Old Poem Revue #2 by Aaron Belz

Raleigh’s Last Poem

Before being beheaded, Sir Walter Raleigh served as one of Queen Elizabeth’s “Sea Dog” anti-Spanish pirates; founded two failed settlements at Roanoke, Virginia; introduced Europe to the curative effects of tobacco; twice ventured to South America in search of El Dorado; wrote a lot of poetry — some quite funny and cutting, like “The Nymph’s Reply” to Chris Marlowe; and ultimately found himself on the wrong side of an England-Spain treaty.

Raleigh possessed an incisive wit. Even at his own execution, he reportedly observed the axe’s sharpness and quipped that it was the only physician capable of curing all ills in one stroke. When his body trembled in its final moments, he told bystanders not to worry, the shaking was due to his “ague.” Yes, a bit like the Flight of the Conchords’ “I’m Not Crying.” Afterward, his head was embalmed and sent to his wife, who kept it in a velvet bag.

In other words, Raleigh was the kind of guy you’d want to meet for drinks. He was an adventurer, a contemporary of Shakespeare, a Renaissance Man’s Renaissance Man before Dos Equis was even a brand. He was real: while neoclassical allusions flourished in English poetry, he kept his verse idiomatic. He was good: while his fellow expeditioners were inventing the transatlantic slave trade, he was taking a proto-#metoo position against the carpe-diem-style poetics of Marlowe, Campion, et al.

In fact, though it’s not a 21^stcentury thing to say, Sir Walter Raleigh was a man of virtue. Unlike his more popular successors, he was a Lord and Gentleman, husband of one wife, faithful father of three sons—given neither to the moon, nor to drink, nor was he a philanderer, nor ruined by opium and STDs. My sense after having toured the Tower of London many years ago, and having read the inscriptions in rock that are now protected behind Lucite, is that England has valorized Raleigh more and more as time has passed.

The night before Raleigh died, he wrote an eight-line poem. Like David Bowie’s “Eight Line Poem,” it was written in London. But that is where the similarities end:

Even such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wander’d all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.

The personification of “Time” isn’t so interesting, nor, for the mercenary mercantilist who founded Roanoke, is the metaphor of failed investment. There’s nothing really cute or twisty or particularly metaphysical or Elizabethan about this poem in any aspect. But to me, it’s a fascinating text for at least two reasons:

First is its weight of irony. In Sir Walter Raleigh we have what must have been one of the most colorful, abundant, heroic life stories — all joys enjoyed, all ways wandered, oceans crisscrossed, deals made, people and logistics managed at a monarch’s command. The man brought tobacco to England for the first time #Legend. I personally smoked cigarettes named after himwhen I was a teenager and later spent seven years living 40 minutes north of a city named after him. Yet his own measure of his life is 8 metrical feet in lines two and five. Nothing much. The poem’s focus is on death: an investment gone south.

Which brings me to the second reason I love this poem, and that is for its allusion to the King James translation of Ecclesiastes, which had been commissioned by King James in 1604 and published in 1611. It was, perhaps, a bestseller at the time.

Ecclesiastes is an old Jewish book about the futility of investment: “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”Everything is “vanity,” says the author of Ecclesiastes; “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Raleigh, too, repeats “dust” twice in his poem. The final chapter of Ecclesiastes (which is chapter 11, I kid you not) focuses on investment in particular, saying (I paraphrase) you can send your harvest out on a boat, and you might get back a good return, or you might not. The one thing you know you’ll get is death.

But the supremo-supremo irony is that King James also decreed the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Aaron Belz has an MFA from NYU and a PhD in American Lit from Saint Louis University. He’s published three books of poetry and has a fourth, Soft Launch, due from Persea later this year. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Old Poem Revue #1 by John King

They Flee From Me

Who wants to discuss old poems?

I’ve decided that on Thursdays we here at TDO should try to share pre-twentieth century poems that have stuck with us.

I’ll begin with this 1535 bluesy verse from a sixteenth century courtier:

They Flee From Me by Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

In the first stanza, women are treated like wild animals toying with being tame—in a scenario that suggests that the speaker should be considered dangerous, poor fella.

In the second stanza, he brags that twenty women have stayed with him, though if they stayed, then where are they? Did they all stay? Are they in his basement? But the woman in a nightie who got naked and grabbed him in her arms and kissed him has him feeling bitterly nostalgic.

In the final stanza, he promises he wasn’t dreaming—which I didn’t think he was until he insisted that he wasn’t.

Hold on, though. Is that really the moment that he cannot let go: a kiss, a term of endearment, a shameless request for romantic feedback? I don’t need Thomas Wyatt to dabble in pornography, but he’s clearly already writing in bad taste, so why not? Or maybe he is full of regret because the naked woman did not get beyond coitus interruptus with him. Maybe he orally pleasured her and then she, sated, left? That would make sense of the “strange fashion of forsaking” in the final stanza. In that case, this may be the earliest letter on file written to Dan Savage. But I think it more likely that she didn’t come when next he called. His tallied 20 other lovers were presumably dropped by Tommy, though the whole this-is-not-a-dream thing makes me think that number is probably inflated by at least 20 lovers.

The turn in this overlong sonnet is that life isn’t fair. Hmmmm.

I read this in a survey of Brit Lit class as a college sophomore, and I certainly felt sensitive and bereft like our fair poet above, though the thing has the stink of toxic masculinity to it now, although the internal contradictions are fairly interesting, though maybe as an exhibition of neuroses. I don’t blame him for having a foot fetish:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

The iambic pentameter bounces from the start, but the poem doesn’t really live up to that—the overture contains the opera here. What did these (probably imaginary) women see in him? What did he see in them? In her? This is kind of a disappointing poem about the power of sex. (Unlike Aphra Behn’s amazing poem about the power of sex, “The Disappointment”). Wyatt thrilled to the surprise of meeting, that confrontation of desire, that revelation of a secret self—but without a woman as a mirror, he didn’t really have much of a self to talk about.

___

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.