Every Reader’s Raleigh

 

   

     The story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s laying down his coat for Queen Elizabeth to cross a puddle was not recorded until eighty years after his death but it signifies his courtly style at a time when members of the ruling class were expected to display both politesse and aesthetic refinement as well as political discernment and military valor.  Like others of his age, he was only by the way a poet.  An active courtier, he endured military service and hazardous voyages of exploration in service to the crown, though his public role under powerful and jealous rulers led him to be imprisoned for several months by Elizabeth and later for thirteen years by James I who ultimately beheaded him.   As a diplomat and a military man, he held influential positions that enabled him to reinforce British rule over Ireland, defend England against Spain, and develop colonies in North America.

     His adventures on behalf of his country are recorded in part in his The Discovery of Guiana, which mixed reportage of his experiences in  the New World with fanciful tales of natives with faces in their chests (highlighted by depiction in the book’s frontispiece) as well as of the gold-rich city of El Dorado.  With the involuntary leisure of his imprisonment he also began a compendious History of the World, admired yet as a monument of English prose if not of historiography. 

      Much of his poetry is written in the comparatively conversational mode called the plain style, eschewing elaborate conceits and dense classical allusions to create the impression of sincerity and passion.  This relatively realistic vision is illustrated by Raleigh’s response to Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” a seduction poem in which the man offers his beloved endless “pleasures” and “delights” might she only “live with me, and be my love.”  Raleigh’s canny lady is well aware that love is not always such an unmixed blessing.   

 

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

 

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complains of cares to come.

 

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,

To wayward winter reckoning yields,

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

 

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

 

Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,

The Coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

 

But could youth last, and love still breed,

Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Each of the blandishments so invitingly catalogued by Marlowe is questioned.  A “honey tongue” may conceal a “heart of gall.”  Material objects are all subject to dessication or rot, people grow old and love fades, time changes all things.  The sole classical reference here is more like a hand grenade than a decorative posy.  Philomel was raped and then suffered her tongue being cut out to prevent her disclosing the crime, a horrific example of sexual violence here concealed in an allusion.

     Raleigh’s sober realism coexists with the most fanciful figures of speech.  Raleigh’s “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk” constructs a fine filigree of imagination idealizing the beloved only to dismiss that pleasing illusion. 

 

Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk

 

Nature, that washed her hands in milk,

And had forgot to dry them,

Instead of earth took snow and silk,

At love’s request to try them,

If she a mistress could compose

To please love’s fancy out of those.

 

Her eyes he would should be of light,

A violet breath, and lips of jelly;

Her hair not black, nor overbright,

And of the softest down her belly;

As for her inside he’d have it

Only of wantonness and wit.

 

At love’s entreaty such a one

Nature made, but with her beauty

She hath framed a heart of stone;

So as love, by ill destiny,

Must die for her whom nature gave him,

Because her darling would not save him.

 

But time (which nature doth despise,

And rudely gives her love the lie,

Makes hope a fool, and sorrow wise)

His hands do neither wash nor dry;

But being made of steel and rust,

Turns snow and silk and milk to dust.

 

The light, the belly, lips, and breath,

He dims, discolors, and destroys;

With those he feeds but fills not death,

Which sometimes were the food of joys.

Yea, time doth dull each lively wit,

And dries all wantonness with it.

 

Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days.

 

 

     Whereas Adam and Eve were made from earth, the beloved cannot be so common; she, the poet says, is composed of finer things: milk, snow, and silk.  She has eyes of light, a floral breath, and lips of jelly!  Yet this perfect creature refuses her devoted lover, having “a heart of stone.”  Her loss thereby is evident as time turns all her charms in the end  to dust.  Her physical charms and her “wanton” spirit cannot last, since decline comes to all and death and everyone’s story ends with the same lamentable conclusion.  The ubi sunt (‘where has gone  . . .”} theme is here allied with the advice to “seize the day” (carpe diem), advising lovers to make the most of their youth since it will soon vanish. 

     The same ironic realism is apparent in “The Lie,” denouncing what Kenneth Rexroth called the Social Lie, the set of assumptions that ratifies social order, each element of which Raleigh disputes. 

 

The Lie

 

 Go, Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others' action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honour how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favour how it falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

 

Tell faith it's fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity

And virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing—

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing—

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.       

 

     Relentlessly in stanza after stanza Raleigh exposes the pretensions of the world.  At his trial Socrates denounced his accusers declaring that proximity to death brings prophetic power, and Raleigh dares likewise to turn accuser before his execution with the honesty that nearness to the grave lends.  The court’s glamor, he says, is specious, and the power of rulers depends upon “factions,” while the nobles are themselves hateful and self-interested.  Raleigh then moves toward a more general cynicism, declaring zeal to be hollow and all love merely lust.  The flesh is ashes and everyone is moving steadily toward the grave.  Intelligence, he says, is only ingenuity and science arrogance, charity is phony, and law nothing but wrangling.  Academics even want “soundness” and depend only on “seeming.”  Both faith and morality have “fled.”  Even  his own mantic denunciations are only in the end “blabbing,” though to let the cat out of the bag, to admit mankind’s hypocrisy, is a capital offense.

    Though the poem is utterly cynical, it concludes on a defiantly positive note, declaring “no stab the soul can kill.”  The reader may well suspect that Raleigh had more in mind his preservation of dignified equanimity rather than Christian salvation.  He had asked that his beheading be public and he impressed onlookers calling the ax “sharp medicine” and, when executioner hesitated, saying “What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!”  His reputation was such that one of his judges later said, “The justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh.”

     Skilled as he was at satire and ironic realism. Raleigh was also capable of spinning courtly sentiments, elegant if not exactly aureate, even making specific reference to Petrarch.   

 

A Vision upon the Fairy Queen

 

Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,

Within the Temple, where the vestall flame

Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,

To see that buried dust of living fame,

Whose tombe faire love and fairer vertue kept;

 

All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:

At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;

And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,

For they this Queene attended: in whose steed

Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras herse:

Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,

And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse,

Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,

And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

 

 

 

     Here Raleigh applauds his friend Edmund Spenser for his monumental allegorical epic The Faery Queene.  Raleigh’s witty compliment is based on  the conceit that Spenser’s queen, representing Elizabeth I, has beauty and virtues that put Petrarch’s lover Laura in the shade.  The Italian poet breaks into tears when the arrival of the living queen so outshines the earlier lady that Laura is cast into “oblivion.”  This substitution of one female ideal with another disturbs even buried ghosts, including that of Homer as obsolete poetic practices and the women praised by earlier poets are displaced by the new queen. This ingenuity and literary shop-talk befits the poem’s place in the introductory material to an edition  of The Faery Queen where it is accompanied by a lengthy letter from Raleigh to Spenser commending and commenting on the method of his friend’s vast poem.

     Raleigh’s life story is the history of his age in courtly rivalries, Realpolitik among nations, and colonial expansion.  His poetry likewise is part of the fabric of his times, representing a late development of courtly love influenced by Italian poets, but with a distinctively British tone of realism and irony that makes many of his pieces appeal to the contemporary reader.