Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton

First published: 1612, part 1; 1622, part 2

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The complete title of Michael Drayton’s long topographical poem is Poly-Olbion: Or, A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, With intermixture of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same, Digested in a Poem. Quite a bit of digesting is entailed, especially when a title page note continues, “With a Table added, for direction to those occurrences of Story and Antiquitie, whereunto the Course of the Volume easily leades not.” This table is Drayton’s extensive index to the proper names in the poem, and it is printed separately in volume 5 of the standard edition. The poem’s title derives from the Greek poly, meaning “many,” and Albion, a name for England that is related to the Greek word for “happy.”

Drayton’s opus comprises thirty songs—as he calls his poems—eighteen in part 1 and twelve in part 2, each preceded by a summary “argument” of twelve to twenty lines in rhymed iambic tetrameter. Each song celebrates the natural beauties and historic events of a particular region of Great Britain and is accompanied by an impressionistic map of that area. Although songs 22 and 24 go on for 1,638 and 1,320 lines, respectively, most of the songs are between 450 and 500 lines in length; the rhymed Alexandrines, or lines of iambic hexameter, are divided frequently by caesuras and split almost evenly between end-stopped and enjambed. Allusions to British history and classical myth abound, and personification becomes a reliable narrative device, notably in the pretense that it is Drayton’s muse who is speaking. The term “chorography,” which is no longer used, in Drayton’s time commonly specified writings about topography, and several classical models of the genre were available to Drayton. Among many influences on Drayton, the Renaissance historian and antiquarian William Camden organized his Brittania (1596) by counties, as Drayton organizes this work. Part 1 of Poly-Olbion is dedicated to Prince Henry, son of the reigning British monarch, James I.

The frontispiece to Poly-Olbion, an engraving by William Hole, presents an elaborate tangle of allegorical meanings. Great Britain is personified as a woman seated within a triumphal arch. Britain holds in her right hand a scepter that signifies her power, and in her left an overflowing cornucopia symbolizes the richness of her land. The open sea behind Britain teems with ships that suggest the sea power Great Britain enjoyed under Elizabeth I, and indeed it is hard not to see the dead queen in the personified Britain. The soft folds of Britain’s clothing are adorned with the peaks and valleys appropriate to a topographical poem. On the four corners of the arch appear statues of Great Britain’s four conquerors: Brute, or Brutus, the legendary nephew of Aeneas; Julius Caesar; the Saxon Hengist, who conquered the land in 449; and William the Conqueror, who led the Norman triumph at Hastings in 1066, and from whom King James I traced his descent. These figures form a loose historical framework for part 1 of the poem.

Summed up broadly, Drayton’s poem depicts the pre-Anglo Saxon period as the source of Great Britain’s distinctive culture. The Romans and the Saxon hordes of Hengist contributed their own unique elements—for example, the Anglo Saxons brought the Christian influence—but the Normans despoiled the land by oppressing its conquered people. It is significant that, considering that part 1 appeared in the middle of James I’s reign (from 1603 to 1625), Drayton concludes his short poem explicating the frontispiece with these lines: “Divorst from Him [the Roman], the Saxon sable Horse,/ Borne by sterne Hengist, wins her [Britain]: but through force/ Garding the Norman Leopards bath’d in Gules,/ She chang’d hir Love to Him, whose Line yet rules.”

Each song in part 1 is followed by “illustrations,” or several pages of dense notes expanding on the historical backgrounds and meanings of individual lines. The author of these notes was John Selden, a learned scholar and friend of Drayton, who explained his mission as illuminating “What the Verse oft, with allusion, as supposing a full knowing Reader, lets slip; or in winding steps of Personating Fictions (as some times) so infolds, that suddaine conceipt cannot abstract a Forme of the clothed Truth.” The erudition of Selden’s annotations can exhaust the unwary reader, especially one who ventures into the marginal glosses, speckled with Greek and Latin, that offer clarifying refinements on the illustrations themselves.

In the rather peevish “To the General Reader” prefacing part 1, Drayton complains of a “great disadvantage” against him in “this lunatique Age.” He is referring to poems that are “wholly deduc’t to Chambers,” “kept in Cabinets,” and circulated only “by Transcription.” He inveighs against coterie poetry, the property of small elitist groups. This fashion works against a poet such as Drayton, who writes with a nationalist bias and hopes for a large public audience. He grumbles that his “unusuall tract may perhaps seeme difficult, to the female Sex; yea, and I feare, to some that think themselves not meanly learned.” These cabinet poets are reviled in song 21 for “Inforcing things in Verse for Poesie unfit,/ Mere filthy stuffe, that breakes out of the sores of wit.” Drayton was the first to introduce this distinction between public and private verse, now a commonplace in the literary history of the period.

In condemning coterie verse, Drayton asserted the value, going back to Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 334-323 b.c.e.), of nemesis, or imitation, in art. He pleads in song 21 for smooth lines that flow “like swelling Euphrates” and states that poets are like painters in expressing things “neerest to the life.” The power of the poet’s art resembles that of Orpheus, who charmed the trees and rocks and led them “T’ imbrace a civill life, by his inticing Layes.” This theory assumes a serious civic role for the poet, a responsibility the frustrated Drayton feels has been thwarted by the cabinet poets.

Poly-Olbion has a prominent historical context and reveals some strong prejudices. For instance, Drayton had studied Welsh historians and apparently accepted their claim that the Welsh were descended from the Trojans and were the first inhabitants of Great Britain. Song 1 includes a long account of how “Noble Brutus” and his Trojan cohorts arrived in Cornwall and fought the “monstrous Giants” there. In Drayton’s telling, Cornwall received its name from the Trojan Corineus, who wrestled the huge Gogmagog and threw him into the sea. This account exemplifies Drayton’s fanciful blending of legend with topography.

Drayton’s confidence that Great Britain had its counterparts for everything that the Greeks and Romans had leads him in song 10 to praise the historicity of the stories about Great Britain’s Trojan ancestors. Throughout Poly-Olbion, aspects of British life are validated by their superiority to classical antecedents, as in these lines from song 7 in which the Golden Fleece is bested: “Lug little Oney first, then Arro in doth take [describing the confluence of three rivers],/ At Lemster, for her Wooll whose Staple doth excell,/ And seemes to over-match the golden Phrygian fell.” Guy of Warwick (“The Knight through all the world renown’d for Chivalrie” in song 12) becomes a virtual Hercules through the magnificence of his accomplishments.

The legends traditionally associated with Bath, Avon, and Avalon enrich the hymns to various rivers and streams that make up song 3. The centerpiece of the song becomes the Arthurian material, such as “great Arthurs Tombe” and “holy Joseph’s grave.” The monastery at Glastonbury reflects “our great fathers pompe, devotion and their skill.” This passage moves Selden in his illustrations to recite the story that Henry II ordered the local abbot, Henry of Blois, to dig up Arthur’s body, which was duly found in a wooden coffin. It is a mark of Selden’s dutifulness that he observes of the wood in this coffin, “Girald saith Oken, Leland thinks Alder.”

Renaissance poets frequently pondered the mysteries of time and change, and this fondness for the mutability theme intersects in song 3 with Drayton’s fascination with Stonehenge. For Drayton, the “Dull heape” stands as a memorial to some grand past now lost to time. Drayton’s personified “mightie Mount” of Wansdike “doth complaine” to Stonehenge in these lines: “Ill did those mightie men to trust thee with their storie,/ That hast forgot their names, who rear’d thee for their glorie:/ For all their wondrous cost, thou that hast serv’d them so,/ What tis to trust to Tombes, by thee we easely know.” Humanity can take no solace in monuments, and thus it becomes imperative for the artist—the poet, such as Drayton—to preserve the memory of a long and grand tradition.

Drayton returns to this theme in part 2, dedicated to Prince Charles, but the work begins on a bilious note. In his brief preface to part 2, “To Any That Will Read It,” Drayton laments that when he began his “Herculean labour” he was hopeful of its success, “But it hath fallen out otherwise.” He blames the “barbarous Ignorance” of British readers and the greedy stationers who are eager to market their “beastly and abominable Trash.” With his voice rising to a screech, Drayton curses that small number who take pride in their benightedness: “For these, since they delight in their folly, I wish it may be hereditary from them to their posteritie, that their children may bee beg’d for Fooles to the fifth Generation, untill it may be beyond the memory of man to know that there was ever any other of their Families.”

The bitterness in these lines anticipates the hints of pessimism in part 2. Poly-Olbion ends with Drayton contemplating a mysterious grouping of “Stones seventie seven” formed in a ring. He complains sadly, “The victories for which these Trophies were begun,/ From darke oblivion thou, O Time, shouldst have protected.” In the final line of his work, his Herculean toil has picked up a new adjective and become “This strange Herculean toyle,” as if perhaps even he himself cannot decide exactly what he has wrought in these 14,454 lines supplemented by the equally heroic toil of Selden in his illustrations to part 1.

Bibliography

Brink, Jean R. Michael Drayton Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Revisionist study of Drayton’s work is influenced by the new historicism. Attributes to Drayton more influence on literary theory than previously acknowledged. Spells out the humanist and antiquarian sources of Poly-Olbion.

Drayton, Michael. Poly-Olbion. Vols. 4 and 5 in The Works of Michael Drayton, edited by J. William Hebel. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1961. Standard edition of Drayton’s poem includes excellent editorial notes and a bibliography in volume 5. Glosses and typography in the large volume 4 capture a feeling for the original text.

Galbraith, David Ian. Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Examines Poly-Olbion and two other poems of the English Renaissance—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars (1595). Discusses how the three poets “enter into a dialogue” with the poets of ancient Rome, as well as with writers of their own era, in order to negotiate a boundary between poetry and history.

Lyne, Raphael. Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567-1632. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Examines Poly-Olbion and three other English Renaissance poems to describe how Drayton and the other writers adapted the works of Ovid. Demonstrates how Drayton and his contemporaries created an English literary language at the same time they imitated classical poetry.

McEachern, Claire. The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Examines the creation of English national identity through an analysis of how the concept of nationality was expressed in Poly-Olbion and other works of the period.

Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. The Legend of Guy of Warwick. New York: Garland, 1996. Meticulously traces the evolution of the legend from its antecedents to its reception and adaptation in the twentieth century, analyzing the various texts in which the legend has been recounted. Includes discussion of Drayton’s version of the legend in Poly-Olbion.