Dazzled with the height of place

Today a piece on the “useful” poem in early modernity, originally published in June 2025.

I’ve written a few times about the importance of anthologies, and the point is hardly confined to contemporary verse: think of the Greek Anthology; the Subhāsitaratnakosha in Sanskrit or the Therīgāthā in Pāli; or the Carmina Burana.1 Anthologies are useful places to start for the reader: but they can also come to define a literature. This is true in English as well. Modern English lyric is often taken to begin with Tottel’s Miscellany — another anthology — first printed in 1557, and an instant publishing success.2

Tottel is generally known and read today, when it is, for its canonical authors: it contains a significant selection of the poetry of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and of Thomas Wyatt, both of whom were writing in the 1530s and 1540s. Modern critical attention has focused especially on their sonnets and love lyrics. But a lot of the poems in the anthology are not love poems, but rather examples of that enduringly popular (if stubbornly unfashionable) genre of the ‘moralising lyric’. By this I mean poems like Kipling’s “If —”, constantly cited in surveys of people’s favourite poems — and quoted just a couple of weeks ago I notice by Emily Wilson in an interview — but generally beneath the notice of literary critics: the sort of poem that it’s easy to sneer at if you’re feeling sophisticated, but all the same tends to come to mind in a genuine tight spot. The poetry of the dentist’s chair, or an overcrowded A&E department in the middle of the night, or just an ordinary miserable day. The sixteenth century took it for granted that poetry was for just this sort of occasion.

The moralising lyric is an essentially conservative form and quite a large number of the examples in Tottel are actually translations. The book contains no fewer than three separate versions of Horace Odes 2.10 — the poem on the ‘golden mean’ which is probably the most famous of all Horace’s moralising odes. None of the three versions, however, say that they are translations, or even mention Horace in their title. Each of them is titled instead in a straightforwardly descriptive way: ‘Praise of mean and constant estate’ (no. 32), ‘Of the golden mean’ (no. 253), and ‘The mean estate is to be accounted the best’ (no. 163).3 (‘Estate’ here means something like situation in life.) The point about poems like this is their message, the emotional occasion to which they are appropriate, not their source; and, like those handy indexes in the back of a Gideon Bible, the titles here are to help you find what you need.4

A fourth poem, no. 128, has an almost identical title to these three Horace translations. It’s called ‘Of the meane and sure estate’, and at first glance you might assume that it is another version of the same poem:

Stond who so list upon the slipper wheele,
Of hye astate and let me here rejoyce.
And use my life in quietnesse eche dele, [all the time; every bit]
Unknowen in court that hath the wanton toyes,
In hidden place my time shal slowly passe
And when my yeres be past withouten noyce
Let me dye olde after the common trace
For gripes of death doth he to hardly passe
That knowen is to all: but to him selfe alas
He dyeth unknowen, dased with dreadfull face.5

But this poem is actually Thomas Wyatt’s translation of the final part of the second chorus from Seneca’s Thyestes, a lyric essay on how true kingship lies not in external power but in self-government and virtuous obscurity. Here’s Seneca’s unforgettably straightforward Latin:

Stet quicumque volet potens
aulae culmine lubrico:
me dulcis saturet quies.
obscuro positus loco
leni perfruar otio,
nullis nota Quiritibus
aetas per tacitum fluat.
sic cum transierint mei
nullo cum strepitu dies,
plebeius moriar senex.
illi mors gravis incubat
qui, notus nimis omnibus,
ignotus moritur sibi.6

In Seneca, there’s a kind of irony here. Thyestes himself spectacularly fails to take the advice, and at the very end of the play, when disaster has overwhelmed him, he describes himself as having ex alto culmine lapsum (‘fallen from the high gable’, 927). But this chorus is one of the most commonly excerpted bits of ancient literature in early modernity, quoted or imitated very often without reference to its context or even to Seneca. It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, that any poetic use of some of its Latin words — certainly both culmen (‘gable; roof top; pinnacle’) and lubricus — immediately recalls it. (A bit like the way any mention of a gyre in an English poem immediately risks overwhelming the reader’s inner ear with a booming snatch of Yeats.7)

The way the titles in Tottel blur Horace and Seneca (without naming or acknowledging either) reflects connections between the classical texts. Seneca’s moralising choruses are dependent upon and consciously reminiscent of Horace’s lyric in their metre, theme and often specific allusions. Here in Tottel, the similar titles and thematic overlap points to an ‘Horatio-Senecan’ zone of classical imitation which would have been obvious to the point of banality to contemporary readers — anyone who’d even begun a basic commonplace book would know that Horace and Seneca “go together” — but is very far removed from how scholars and critics generally write about either Horace or Seneca today.

In their edition, Holton and MacFaul do their best to disaggregate this particular example of overlap, by pointing out that the titles of these four poems are using “mean” in two different ways: to point to the “mean”, that is lowly estate of a humble way of life and the “mean”, that is middle way. This is obviously correct, but it’s also I think to over-explain. Mean means more than one thing; but it’s one word; and the moral point made over and over again by these poems is that if you are tempted by glory and high office, the best way (the best means) to seek and attain the “mean” (that is, the middle way of wisdom) is to remind yourself of the virtues of simplicity (the mean life) and the vagaries of fortune: how easily, that is, high becomes low, and how little difference wealth or status makes when your time is up. Or as poem 163 — one of those versions of Odes 2.20 — puts it, ‘The higher hall the greater fall’. That expression is much closer to Seneca than Horace: here as very often the poet brings a Senecan commonplace to bear on Horace’s ode.

The theme of Seneca’s chorus is perhaps the single most common one for moralising lyric of this period. There are plenty of examples to draw on from Horace as well, and poets working in this general mode also often look to Claudian’s ‘Old Man of Verona’ (Carmina minora 20), Martial 10.47 (a rather atypical — for Martial — but extremely popular epigram) and several of the lyric portions of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Indeed, poem no. 31 in Tottel is Surrey’s version of Martial 10.47 with yet another very similar title, here ‘The meanes to attain a happy life’:

Martial, the thinges that do attain
The happy life, be these, I finde.
The richesse left, not got with pain:
The frutefull ground: the quiet minde:
The egall frend, no grudge, no strife:
No charge of rule, nor governance:
Without disease the healthful life:
The household of continuance:
The meane diet, no delicate fare:
Trew wisdom joyned with simplenesse:
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppresse:
The faithfull wife, without debate:
Such slepes, as may begile the night:
Contented with thine own estate,
Ne wish for death, ne feare his might.8

Another of Wyatt’s poems in Tottel, titled (possibly with particular reference to Henry VIII), ‘He ruleth not though he raigne over realms that is subject to his own lustes’ (no. 122), deals overall with the same subject as Seneca’s ‘kingship’ chorus, though it is in fact derived primarily not from Seneca but from the verse portions of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Like Seneca’s choruses, many of these are in Horatian metres, and for the early modern reader Boethius “belonged” quite naturally with the two earlier authors. The poem is about how glory, wealth and power are false goods compared to self-possession. Here’s the first stanza, which corresponds to Boethius 3.5.

If thou wilt mighty bee, flee from the rage
Of cruel will, and see thou kepe thee free
From the foule yoke of sensuall bondage,
For though thyne empyre stretche to Indian sea,
And for thy feare trembleth the fardest Thylee, i.e. ultima Thule
If thy desire have over thee the power,
Subject then art thou and no governour.9

Both the content and the general structure of this poem is echoed frequently in later lyrics. Here for instance is Poem 91 in Fulke Greville’s Caelica, on the illusory rewards of nobility and fame:

Rewards of earth, Nobilitie and Fame,
To senses Glorie, and to conscience woe,
How little be you, for so great a name?
Yet lesse is he with men that thinks you so.
    For earthly Power, that stands by fleshly wit,
    Hath banish’d that Truth which should governe it.

Nobilitie, Powers golden fetter is,
Wherewith wise Kings subjection doe adorne,
To make man thinke her heavy yoke, a blisse,
Because it makes him more than he was borne.
    Yet still a slave, dimm’d by mists of a Crowne,
    Lest he should see ,what riseth, what puls downe.

Fame, that is but good words of evill deeds,
Begotten by the harme we have, or doe,
Greatest farre off, least ever where it breeds,
We both with dangers and disquiet wooe.
    And in our flesh (the vanities false glasse)
    We thus deceiv’d adore these Calves of brasse.10

Just as Seneca is indebted to the moralising portions of Horace, so is Boethius dependent upon Horace and Seneca. These three authors “went together” for early modern readers, and versions or borrowings of all three are often found together in both print and manuscript verse. One manuscript in the British Library, for instance, which seems to date from the 1620s, contains a sequence of versions and translations of seven Horatian odes; four lyric parts of Seneca (the Thyestes chorus translated twice), three epigrams of Martial (including 10.47) and two of the lyric parts of Boethius.11 The sequence has an obvious thematic coherence and although the author remains anonymous some parts are very good. Here for instance is the second (and shorter) of two translations of the Seneca Thyestes chorus:

Let him that list, vpon the slippery hill
Of courtly fauor build his lofty tower,
in humble valley I securely will
and safely rest within my lowly bower;
while, in obscurity to states vnknowne,
like a still riuollet my yeares slyde on –
So, without noyse when I haue runne my race,
from worldly care & perturbation free,
then, to the graue a gods name let me passe
a plaine ould fellow: better yet then he,
whom all men know too well, and yet alone
alas, he dies vnto himself vnknowne.

English poetry of this kind has its sixteenth-century roots in translation and imitation — often unacknowledged — of a cluster of classical and post-classical texts on related themes. Out of these roots grow many of the most widely circulated English lyrics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These poems tend not to make it into modern anthologies but they includes some of the very best — and, dare I say it, most useful — of early modern lyrics. One of my all-time favourites is Henry Wootton’s poem, written probably originally about the spectacular fall, in 1616, of Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset and long-time royal favourite, though in manuscripts you find it titled in a wide variety of ways, and really, it will do for anyone and indeed every one of us, whenever we find ourselves dazzled out of good sense:

Dazel’d thus, with height of place,
Whilst our hopes our wits beguile,
No man markes the narrow space
’Twixt a prison, and a smile.

Then, since fortunes favours fade,
You, that in her armes doe sleep,
Learne to swim, and not to wade;
For, the Heart of Kings are deepe.

But, if Greatness be so blind,
As to trust in towers of Aire,
Let it be with Goodness lin’d,
That at’least, the Fall be faire.

Then though darkned, you shall say,
When Friends faile, and Princes frowne,
Vertue is the roughest way,
But proves at night a Bed of Downe.

If you enjoyed this taste of early modern “useful” poetry, you might like Poems Beautiful and Useful, a pamphlet I edited and introduced last year, which is available here.

10

Greville, Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633), 238. Caelica was not published until 1633, though was probably completed by 1618 and elements may date from much earlier. For another poem by Greville, see

I a God by Cupid dreams

·

January 5, 2025

This poem is from a long sequence of lyrics, Caelica, which was not published until after Greville’s death in 1633, but was probably written wholly or mainly in the sixteenth century. Greville (1554-1628) is best known as a friend of Philip Sidney. You can read more about him