A Defence of Poesie and Poems
Approaching warms, not else, dead logs up sends
From hideous depth; which tribute, when it ends,
Sore sign it is the lord’s last thread is spun.
My lake is Sense, whose still streams never run
But when my sun her shining twins there bends;
Then from his depth with force in her begun,
Long drownéd hopes to watery eyes it lends;
But when that fails my dead hopes up to take,
Their master is fair warned his will to make.
III.
We have a fish, by strangers much admired,
Which caught, to cruel search yields his chief part:
With gall cut out, closed up again by art,
Yet lives until his life be new required.
A stranger fish myself, not yet expired,
Tho’, rapt with Beauty’s hook, I did impart
Myself unto th’ anatomy desired,
Instead of gall, leaving to her my heart:
Yet live with thoughts closed up, ’till that she will,
By conquest’s right, instead of searching, kill.
IV.
Peak hath a cave, whose narrow entries find
Large rooms within where drops distil amain:
Till knit with cold, though there unknown remain,
Deck that poor place with alabaster lined.
Mine eyes the strait, the roomy cave, my mind;
Whose cloudy thoughts let fall an inward rain
Of sorrow’s drops, till colder reason bind
Their running fall into a constant vein
Of truth, far more than alabaster pure,
Which, though despised, yet still doth truth endure.
V.
A field there is, where, if a stake oe prest
Deep in the earth, what hath in earth receipt,
Is changed to stone in hardness, cold, and weight,
The wood above doth soon consuming rest.
The earth her ears; the stake is my request;
Of which, how much may pierce to that sweet seat,
To honour turned, doth dwell in honour’s nest,
Keeping that form, though void of wonted heat;
But all the rest, which fear durst not apply,
Failing themselves, with withered conscience die.
VI.
Of ships by shipwreck cast on Albion’s coast,
Which rotting on the rocks, their death to die:
From wooden bones and blood of pitch doth fly
A bird, which gets more life than ship had lost.
My ship, Desire, with wind of Lust long tost,
Brake on fair cliffs of constant Chastity;
Where plagued for rash attempt, gives up his ghost;
So deep in seas of virtue, beauties lie:
But of this death flies up the purest love,
Which seeming less, yet nobler life doth move.
VII.
These wonders England breeds; the last remains—
A lady, in despite of Nature, chaste,
On whom all love, in whom no love is placed,
Where Fairness yields to Wisdom’s shortest reins.
A humble pride, a scorn that favour stains;
A woman’s mould, but like an angel graced;
An angel’s mind, but in a woman cased;
A heaven on earth, or earth that heaven contains:
Now thus this wonder to myself I frame;
She is the cause that all the rest I am.
* * * * *
THOU blind man’s mark; thou fool’s self-chosen snare,
Fond fancy’s scum, and dregs of scattered thought:
Band of all evils; cradle of causeless care;
Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought:
Desire! Desire! I have too dearly bought,
With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware;
Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought
Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare;
But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought;
In vain thou mad’st me to vain things aspire;
In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire:
For Virtue hath this better lesson taught,
Within myself to seek my only hire,
Desiring nought but how to kill Desire.
FROM EARTH TO HEAVEN.
LEAVE me, O love! which reachest but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be,
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light
That doth both shine, and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold! let that light be thy guide,
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And think how evil becometh him to slide,
Who seeketh heaven, and comes from heavenly breath.
Then farewell, world, thy uttermost I see,
Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.
SPLENDIDIS LONGUM VALEDICO NUGIS
FOOTNOTES.
{1} _Edward Wotton_, elder brother of Sir Henry Wotton. He was knighted
by Elizabeth in 1592, and made Comptroller of her Household. Observe the
playfulness in Sidney’s opening and close of a treatise written
throughout in plain, manly English without Euphuism, and strictly
reasoned.
{2} Here the introduction ends, and the argument begins with its § 1.
_Poetry the first Light-giver_.
{3} A fable from the “Hetamythium” of Laurentius Abstemius, Professor of
Belles Lettres at Urbino, and Librarian to Duke Guido Ubaldo under the
Pontificate of Alexander VI. (1492–1503).
{4} Pliny says (“Nat. Hist.,” lib. xi., cap. 62) that the young vipers,
impatient to be born, break through the side of their mother, and so kill
her.
{5} § 2. _Borrowed from by Philosophers_.
{6} Timæus, the Pythagorean philosopher of Locri, and the Athenian
Critias are represented by Plato as having listened to the discourse of
Socrates on a Republic. Socrates calls on them to show such a state in
action. Critias will tell of the rescue of Europe by the ancient
citizens of Attica, 10,000 years before, from an inroad of countless
invaders who came from the vast island of Atlantis, in the Western Ocean;
a struggle of which record was preserved in the temple of Naith or Athené
at Sais, in Egypt, and handed down, through Solon, by family tradition to
Critias. But first Timæus agrees to expound the structure of the
universe; then Critias, in a piece left unfinished by Plato, proceeds to
show an ideal society in action against pressure of a danger that seems
irresistible.
{7} Plato’s “Republic,” book ii.
{8} § 3. _Borrowed from by Historians_.
{9} § 4. _Honoured by the Romans as Sacred and Prophetic_.
{10} § 5. _And really sacred and prophetic in the Psalms of David_.
{11} § 6. _By the Greeks_, _Poets were honoured with the name of
Makers_.
{12} _Poetry is the one creative art_. _Astronomers and others repeat
what they find_.
{13} _Poets improve Nature_.
{14} _And idealize man_.
{15} _Here a Second Part of the Essay begins_.
{16} § 1. Poetry defined.
{17} § 2. _Its kinds_. _a._ _Divine_.
{18} _b._ _Philosophical_, _which is perhaps too imitative_.
{19} Marcus Manilius wrote under Tiberius a metrical treatise on
Astronomy, of which five books on the fixed stars remain.
{20} _c._ _Poetry proper_.
{21} § 3. _Subdivisions of Poetry proper_.
{22} _Its essence is in the thought_, _not in apparelling of verse_.
{23} _Heliodorus_ was Bishop of Tricca, in Thessaly, and lived in the
fourth century. His story of Theagenes and Chariclea, called the
“Æthiopica,” was a romantic tale in Greek which was, in Elizabeth’s
reign, translated into English.
{24} _The Poet’s Work and Parts_. § 1. WORK: _What Poetry does for us_.
{25} _Their clay lodgings_—
“Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”
(Shakespeare, “Merchant of Venice,” act v., sc. 1)
{26} _Poetry best advances the end of all earthly learning_, _virtuous
action_.
{27} _Its advantage herein over Moral Philosophy_.
{28} _Its advantage herein over History_.
{29} “All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authórising thy trespass with compare.”
Shakespeare, “Sonnet” 35.
{30} “Witness of the times, light of truth, life of memory, mistress of
life, messenger of antiquity.”—Cicero, “De Oratore.”
{31} _In what manner the Poet goes beyond Philosopher_, _Historian_,
_and all others_ (_bating comparison with the Divine_).
{32} _He is beyond the Philosopher_.
{33} Horace’s “Ars Poetica,” lines 372–3. But Horace wrote “Non
homines, non Di”—“Neither men, gods, nor lettered columns have admitted
mediocrity in poets.”
{34} _The moral common-places_. Common Place, “Locus communis,” was a
term used in old rhetoric to represent testimonies or pithy sentences of
good authors which might be used for strengthening or adorning a
discourse; but said Keckermann, whose Rhetoric was a text-book in the
days of James I. and Charles I., “Because it is impossible thus to read
through all authors, there are books that give students of eloquence what
they need in the succinct form of books of Common Places, like that
collected by Stobæus out of Cicero, Seneca, Terence, Aristotle; but
especially the book entitled ‘Polyanthea,’ provides short and effective
sentences apt to any matter.” Frequent resort to the Polyanthea caused
many a good quotation to be hackneyed; the term of rhetoric, “a
common-place,” came then to mean a good saying made familiar by incessant
quoting, and then in common speech, any trite saying good or bad, but
commonly without wit in it.
{35} _Thus far Aristotle_. The whole passage in the “Poetics” runs: “It
is not by writing in verse or prose that the Historian and Poet are
distinguished. The work of Herodotus might be versified; but it would
still be a species of History, no less with metre than without. They are
distinguished by this, that the one relates what has been, the other what
might be. On this account Poetry is more philosophical, and a more
excellent thing than History, for Poetry is chiefly conversant about
general truth; History about particular. In what manner, for example,
any person of a certain character would speak or act, probably or
necessarily, this is general; and this is the object of Poetry, even
while it makes use of particular names. But what Alcibiades did, or what
happened to him, this is particular truth.”
{36} Justinus, who lived in the second century, made an epitome of the
history of the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Macedonian, and Roman Empires,
from Trogus Pompeius, who lived in the time of Augustus.
{37} _Dares Phrygius_ was supposed to have been a priest of Vulcan, who
was in Troy during the siege, and the Phrygian Iliad ascribed to him as
early as the time of Ælian, A.D. 230, was supposed, therefore, to be
older than Homer’s.
{38} _Quintus Curtius_, a Roman historian of uncertain date, who wrote
the history of Alexander the Great in ten books, of which two are lost
and others defective.
{39} Not knowledge but practice.
{40} _The Poet Monarch of all Human Sciences_.
{41} In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” a resemblance has been fancied between
this passage and Rosalind’s description of Biron, and the jest:—
“Which his fair tongue—conceit’s expositor—
Delivers in such apt and gracious words,
That agéd ears play truant at his tables,
And younger hearings are quite ravishéd,
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.”
{42} Virgil’s “Æneid,” Book xii.:—
“And shall this ground fainthearted dastard
Turnus flying view?
Is it so vile a thing to die?”
(Phaer’s Translation [1573].)
{43} _Instances of the power of the Poet’s work_.