Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co.
Paternoster House London W.C.
1897
IDEA
by
MICHAEL DRAYTON
FIDESSA
by
BARTHOLOMEW GRIFFIN
CHLORIS
by
WILLIAM SMITH
IDEA
by
MICHAEL DRAYTON
The true story of the life of Michael Drayton might be told to
vindicate the poetic traditions of the olden time. A child-poet
wandering in fay-haunted Arden, or listening to the harper that
frequented the fireside of Polesworth Hall where the boy was a petted
page, later the honoured almoner of the bounty of many patrons, one
who "not unworthily," as Tofte said, "beareth the name of the chiefest
archangel, singing after this soule-ravishing manner," yet leaving but
"five pounds lying by him at his death, which was _satis viatici ad
coelum_"--is not this the panorama of a poetic career? But above
all, to complete the picture of the ideal poet, he worshipped, and
hopelessly, from youth to age the image of one, woman. He never
married, and while many patronesses were honoured with his poetic
addresses, there was one fair dame to whom he never offered dedicatory
sonnet, a silence that is full of meaning. Yet the praises of Idea,
his poetic name for the lady of his admiration and love, are written
all over the pages of his voluminous lyrical and chorographical and
historical poems, and her very name is quaintly revealed to us. Anne
Goodere was the younger daughter in the noble family where Drayton was
bred and educated; and one may picture the fair child standing
"gravely merry" by the little page to listen to "John Hews his lyre,"
at that ancestral fireside. "Where I love, I love for years," said
Drayton in 1621. As late as 1627, but four years before his death, he
writes an elegy of his lady's not coming to London, in which he
complains that he has been starved for her short letters and has had
to read last year's over again. About the same time he is writing that
immortal sonnet, the sixty-first, the one that Rossetti, with perhaps
something too much of partiality, has declared to be almost, if not
quite, the best in the language. The tragedy of a whole life is
concentrated in that sonnet, and the heart-pang in it is
unmistakable. But Drayton had stood as witness to the will of Anne's
father, by which £1500 was set down for her marriage portion. She was
an heiress, he a penniless poet, and what was to be done?
About 1590, when Drayton was twenty-eight, and Anne was probably
twenty-one years old, Drayton left Polesworth Hall and came to London.
Perhaps the very parting was the means of revealing his heart to
himself, for it is from near this time that, as he confesses later, he
dates the first consciousness of his love. He soon publishes _Idea,
the Shepherd's Garland, Rowland's Sacrifice to the Nine Muses_, where
we first see our poet, in his pastoral-poetic character, carving his
"rime of love's idolatry," upon a beechen tree. Thirteen stanzas of
these pastoral eclogues do not exhaust the catalogue of her beauties;
and when he praises the proportion of her shape and carriage, we know
that it was not the poet's frenzied eye alone that saw these graces,
for Dr. John Hall, of Stratford, who attended her professionally,
records in his case-book that she was "beautiful and of gallant
structure of body." Anne was married about 1595 to Sir Henry
Rainsford, who became Drayton's friend, host and patron. It is likely
that Lady Rainsford deserved a goodly portion of the praises bestowed
upon her beauty. And she need not have been ashamed of the devotion of
her knight of poesy; for Michael Drayton was, like Constable and
Daniel and Fletcher, a man good and true, and the chorus of
contemporaries that praise his character and his verse is led by pious
Meres himself, and echoed by Jonson.
_Idea's Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains_, formed the title under which
the sonnet-cycle appeared in 1594. _Idea_ was reprinted eight times
before 1637, the edition of 1619 being the chief and serving for the
foundation of our text. Many changes and additions were made by the
author in the successive editions; in fact only twenty of the
fifty-one "amours" in _Idea's Mirrour_ escaped the winnowing, while
the famous sixty-first appears for the first time in 1619. There is a
distinct progress manifest in the subdual of language and form to
artistic finish, and while the cycle in its unevenness represents the
early and late stages of poetic progress, the more delicate examples
of his work show him worthy of the praise bestowed by his latest
admirer and critic,
"Faith, Michael Drayton bears the bell
For numbers airy."
It will be noted that, while many rhyme-arrangements are experimented
upon, the Shakespearean or quatrain-and-couplet form predominates. In
the less praiseworthy sonnets he is found to lack grammatical clamping
and to allow frequent faults in rhythm, and he toys with the
glittering and soulless conceit as much as any; but where his
individuality has fullest sway, as in the picturesque Arden memory of
the fifty-third, the personal reminiscences of the Ankor sonnets, and
the vivid theatre theme of the forty-seventh, in what Main calls that
"magical realisation of the spirit of evening" in the thirty-seventh,
and above all in the naïve and passionate sixty-first, there is a rude
strength that pierces beneath the formalities and touches and moves
the heart. Drayton, like Sidney and Daniel and Shakespeare, draws
freely upon the general thought-storehouse of the Italianate
sonneteers: time and the transitoriness of beauty, the lover's
extremes, the Platonic ideas of soul-functions and of love-madness,
the phoenix and Icarus and all the classic gods, engage his fancy
first or last; and no sonnet trifler has been more attracted by the
great theme of immortality in verse than he. When honouring Idea in
the favourite mode he cries
"Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise."
A late writer holds that years have falsified this prophecy. It is
true that Lamb valued Drayton chiefly as the panegyrist of his native
earth, and we would hardly venture to predict the future of our
sonneteer; but the fact remains that now three hundred years after his
time, his lifelong devotion to the prototype of Idea constitutes, as
he conventionally asserted it would, his most valid claim to interest,
and that the sonnets where this love has found most potent expression
mount the nearest to the true note of immortality.