Literary and visual Ralegh

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Raleigh in ruins, Raleigh on the rocks

Sir Wa’ter’s two Books of Mutabilitie and their subject’s allegorical presence in select Spenserean narratives and complaints

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James Nohrnberg

All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me.

Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends;…

Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book!

(AV Job 19:18–19, 23)

‘The end of the bookes … entreatinge of Sorrow’

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… changes and armies of sorowes are against me.

(Job 10:17, Geneva Bible)

John Stuart Mill said poetry was not, properly speaking, heard, but rather overheard, and, if ever a poem was meant to be overheard, it is the complaint of the distraught Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Ocean to Cynthia.³ But we are free to doubt that the ‘Cynthia’ who was meant to overhear it – Raleigh’s sovereign, Queen Elizabeth – would have ever lent it that ear for which it seems so palpably and unavailingly designed. The poem, as we will describe it, with its ‘tale that Sorrow bydds thee tell’ (OC 214), quite eludes Mill’s antithesis between poetry, oriented on its own consciousness, and eloquence, oriented upon another’s.⁴ Indeed, some part of Raleigh’s despairing soliloquy was auditioned by the Queen’s poet Spenser, who three times refers to his acquaintance with a major piece by Raleigh featuring ‘Cynthia’, even if actually hearing some part of that alleged magnum opus may have put Raleigh’s protégé to sleep: the Cynthia cited in Spenser’s proem to Book III of The Faerie Queene was apparently a potent soporific. And yet Raleigh himself seems to say the poem we actually have was strong stuff – it was virtually inspired, it being the product of a ‘furious madness’ that, of itself, ‘[w]rote what it would’ (OC 143–6).⁵ But such a claim is artful, and must needs dissimulate – or else betray – a piece frequently eavesdropping on its own manifestly rhetorical contrivance.

In The Ocean to Cynthia the miserable poet’s representation of himself in prison and in disgrace – in the soup, so to speak – inevitably shades into his pitiable and pathetic self-advocacy. Mill asks, extending his remarks to music, and in regard to Mozart, ‘Who can imagine Dove sono heard? We imagine it overheard’:

Purely pathetic music commonly partakes of soliloquy. The soul is absorbed in its distress, and though there may be bystanders, it is not thinking of them. When the mind is looking within, and not without, its state does not often or rapidly vary; and hence the even, uninterrupted flow, approaching almost to a monotony, which a good reader, or a good singer, will give to words or music of a pensive or melancholy cast. But grief taking the form of a prayer, or of a complaint, becomes oratorical; no longer low, and even, and subdued, it assumes a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning accent; instead of a few slow equal notes, following one after another at regular intervals, it crowds note upon note, and often assumes a hurry and bustle like joy.⁶

A sincere mind does not revel in grief, but bows speechless beneath it. And although Raleigh’s speaker claims it has been a great labour to prevent himself from expressing his passion for the royal vestal, it might appear from his excessive protestation that it was, instead, a great labour to make her believe the lie that he was deeply in love with her.⁷ He may well appear to be one of those oratorical ‘attitudinizers’ Mill discovers, ‘almost to a man’, among the heads of the largely historical subjects of French painting.⁸ But while Raleigh struck his rhetorical pose at court, his desire had cried, give me some food, and, in lieu of Elizabeth Tudor, her attendant Elizabeth Throckmorton had decisively obliged, and answered importunity ‘switter swatter’.⁹

Raleigh’s poem could warn a reader that there are no True Confessions, only false ones. Former joys, attentions, favours, and deserts are strongly alleged, and form a constant refrain: how could the Queen’s subject – and therefore the Queen herself – deny or repudiate them? For just as Raleigh had fondly dreamt Elizabeth’s constancy would prolong her devotion to her let’s-pretend suitor, so thereafter he vainly hoped her former charities might cover all his sins against propriety: her sense of honour, and his faith, might save him, rather than damn him. But if what Raleigh wants is a suspended sentence, while having no one but himself for an advocate, then the abject suitor has a fool for a lawyer – and a pathetic whine for his chief lobbyist. The rhetoric for the loss of esteem he once so manifestly enjoyed draws a reader into the vicious circle traced by the round-and-round of an aggrieved ego that cannot stop encountering and re-encountering its own offence, the scarcely nameable point of impasse on the broken record where his recital turns into a stutter – one that is as repetitious as it is verbose.

In his Legend of Friendship, Raleigh’s friend Spenser supplies the bereft Timias, a counter for Raleigh, with a more effective advocate, a peacemaking dove that acts the ambassadorial go-between for whose office Raleigh’s poem seems itself to have been quite incompetent.¹⁰ Indeed, confronted by the evidence of Raleigh’s unremitting self-advertisement throughout his adventurous life, A. L. Rowse reluctantly concludes ‘that underneath the glitter and the excitement, he was a bore about himself’.¹¹ Moreover, the poet’s abjection in his poem likewise suggests that he could be an enterprising operator – but not, to judge by the poem itself, an imperceptible and discreet one.

Among the many scenes offered in Spenser’s comparably autobiographical poem, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, is the early one of Raleigh reading from his ‘lamentable lay’ (164), and among the many other relevant matters in Spenser’s piece elsewhere there is the depiction of Raleigh’s proficiency as a river-like infiltrator of the taboo territory of the Queen’s Ladies in Waiting, along with the compliment to Raleigh as a sea-captain or navigator in the person of Colin’s guide and fellow-traveller to the English court – the trans-Atlantic explorer is celebrated as the Shepherd of the Ocean. Raleigh’s own poem, with its title referring to this identity as a mariner, is apparently the piece alleged as exchanged with Spenser in advance of the poet’s visit with Raleigh to the English court, in order to present his 1590 Faerie Queene to her majesty; but Raleigh’s poem asks, in so many perplexed words, ‘whether the goddess who ruled the waves could ever absolve the privateer who had boarded Elizabeth Throckmorton’ – somewhat after (c. 1592).¹²

Raleigh’s verses are the abject poetical confession of the distraught courtier’s confusion and despair over his – Sir Wa’ter’s – precipitous descent from royal favour into the muddy mess of political and sexual disgrace: ‘[F]loods of sorrow and whole seas of woe / The banks of all my hope did overbear, / / And drowned my mind in depths of misery’ (OC 140–2), complains the speaker-writer. As for the alienated mistress named Cynthia in the title, in the words of Natale Conti, ‘Euripides thought that Diana and the Moon were one and the same …. Callimachus therefore claimed that Diana had the skill to inflict very dark catastrophes on anyone she wanted, as these verses testify: Froward men, on whom thou wilt impress thy grievous wrath… their tilth feeds frost […] and their wives either are smitten or die in childbirth (Dian. 124–27). For the power to do all of these things was regarded as the special province of the Moon’.¹³ In Raleigh’s poem the lunar goddess has become one particular mortal’s natural disaster.

The theme of Raleigh’s poem is a mutability that is political: i.e., the precariousness of the ageing courtier’s estate, as revealed by his fall from eminence and the loss of his privileged position in court. His good fortune could not endure, nothing like that joy can last, all good things must come to an end. For an experienced person to suppose otherwise is unreasonable, and the memory of the disgraced one’s former place in the sun is hardly a consolation. The levée is down, everything in a patron-client relation so carefully built up is destroyed and desolated (OC 221–36). But at the same time the mutability in question is also natural, and thus one with the material imagery expressing it. Raleigh is thus forced to ask what kind of stuff he’s really made of.

Raleigh’s allegorical stand-in the narrative of The Faerie Queene after Books I and II, where Arthur’s squire is not named, is the aforementioned Timias. In Book IV Spenser describes Belphoebe’s rustication and mortification of the rejected courtier as penitential: ‘No other drinke here did he [Timias] euer tast, / Then running water, tempred with his teares’ (FQ IV.vii.41). The ascetic is here identifiable with the same exact Sir Walter who poured out his sorrows in The Ocean to Cynthia. The mutable element of water, from which came Sir Wa’ter’s nickname at court, ruefully appears in all of its forms and variety within his poem, pouring down, welling up, drying out, going vapourously away. Whether actually pirating or merely trading on ‘The Admiral of the Ocean Sea’, Columbus’s inalienable title, in calling himself Ocean Raleigh also burdens this quasi-allegorical nom de plume with reflections like Augustine’s on matter itself, in the Confessions:

For myself, Lord, if I am to confess to you with my mouth and my pen everything you have taught me about this question of matter, the truth is that earlier in life I heard the word but did not understand it, and those who spoke to me about it did not understand it either. I used to think of it as having countless and varied shapes, and there I was not thinking about matter at all. My mind envisaged foul and horrible forms nevertheless. I used to use the word formless not for that which lacked form but for that which had a form such that, if it had appeared, my mind would have experienced revulsion from its extraordinary and bizarre shape, and my human weakness would have been plunged into confusion. … [T]he mutability of changeable things is itself capable of receiving all forms into which mutable things can be changed. But what is this mutabililty? Surely not mind? Surely not body? Surely not the appearances of mind and body? If one could speak of ‘a nothing something’ or ‘a being which is non-being’, that is what I would say.¹⁴

The relative formlessness of Raleigh’s confessional poem, paradoxically, is an essential of its form – its water-like, or Walter-like, changeability.

At least once in Raleigh’s prolonged yet plotless debate with his fate the aggrieved party seems to say that Elizabeth’s or Cynthia’s own high noon is also over, and that it is mainly the force of her devotee’s imagination and memory that is now keeping her bright (OC 104–17). Comparably, the mortal moon of Edmund Spenser’s Two Cantos of Mutabilitie suffers eclipse in the shadow of the Titaness of Change. In Spenser’s subplot Raleigh-as-Molanna, disgraced by the Queen-as-Cynthia, forms a mirrorlike parallel with Spenser-as-Faunus scapegoated by the same unapproachable goddess who is otherwise so much the object of the author of The Faerie Queene’s worship and purposes. The Mutabilitie Cantos, we are told, might logically have found their place in a Legend of Constancy. It seems possible that the piece’s editorial apparatus was ghost-written by Spenser himself. Elizabeth had made her constancy legendary in her motto semper eadem, ‘always the same’. The words ‘to live with eternitie of her fame’ (along with ‘and of Virginia’ – Raleigh’s Virginia) were added to Spenser’s Dedication of his magnum opus in 1596, at the front (when the Letter to Raleigh was subtracted, from the back). The word Eternitie appears in the last two, supplemental stanzas to the Two Cantos, thus book-ending the whole 1612 Works version of The Faerie Queene with both this key word and Elizabeth’s own name – as finally encrypted in ‘Sabbaoth God’. For Time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop – or Sabbath – and so must the Queen’s own earthly life.

Raleigh’s Ocean to Cynthia also works the changes on the conceit of Elizabeth’s stedfastness and sempiternity:

A beauty that can easily deceive

Th’arrest of years, and creeping age outclimb,

A spring of beauties which time ripeth not,

Time that but works on frail mortality, …

A vestal fire that burns but never wasteth,

The loseth nought by giving light to all,

That endless shines each where, and endless lasteth, …

Blossoms … that can nor [f]ade nor fall.

(OC 183–92)¹⁵

Ostensibly compliments, these lines might also be read subversively, as a slightly menacing warning about a mere mortal’s self-deceiving pretentions to immortality. The moon may prove, so to speak, sublunary. Things – given whatsoever they may have been and yet may be – change.

The form of The Ocean to Cynthia is technically a fraction, if practically a fragment. Its putative enumeration may make it the eleventh and unfinished twelfth book of an otherwise mainly unwritten poem, as Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos are the putative sixth and seventh cantos of an otherwise unwritten book of twelve cantos.¹⁶ That underrepresented book would have also been part of a further instalment of a projected twelve book poem. Raleigh says he has wasted twelve years waging war for the Queen (OC 120–1), and so it is logical to suppose that each book of his projected poem would have corresponded to one of those glorious years, and that the eleventh book records the poet’s eleventh-hour crisis. The twelfth book would have celebrated his and the Queen’s reconciliation, just as Spenser’s twelfth book would have celebrated the virtual marriage of Arthur and Gloriana.

In both the case of Spenser’s poem and Raleigh’s we are not talking about the work we have got, of course, yet a work that we nonetheless seem invited to construct, or discern on the receding horizon of the poet’s unfulfilled yet plausible intentions. A twelve-book poem would have some claims to being an epic, but the poem we possess is a protracted lyric complaint, of the epyllion kind, featuring a lover alone with his mental image of a remote and impossible she, and compelled by ‘Such heat in ice, such fire in frost’ (69) as remain in the typical Petrarchan mistress’s physical absence. Although the book we have is not a group of such poems, its last fourteen lines are a valedictory readily isolated as a terminal sonnet for a series.

But otherwise the sheer mindless iteration of the waves of the Atlantic seems to have penetrated to Raleigh’s rhetoric – the verses are half-written and twice-written all at once: perpetually undoing their burden by ceaselessly redoing its clinches, less a product (like a sonnet) and more a process (like a catalogue), a monotonous litany of woes that are all the same woe, however variously rehearsed. There is much inspired anaphora –

But in my minde so is her love inclosde

And is thereof not only the beste parte

But into it the essence is disposde …

Oh love (the more my wo) to it thow art

Yeven as the moysture in each plant that growes,

Yeven as the soonn vnto the frosen grovnd,

Yeven as the sweetness, to th’ incarnate rose,

Yeven as the Centre in each perfait rovnde,

As water to the fyshe, to men as ayre,

As heat to fier, as light vnto the soone.

(OC 426–35)¹⁷

– but the result is self-reproducing in a way that can easily seem tedious and automatic. The complainer’s self-immersion is so self-destructive that he is virtually drowning himself within himself – or swamping his case within his copious vein of self-pity. Perhaps there is a precedent in the length of Job’s complaint – or in its criminal’s indictment: ‘He is swift as the waters … Drought and heat consume the snow waters: so doth the grave those which have sinned’ (AV 24:18–19).

An ocean never drowns itself, of course. But much churning does not necessarily yield sweet butter – as opposed to a salty froth. Passionately spinning various rhetorical wheels, Raleigh’s plaint is not apparently getting anywhere – and has little prospect of doing so beyond its present limits. And yet the poem’s canvas of Raleigh’s life goes so far as to prescribe (accurately enough) his future retirement package: ‘Wee should beginn by such a parting light / To write the story of all ages past / And end the same before th’ aprochinge night’ (101–2). In prison during most of his life in the reign of James I – for twelve years – Raleigh took at least half his own earlier advice, and wrote the pentateuch of his unfinished History of the World, a book immensely popular for many decades after its author’s beheading. Fear of hanging may have concentrated his mind in good ways – the book – but also bad: the Guiana project.

But what hidden merits in The Eleventh Book of the Ocean to Cynthia caused the Oxford editor Professor Emrys Jones to give nearly the largest single space in his anthology of the period’s English verse to the whole text of a piece both so manifestly unfinished and so unincrementally redundant? Jones might invoke the golden opinion of C. S. Lewis that the silver poetry of Raleigh’s composition achieves greatness without polish, and that its eloquence of expression transcends the unrelieved drabness of the speaker’s subject and his unrelieved fixation on a subject’s misery.¹⁸ The poem offers prolific variations on a single morose but virtuoso string, and presumably Professor Jones put in all of its so-called Book Eleven in The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse because it was all or nothing – the anthologist was confronted with a piece quite undifferentiated and unsegmented beyond its quatrains (with a few triads and quinzains). The accumulation of stanzas does not really amount to a torso of a poem, only an invertebrate pile, with water and aridity, deluge and dessication, on every page. Having nowhere to go, the poem keeps starting over, rebeginning its search for a non-existent exit from its maudlin premise: an apparent denial but real conviction that endlessly crying over spilt milk can do the disgraced devotee some kind of good. But ‘To taste the sea’, it is said, ‘all you need is one