Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (25 page)

A special difficulty arises with the so-called 'Ralegh group' of poems in The Phoenix Nest, an anthology printed in 1593. Many of these are anonymous and in 1931 Hoyt Hudson proposed that thirteen of them could perhaps be attributed to Ralegh, with a core of seven poems, which were reliable, mainly on grounds of style and positioning in the volume.
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 To these thirteen Agnes Latham added three more. Two of this 'Ralegh group' turn out to be, pretty certainly, the work of Sir Arthur Gorges, and only for three of the rest does there seem, in the view of Michael Rudick, good reason to count them as Ralegh's.
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As we have seen, the earliest poem that can be confidently assigned to Ralegh is a commendatory verse for George Gascoigne's The Steele Glas (1576); it lacks the sharpness and flavour of Ralegh's later verse and is altogether inferior to the next of his rare printed poems, the dedicatory sonnet to Spenser's The Faerie Queene:

Here Ralegh combines lavish commendation of his friend Spenser with high praise for the Queen. Petrarch and Homer have been displaced by the achievements of Spenser, while the graces have deserted Laura's tomb to attend upon Elizabeth.

Most of Ralegh's poems were written in the context of the Court and most of them concern the Queen: poems seeking patronage, poems of love and praise, poems of complaint at her desertion of him. One of these, accepted as genuine by most scholars although only with reservations by Rudick, is The Sheepheards praise of his sacred Diana:

Elizabeth is praised as a goddess, specifically the Moon goddess, Diana, immortal, timeless, unchanging. The praise is widened to include the ladies of the court ('her Nimphs') and her male courtiers ('her Knights, in whom true honour lives'). The Queen herself is the source of virtue and of beauty.

Very different in tone, and far more personal, is the poem generally known as 'Farewell to the Court':

Ralegh used the refrain later in lines 123 and 124 of 'The Ocean to Cynthia':

Perhaps about the same date is a poem of regret or fear that he has lost the love of the Queen:

To this the Queen herself replied:

May links these two poems to the return of the Earl of Essex to England from the Netherlands in November 1586 and to the threat that he posed to Ralegh. He suggests that in the second poem Ralegh is identifying 'fortune' with his rival.
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 It may be so; but more interesting is the tone of both poems. Greenblatt shows how the anonymity of'Praysed be Diaiiaes faire and harmelesse light' has been replaced by something more personal. Ralegh's love and sorrow seem here more deeply felt. Elizabeth's response has a certain commonsense briskness about it. She is not one to be ruled by fortune, 'so blinde a Witche', so Ralegh should brace up and put away his fears. Reading Ralegh's poetry, fine as it is, does occasionally produce such a reaction even after four hundred years.
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Very different from Ralegh's other poems is his epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney, printed in The Phoenix Nest in 1593.
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 Sidney had died of wounds inflicted at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, so the epitaph may have been written earlier than the date at which it was printed. It begins with modest self-deprecation, unusual for Ralegh:

With grace and elegance Ralegh describes Sidney's virtues in peace and war: