In late-medieval England, the resolution of the Wars of the Roses in 1485 meant the establishment, with the House of Tudor, of something approaching a stable monarchy. Under Henry VII and his successors, court life and diplomatic relations had room, more or less for the first time, to flourish and overflow into something approaching a stable culture. This newly settled culture gave rise not only to a new kind of poetry, but a new kind of poet. Chiefly, what we have in this Tudor era is a sudden explosion of poets whose names we can affix to their poems. We have poets who created bodies of work that we know, beyond the noonday shadow of reasonable doubt (aside from the continual chewing over of Shakespeare’s identity), belong to them. We have poets whose turns of mind we can observe in those bodies of work. We have poets who took received forms (notably the Italian sonnet) and made them not only distinctly English, but distinctly their own. In their bodies of work, with their particular innovations, we can see, perhaps for the first time, what it looked and felt like to participate, consciously, in the making of a living poetic tradition. In the course of a relatively short life, Philip Sidney (1554–1586) created a place for himself in that living tradition. Unpublished in his lifetime, Sidney’s “Psalm XIII” appeared as Poem of the Day this past March (and his sister’s “Psalm 138,” in the poetic translation of the Sidney Psalter that he began and she finished, appeared in the Sun last week). But Sidney is known to us today chiefly for his contribution to the establishment of the sonnet as a distinctly English poetic form, not simply a hashed-over palimpsest of Italian original. Though his famous sonnet cycle “Astrophil and Stella” follows, more or less, the Italian poet Petrarch’s rhyme scheme — abbaabbacdecde — his relation to the sonnet is more dynamic than fideistic replication of the form. Today’s poem, meanwhile, “Ring Out Your Bells,” is characterized by play: play with varying meters and patterns of rhyme, but also play with the form of the Great Litany, the first English-language liturgical rite imported into Anglican use by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and a staple of the Book of Common Prayer from its earliest editions. “Good Lord deliver us” was a response every English person would have known. The Litany begs God’s deliverance from a list of physical and spiritual perils, including but not limited to “synne . . . blyndeness of harte . . . fornicacion . . . battayle and murther . . . all false doctrine and heresy.” Here, tongue-in-cheek verses tolling the bell for the death of romantic love build to a repeated parody of that familiar litany. Through three stanzas this refrain invokes divine protection against the wiles of women and the vagaries of the lover’s own heart. In the final stanza, however, the speaker turns from lamenting the death of love to lamenting the feebleness of his own confidence in his beloved. It is from that peril, the failure of hope, that he begs the good Lord to deliver us.Ring Out Your Bellsby Sir Philip Sidney Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread;For Love is dead —All love is dead, infectedWith plague of deep disdain;Worth, as nought worth, rejected,And Faith fair scorn doth gain.From so ungrateful fancy,From such a female franzy,From them that use men thus,Good Lord, deliver us!Weep, neighbours, weep; do you not hear it saidThat Love is dead?His death-bed, peacock’s folly;His winding-sheet is shame;His will, false-seeming holy;His sole exec’tor, blame.From so ungrateful fancy,From such a female franzy,From them that use men thus,Good Lord, deliver us!Let dirge be sung and trentals rightly read,For Love is dead;Sir Wrong his tomb ordainethMy mistress’ marble heart,Which epitaph containeth,“Her eyes were once his dart.”From so ungrateful fancy,From such a female franzy,From them that use men thus,Good Lord, deliver us!Alas, I lie, rage hath this error bred;Love is not dead;Love is not dead, but sleepethIn her unmatched mind,Where she his counsel keepeth,Till due desert she find.Therefore from so vile fancy,To call such wit a franzy,Who Love can temper thus,Good Lord, deliver us!___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
