'Still to Suruiue in My Immortall Song'

Many of the best things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of their disappearance. If fortunate, we learn this lesson early. Their transitoriness becomes part of their charm, whether a cat, a garden or a brother. We are grateful and enjoy them accordingly, knowing they and we will vanish, leaving only, perhaps, memories. Here is a sonnet by Michael Drayton written around 1619: 

“How many paltry, foolish, painted things,

That now in Coaches trouble eu’ry Street,

Shall be forgotten, whom no Poet sings,

Ere they be well wrap’d in their winding Sheet?

Where I to thee Eternitie shall giue,

When nothing else remayneth of these dayes,

And Queenes hereafter shall be glad to liue

Vpon the Almes of thy superfluous prayse;

Virgins and Matrons reading these my Rimes,

Shall be so much delighted with thy story,

That they shall grieve, they liu’d not in these Times,

To haue seene thee, their Sexes onely glory:

So shalt thou flye aboue the vulgar Throng,

Still to suruiue in my immortall Song.”

 

It’s a familiar trope in Horace and in English poetry. Drayton lauds his beloved, assuring her that his words and her memory will last. Other women -- “paltry, foolish, painted things” (I love that phrase) – will not be so honored and immortalized. Often in Drayton’s verse is an awareness of the world’s fleetingness. Things – people, objects, poems – are doomed to oblivion. Memory is a curse and blessing. While seducing his beloved with flattery, he flatters and seduces us, his readers.

 

Drayton’s major work is Poly-Olbion (1612), a poem of almost 15,000 lines written as survey of Great Britain’s geography and history composed in alexandrine couplets. As poetry, it’s often clunky, veering close to prose, but the subtitle suggests both its grandiosity and charm: A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests and other Parts of the Renowned Isle of Greate Britaine with intermixture of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same: Digested in a Poem.

 

Drayton catalogues the birds (“even the echoing Ayre / Seemes all compos’d of sounds.”), flowers, fish and trees of Great Britain, and damns the destruction of the natural world, especially the trees:

 

“Foreseeing, their decay each howre so fast came on,

Under the axes stroak, fetcht many a grievous grone,

When as the anviles weight, and hammers dreadfull sound,

Even rent the hollow Woods, and shook the queachy ground.”

 

Drayton observes that many trees have been cut down and burned to smelt iron:

 

“These yron times breed none, that minde posteritie,

Tis but in vaine to tell, what we before have been,

Or changes of the world, that we in time have seen;

When, not devising how to spend our wealth with waste,

We to the savage swine, let fall our larding mast.

But now, alas, our selves we have not to sustaine,

Nor can our tops suffice to shield our Roots from raine.”

 

Think of it as proto-environmentalism. Drayton was born a year before Shakespeare and died on December 23, 1631 at age sixty-eight.