Ask me no more whither doth haste
The nightingale when May is past;
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters, and keeps warm her note.
Sometimes when the lady was dead, and Carew, again, wrote on her
monument--
And here the precious dust is laid,
Whose purely-tempered clay was made
So fine that it the guest betrayed.
But there was besides another Lady of the lyrics; one who will never pass
from the world, but has passed from song. In the sixteenth century and
in the seventeenth century this lady was Death. Her inspiration never
failed; not a poet but found it as fresh as the inspiration of life.
Fancy was not quenched by the inevitable thought in those days, as it is
in ours, and the phrase lost no dignity by the integrity of use.
To every man it happens that at one time of his life--for a space of
years or for a space of months--he is convinced of death with an
incomparable reality. It might seem as though literature, living the
life of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages. Death was as
often on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in their hands,
but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts. The discovery of
death did not shake the poets from their composure. On the contrary, the
verse is never measured with more majestic effect than when it moves in
honour of this Lady of the lyrics. Sir Walter Raleigh is but a jerky
writer when he is rhyming other things, however bitter or however solemn;
but his lines on death, which are also lines on immortality, are
infinitely noble. These are, needless to say, meditations upon death by
law and violence; and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne,
written after his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife--"Now,
Sweet-cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thy
deservings"--and singularly beautiful prose is this. So also are
Southwell's words. But these are exceptional deaths, and more dramatic
than was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age.
It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle business of
life--not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a darkness--that was
the Lady of the lyrists. Nor was their song of the act of dying. With
this a much later and much more trivial literature busied itself. Those
two centuries felt with a shock that death would bring an end, and that
its equalities would make vain the differences of wit and wealth which
they took apparently more seriously than to us seems probable. They
never wearied of the wonder. The poetry of our day has an entirely
different emotion for death as parting. It was not parting that the
lyrists sang of; it was the mere simplicity of death. None of our
contemporaries will take such a subject; they have no more than the
ordinary conviction of the matter. For the great treatment of obvious
things there must evidently be an extraordinary conviction.
But whether the chief Lady of the lyrics be this, or whether she be the
implacable Elizabethan feigned by the love-songs, she has equally passed
from before the eyes of poets.