POETS Day! George Gascoigne, Birth of the Modern

Illustration by Rene Sears

As a kid, I had a lot of Doonesbury books. Zonker was my favorite character. I particularly liked his professional tanning arc, prepping for the George Hamilton Classic. There was one strip where he was laying out for two panels with his tanning coach by his side. In the third, he sighs and says, “The thrill is gone, Bernie,” to which Bernie responds in the fourth, “It’s just a passing cloud.”

There are deficiencies in describing a comic strip where nuances may be lost, so trust me when I tell you that it was funny. As to the story, Zonker took a break from the rigors of training, refreshed, and got back to it. He won the Hamilton.

Sometimes you need a break in order to do well in the long run. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, read this.

***

“He brake the ice for our quainter poets that now write.” – Robert Tofte, 1615

from The Steel Glass
George Gascoigne (c.1535-1577)

O knights, O squires, O gentle bloods yborn,
You were not born all only for yourselves:
Your country claims some part of all your pains.
There should you live, and therein should you toil
To hold up right and banish cruel wrong,
To help the poor, to bridle back the rich,
To punish vice, and virtue to advance,
To see God serv’d and Belzebub suppres’d.

Continental poems had been translated into English in blank verse. There were dramas written in it as well, but above is the opening of first known original English poem written in blank verse. It’s not great. In his book Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use, Robert Shaw faults first word repetition as seen in the lines above, and in these he gives as example:

Our bumbast hose, our treble double ruffes,
Our sutes of Silke, our comely garded capes,
Our knit silke stockes, and spanish lether shoes
(Yea velvet serves, ofttimes to trample in)
Our plumes, our spangs, and al our queint array
Are pricking spurres, provoking filthy pride,
And snares (unseen) which leade a man to hel.

He’s also annoyed with the almost regular caesura after the second stress. “Disaffecting,” he calls it. Shaw mentions in a footnote that Edward R. Weismiller calls the same “extraordinary” in an entry in A Milton Encyclopedia (1978). He quotes more from Weismiller: “a metrical caesura (as distinguished from a simple pause, a sense break) for possibly the first and probably the last time in the history of English accentual-syllabic verse.” That surprises me because I feel like I come across it every now and then and I’m tempted to disagree, but no immediate example comes to mind. Weismiller was a Guggenheim Fellow so likely I’m either misunderstanding or completely in the wrong. Not sure tell if Weismiller means “extraordinary” good, or “extraordinary” bad. Shaw leaves little doubt about his own feelings, “Gascoigne deserves notice for innovation in his application of blank verse to a new genre, but his work… is with reason more often cited than read.”

I like Gascoigne a great deal. He didn’t write exclusively in blank verse by any means and much of his poetry’s very good, but the man himself is fun, one of those characters history frowns upon while winking. Disinherited, denied a third term in Parliament due to his being a “a common rhymer… noted for manslaughter… a notorious Ruffian,” as well as an atheist and possibly a spy, a soldier of fortune briefly imprisoned by the Spanish as well as the English, a playwright, and a lawyer; learned from a stint in debtors’ prison and married rich; wrote of court scandal – veiled, but those who knew were having none of it and deemed his stuff obscene. He was constantly in and out of trouble and kept just to the interesting side of bad; naughty rather than horrible.

And If I Did, What Then?

“And if I did, what then?
Are you aggriev’d therefore?
The sea hath fish for every man,
And what would you have more?”

Thus did my mistress once,
Amaze my mind with doubt;
And popp’d a question for the nonce
To beat my brains about.

Whereto I thus replied:
“Each fisherman can wish
That all the seas at every tide
Were his alone to fish.

Gascoigne racked up a slew of firsts in addition to blank verse of “The Steel Glass.” He’s credited with starting the cult of the Virgin Queen surrounding Elizabeth I. Those who decide such things argue whether or not his The Adventures of Master F.J. qualifies as a novel. If it does, it was the first written in English. His The Supposes was the first English prose comedy. And most interestingly to me, he wrote “Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse in English,” which, per Andrew Lang in his History of English Literature, “is the earliest English work, in no way indebted to Aristotle, on the Art of Poetry.”

I fall periodically into a phases where I enjoy reading about poetry, essays on form and philosophy and such, more than I do reading actual poetry. I do this with baseball too on occasion. Box scores and stats hide trends; orderly tea leaves with arcane secrets hinted at but not shown in any nine-inning snapshot. William Logan, Dana Gioia, and James Matthew Wilson all count among my favorite living poets, but in all three cases I read their criticism more often than their poetry. I’ve spent more time considering Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” than, perhaps, I have any other poem. I’ve mulled time past, time future, garlic and sapphires, and flowerless rose gardens looking for an illuminating still point while wandering around my neighborhood so often I’ve begun to associate bends and trees with passages from the poem. I may have spent more time flipping around thoughts from his essay “The Music of Poetry.” It’s an oddity, but I’m a fan of writing about writing.

“Certayne Notes” is not a philosophy of poetry or art. It’s a craftman’s guide more than anything else. He has admonishments against showing off and inverting word order in the style of the “Latinists.” “Ballade,” “verlay,” “sonet,” and “rondlette” are all defined, given shape with rhyme schemes and line counts. He warns hopeful poets off overusing alliteration and inverting word order as the “Latinists” do. Don’t be trite or obvious, so no “hir cherrie lips” or “christal eye.” Pick a meter and stick with it.

I’ll get back to the essay in a second. First, here’s an untitled sonnet he wrote as introduction to a French language instruction book. He does seem married to that second stress caesura.

[To The French Littleton. A most easie, perfect and absolute way to learne the frenche tongue. 1566.]

George Gascoigne
Squire in commendation of this booke.

The pearle of price, which englishme have sought
So farre abrode, and cost them there so dere
Is now founde out, within our contrey here
And better cheape, amongst us may be bought
I meane the frenche: that pearle of pleasant speeche
Which some sought far, & bought it with their lives
With sickenesse some, yea some with bolts & gyves
But all with payne, this peerelesse pearle did seeche:
Now Holyband (A frendly frenche in deede)
Hath tane such payne, for everie english ease
That here at home, we may this language learne:
And for the price, he craveth no more meede
But thãkeful harts, to whome his perles may please
Oh thank him the, that so much thank doth earne.

Tam Marti quam Mercurio.

The last bit in Latin is translated as “As much to Mars as to Mercury,” a motto I believe he chose for himself rather than inherited as a Gascoigne. I took the poem from a 1907 Cambridge Press edition of his collected works that claims to have special reproductions of original documents. There’s an accent mark over the final “e” in “englishme” and over the same in the word “the” in the last line that I couldn’t reproduce in Word. It’s a tilde that I’m assuming adds an “n” sound making “englishmen” and “then.” I don’t know that I’ve seen that before.

Back to “Certayne Notes.” What strikes me is that it was the first, 1587, written advice on poetry given in English, and it differs very little on many points from modern tracts on the same.

Gascoigne writes “first the most auncient English words are of one sillable, so that the more monasyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne,” and later “Also as much as may be, eschew straunge words, or objoleta et inufitataI, unlesse the Theame do give just occasion.” Latin’s not an assumed part of education anymore, so it’s probably funnier to me than it would be to Gascoigne’s cohort that he follows “keep it simple” with a second language clarifier.

He’s not far from Wordsworth’s “language near to the language of men,” or Eliot’s “[poetry] cannot afford to lose its contact with the changing language of common intercourse,” or even Pound’s ‘keep it accurate, keep it clear” (though Pound could go off). Good advice is good advice. Nobody likes an Inkehorne.

The whole essay is here, if you like.

For That He Looked Not upon Her

You must not wonder, though you think it strange,
To see me hold my louring head so low,
And that mine eyes take no delight to range
About the gleams which on your face do grow.
The mouse which once hath broken out of trap
Is seldom ’ticèd with the trustless bait,
But lies aloof for fear of more mishap,
And feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit.
The scorchèd fly, which once hath ’scaped the flame,
Will hardly come to play again with fire,
Whereby I learn that grievous is the game
Which follows fancy dazzled by desire:
So that I wink or else hold down my head,
Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred.