'Reader! Then Make Time, While You Be'

Some years ago I befriended an Irish-born mechanical engineer. Michael was unusual among members of his profession in that he was well-read (in English and Irish) and could write. Two of his plays were produced and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Michael died in 2016. I attended the memorial service held in a chapel on campus. On the program were printed Romans 12:12, a stanza from Dickinson and Fulke Greville’s Caelica LXXXII:

“You that seek what life is in death,

Now find it air that once was breath.

New names unknown, old names gone:

Till time end bodies, but souls none.

            Reader! then make time, while you be,

            But steps to your eternity.”

I was thrilled and disappointed. I had no idea Michael would have known the poems of the 1st Baron Brooke, and I wished we could have talked about them. Few readers know his work or pay it much mind if they do. Shakespeare’s contemporary might have remained even more anonymous but for the championing of Yvor Winters and his student, Thom Gunn. Greville’s early poems are addressed to Caelica (celestial one), as his friend Sir Philip Sidney addressed his sonnet sequence to Stella (star).  Here is one of the sonnets Greville included in the sequence, Caelica C:

“In night when colours all to black are cast,

Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

The eye a watch to inward senses plac’d,

Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,

“Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

Where fear stirr’d up with witty tyranny,

Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence

Doth forge and raise impossibility;

“Such as in thick-depriving darkness

Proper reflections of the error be;

And images of self-confusedness,

Which hurt imaginations only see,

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils;

Which but expressions be of inward evils.”

The sensibility at work here is distinctly modern, and “witty tyranny” is very witty. We are the self-deluding species. Greville was born on Oct. 3, 1554, and died on this date, Sept. 30, in 1628. Greville was stabbed by his servant, Ralph Haywood, who turned the knife on himself. Haywood believed Greville had cheated him out of a bequest in his will. The poet suffered for a month before dying.