Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (29 page)

'The Ocean to Scinthia' is followed in the Hatfield MS by a much shorter poem of twenty-one and a half lines, entitled 'The end of the boockes, of the Oceans love to Scinthia, and the beginninge of the 22 boock, entreating of Sorrow'. Ralegh begins with lines lamenting his lost happiness:

These lines he was to use again in two of his petitions to James I's consort, Queen Anne.
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 But here he moves on to talk of others taking his place and enjoying the happiness he once had. This they can do because the Queen has the same power of renewal as the sun:

This is a poem of acceptance, even of resignation. The poet's day is over, and others have succeeded him in the favour of the Queen, as yet others will succeed them in this eternal process of birth, ripening, death and decay. The Queen, as the sun, is part of the natural cycle and there is nothing to be gained by protesting or rebelling against it.

The 'Cynthia poems' describe a man caught in violent oscillations of emotion, from fathomless despair to the height of exaltation. His feelings are driven forward and back by irresistible and contrary impulses. They are expressed by vivid images from the natural world: the sun continuing to produce green shoots even on winter days; the mill-wheel that goes on turning even when the mill-stream has been diverted; the hour after sunset that 'leaves a light much like the past day's dawning'; the 'man distract' who rages in vain until he is forced to rest and then finds 'but increase of pain and fiery heat'. Why did he write these poems, in particular the '21th and last booke'? It is hardly a normal petition, for it is addressed to himself rather than to Cynthia. Yet it is surely more than just an exploration of his inner mental state or the disintegration of a relationship. Probably it was also an attempt to win back the Queen's love by displaying in as dramatic a manner as possible his wretchedness and her cruelty.
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In The History of the World, first published in 1614, Ralegh translated seventy-two extracts from Latin verse. There is no doubt that these are his, though two others from the History are not.
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Here are three samples. In the first of them Ralegh translates a passage from the Aeneid on 'the working of God's spirit in all things'.
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From Catullus:
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On idolatry, from Rhodius Anaxandrides:
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After 1603 Ralegh wrote little verse and, of course, a great deal of prose: not only the History, but also several tracts of advice to Prince Henry.
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 Apart from the verses in the History only four poems survive that can, with reasonable certainty, be attributed to him. These are:'What is our Life?';'Had Lucan hid the Truth'; his Petition to Queen Anne; and 'Even such is Time', the eight lines said to have been written on the night before he died. A poem entitled 'Certain hellish verses devised by that Atheist and traitour Rawley' was almost certainly written by one of his enemies. The epigram 'What is our Life?' exists in about seventy different manuscript copies from before 1660. There are more attributions to Ralegh than to anyone else and he is the most likely, though not the definite, author. There are several versions of the epigram, of which eight-line and ten-line versions are attributed to Ralegh. We print here the ten-line version:

The topos of life as theatre had a long tradition stretching back to classical times. It fitted well with Stoic ideas of life being illusory and directed by a higher power, but from the time of St Augustine it virtually disappeared, in the absence of theatres, until it was revived by Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century. From Italy and France it came to England in the reign of Elizabeth.
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 It was a favourite concept with Shakespeare and with Ralegh, who used it significantly in the History: 'God, who is the Author of all our tragedies, hath written out for us, and appointed all the parts we are to play'; and most of the parts end in disaster, especially those of the great. Stephen Greenblatt has convincingly argued that the general concept of life as theatre underlies Ralegh's 'dramatic sense of life'.
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'Had Lucan hid the truth to please the time' is an elegant tribute to his cousin and friend, Sir Arthur Gorges, on a translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (1614). Gorges was with Ralegh when he tried to break out of house arrest to see the Queen in 1592 and at the landing on Fayal in the Azores in 1597. He and Lucan are both praised as men who have suffered through standing for truth.
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'On the State of France under the Administration of the Guises by Sir Walter Rawleigh' is not certainly Ralegh's. It describes, in terms of the card game primero, the situation in France in 1584-5, shortly before the outbreak of the war of the three Henries. Full understanding of the poem would be helped by knowledge both of sixteenth-century card games and of the story of the French Wars of Religion! The second verse can stand as a sample:

There are three versions of Ralegh's petition to Queen Anne.
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 There can be no doubt of Ralegh's authorship, but there has been controversy over the dates of composition, Lefranc arguing for 1603, after Ralegh's conviction for treason, others for the time of his execution in 1618. Both are possible. The three versions of the petition are broadly similar in tone and language, and share some lines with the 'The Ocean to Cynthia'. In no. 32, the longest, of seventy-eight lines, he laments the fading of the joys of his youth:

To whom, he asks, can he cry for help?