknown poet throws out four lines of sublime English verse that remain unmatched during the next 500 years. How can that be?

The first point to remember is that poets at the beginning of the century were capable of producing technically impressive poems still thrilling to read today. We never want to forget that. The second point is that “Western wind” is a thrilling but tiny artifact – four lines: twenty-six words of English poetry. Missing is what makes Skelton Skelton, Wyatt Wyatt, and Surrey Surrey, and what makes the sixteenth century a milestone in English literary history: indebted as it is to the Middle English triumvirate of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate, the fully realized presence of the modern English poet himself, his canon of poetry, written within the context of Christian nationhood, with both classical and medieval origins to his “Renaissance” literary career. During the early Tudor era, men (and some women) were writing poetry, most of it in manuscript, and circulating it among friends, but most of the verse is “courtly,” written by courtiers. In particular, poetry is attached to the Henrician court, as exemplified by Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey, none of whom much puts their poems in print. Even Skelton remains wary of the medium that Spenser will later champion as the fit vehicle for the nation’s laureate poet. Nonetheless, as we look into the pioneering work of these three early Tudor court poets, we need to remember that they do not write in a vacuum, that poetry is being written, that it has been written during the fifteenth century, that it has once been written by Chaucer, and that there is by 1500 a native tradition of English verse (a key figure is Stephen Hawes, author of Pastime of Pleasure, discussed in later chapters).

The problem, as we shall see in more detail presently, is that by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the native line of verse-making back to Chaucer had been broken for complicated historical reasons, having much to do with the hundred-year War of the Roses. For much of the fifteenth century, the House of Lancaster fought with the House of York, and only in 1485, at the Battle at Bosworth Field, was civil war resolved. The Lancastrian Henry Tudor defeated the Yorkist King Richard III, and subsequently Henry married Elizabeth, a York bride, to inaugurate the Tudor dynasty that spans the sixteenth century. During this time of political upheaval, the English language evolved dramatically, most notably through the Great Vowel Change, in which pronunciation of the “e” at the end of a word disappeared (Chaucer’s often two-syllable “sprighte” was read as one syllable). Such a change affected the scanning of English verse, and no longer could readers scan a line of Chaucerian verse metrically. This meant that it fell to sixteenth-century poets to invent an English line that could compete with those in France and Italy. It is this change that leads us to distinguish between the “Middle English” of Chaucer and the “modern English” of Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey. The simple meter and form of “Western wind,” for all its technical brilliance, could not sustain a competitive national poetry. Poets like Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey are not simply great artists; they are great experimental stylists. They work hard to solve the metrical problem, and Surrey usuall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: The Pleasures and Uses of Sixteenth-Century Poetry
• Part I: 1500–1558. Reading Early Tudor Poetry: Henrician, Edwardian, Marian
• Part II: 1558–1600. Reading Elizabethan Poetry
• Part III: A Special Case
• Conclusion: Retrospective Poetry: Donne and the End of Sixteenth-Century Poetry
• Bibliography
• Index