This week I’ve been haunted by a ghost poem.
I found it in a little, undated pamphlet, Michael Drayton: Elizabethan Poet, by John Sherwood. Once the property of Great Yarmouth Public Libraries Reference Department, it has long been stamped WITHDRAWN.
The first part of the pamphlet is a memoir of Sherwood’s own childhood in Drayton’s Warwickshire (at the time of writing he had tried ‘without success, to form a Michael Drayton Society’). The second part offer a brief life of Drayton (1563—1631) and an even briefer selection of his verse.
It was here I met the ghost:
It’s a very pretty lyric, fine as its own ‘cobweb lawn’, lightly evocative of high summer — and for an Elizabethan poet, disturbingly without motive: no myth or allegory, no elaborate argument, no Petrarchan scenario. Its idle delight in the day itself is more reminiscent of a Romantic sigh for Nature, such as Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied II’.
Googling like a good scholar, I discovered that its slightness was not entirely intentional. According to the online text of William Stanley Braithwaite’s Book of Elizabethan Verse (1907), there were two more stanzas:
This felt more like it: perhaps there was even a suggestion here of the court of Queen Elizabeth herself, where decorous flower-girls admire each other in ‘the subtle air’? The last quatrain’s suggestion that ‘sovereignty’ might receive ‘too large a share’ had something of a witty, riddling quality to it too — was Drayton comparing the sweet breeze of a summer’s day to a monarch’s munificence?
Maybe: but I soon discovered that The Book of Elizabethan Verse was also playing me false. The poem features in numerous nineteenth and twentieth century anthologies under various editorial titles (‘A Fine Day’, ‘A Clear Day’, ‘Summer’s Eve’). But it is in fact the first twenty lines of a much longer poem, ‘The Sixth Nymphal’, from Drayton’s last pastoral work The Muses Elizium (1630), which was published one year before his death (and 27 years after the death of Elizabeth I).
Who was the first to hear and frame these lines as a little poem in themselves? It’s not clear, although one early version, titled ‘Stanzas’, appeared in The Kaleidoscope, a literary and scientific miscellany from 1827. A century later, Walter de la Mare included the three-stanza version in his Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages (1923). Later still, it was set to music, alongside de la Mare’s own poems, by the composer Doreen Carwithen.
So it is a poem that died as a dusty Elizabethan pastoral and returned from the grave as a delicate Romantic fragment. And it is this amorphousness of a poem’s meaning through time that has haunted me.
I picked up John Sherwood’s home-made Drayton pamphlet on Sunday evening, shortly after hearing the news that the COP26 summit had ended with a change of wording on coal: from ‘phase out’ to ‘phase down’.
Sherwood’s childhood memoir looks back ambivalently on life in a Warwickshire coal mining village a hundred years ago, recalling lack of food and fuel (families would dig in the fields for stray coal), while praising the ‘courage and grit of our miners’, which will last ‘so long as men continue to go down into the earth in search of coal’.
But how much longer will that be? And when they stop, will the kind of summer day caught in the crystal of Drayton’s clipped-out verses also be a memory?