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A Complaint by Night of the Lover Not Beloved[1]

Ejes, p. 164

The division of the sonnet is highly problematic.

The rhyme scheme is ABABABABABAB CC: a douzain followed by a couplet.

Syntactically, the primary divisions are lines 1-4, 5, 6-9 and 10-14, which completely negates the possibility of interpreting the poem conventionally as 2 quatrains and a sextet.

Is there a volta?

- Surrey teases us with the ‘But’ at the beginning on 11 but it is an integral part of the sentence beginning in 10 and ending in 14.

This is all highly experimental.

Other sonnets by Surrey rhyme:

ABAB CDCD ECEC FF

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG (‘the Shakespearean Sonnet’)

ABABABAB ACA CCC

the Nature is at Peace in the Night

1. Alas! / so all / things now[2] / do hold / their peace[3], probably RIP

2. Heaven / and earth / distur/bèd in / no thing. initial inversion,

assonance

3. The beasts, / the air, / the birds / their song / do cease,[4] RIP,

alliteration

4. The nigh/tès chare[5] / the stars / about / doth[6] bring.[7] RIP

5. Calm is / the sea[8],[9] / the waves / work less / and less:[10] initial inversion

the Lover’s Disquietude and Woe[11]

6. So am / not I,[12] / whom love, / alas, / doth6 wring[13], RIP, alliteration

7. Bringing / before / my face / the great / increase[14] initial inversion

8. Of my / desires, / whereat[15] / I weep / and sing RIP,

partial assonance

9. In joy / and woe, / as in / a doubt/ful[16] ease[17]. RIP

his unrequited love dis-ease

10. For[18] my / sweet[19] thoughts[20] / sometime / do plea/sure bring[21],

11. But by / and by[22] / the cause / of my / dis-ease[23] RIP

12. Gives me / a pang[24] / that in/wardly[25] / doth6 sting, initial inversion

his unrequited love

13. When that / I think / what grief / it is / again[26] initial inversion,

14. To live[27] / and lack / the thing[28] / should[29] rid / my pain. RIP,

alliteration,

assonance

You can listen to it at:

True godly love (caritas), which creates harmony and rest in the world, is contrasted with desirous love/lust (cupiditas), which throws everything out of joint and creates inner conflict.

OR

This is a rather bawdy poem about sexual frustration.

“thing... increase...”

“All things now do hold their piece[30]” = All vaginas contain their corresponding penises

This creates a series of antitheses:

love = torture

joy = woe

Don’t confuse the narrative voice with the poet’s own feelings.

It’s about as easy to write a sonnet in a moment of passionate expression as it is to write a crossword.

- this is a laboured exercise in meter and rhyme.

Sexy slide presentation:



PARAPHRASE

Nature is calm at night. By contrast, I’m not because love tortures me. I suffer emotional extremes when I think about the one I love. My sensual thoughts give initial pleasure and then pain when I realize that my passion cannot be satisfied.

or:

Unhappily I notice that all things in nature hold their peace and are quiet.

Neither heaven nor earth have anything stirring.

The animals, the winds, the birds, all are quiet; there is no song anywhere.

The night sky rotates in an orderly way.

The sea is calm; the waves work less and less in the lowering tide.

I am not like the sea; I grow not quieter, I who love does woefully pain.

Love brings me the image of the one I love that causes me to both weep and sing.

In both joy and sorrow, love brings me double feelings.

My loving thoughts sometimes give me pleasure

Until the cause of my woe returns to my thoughts

Causing me an inward torment of stinging pain.

This is because I again think of what grief I have

In living when I lack the returned love that would rid me of my pain.

164. ‘Or che ’l ciel et la terra e ’l vento tace’

Now that the sky and the earth and the wind are silent

and the wild creatures and the birds are reined in sleep,

Night leads its starry chariot in its round,

and the sea without a wave lies in its bed,

I look, think, burn, weep: and she who destroys me

is always before my eyes to my sweet distress:

war is my state, filled with grief and anger,

and only in thinking of her do I find peace.

So from one pure living fountain

flow the sweet and bitter which I drink:

one hand alone heals me and pierces me:

and so that my ordeal may not reach haven,

I am born and die a thousand times a day,

I am so far from my salvation.

This sonnet is another adaptation from Francesco Petrarca:

Or che'l ciel e la terra e'l vento tace

E le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena,

notte il carro stellato in giro mena

e nel suo letto il mar senz'onda giace,

veggio, penso, ardo, piango; e chi mi sface

sempre m'è inanzi per mia dolce pena:

guerra è ‘l mio stato, d'ira et di duol piena,

et sol di lei pensando ò qualche pace.

Così sol d'una chiara fonte viva

move ‘l dolce e l'amaro ond'io mi pasco;

una man sola mi risana e punge;

e perché ‘l mio martir non giunga a riva,

mille volte il dí moro e mille nasco;

tanto da la salute mia son lunge.

Petrarch’s sonnet is, in turn, based on the famous night passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 4, wherein Dido, queen of Carthage, laments Aeneas, a Trojan warrior.

Surrey translates the passage as follows (in blank verse):

It was then night: the sound and quiet sleep

Had through the earth the wearied bodies caught;

The woods, the raging seas, were fall’n to rest,

When that the stars had half their course declined.

The field whist; beasts, and fowls of divers hue,

And what so that in the broad lakes remained,

Or yet among the bushy thicks of briar,

Laid down to sleep by silence of the night

’Gan ’suage their cares, mindless of travails past.

Here is a modern translation:

It was night, and everywhere weary creatures were enjoying

peaceful sleep, the woods and the savage waves were resting,

while stars wheeled midway in their gliding orbit,

while all the fields were still, and beasts and colourful birds,

those that live on wide scattered lakes, and those that live

in rough country among the thorn-bushes, were sunk in sleep

in the silent night. But not the Phoenician, unhappy in spirit,

she did not relax in sleep, or receive the darkness into her eyes

and breast: her cares redoubled, and passion, alive once more,

raged, and she swelled with a great tide of anger.

You can see quite how popular this passage was from Thomas Sackville’s Complaint of the Duck of Buckingham in ‘The Mirror of Magistrates’ (1587):

Midnight was come, when every vital thing

With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest.

The beasts were still; the little birds that sing

Now sweetly slept beside their mother’s breast;

The old, and all were shrouded in their nest.

The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease;

The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.

...and in William Fowler’s The Tarantula of Love (1597)

The day is done, the sun doth else decline,

Night now approaches, and the moon appears,

The twinkling stars in firmament does shine,

Decoring with the Poles their circled spheres;

The birds to nests, wild beasts to dens retires,

The moving leaves unmoved now repose,

Dewdrops does fall, the portraits of my tears,

The waves within the seas them calmly close:

To all things Nature order does impose,

But not to love, that proudly doth me thral.

Wha all the days and nights but change or choice,

Stirs up the coals of fire unto my fall,

And saws his briars and thorns within my heart,

The fruits whereof are dule, frief, groans and smart.

-----------------------

[1] Tottel’s title

[2] Probably an iamb (it sounds better as an iamb) but you could legitimately argue for a trochee.

[3] to hold one’s peace – calm down, be silent; ‘peace’ could be pronounced /pes/ at the time.

[4] hyperbaton: the birds (do) cease their song; in the first half of the 15th Century ‘cease’ was pronounced /ses/ (and often spelt ‘cesse’).

[5] chare – job; chariot, car; but derived from Petrarch’s carro; the Great Bear

[6] doth – (archaic) does. This ‘dummy do’ is an expletive (in Pope’s terminology) since it plays on semantic role and simply creates a necessary unstressed syllable.

[7] assonance and partial alliteration. Notice the hyperbaton (= The night’s chariot doth bring about the stars)

[8] the sea/ocean was a standard symbol of mutability and turbulence but even it is calm

[9] hyperbaton (= the sea is calm).

[10] chiasmus: the two half-lines say the same thing but in reverse order. Notice the onomatopoeia in “less and less”.

[11] from here on Howard diverges from Petrarch and focuses on a psychological investigation of the desirous man

[12] hyperbaton (= I am not so)

[13] to wring (wring-wrung-wrung) – a. torture; or b. (innuendo) ‘rub’, ‘force to tears’

[14] alliteration and assonance; ‘increase’ could be pronounced /in’kres/ at the time.

[15] whereat – at which

[16] doubtful – apprehensive

[17] ease – (in this case?) idleness, neglect; ‘ease’ could be pronounced /es/ at the time.

[18] for – because (ya que)

[19] sweet – (in this case?) relating to sexual intimacy (as at All’s Well That Ends Well, II.iv.42)

[20] there is a case for substitution: for my / SWEET THOUGHTS. However, this would leave three consecutive stressed syllables, which are difficult to say

[21] hyperbaton (= my sweet thoughts (do) sometime bring pleasure)

[22] by and by – (in Early Modern English) immediately, straightaway

[23] disease – dis-ease, discomfort, distress, disturbance of mind; but also possibly venereal disease as at Henry VIII, I.iii.35-36; ‘dis-ease’ would be pronounced /di’ses/ here.

[24] pang – torment

[25] the light stress on -ly is somewhat unnatural but it would maintain the five-stress.

[26] rather clumsy hyperbaton in that ‘again’ goes with ‘think’

[27] possible contrast with ‘die’ (= have an orgasm)

[28] thing – (innuendo) pudenda, vagina: if so do we have to reinterpret lines 1 (‘all things’) and 2 (‘no thing’)

[29] should – that would

[30] Shakespeare puns on peace/piece at King John IV.iii.93

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