WILLIAM DRUMMOND (1585-1649) From the Engraving by C. H. Jeens, after Gaywood. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co. Ltd. The Shepherd's Song of Venus and Adonis A Pastoral Song between Phyllis and Amaryllis Damelus' Song to his Diaphenia Sonnets: Of his mistress : upon occasion of her walking “If true love might true love's reward obtain" “ Lady! in beauty and in favour rare “Wonder it is, and pity is't, that she Pity refusing my poor love to feed" Of his mistress : upon occasion of a friend of his which dissuaded him from loving “Sweet Hand! the sweet yet cruel bow thou “Needs must I leave, and yet needs must i PAGE 39 45 46 47 47 47 48 48 49 49 49 50 50 51 51 51 52 52 52 53 53 54 54 54 55 55 55 56 WILLIAM DRUMMOND SONGS, SONNETS, MADRIGALS, ETC. Song: “It autumn was, and on our hemisphere" “Phoebus, arise" “I know that all beneath the moon decays" “Now while the Night her sable veil hath spread “Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest “Ah! burning thoughts, now let me take some rest "With flaming horns the Bull now brings the year” " To the delightful green "În vain 1 haunt the cold and silver springs” “Like the Idalian queen". “Dear chorister, who from those shadows sends” “Trust not, sweet soul, those curlèd waves of gold” “ If crost with all mishaps be my poor life” "The sun is fair when he with crimson crown “Sweet rose, whence is this hue" “Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place" Alexis, here she stay'd; among these pines “I fear not henceforth death " “This Life, which seems so fair' "My lute, be as thou wast when thou didst grow' Sweet Spring, thou turn'st with all thy goodly train Visible Below ܪܝ܂ 56 GLOSSARY 64 Preface THE three poets brought together in this booklet were all born within one quarter of a century, and their work represents much that is most characteristic of one of the richest periods in our poetical history. The earliest of them was born two or three years before the birth of Shakespeare, the latest of them died in the year in which Lovelace's " Lucasta" was first published. The first two-and the two of the trio least well-remembered -have this in common, that they were both of them Roman Catholics in days when their native country was little tolerant of such. Each was a man of true poetic feeling and gifts, who is perhaps only partly remembered because he was but a lesser light more or less dimmed by the brilliant galaxy in which he was set. This is not the place for a close examination of their writings, a comparison of their methods, a balancing of their relative positions in our literary hierarchy; here we have but a handful of blossoms gathered from three gardens of poesy, at a time when it could most truly be said that all could grow the flower for all had got the seed. A brief note of the position that each held in his time will form perhaps the most appropriate preface. I ROBERT SOUTHWELL (1561 ?-1595), who is best known, by those who know him at all, as the writer of that beautifully fanciful devout lyric, "The Burning Babe," was the son of Richard Southwell of Horsham St. Faith's in Norfolk, and it is interesting to recall that his maternal ancestry gave him descent from that Sussex family from which there also descended in Percy Bysshe Shelley a later poet of a very different stamp. Educated at the Jesuit College at Douay, Southwell was at an early age incited with a desire to become a Jesuit, and in 1580 he was admitted to his first vows. At Rome he took holy orders, and at about the age of five and twenty undertook the dangerous enterprise of removal to England at a time when the penal laws against his co-religionists were fatally severe. For a few years he lay perdu, officiating for his fellow Catholics in secret, "helping and gaining souls,” and writing to Rome of the posture of affairs in the country given over so strongly to the enemy. Despite all his disguises, his earnestness in mastering such topics of conversation as should tend to remove suspicion of his real character and leave him free to the exercise of his faith, Southwell was captured in 1592. Thanks to Elizabethan law the very presence of a Jesuit in this country was a matter of treason, and on that charge he was tried, condemned, and in February 1595 was hanged at Tyburn. When at Rome Southwell was known to write much, both poetry and prose, but it was not until shortly after his death that his first poems were published, and then of course without any name being attached to them. They were at once popular with many readers and were reprinted not only in London, but also—with their author's initials-at Douay. His writings were such as to suggest the zealot marked out for martyrdom; not only are they devoted to religious themes, but the author explicitly deprecated the giving over of poetry to amorous, worldly and secular matters,-he even went the length of taking a known poem of the latter character and rewriting it as a devotional one to show how easily and effectively the muse might be made to serve the cause of religion. Southwell's work had a distinct effect on several of the smaller writers of the great age, and perhaps we may even trace it in the more remarkable work of his successor Donne. Ben Jonson, writing to the third of the poets represented in this booklet, declared that could he have claimed “The Burning Babe" as his own he would have been content to destroy much that he had written. That poem |