William Shakespeare's 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow'

Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28

Why Shakespeare? It’s a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the plays contain passages like this where you can enjoy the way a few words can be made to do a great deal of work.

Words associated with time, mortality, the stage, images of transience and futility, all coalesce in that last magnificent sentence to present one of the most nihilistic views of life in English.

Life is brief, death is dusty. There is no afterlife, no possible redemption. If there is a God overseeing it all, he she or it is an idiot. You live your life as an actor in a play, unable to make your own decisions, a puppet of the script and the director. But you’re not even a  good actor, you’re clumsy, you have a bit part and if life were a film when the credits roll you can only appear as ‘man walking dog across street’, or ‘girl third from right in crowd’. You don’t even have the consolation that you took part in a masterpiece,. You’re trapped in a trivial story,  written by an idiot, and it means nothing.

It's not only nihilistic, it’s also startlingly unchristian,

And then you should remember that this is a speech by a specific character at a specific moment in the play. Macbeth has made bad choices from the start. He is about to be held accountable for them. What better self-defence than to claim he had no choice? The speech may be nihilistic, but the play contradicts everything he says. He’s lying to himself.

Very clever that  Mr. William Shakespeare. Wrote some good lines.

George Herbert's 'The Collar'

George Herbert 1593-1633

Herbert was a priest, and his poetry has been described as ‘some of the most moving devotional poetry in the English Language’. But often, as in this poem, the relationship between priest and god, is strained.

‘The collar’ runs on a series of puns, some depending on spellings and usage which are not longer current, and which may not be evident in a reading. A collar was a yoke, but also a priest’s collar, a sign of service. It’s also a way of being caught, and an aural pun on choler, or anger. A board was a table, but also the altar. Free as the rode is free as the road and free as the rode (the Cross). ‘Still in suit’ puns on both Still and suit…And so on. He was Donne’s contemporary after all.

Of all Herbert’s poems why this one? For very non religious reasons. It reminds of those moments when study becomes onerous; progress isn’t progressing, time and effort seem wasted and the thought of doing anything that will give an immediate return, no matter how trivial, becomes so very attractive.

Having flung the grammars at the wall, and sworn to never open them again, sooner or later the voice is chiding…childe….calling you back to the necessities of discipline.

Herbert has been the subject of a fine biography: Music at Midnight by John Drury. Penguin published his complete English poems. Mark Oakley’s, ‘My Sour Sweet Days, George Herbert and the Journey fo the Soul’ is a gentle thoughtful non-academic introduction.

Ovid's 'Pygmalion' trans Arthur Golding

Arthur Golding (1536-1605)

Publius Ovidius Naso (43 Bc-17/18 AD)

Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ written in Latin in the first decade of the First Century AD, long before England was invented, is ironically one of the key texts in English poetry and Ovid one of its most influential poets. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Metamorphosis after the Middle Ages is Golding’s translation, which influenced so many who read it, including one W. Shakespeare.

The story of Pygmalion lives on in Shaw’s play and the musical version of Shaw’s play, and nothing makes it any less disturbing. It also lives on in ‘The Pygmalion effect’, the idea that high expectations in management or teaching can lead to enhanced results because of the ‘self fulfilling prophecy’.

Whatever the leadership gurus make of it, like most of Ovid’s stories, it’s disturbing. But then you’ve probably met at least one deluded person who recreated a human being as an unrealistic ideal and you might have been unlucky enough to be around to see the damage that caused.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'Whoso List to Hunt'

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

When does English Poetry begin?

You could argue Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest datable poem in Old English. But listen to it on the Poetry Voice: Caedmon’s Hymn isn’t written in English.

You could argue for Chaucer, who is readable with patience by any literate modern English speaker.

Or you could go straight to Wyatt. Who is perhaps the first English poet to sound like a modern poet.

He has been the subject of two superb but very different, and therefore complimentary, biographies recently. And there is or was a fine Penguin collected, which may not do him a great service since wading through the lot will remind you of how utterly conventional so much of the poetry produced at the court was.

The fifteenth century is a dead one for English poetry. So you could argue that poetry that is recognisable to a modern reader, both in form and language, begins after Wyatt and Surrey found their models or excellence in Italy. Wyatt Englished Petrarch. You can see the process by comparing this poem with Petrach’s Sonnet 190 which Wyatt is ‘versioning’, it’s part translation, part adaptation, all new poem. You can compare translations: http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/eng208PetrarchSonnet190.htm

But when you’ve got over the sense of an individual voice speaking directly to you and the striking images, you might want to consider the implications of the metaphor of the hunt as romantic pursuit. Think about what the hunters and their dogs do when they have finally trapped their prey. Welcome to the Renaissance.

George Gascoigne's 'Gascoigne's Lullabie'

George Gascoigne (1535-1578)

I know very little about George Gascoigne, and looking him up on line hasn’t added much to that. But I do like this poem for its combination of weary resignation and sly humour.

And poems like this are the reason why good anthologies are so valuable. I found this one in Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, edited by John Leonard. A lot can be said against anthologies, but a good one, like Seven Centuries, is a great place to start if you’re curious about poetry written in other times or want to read something by famous poet x without wading through x’s complete poems. And in a good anthology, nestled beside famous poet x’s well known poem, will be a poem by someone you’ve never heard of, which you wouldn’t have otherwise found.

Sir Walter Ralegh's 'The Lie'

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

One of those poems that doesn’t date, that stays relevant?

Ralegh or Raleigh, take your pick. The ultimate hyphenated man of the Elizabethan Renaissance. And nowhere does the gap between what the poems claim and what the poet did in his day job seem greater.: this was the man who took part in the massacre at Smerwick. Who set off in tiny ships to sail to America: Flamboyant Courtier, Royal Favourite, Brutal soldier, Poet, Scholar, Patron of poets, falling out of Royal favour with James, and despite his failure to find El Dorado, sailing home knowing home meant execution. Even his death seems emblematic of the end of an age.

‘The Lie’, also called ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s farewell’, ‘The Soul’s errand’ and ‘Satyra volans’ is dated to the 1590s, and circulated in manuscript. Apparently there are replies to it. It’s not the poem Sir Walter wrote in the tower, waiting to have his head removed from his shoulders.

This version is taken from the excellent ‘The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse’ 1509-1659: selected and introduced by David Norbrook and edited by H.R. Woudhuysen (2005) For anyone with any interest in the poetry of this period, the preface and introduction are an education and the selection goes far beyond the usual suspects.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me'

Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503-1542

The First great English poet? The first writer of great English lyric poems?

If you look behind Wyatt, it’s hard to find much that is worth reading between him and Chaucer. Since most modern readers don’t share Chaucer’s assumptions about poetry, Wyatt’s poems do feel like a new start. They are amongst the first English poems that can be read, as poems, by any literate reader for the pleasure they offer.

No matter how conventional or artificial the voice is, reading Wyatt is an encounter with a voice. Reading Wyatt’s collected is a depressing wade through forests of Tudor Pine, but there are gems and this is one of them. The idea that the woman in the second verse is Anne Boleyn is probably a critic’s fantasy.

Recently Wyatt was the subject of two excellent biographies, which complement each other. Nicola Shulman’s ‘Graven with Diamonds’ (2011) is very good on the poems and their place in the Court. Susan Brigden’s ‘Thomas Wyatt, the Heart’s Forest’ (2012) is a fine, detailed scholarly biography.

There will be more Wyatt on The Poetry Voice.

John Donne's 'Song'

John Donne (1572-1631)

 Really John? Not one woman, anywhere?

I think most of Donne’s poems were published posthumously, and it may be that Donne never intended this particular piece to be printed. But it was, and I think it’s a fine example of a writing problem.

It’s easy to imagine someone who is hurt, feeling betrayed, confused and humiliated by someone he or she had trusted.  You wouldn’t expect them to be thinking clearly for a while.  They might say things they’d later regret.

It’s also easy to imagine someone in that situation turning to poetry as a form of catharsis.

But when you’ve expressed your bitterness and confusion, after you lashed out at whoever hurt you, what do you do with the end product?

Show it to a few friends, who understand your situation and sympathize, without taking your exaggerations seriously or as representing what you normally believe?

Show it to the individual who hurt you? As a form of revenge?

Publish it?

The modern fashion for selfie poems would seem to approve the last choice. But once the poem is published and available to strangers, it shifts the way it asks to be read. It goes from being a private, contingent howl, a statement of an emotion the poet should grow out of, to a public statement of considered fact that’s going to be around long after the emotion that inspired it has been reconsidered.

And once published readers have every right to feel that there is something wrong with this poem. The beautiful opening line, the obvious metrical control, the inventive images, the obvious skill of the maker, all seem strange vehicles for such an obviously out of control argument. 

Liam Guilar's 'Lute Recitals'

The Poetry Voice is fifty! And here is something different to celebrate.

This poem was inspired by a contrast; Allan Alexander’s ‘Castles In the Sky’, a Cd that alterted me to the pleasures of the lute, and a bizarre conversation with a lutenist, who derided ‘Castles in the Sky’ for not being ‘Authentic’. Apparently everything has to be ‘authentic’. I started wondering what an authentic Dowland performance would have been like.

The music i’m playing in the background is Allan’s ‘Dance of the Washerwoman’….his guitar arrangement of a Renaissance lute piece.

‘Lute Recitals’ first appeared in the journal 'Southerly' and then in my book, "I'll Howl before you bury me'.

Sam Daniel's from 'To Delia'. The first sonnet.

Samuel Daniel (1562-1619). The first sonnet in the sequence ‘To Delia’.

It’s been estimated that between 1530 and 1650 in Italy, France, Germany and Britain some 3,000 writers produced about 200,000 sonnets. Most of these are conventional and uninteresting. While ‘To Delia’ isn’t equal to the standard set by Sidney, most of the sonnets in it are well-written, intelligent but conventional Tudor Pine: the lover discovers there’s only so many ways in which he can bemoan his lover’s indifference and exhausts them and the reader’s patience.

But I think this first sonnet has one of the best opening images of any sonnet or poem: ‘Unto the boundless ocean of your beauty/runs this poor river…’

Sonnet 1 from Sir Philip Sidney's 'Aristophil and Stella'

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was so many things to his contemporaries. To history he is one of the first major poets of the Tudor ‘Renaissance’. Aristophil and Stella is one of the first sonnet sequences in English, and may well be the best of them.

Despite Sidney’s claims in his Defence that poetry was moral and lead to virtue, Aristophil and Stella is the story of an (?unrequited?) adulterous passion. After Sidney’s early death, Penelope Rich was happy to admit that she was ‘Stella’.

This is the first sonnet of the sequence, with its famous final line.