POETS Day! Poems Found While Reading an Essay by Anthony Hecht

Illustrated by Rene Sears

There’s a constant drip to my life now. A background sound would imply direction. This isn’t that. This ubiquitous drip, this relentless hydro-metronome, reverberates from the porcelain of the bathroom behind me, the steel of the kitchen I’m in, and somehow through two bedroom doors from the other bathroom. It is of the house.

In 2010, a cold snap came. We were newly minted homeowners, landed for only a week at the time. The inspection report showed an open heating duct in the crawlspace so I donned my fiscal responsibility hat and had the duct capped immediately on moving in. The pipes froze a few days later and one burst a day or two after that. Chesterton’s fence was under my house.

In Wisconsin and other Big10 locales, pipes are insulated or designed to expand somehow. I’ve read about systems where conductive wires are wrapped around water pipes to provide warmth when switched on. This is all Star Trek stuff to Alabamians. Nobody has that here so we drip our faucets.

It hasn’t been above freezing for three days now. The drip haunts me. Mocks me. Its maddening report more assault than assurance. But what if it stops?

Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Nothing gets done at work on a Friday afternoon anyway, so go do fun stuff. Or if you live in Alabama, go home and listen. Listen and fear.

Drip. Drip. Dri…

***

I have a copy of Anthony Hecht’s Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry I keep on hand when I’m in the mood. It sits in a stack with Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History by William Logan, the collection of T.S. Eliot essays, Poetry and Poets, and a few like. Sometimes I think I enjoy reading about poetry, criticism and commentary, more than I like reading actual poetry. That might not be odd, but I think it is, and it warms my vanity as personal idiosyncrasies will.

These are all filled with essays that can be read in no order for the most part. I reach out when I’m in the mood for a fix but don’t want to commit to a book at the time. I did that Sunday. “On Henry Noel’s ‘Gaze Not on Swans’” by Hecht delivered as expected. He’s an arrogant writer in the best way.

“Gaze Not on Swans,” as he wrote, “belongs to a little genre of elaborate quatrain-verse compliments to ladies that would include a number of other graceful and elegant poems.” He then proceeds to list three more which I looked up and was – a more masculine synonym escapes me right now – enchanted.

They’re definitely of a fashion. He points out that three of the four – I’m including the Noel poem with his three comparisons – begin each or most stanzas with an admonition or as Hecht put it, “framed rhetorically as injunctions: ‘Ask me no more,’ ‘Do not conceal,’ ‘Gaze not at swans.’” The poets array beauties and wonders of the natural world and then impress that none of them holds a candle – Noel uses just that image – to the beauty and wonder of the woman who stirred the poet to write.

They’re very good so I thought I’d share.

Thomas Carew, pronounced “Carey” the first two times you read it after learning how to say it properly but back to “Carew” after that, is counted among the Cavalier poets; supporters of Charles I who portrayed themselves as boisterous and fun loving, clever but up to mischief, modern Otters and Boones.

Before making it to court, he found himself in trouble for slander and levity (let he who is without sin…). Apparently, he wrote something unflattering about his employer and lost his job. His father was furious as only a respectable patriarch about London can be and things were looking bad for young Thomas. Employment was elusive. A seemingly menial position with a Baron was his in to court and he made the most of it, eventually becoming Sewer in Ordinary to the King which means he was the king’s food and drink taster. This was actually a sought after position. You had real access.

There’s a great story, and I won’t say “probably apocryphal” because that phrase is kryptonite to so many great stories, claiming he was leading Charles I to his chambers and quickly blew out the candle he was carrying “on accident” because he saw Lord St Albans cuddling up to the Queen. In the darkness, Lord Alban scuttle-hurried away, the King was none the wiser, and Carew became a Queenly favorite. So the story goes.

He’s best known for his naughty “A Rapture,” which was written to and about Celia, a mystery mistress who may not have existed, may be a composite of several women he knew, or may have gone to another school. I believe the poem below is also addressed to Celia, though her name is never mentioned, because in the first line he directs that she “Ask me no more where Jove bestows,” after having, in “A Rapture,” made it very clear where Jove was headed and what he planned on bestowing.

A Song: Ask me no more where Jove bestows
Thomas Carew (1595-1640)

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty’s orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day;
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.

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.

Ask me no more where those stars ’light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.

Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.

Henry Wotton spent time collecting intelligence on Poland, Italy, Germany, and Transylvania for Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. He doesn’t seem to have had a role in Devereux’s attempt to oust Elizabeth I, but when the Essex Rebellion was crushed, he knew his associations painted him in less than an ideal light – maybe not a rebel, but rebel coded – so he split for the continent.

His travels led him to Italy where the Grand Duke of Tuscany told him of a plot to kill James VI of Scotland and provided him with evidence of some sort and means to travel and warn the king. Under the name Ottavio Baldi, Wotton made his way to Scotland and explained the plot. When James VI of Scotland became James I of England, Henry Wotton became Sir Henry Wotton. He was offered various ambassadorships, but passed, choosing to travel Europe doing jobs as needed for the crown.

Like Carew, he found himself in trouble for something he wrote in a letter. While abroad, someone got hold of and publicized a correspondence in which he’d written, “An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” This coming from a known agent of the English Crown was a PR disaster. James was mad but not furious and Wotton wasn’t very useful diplomatically, so he took a seat in Parliament, either weathered the storm or got bored, and headed back to Europe as a King’s man once again.

In that capacity, he went to Vienna to give whatever aid was possible to James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, wife of Fredrick V, and later known as The Winter Queen. Ferdinand II had been or was in the process of being deposed and replaced by Fredrick (I can’t pin down Wotton’s arrival), an event that was one of the events, if not the event, that began the Thirty Years War.

Wotton was particularly devoted to Elizabeth. It wasn’t a romantic devotion as far as I can tell. There was a big age difference. He wrote this next poem for her. In his essay, while parsing the Noel poem, Hecht points out that mistress didn’t carry the romantic connotations in Elizabethan times that it does now. Or rather, it could but didn’t necessarily. Here, it doesn’t. I’m pretty sure.

You Meaner Beauties of The Night
Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)

You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light;
You common people of the skies,
What are you when the sun shall rise?

You curious chanters of the wood,
That warble forth Dame Nature’s lays,
Thinking your voices understood
By your weak accents; what’s your praise
When Philomel her voice shall raise?

You violets that first appear,
By your pure purple mantles known,
Like the proud virgins of the year,
As if the spring were all your own;
What are you when the rose is blown?

So, when my mistress shall be seen
In form and beauty of her mind,
By virtue first, then choice, a queen,
Tell me, if she were not design’d
Th’ eclipse and glory of her kind?

It would be too much to expect all of the poets mentioned in Hecht’s essay to have entertaining biographies. Wotton was too close to one attempt at removing a monarch and later foiled a plot to do away with another. Carew the slanderer played a role in concealing the cuckolding of a king (allegedly.) I’m not sure Sir Francis Kynaston could even be accused of levity.

He seems like a productive and clever guy: Member of Parliament, Knight, courtier. He founded an academy which didn’t last but did receive patronage from Charles I. He was lauded for his translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde from Middle English into Latin, which seems a bit backwards but was appreciated at the time.

I have no idea who Cynthia was. I imagine she was very pretty.

To Cynthia, on Concealment of Her Beauty
Sir Francis Kynaston (1587-1642)

Do not conceale thy radiant eyes,
The starre-light of serenest skies,
Least wanting of their heavenly light,
They turne to Chaos endlesse night.

Do not conceale those tresses faire,
The silken snares of thy curl’d haire,
Least finding neither gold, nor Ore,
The curious Silke-worme worke no more.

Do not conceale those brests of thine,
More snowe white then the Apenine,
Least if there be like cold or frost,
The Lilly be for ever lost.

Do not conceale that fragrant scent,
Thy breath, which to all flowers hath lent
Perfumes, least it being supprest,
No spices growe in all the East.

Do not conceale thy heavenly voice,
Which makes the hearts of gods rejoyce,
Least Musicke hearing no such thing,
The Nightingale forget to sing.

Do not conceale, not yet eclipse
Thy pearly teeth with Corrall lips,
Least that the Seas cease to bring forth
Gems, which from thee have all their worth.

Do not conceale no beauty grace,
That’s either in thy minde or face,
Least vertue overcome by vice,
Make men beleeve no Paradice.

Henry Noel may not have written this next poem. It’s more than likely that he did, but Hecht first came across the work in Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Peason. William Strode was listed as the author. Hecht found that an editor of Strode’s work doubted the attribution and pointed to an earlier anthology where Noel is credited. Hecht is Anthony Hecht, so when he adds that he supports Noel’s authorship based on “my own instincts gained from reading the whole of Strode’s poetic output, in the course of which he never rises to anything like the level of this extraordinary poem,” I believe him.

I’ve found very little biographical information on Noel. He was a Member of Parliament and courtier. No idea beyond that.

The poem below is wonderful. I won’t try to break it down as I’d be ashamed after reading Hecht’s “On Henry Noel’s ‘Gaze Not on Swans’” as he does such a great job of doing just that. I will mention two things that struck Hecht. First, he is amazed at how deftly the poet tears down in stanzas four and five what he built up in the first three. Second, he does not believe the final image to be a decaying skull. He mentions that because a friend is adamant that it is, and he respects her opinion. He relies on a definition of “socket” used at the time of writing as the place where a candle was attached to holder or lantern. He sees the sun outshining the light of a lantern whose light is “Sunk in their sockets and decay’d.” She sees the sockets as eyes which he allows may be there, but if so is secondary to the lantern.

The essay doesn’t seem to be online and I can’t find it as published anywhere but in Hecht’s book Melodies Unheard, available from John Hopkins University Press for around forty-five bucks, a little more for the Kindle version, which always confuses me. If nothing else, it’s worth a library request. He can be very interesting.

I found “Beauty Extoll’d” as an alternate title so I put it down there in brackets, but Hecht says “Gaze Not on Swans,” and Hecht is Anthony Hecht.

Gaze Not on Swans [or Beauty Extoll’d]
Henry Noel (????-1597)

Gaze not on swans in whose soft breast
A full hatcht beauty seems to rest,
Nor snow which falling from the sky
Hovers in its virginity.

Gaze not on roses though new blown
Grac’d with a fresh complexion,
Nor lilly which no subtle bee
Hath rob’d by kissing chemistry.

Gaze not on that pure milky way
Where night vies splendour with the day,
Nor pearls whose silver walls confine
The riches of an Indian mine:

For if my emperesse appears
Swans moultring dy, snow melts to tears,
Roses do blush and hang their heads
Pale lillyes shrink into their beds;

The milky way rides past to shrowd
Its baffled glory in a clowd,
And pearls do climb unto her eare
To hang themselves for envy there.

So I have seene stars big with light,
Proud lanthorns to the moone-ey’d night,
Which when Sol’s rays were once display’d
Sunk in their sockets and decay’d.