Poems by Sir Walter Ralegh

First published: 1813, as The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh Now First Collected, with a Biographical and Critical Introduction

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Sir Walter Ralegh, like so many other Renaissance courtiers, considered the writing of poetry one of the polite arts, to be practiced in one’s leisure moments for the pleasure of friends. In his busy political, military, and adventuring career, his poetic efforts apparently carried little weight, and he never seems to have encouraged their publication, although he was much interested in presenting to the public his History of the World (1614) and his treatises on his expeditions to the new world. As a result of this carelessness, on his part and on the part of publishers who did publish his work and who sometimes published work that was not his under his name, over the years countless verses have been attributed to him, and no one can be sure how many of them he actually wrote. The small body of work that is unquestionably his, however, shows him to be a poet of high ability.

Ralegh was perhaps second only to Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney as poets in the court of Elizabeth I. He shunned the opulence of the typical poetry of his time for a sparse, dignified style that has many echoes of his predecessors, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey. The melancholy quality that pervades much of Ralegh’s work is close to that of almost all of Wyatt’s poems and to the last lyrics of Surrey, written while he was in the Tower awaiting trial and execution. Ralegh himself spent more than ten years in the Tower, hoping against hope for release, and a sense of the constant closeness of death runs through his later work. Life is precarious, “beauty, fleeting,” and death near at hand for all. Ralegh’s answer to Christopher Marlowe’s famous pastoral lyric “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” (1600) is filled with this sense of the transience of all things:

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,And Philomel becometh dumb;The rest complains of cares to come.The flowers do fade, and wanton fieldsTo wayward winter reckoning yields;A honey tongue, a heart of gall,Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

Ralegh protests against the actions of time in another lyric, “Nature that washt her hands in milke,” in which he describes the creation of the perfect woman by Nature, at the request of Love. This paragon no sooner exists than Time, “being made of steel and rust,/ Turns snow, and silk and milk to dust.” The final stanza is the eternal human lament:

Oh, cruel time! Which takes in trustOur youth, our joys and all we have,And pays us but with age and dust,Who in the dark and silent graveWhen we have wandered all our waysShuts up the story of our days.

While Wyatt’s laments are most often those of the Petrarchan lover, scorned by the lady to whom he offers devotion, Ralegh’s melancholy seems to derive from a more general vision of the human condition. Even in those sonnets in which he takes the conventional stance of the rejected lover, he seems conscious of a larger world. One of these concludes, “And at my gate despair shall linger still,/ To let in death when love and fortune will.”

Ralegh’s sense of the destructive powers of time has particular force in his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, an excellent poem in which the writer pays tribute to a fellow courtier-soldier-poet. There is in the “Epitaph” a touch of envy of Sidney, who died with an unblemished reputation and was freed from the threats of time and evil men:

What hath he lost, that such great grace hath won?Young years for endless years, and hope unsure,Of fortune’s gifts, for wealth that still shall dure,Oh, happy race, with so great praises run!

Like many other writers of his century, Ralegh uses his poetry to chastise the court for its hypocrisy, its vice, and its folly. Few men, indeed, suffered more from the false appearances of monarchs and their ministers. The brief stanzas of “The Lie” move over the whole spectrum of society:

Say to the court it glows,And shines like rotten wood;Say to the church, it showsWhat’s good, and doth no good:If church and court reply,Then give them both the lie.

The tone of Ralegh’s poetry is not unmitigated gloom; few men were more vibrantly alive than this courtier-adventurer, and he could compose sprightly, witty lyrics with the best of his contemporaries, following out a pseudological argument in the manner of John Donne, singing lyrically about the beauty of the moon or defining love in the ordinary vocabulary of his day:

Yet what is love? I pray thee sain.It is a sunshine mixed with rain;It is a tooth-ache, or like pain;It is a game where none doth gain;The lass saith no, and would full fain:And this is Love, as I hear sain.

There is much of the medieval heritage in Ralegh’s work. Folk wisdom, proverbs, and the haunting quality of many of the early ballads lurk under the surface of several of his poems, notably one addressed to his son. The poem begins quietly and continues in a matter-of-fact way that reinforces its horror. Three things, “the wood, the weed, and the wag,” prosper separately, but, together they bring destruction:

The wood is that, that makes the gallows tree,The weed is that, that strings the hangman’s bag;The wag, my pretty knave betokens thee.Now mark, dear boy: while these assemble not,Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild;But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

Medieval in a different sense is one of Ralegh’s last and best poems, “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage.” Its Christian allegory is that of a traveler’s journey to salvation:

Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,My staff of faith to walk upon,My scrip of joy, immortal diet,My bottle of salvation,My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

Ralegh’s irregular metrical pattern is admirably suited to his subject; the simplicity of his acceptance of redemption in the second section is mirrored in the short rhymed lines, the clarity of the language, and the images of silver, nectar, milk, and crystal. The fourth section, with its theme of judgment, is harsher in both rhythm and vocabulary, as Ralegh speaks of Christ as the advocate, pleading the cause of sinful man in a court where bribery and forgery have no place, a compelling allusion to the trial in which Sir Edward Coke, not Christ, was the King’s Counsel, and the verdict was, in the minds of most, a travesty of justice. The concluding stanza has a macabre quality. Ralegh is said to have written these last lines on the night before his execution: “Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread/ Set on my soul an everlasting head./ Then am I ready like a palmer fit,/ To tread those blest paths which before I writ.”

Ralegh’s longest extant poem is a fragment of a still more extensive work called “Ocean’s Love to Cynthia.” The original version, so far as scholars have been able to deduce, was addressed to Queen Elizabeth about 1587, when Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, seemed to be replacing Ralegh in her esteem. In its first form the poem evidently served its purpose, for Ralegh was reinstated in Her Majesty’s favor until his indiscreet affair and hasty marriage with one of her maids of honor in 1592. It has been suggested that the surviving fragment of the poem was written from the Tower, where Ralegh had been imprisoned with his bride, in an attempt to mollify Elizabeth’s resentment.

The quatrains of the extant text are presented as the outpourings of a disillusioned lover of the queen. There is no real narrative link; the whole poem is essentially the exposition of a state of mind. It is written in four-line stanzas with alternate rhymes, a compact form that lends itself to the development of a slightly different point in each quatrain. The extant manuscript is evidently an unfinished version of the poem, for occasionally Ralegh left two, three, or five lines as a separate unit to be revised later. However, even if the poem as it exists is unfinished, it demonstrates forcefully Ralegh’s power to convey his deep and intense disillusionment. Toward the end of the fragment the poet, speaking as a shepherd, ponders the paradox of his state of mind. His mistress may treat him well or ill, but she is with him forever: “She is gone, she is lost, she is found, she is ever fair.” He can only take life as it comes, let his flocks wander at will, and live with his despair: “Thus home I draw, as death’s long night draws on;/ Yet every foot, old thoughts turn back mine eyes;/ Constraint me guides as old age draws a stone/ Against the hill, which over-weighty lies.” He must, in the last analysis, trust in the mercies of God.

Ralegh never entirely fulfilled his promise as a poet. His intense interest in colonizing projects, his career at court, and his later political misfortunes probably combined to prevent his devoting his energies to poetry, and his gigantic project, the history of the world, left far from complete at his death, occupied his last years in the Tower. The works he did leave, however, are among the best of the Elizabethan age. The virtues of his poems are their quiet strength and the melancholy tone that was the almost inevitable result of his skeptical, inquiring mind.

Bibliography

Bates, Catherine. Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Analyzes the depiction of masculine identity in works by Ralegh and other English Renaissance poets. Argues that these poets create alternative models of masculinity, often portraying men as broken and abject instead of as powerful and in control.

Hammond, Gerald, ed. Introduction to Selected Writings, by Sir Walter Ralegh. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1984. Hammond’s introduction to this collection gives substantial attention to Ralegh’s poetry, addressing its themes and styles as well as the influence of others on Ralegh’s work.

May, Steven W. The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Includes a discussion of Ralegh’s career. Examines Ralegh’s genres and looks closely at the relationship between Ralegh’s poetry and his position as courtier to Elizabeth I

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sir Walter Ralegh. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Provides a solid general introduction to the life and the major works of the writer.

Oram, William A. “Raleigh, the Queen, and Elizabethan Court Poetry.” In Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, edited by Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. An analysis of Ralegh’s poetry in the context of his relationship with Elizabeth I and the court politics of his day.

Trevelyan, Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Exhaustive biography written by a direct descendant of Ralegh. Draws from Ralegh’s poems and prose to recount his life.

Ure, Peter. “The Poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh.” In Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays, edited by J. C. Maxwell. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 1974. Ure examines Ralegh’s friendship with Edmund Spenser and its effects on Ralegh’s poetry. Notes particularly the dark quality of Ralegh’s writing from the Jacobean period.