On Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey

Today we do a quick look at some of the poetry of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who is credited with the development of the English sonnet and of blank verse.  We'll look at "The Night Piece," "Love that Doth Reign," and  “Alas, so all things now do hold their peace."

Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another bonus episode on the Classic English Literature Subcast.  On our last full podcast episode we had a look at Sir Thomas Wyatt, whom some have called the Father of the English Sonnet because he introduced the form from Italy.  Well, it must be said that this is no case of virgin birth or parthenogenesis and, as accepting as we now are of alternative parenting arrangements, I feel it incumbent upon me to let you know that there is another father in the mix, that the sonnet is the privileged scion of a two-parent home and has grown up sturdy and strong.

OK, that got weird.  What I’m saying is that a bloke named Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, has as great a claim to the sobriquet Father of the English Sonnet.  While we’re on it, why are there only fathers in such instances?  We call Chaucer the Father of English Literature and Wyatt the Father of the Sonnet.  But we don’t call Margery Kempe the Mother of English Autobiography.  Or Mary Shelley the Mother of Science Fiction (which she is, by the way).  Lot of cultural anxiety about male potency simmering underneath here . . . .

Anyway, the other Dad, Henry Howard, lived but briefly, executed for treason at the age of 30 in 1547.  But it was bound to happen.  He was a courtier, had been the childhood friend of Henry Fitzroy (the Duke of Richmond and Henry 8’s illegitimate son), and he was cousin to Anne Boleyn.  He had been in chokey a few times for punching another courtier and for wandering about the night streets, breaking windows.  He sounds a bit of a upper-class punk – the kind of arrogant, bullying rich kid who became the antagonist in every second 80s teen movie.  He certainly did not like the great unwashed, clashing with the “new men” of Henry’s court, non-aristos who wielded considerable influence, particularly the very powerful Thomas Cromwell, whom he called a “foul churl.”  History has been clear that people who cross Cromwell seldom thrive.

But in those brief, turbulent decades, HH made an indelible impression on the character of English verse.  He is credited with the development of blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter.  The iambic line which, as we’ve seen, can be a quite supple and natural-feeling meter for English, can nonetheless feel rigid over long poems if rhyme, especially in heroic couplets, features prominently.  Blank verse, by dispensing with the rhyme, retains the lissome rhythm but avoids any predictability.  He used it to great effect in his trans;lations of Virgil’s Aeneid, the great Roman epic.  Here’s a brief passage from Book 4, often called The Night Piece, contrasting the silent night with Dido’s fear that Aeneas will desert her:

It was then night; the sound and quiet sleepHad through the earth the wearied bodies caught;The woods, the raging seas were fallen to rest;When that the stars had half their course declined;The fields whist, beasts, and fowls of divers hue,And what so that in the broad lakes remained,Or yet among the bushy thicks of brier,Laid down to sleep by silence of the night'Gan swage their cares, mindless of travails past.
You can sense the structured rhythm of the passage but at no time does it feel rote and monotonous.  It feels like elevated prose.  This elasticity will open English to some of its greatest achievements.  The Elizabethan dramatists, most famously Marlowe and of course Shakespeare, composed their plays in blank verse.  In the century following, John Milton renders perhaps the greatest English epic, Paradise Lost, in this mighty meter.  So I think we all owe Henry Howard a thank you.
Especially since he gets little credit for his other contribution to poetry: the Shakespearean sonnet.  Yeah, Surrey develops the pattern and then Shakespeare gets his name on it.  Basically, Surrey takes Wyatt’s version of Petrarch’s version, breaks the octave sestet scheme into three quatrains (rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF) and then a final heroic couplet (GG).  This expands the rhyme pool to seven sounds, so there’s greater flexibility.  As I said, though, Shakespeare takes this structure and just writes some of the world’s greatest poetry and so poor Surrey suffers the curse of the very talented who compare unfavorably to genius.
But very talented still deserves attention.  Here’s one of Surrey’s better known sonnets, adapted from Petrarch’s Sonnet 109 or 140 (depending on who’s doing the counting). It’s called “Love that doth Reign”:
Love that doth reign and live within my thoughtAnd built his seat within my captive breast,Clad in arms wherein with me he fought,Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.But she that taught me love and suffer pain,My doubtful hope and eke my hot desireWith shamefaced look to shadow and refrain,Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.And coward Love, then, to the heart apaceTaketh his flight, where he doth lurk and 'plain,His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain,Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove,--Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.
Oh, oh, oh, sir! Sir!Yes, imaginary enthusiastic and polite pupil?The poem doesn’t rhyme the way you said, sir.No?No, sir.  The first two quatrains rhyme like you said, sir, but the third quatrain reverts to the C rhyme instead of introducing an F rhyme, sir.  So the couplet rhymes FF, sir, with no G.Very well spotted, imaginary enthusiastic and polite pupil.
And that is exactly how all my classes always go.  Slice of life.
Anyway, the first quatrain introduces the conceit of a personified love in the role of a knightly champion or conqueror.  Note the military diction: reign, seat, captive, arms, fought, and banner.  Sir Love has subdued the speaker, made him a vassal.
The second quatrain switches our attention to the speaker’s beloved, a woman impatient with the romantic sighs and gallant gestures of her wooer.  She rejects his displays of love and becomes angry.  She has bested Sir Love.
Quatrain three remarks upon Love’s cowardice as he retreats, “his purpose lost.”  But the speaker, the victim of this battle, remains loyal to his master, though he suffers for Sir Love’s disgrace.  Then we get the volta – “yet” – always handy when the poet signposts the shift for you: “Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove,-- / Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.”  The speaker keeps his fidelity to Love because it is sweet to die for it: dulce et decorum est.
If you note the rhymes that get repeated – the reintroduction of the C rhyme in the third quatrain – you see that line 12 repeats line 5: the word is pain, crucial for the poem’s meaning.  Line 10 “plain” is a diminution of the word “complain” and rhymes with line 7’s “refrain” – a word that, as a verb, means both “holding back” or “preventing oneself.  makes sense.  But if we allow ourselves to think of it as a noun, it means a line of phrase repeated at intervals.  So, maybe the sound of the rhymes themselves are a kind of refrain.
Hmmm . . . . I was about to tee up another one of Surrey’s sonnets, and as I read this one over, I notice that it, too, doesn’t really follow the standard format I indicated above.  So, I guess you’ll just have to trust me that Surrey developed what became the Shakespearean sonnet even though the two examples I’ve selected vary that format.  See if you can spot the variation in “Alas, so all things now do hold their peace!”
    Alas, so all things now do hold their peace!Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing;The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease,   The nightès car the stars about doth bring;Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less:   So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring,Bringing before my face the great increase   Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing,In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case.   For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:But by and by, the cause of my disease   Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,When that I think what grief it is againTo live and lack the thing should rid my pain.   
Oh, sir! Sir!Yes, imaginary enthusiastic and polite pupil?The odd numbered rhymes in the quatrains are all A rhymes, if we allow for slant rhymes. And all the even lines are B rhymes.I am very impressed, imaginary enthusiastic and polite pupil.
This sonnet is actually a reworking of Petrach’s reworking of the passage from Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid – The Night Piece – that we read earlier.  It concerns a speaker yearning for something that upsets his traquility, a tranquility he notes in all the world around him.  The poem frequently makes use of Petrachan contrasts: joy and woe, pleasures and pangs, and so on.  But its rhyme pattern is not its only weirdness.  The first quatrain notes the peacefulness of the world and all its animals and includes a rather strange two-syllable pronunciation of the possessive “nights” as “night-es.”  Necessary for the iambic, don’t you know.
That notion continues in line 5, but at the end of that line we get something of a volta, weird in the middle of a quatrain.  The line ends with a colon, indicating a subordinate clause to follow, and that is “So am not I,” contrasting the speaker’s turbulent emotional state with nature’s placidity.  And we get another pseudo-volta at line 10.  Same punctuation introducing a similar contrast.
So, what can we make of this?  Well, allow me to propose that the ABAB structure for the quatrains provides something of an ambiguous stability, a kind of stasis.  Which nicely underlines the idea of “holding peace” brought up in the first line.  But the ambiguity arises because the A rhymes are indeed often slanted, so there is always the possibility of things being “disturb-ed.”  Such “disturb-edness” is evident in the oddly placed pseudo-voltas.  Why?  Well, the noun in the last line I find rather curious.  The speaker laments living and lacking “the thing should rid my pain.”  Why “thing”?  Why such a vague word?  You could easily plug “love” in there (and it seems like that’s what he’s pining over).  He does personify love in line 6 as his tormentor. But Surrey doesn’t repeat “love” in the last line.  He chooses “thing.”  So what thing?  Actually, it’s a repetition from line 2, how no thing disturbs heaven and earth.  I don’t really know why Surrey uses this word – I would only be speculating – unless the speaker himself is not sure what he lacks, what troubles him.  Some kind of free-floating anxiety?  Answers on the back of a $20 bill.
So there you have it, sonnet fans.  A quick look at one of the form’s early architects.  Just wanted to give him some respect.
Next time, we’ll give poetry a rest and dip into a prose allegory by one of the most influential men of the Tudor period.  Stay tuned.  Thanks for listening!