In a pageant there is much shining disorder, a happy tumult, which it needs helping sunlight, willing spectators, and a good marching music to link into any semblance of order. In this "Pageant of Elizabethan Poetry" there is indeed a scheme in the arrangement, but a scheme as loose as I could make it, and one which I have done my best to disguise. It begins buoyantly, with music and dancing and some almost wordless singing, the music and banners of the pageant; then follow the praise and celebration of wine, sleep, and content, of spring and the seasons, and then pastoral masquerades and the delight of all lovely natural growths, the triumph of nature; and then the auxiliary chronicles and canticles of fairies, Cupid, and the graces and forces outside nature; and after these some praise of poets who have praised beauty; and then the praise and delineation of beauty, a Renaissance ecstasy, ending with the later, more sophisticated, delight in "beauty's sweetest dress". Then we hear the announcement of love, and a more or less dispassionate considering of love and women, how men would love if they might and how they would have women be; and then the dispraise of love, which is the slave's homage of revolt, and the scornful weighing and valuing of

1...

women, which is mostly disappointed hope, and the

hate which is itself a form of love; and then lovepoems, a multitude, and of all moods, beginning with Sidney, the great love-poet of that age, and ending with Sidney, and within that circle turning as within the limits of an enchantment. The great ritual of the "Epithalamion" leads through bride-songs, dawnsongs, and slumber-songs to a lullaby which becomes sacred; and that brings us by childish and homely ways to some hymns and pious meditations, which merge into men's thoughts about the hazards of life and the meaning of the world, with a great battle coming into the midst of these things, for a moral in action; and then we see old age, and hear laments over change and fate, and because "dust hath closed Helen's eye", and the dirges and epitaphs of death, and no inconsolable conclusion.

A PAGEANT OF

ELIZABETHAN POETRY

1

Shake off your heavy trance!
And leap into a dance
Such as no mortals use to tread:
Fit only for Apollo

To play to, for the moon to lead,
And all the stars to follow!

2

Francis Beaumont.

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain-tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers

There had made a lasting spring.

Everything that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,

Hung their heads, and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or, hearing, die.

Fletcher.

Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet!
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet!
There, wrapped in cloud of sorrow, pity move,
And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her
love:

But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain,

Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again!

All that I sang still to her praise did tend;
Still she was first, still she my songs did end:
Yet she my love and music both doth fly,
The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy.
Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight!

It shall suffice that they were breathed and died for her delight.

4

Rose-cheeked Laura, come;

Campion.

Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other

Sweetly gracing.

Lovely forms do flow

From concent divinely framed;

Heaven is music, and thy beauty's
Birth is heavenly.

These dull notes we sing

Discords need for helps to grace them,

Only beauty purely loving

Knows no discord,