Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 9

I prithee keep my kine for me, Carillo, wilt thou? tell.-- First let me have a kiss of thee, And I will keep them well.

Another translation is the poem headed 'A Pastorall' in Daniel's _Delia_ of 1592, a rendering of the famous chorus to the first act of Ta.s.so's _Aminta_.

When we turn to original verse, the first group of poets to arrest our attention is the court circle which gathered round Sir Philip Sidney.

There is a poem by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, preserved in Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_, and there headed 'A Dialogue between two Shepherds, Thenot and Piers, in Praise of Astrea.' It was composed for the entertainment of the queen, and was no doubt sung or recited in character.

Such was likewise the mode of production of Sir Philip's 'Dialogue between two Shepherds, uttered in a pastoral show at Wilton,'[125] which is more rustic in character. _Astrophel and Stella_ supplies a graceful 'complaint to his flock' against the cruelty of

Stella, fiercest shepherdess, Fiercest, but yet fairest ever; Stella, whom the heavens still bless, Though against me she persever.

Though I bliss inherit never.

The _Poetical Rhapsody_ again preserves two others, the outcome of Sidney's friends.h.i.+p with Greville and Dyer. The first is a song of welcome; the second, headed 'Dispraise of a Courtly Life,' ends with the prayer:

Only for my two loves' sake, In whose love I pleasure take; Only two do me delight With the ever-pleasing sight; Of all men to thee retaining, Grant me with these two remaining.

Of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the loyal admirer and biographer of Sidney, who desired on his tomb no better pa.s.sport to posterity than that he had been Sir Philip's friend, we have among other works published in 1633 a series of so-called sonnets recording his love for the fair Caelica. There is a thin veil of pastoralism over the whole, with here and there a more definite note as in 'Sonnet' 75, a poem of over two hundred lines lamenting his lady's cruelty--

Shepheardesses, yet marke well The Martyrdome of Philocell.

Of Sir Edward Dyer's works no early edition was published. Such isolated poems as have survived were collected by Grosart in 1872 from a variety of sources. If the piece ent.i.tled _Cynthia_ is authentic, it gives him a respectable place beside Greville among the minor pastoralists of his day.

Lastly, in connexion with Sidney we may note a curious poem which appeared in the first edition of the _Arcadia_ only.[126] It is a 'bantering'

eclogue, in which the shepherds Nico and Pas first abuse one another and then fall to a comic singing match. It is evidently suggested by the fifth Idyl of Theocritus, and is a fair specimen of a very uncommon cla.s.s in English. Akin to this is the burlesque variety, of which we have already met with examples in Lorenzo's _Nencia_ and Pulci's _Beca_, and which is almost equally rare with us. A specimen will be found in the not very successful eclogue in Greene's _Menaphon_. The following is as near as the author was able to approach to Lorenzo's delicately playful tone:

Carmela deare, even as the golden ball That Venus got, such are thy goodly eyes: When cherries juice is jumbled therewithall, Thy breath is like the steeme of apple pies.

It would, of course, be grossly unfair to judge Robert Greene, the ever-sinning and ever-repentant, by the above injudicious experiment. His lyrical powers appear in a very different light, for instance, in the 'Palmer's Ode' in _Never Too Late_ (1590), one of the most charming of his many confessions:

As I lay and kept my sheepe, Came the G.o.d that hateth sleepe, Clad in armour all of fire, Hand in hand with Queene Desire, And with a dart that wounded nie, Pearst my heart as I did lie, That, when I wooke, I gan sweare Phillis beautie palme did beare.

From the same romance I must do Greene the justice of quoting the delightful, though but remotely pastoral, song of every loving nymph to her bashful swain:

Sweet Adon, darest not glance thine eye-- N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?-- Upon thy Venus that must die?

Je vous en prie, pity me: N'oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel-- N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

See how sad thy Venus lies-- N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?-- Love in heart and tears in eyes; Je vous en prie, pity me: N'oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel-- N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami?

It is hard to refrain from quoting half a dozen other pieces. There is the courting of Phillis in _Perimedes the Blacksmith_ (1588), with its purely idyllic close; or again the famous 'Shepherd's Wife's Song' from the _Mourning Garment_ (1590):

Ah, what is love? It is a pretty thing, As sweet unto a shepherd as a king; And sweeter too, For kings have cares that wait upon a crown, And cares can make the sweetest love to frown: Ah then, ah then, If country loves such sweet desires do gain, What lady would not love a shepherd swain?

No one not utterly callous to the pathos of human life, or warped by some ethical twist beyond the semblance of a man, has ever been able to pa.s.s unmoved by the figure of Robert Greene. We see him, the poet of all that is truest and tenderest in human affection, abandoning his young wife and child, drawn by the power of some fatal fascination into the whirlpool of low life in London, and then, as if inspired by a sudden revelation of objective vision, penning the throbbing lines of the forsaken mother's song:

Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.

We see him again amid the despair and squalor of his death-bed, warning his friends against his own example, and addressing to the wife he had not seen for years those words endorsed on a bill for ten pounds, words ever memorable in the history of English letters: 'Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth, and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not succoured me I had died in the streets.' Such are the scenes of sordid misery which underlie some of the choicest of English songs. It is best to return to the surface.

The lyric 'sequences' published towards the close of the sixteenth century frequently contain more or less pastoral matter. Barnabe Barnes appended some poems of this sort to his _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ (c.

1593), among others a version of Moschus' idyl of runaway love, a theme which had long been a favourite one with pastoral writers. Poliziano's Latin translation of Moschus[127] was commended by E. K. in his notes to the _Shepherd's Calender_, and the same original supplied Ta.s.so with the subject of his _Amore fuggitivo_, which served as epilogue to the _Aminta_. William Smith's _Chloris_ (1596), except for plentiful swearing by pastoral deities, is less bucolic in spite of its dedication to Colin Clout. The most important of the sequences from our present point of view is Nicholas Breton's _Pa.s.sionate Shepherd,_ which was not published till 1604. It contains five pastorals in praise of Aglaia:

Had I got a kingly grace, I would leave my kingly place And in heart be truly glad To become a country lad, Hard to lie and go full bare, And to feed on hungry fare, So I might but live to be Where I might but sit to see, Once a day, or all day long, The sweet subject of my song; In Aglaia's only eyes All my worldly paradise.

This is a fair specimen of Breton's dainty muse, but his choicest work appeared in that wonderful anthology published in 1600 under the t.i.tle of _England's Helicon_. To this collection Breton contributed such verses as the following:

On a hill there grows a flower-- Fair befall the dainty sweet!-- By that flower there is a bower, Where the heavenly muses meet.

In that bower there is a chair, Fringed all about with gold; Where doth sit the fairest fair, That ever eye did yet behold.

It is Phyllis fair and bright, She that is the shepherd's joy; She that Venus did despite, And did bind her little boy.

Or again:

Good Muse, rock me asleep With some sweet harmony; The weary eye is not to keep Thy wary company.

Sweet Love, begone awhile, Thou knowest my heaviness; Beauty is born but to beguile My heart of happiness.

Another poem no less perfect has been already quoted at length. In its own line, the delicate carving of fair images as in crystal or some precious stone, Breton's work is unsurpa.s.sed. We cannot do better than take, as examples of a very large cla.s.s, some of the poems printed, in most cases for the first time, in _England's Helicon_. Of Henry Constable, the poet indicated doubtless by the initiais H. C., we have a charming song between Phillis and Amaryllis, the counterpart and imitation of Spenser's 'Bonibell' ballad:

_P._ Fie on the sleights that men devise-- (Heigho, silly sleights!) When simple maids they would entice.

(Maids are young men's chief delights.) _A._ Nay, women they witch with their eyes-- (Eyes like beams of burning sun!) And men once caught they do despise; So are shepherds oft undone.

_P._ If every maid were like to me-- (Heigho, hard of heart!) Both love and lovers scorn'd should be.

(Scorners shall be sure of smart.) _A._ If every maid were of my mind-- (Heigho, heigho, lovely sweet!) They to their lovers should prove kind; Kindness is for maidens meet[128].

Of Sir John Wotton, the short-lived half-brother of the more famous Sir Henry, there is a spirited song, betraying unusual command over a complicated rhythm:

Jolly shepherd, shepherd on a hill, On a hill so merrily, On a hill so cheerily, Fear not, shepherd, there to pipe thy fill; Fill every dale, fill every plain; Both sing and say, 'Love feels no pain.'

Another graceful poet of _England's Helicon_ is the 'Shepherd Tony,' whose ident.i.ty with Anthony Munday was finally established by Mr. Bullen. He contributed, among other verses, a not very interesting reply to Harpelus'

complaint in 'Tottel's Miscellany,' and the well-known and exquisite:

Beauty sat bathing by a spring Where fairest shades did hide her,

which reappears in his translation of the Castilian romance _Primelion_.

In Marlowe's 'Pa.s.sionate Shepherd to his Love,' of which _England's Helicon_ supplies one of three texts[129], we come to what is, with the possible exception of _Lycidas_ alone, the most subtly modulated specimen of pastoral verse in English. So far as internal evidence is concerned the poem has absolutely nothing but its own perfection to connect it with the name of Marlowe; it is utterly unlike all other verse, dramatic, narrative, or lyric, ascribed to him. An admirable eclectic text, which exhibits to the full the delicacy of the rhythm, has been prepared by Mr.

Bullen in his edition of Marlowe's works. It would be impossible not to quote the piece in full:

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and vallies, dales and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Fair-lined[130] slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy-buds, With coral clasps and amber studs; And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love.