I discovered this week's poem in a glorious anthology, Elizabethan Lyrics, edited by Norman Ault in 1925. I'd like to say a bit about the anthology first, because it's such an achievement. Ault's aim was to challenge the conventional claim about Elizabethan poetry that "After Wyatt and Surrey, nothing; then Sidney and the giants." The major figures receive duly generous space, of course, but around them swirls a garland of minor but exquisite works, some by Anon, many by long-forgotten names. And, having mined the printed poetry collections, dramatic works, songbooks and manuscripts of the period, Ault arranges all the poems, as far as possible, in chronological order. This means that the poems of the productive major figures are not clumped in the usual way, but scattered across the volume, allowing individual developments, influences and shifts of fashion to be traced. Ault's cornucopia of an anthology demonstrates that "the giants" were of their time as well as above it; feeding, and fed by, its remarkably fertile soil.
The author of this week's poem, "A Palinode," is represented only by this single composition (dated 1600) – but what a complex and lovely piece it is. Edmund Bolton was born c.1575 and died c.1633. It seems he was an eccentric sort of character: a Catholic, he held a court post under James I, only to fall out of favour on the accession of Charles I and end his days imprisoned for debt.
The palinode is not a strict poetic form: the term simply means a retraction. Bolton, however, raises retraction to an art. His poem is shaped as two sonnets, each rather different in rhyme-scheme, and certainly not straightforward mirror-images of statement and retraction. The sonnets are ingeniously linked by argument and images, the latter arranged in different patterns and symmetries. Bolton might be shaking a kaleidoscope or choreographing a very elaborate minuet.
He begins with some pleasant but fairly conventional imagery. Notice how the key verbs of the first four lines ("wither", "fade", "vanish", "melt") are taken up by the fifth, but set in reverse order, more palindrome than palinode. The sixth line repeats the images of the first four in their original order ("primrose", "sunlit fountains", "bubble", "snow") but the "primrose" now becomes the "rose", the "sunlit fountains" are simply, and rather magically, "the shine." And in line seven we see why. Bolton has evolved a further metaphor: the rose, shine, bubble and snow are now attributes "Of praise, pomp, glory, joy –". If you're feeling faintly dazzled, put on your sunglasses; Bolton hasn't finished. A final melancholy scene reprises the natural emblems, with further beautifully evocative adjectives, and asserts the Biblical lesson. The human treasures we "up-lay" also "wither, vanish, fade, and melt away". Those verbs do not, of course, denote a logical progress, or "vanish" would need to come last. They simply denote various kinds of evanescence.
The second sonnet begins with the four key images, again in reverse order. First, there's the snow, now attached to an expansive conceit that indicts the over-ambitious hills whose nakedness its melting has exposed. The bubble sails away and wreaks havoc – a shipwreck, no less. Perhaps the repetition of the word "dalliance" should alert us to an erotic subtext? At this point, the plot thickens, the wordplay intensifies. The sun has melted the snow, and perhaps we half expect a chain of reactions now, along the lines of "The House that Jack Built." But that's not what happens. The sun restores negative to positive, colours the bubble, makes the primrose grow. Bolton can only be building to another retraction. He is, but he expresses it subtly, concluding his bravura display with a rhetorical question rather than a statement.
The final couplet unites the two quartets of concrete and abstract nouns. Evanescence wins, but evanescence itself is temporary. Flowers fade, but grow again, and so on. Bolton's "A Palinode" reminds me of Louis MacNeice's "Snow" (it's possible, of course, that MacNeice knew the Palinode, and sourced his snow and roses there). Bolton, too, sets disparate images together and somehow suggests that, even if life is mere shine and bubble, there is constant wonder in "the drunkenness of things being various". The poem creates an impression not of pendulum-like assertion and retraction, but of circularity. What goes around comes around, and vice versa. Bolton puts it far more memorably.
As withereth the primrose by the river,
As fadeth summer's sun from gliding fountains,
As vanisheth the light-blown bubble ever,
As melteth snow upon the mossy mountains:
So melts, so vanishes, so fades, so withers
The rose, the shine, the bubble and the snow
Of praise, pomp, glory, joy – which short life gathers –
Fair praise, vain pomp, sweet glory, brittle joy.
The withered primrose by the mourning river,
The faded summer's sun from weeping fountains,
The light-blown bubble, vanishéd for ever,
The molten snow upon the naked mountains,
Are emblems that the treasures we up-lay
Soon wither, vanish, fade and melt away.
For as the snow, whose lawn did overspread
The ambitious hills, which giant-like did threat
To pierce the heaven with their aspiring head,
Naked and bare doth leave their craggy seat;
Whenas the bubble, which did empty fly
The dalliance of the undiscernéd wind,
On whose calm rolling waves it did rely,
Hath shipwreck made, where it did dalliance find;
And when the sunshine, which dissolved the snow,
Coloured the bubble with a pleasant vary,
And made the rathe and timely primrose grow,
Swarth clouds withdrawn (which longer time do tarry) –
Oh, what is praise, pomp, glory, joy, but so
As shine by fountains, bubbles, flowers or snow?