Michael Drayton's Idea - time calls me to relate \ My tedious travels

Michael Drayton, a contemporary of Samuel Daniel, skipped the anagram.  He did not hide the Ideal behind Delia or the idea behind Délie, but addressed his sonnet sequence directly to “Idea.”  Oddly, or perhaps this is the ironic point, Drayton’s sonnets often feel more like they could be addressed to an actual woman than the poems of Daniel or Scève.  He is best known – I think this is true – for the sonnet “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part” (1619), which I glanced at almost six years ago.  It’s a stunner.  As good as Shakespeare.  And even with the turn to allegorical figures in the last six lines, it has the erotic charge of a great love poem.

Unlike this one, also from the 1619 Idea:

Like an adventurous seafarer am I,
Who hath some long and dang’rous voyage been,
And called to tell of his discovery,
How far he sailed, what countries he had seen,
Proceeding from the port whence he put forth,
Shows by his compass how his course he steered,
When east, when west, when south, and when by north,
As how the pole to ev’ry place was reared;
What capes he doubled, of what continent,
The gulfs and straits that strangely he had passed,
Where most becalmed, where with foul weather spent,
And on what rocks in peril to be cast.
Thus in my love, time calls me to relate
My tedious travels, and oft varying fate.

The conceit completely takes over.  Taking the “I” as something real, we see in the first line that he is life a seafarer, after which the next the next eleven lines describe not the real “I” but the purely metaphorical seafarer.  Since “I” is like the seafarer, by logic the poem is simultaneously describing “I,” but who does not lose that thread by the twelfth line?

Drayton is more direct than Daniel, but the elaborate, playful extension of the metaphor is the purpose of the poem, which in the closing couplet turns out to be not a love poem but a poem about writing love poems.

Look at the seventh line, “When east,” etc.  As prose, as argument, it is filler – we know how a compass works – but it is pleasant to say aloud and pleasant to read in its surroundings, where ordinary ideas become poetry.

Drayton thinks, and therefore is.  One cannot have an Idea without “I”:

Nothing but No and I, and I and No,
How fals it out so strangely you reply?
I tell yee (Faire) ile not be answered so,
With this affronting No, denying I.
I say, I Love, you sleightly answere I:
I say, You Love, you peule me out a No:
I say, I Die, you Eccho me with I:
Save mee I Crie, you sigh me out a No;
Must Woe and I, have naught but No and I?
No I, am I, if I no more can have;
Answere no more, with Silence make reply,
And let me take my selfe what I doe crave,
    Let No and I, with I and you be so:
    Then answere No and I, and I and No.

This, from 1594, is an unusually rapid sonnet, mostly monosyllables, when read aloud verging on nonsense.  Adding quotation marks helps sort it out.  The poem is as usual more learned than it looks – the “Eccho” line refers to Philip Sidney’s echo poem “Fair rocks, goodly rivers, sweet woods…” at the very least.  But at heart it is a joyful manipulation of words, poetry as pure play.

Michael Drayton - thou might'st him yet recover

I took a (totally fair) crack at Michael Drayton (1563-1631) a couple of weeks ago. I'll make it up to him by having him lead off Favorite Pre-19th Century Poems in English week. Here's a sonnet from the 1619 edition of Idea:

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one lot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.

The last six lines are tangled, and easy to read in a way that gives the sense but misses the weirdness of the scene. Passion is personified, and dying, personified faith is at his side, personified innocence closes passion's eyes. Pretty strange. But he's not dead yet - "thou" might save him.

Clumsy attention can crush poetry, so I want to be careful. Some gentle appreciation: the opening line is perfect, just monosyllables. Also excellent, "cleanly" - he doesn't really mean it. This light and liquid poem is heavy on "l"s - "last gasp of love's latest" is where they're loveliest.

Drayton is a minor poet because unlike Shakespeare or Sidney or Donne, he only wrote a few poems as perfect as this one.

The whole world in a book

Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana is part of a tradition of describing the whole world in a book. Anyway, some enormous chunk of it. Landívar's Latin poem on beavers reminded me that Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton wrote his own ode to the beaver* in his enormous Poly-Olbion (1613/1622), his attempt to describe all of England in verse - the history, the rivers, the animals, everything:

Being bodied like a boat, with such a mighty tail
As served him for a bridge, a helm, or for a sail,
When kind did him command the architect to play,
That his strong castle built of branchèd twigs and clay;

And then it goes on and on like that. And then on some more. Drayton claims the idea for the sled came from watching beavers drag branches across the snow.

The poly-whatever impulse goes back to Pliny, at least, but early modern writers really went to town with it. The all-time champion must be the 17th century German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher,** who wrote numerous books, on China, geology, music, and everything, and planned many, many more, mostly on enormous topics. If I remember correctly, one of his ideas was to write a book cataloguing the heights of all the trees in the world. Not all of the species of trees - all of the individual trees.

The idea is still alive. Here is Borges skewering Pablo Neruda's Cantos, in "The Aleph" (1945):

'Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.'

* In this case, a species of English (Welsh?) beaver, already extinct when Drayton was writing.

** For more on Kircher, I would go to Ingrid Rowland's The Ecstatic Journey, or the essays in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, neither of which I have read.