"They feel least cold and pain who plunge at once into it" - Abraham Cowley faces up to a New Year

Two melancholy New Year poems. Cowley indulges his usual affectation of being afflicted by love, though he’s a better poet when he addresses getting older, the plangent theme of the second stanza, and the very rational fears of life simply getting sadder (stanza three) – “uncleanly poverty”, as the poem puts it with unsparing accuracy, might arrive in the New Year. The final stanza turns round on the whole endeavour of trying to look forward, imagining what misery it would be if we could look forward at all. The poem finally resolves to just plunge into the New Year – the second stanza was about having no choice but to do otherwise.

Abraham Cowley, ‘To the New Year’

1.

Great Janus, who dost sure my Mistris view
With all thine eyes, yet think’st them all too few:
If thy Fore-face do see
No better things prepar’d for me
Then did thy Face behind,
If still her Breast must shut against me be
(For 'tis not Peace that Temple’s Gate does bind)
Oh let my Life, if thou so many deaths a-coming find,
With thine old year its voyage take
Born down, that stream of Time which no return can make.

2.

Alas, what need I thus to pray?
Th’old avaritious year
Whether I would or no, will bear
At least a part of Me away.
His well-horst Troops, the Months, and Days, and Hours,
Though never anywhere they stay,
Make in their passage all their Prey.
The Months, Days, Hours that march i'th'Rear can find
Nought of Value left behind.
All the good Wine of Life our drunken youth devours;
Sourness and Lees, which to the bottom sink,
Remain for latter years to Drink.
Until some one offended with the taste
The Vessel breaks, and out the wretched Reliques run at last.

3.

If then, young year, thou needs must come,
(For in Times fruitful womb
The Birth beyond its Time can never tarry,
Nor ever can miscarry)
Choose thy Attendants well; for 'tis not Thee
We fear, but 'tis thy Company,
Let neither Loss of Friends, or Fame, or Liberty,
Nor pining Sickness, nor tormenting Pain,
Nor Sadness, nor uncleanly Poverty,
Be seen among thy Train,
Nor let thy Livery be
Either black Sin, or gaudy vanity;
Nay, if thou lov’st me, gentle Year,
Let not so much as Love be there:
Vain fruitless Love, I mean; for, gentle Year,
Although I fear,
There’s of this Caution little need,
Yet, gentle Year, take heed
How thou dost make
Such a Mistake.
Such Love I mean alone
As by thy cruel Predecessors has been shown,
For though I’have too much cause to doubt it,
I fain would try for once if Life can Live without it.

4.

Into the Future Times why do we pry,
And seek to Antedate our Misery?
Like Jealous men why are we longing still
To See the thing which only seeing makes an Ill ?
'Tis well the Face is vail’d ; for 'twere a Sight
That would even Happiest men affright,
And something still they’d spy that would destroy
The past and Present Joy.
In whatsoever Character
The Book of Fate is writ,
'Tis well we understand not it -
We should grow Mad with little Learning there.
Upon the Brink of every Ill we did Foresee,
Undecently and foolishly
We should stand shivering, and but slowly venter
The Fatal Flood to enter,
Since willing, or unwilling we must do it,
They feel least cold and pain who plunge at once into it.

Tennyson’s uncanny poem has far less of mind and resolution in it: no plunging forward into the future for him. He can’t believe in the spirit he claims one can hear, but then again, neither can he personify with Cowley’s utter lack of restraint, so it’s just a spirit who might be ‘Time’, or ‘Death’, or the Old Year, senile and demented. The heavily aspirated refrain makes anyone speaking the poem breathe out to their last bit of breath. The sunflower, the now immobile former heliotrope no longer follows the sun, but looks only down into the earth, Hamlet-like. The suggestion of the coffin below in the ‘fading edges of box beneath’ in this ill-tended parterre, and hanging on syntactically at the end of it all, ‘the year’s last rose’ – all these things could not be bettered. Wild, melancholy, indulgent Tennyson! The flowers just die, or have been hanged like some innocent in the 19^th century penal system. A hollyhock produces masses of seed: “the seed is of a quick spirit and cometh up the sixth day” (if you collect and sow in March) notes Stephen Blake in his The compleat gardeners practice of 1664. So does the sunflower. But Tennyson resists all the suggestions of a natural cycle, the old flowers have their own sexton preparing them for their graves.

I

A spirit haunts the year’s last hours
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

II

The air is damp, and hush’d, and close,
As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the year’s last rose.

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

I couldn't find a Tennysonian garden today, but took my photograph in some river sallows near Hambleden.

A bad start to 1609 at the Sign of the Firebrand

A bloudy new-yeares gift, or A true declaration of the most cruell and bloudy murther, of maister Robert Heath, in his owne house at high Holbourne, being the signe of the fire-brand (1609) is a typical murder pamphlet: heavy on the moralizing, slow to probe motive, and generally content that someone has been made an example of on the gallows.

What is rather thrilling about the little book is the intense domestic detail the anonymous author supplies: read it, and you are back there in the early morning of January 1^st 1609, in a crowded house that is utterly dark, utterly cold, and murderously divided.

Master Robert Heath was a cook, Rowland Cramphorne was his tapster, so the business obviously extended to a complete catering in food and drink. It is clear that Master Heath drank: he was one that ‘kept much companie’, and on the fatal night, he came home at about 9pm ‘somwhat disguised in drinke’ and fell asleep in front of the kitchen fire. His wife is all too used to this, and always has her maid put a table against their bedroom door. She tells the court that this would alert her to her husband coming into the room late at night, but it sounds more like her regular way of keeping him downstairs. Upstairs, at midnight, a gentleman lodger wakes up both cold and thirsty. He calls for Rowland, who alleges that there are no faggots left in the house. Briefly, they contemplate going out, even at this late hour, to find drink and a fire, but in the end the gentleman decides to make do and shiver on through the night.

At 2am, the maid retired upstairs to her mistress’s room, leaving Rowland and her master below. Rowland shares a bed in the house with a boy. The narrative asserts that he had made this boy drunk with ale and sack, the boy certainly doesn’t seem to know when Rowland retired or got up again. But in this chilly and drink-stupefied household, at some point in the night, ‘the devil prevailed so farre with him, to doe that horrible deed of darkness'. A candle the maid had left by her master was a quarter burned at the time of the murder, and extinguished upside down its holder.

Next door, a joiner, his wife and their lodger are huddled in one chamber: between two or three in the morning, they hear ‘a great noise in Master Heaths house, as it were the fall of stooles or Chaires’. Nobody in the Heath household seems to have heard this, and next door, they just decide that their neighbours are making an early start on their pie making for New Year’s Day. The room they are in is adjacent to Rowland’s, and the partition so thin that the late night opening and closing of his door shakes their bed.

At five am, a barber’s maid comes to the house for fire, but finds the main door shut, at 6am the maid descends, gropes about in the dark till she finds the candle on the dresser (how did she know that it had not burned down and gone out?) relights it, and discovers the body. She goes and wakes Rowland with the news that ‘he knew too well’.

The ‘outcry of this murder being made’, the Joiner, even then on his way to a morning lecture at Christs-Church (a sermon, of course), diverts into the house. Heath was not quite dead, but dies as they try to lift him upstairs.

Rowland, Heath’s wife and the maid all assert that they have no idea who did the murder: the house doors, they say, had been left wide open in the morning, as if the murderer had departed that way (they clearly hope to incriminate either the drinking companions who had returned to the house with Heath, or others who had been upstairs with the gentleman).

Under examination, though, Rowland is found to have in his pocket money with blood upon it. He claims that he was bloodied in lifting his master, but the pious joiner from next door denies that Rowland had helped. A ‘fire fork’ is found to have a drop of blood upon it (Rowland later confesses, rather, that he had hit his master with a 'double jug').

The narrative now shifts to immediate motive: the day before, Heath, out drinking, had sent home for more beer: but each time he asked, his tapster had denied him. Heath had even sent money back home to pay for the beer from his own business: Rowland had still refused. Rowland had reportedly been struck by his returning master (this would be on the morning of New Year’s Eve), and dismissed.

The Jury finds all this enough, Rowland was convicted, drawn on a hurdle to his own street, and hanged on a gibbet ‘set up at Graies-Inne lane end, somewhat neeere unto the house where the murder was committed’ (this was on the 21^st February 1609).

Rowland’s behaviour at the gallows was interesting, to say the least: “where being by good and godly preachers dealt withal, to cleare his own conscience, & deliver the truth in so doubtfull a case, whether any other had hand or no with him in the action: he would heare no speeches concerning his mist[ress] or the maid, but cleared them [as?] much as he could, taking al upon himself: & loath to hear any further admonishment, which with love and much charity was laboured unto him: when he was willed to make no haste, but take time to his own liking, putting one legge beside the ladder, and they calling him yet to stay, yea, the hangman offering to holde him by the choler of his doublet, he desperately threw himselfe off, not willing to listen to any further good counsel.”

I take it that these suspicions were basically correct. A tapster surely would not have refused his own master drink, even with money offered, unless put up to it by his mistress. Heath and his cronies were drinking the profits, his wife was sick of his drunken returns to their bedroom. When the maid looks for and lights the candle she had left burning by her master the night before, she finds what she had half expected from the bangs in the night they had been careful not to hear, and knows who to go to. I suspect, too, that the two women distanced themselves from the man who had carried out the murder and took all the blame (even to the point of speeding his own death for fear that he might blab something out). For the little pamphlet begins with an odd, and unsubstantiated account of Rowland Cramphorne’s bad character, a tale of a girl (anonymous in an otherwise quite specific text) he had seduced and deserted, who had predicted that he would come to a bad end. ‘All these imputations now dye with him’ says the pamphleteer, who might just be trying to signal that there’s another story beside the officially accepted one, mentioning in passing ‘what hath bin said concerning his Mistresse’…

But cold, dark, crowded early modern London!

New Year's Gifts

As another seasonal posting to follow on from last year’s effort,

http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-years-gift-1607.html

I thought I would access all the ‘New Year’s Gift’ title returns on EEBO, and pull out a plum. There’s material for a whole whacky doctorate out there in the unexpected range of early modern ‘new year’s gift’ publications. There are the godly:

A lecture or exposition vpon a part of the. v. chapter of the epistle to the Hebrues As it was read in Paules the. 6. day of December. 1572. By Edward Deryng. Prepared and geuen for a new yeres gift to the godly in London and els where, for this yeare. 1573.

and

Londons Nevv-yeeres gift. Or The vncouching of the foxe A godly sermon preached at Pauls Crosse, the first of Ianuarie. 1608. By Thomas Iackson, Bachelour of Diuinitie

(and alongside these, the denunciatory ‘gifts’, admonishing Catholics, etc). Then there are the gifts of advice, to offspring and godchildren, like:

The father's new-years-gift to his son containing divers useful and necessary directions how to order himself both in respect to this life and that which is to come / written by the Right Honourable Sir Matthew Hale

or

The lady's new-years gift, or, Advice to a daughter, 1688 ~ I had forgotten that Lord Halifax’s life-and-spirit-withering admonitions about enduring marriage to a husband with any one of a range of ‘inconvenient’ vices was published under this banner.

Then the literary: Nicholas Breton offered

A smale handfull of fragrant flowers selected and gathered out of the louely garden of sacred scriptures, fit for any honorable or woorshipfull gentlewoman to smell vnto. Dedicated for a Newe-yeeres gyft, to the honorable and vertuous lady, the Lady Sheffeeld.

and also Thomas Churchyard’s unconvincing attempt to reverse the real roles of the producers and consumers of poetry:

A light bondell of liuly discourses called Churchyardes charge presented as a Newe yeres gifte to the right honourable, the Earle of Surrie, in whiche bondell of verses is sutche varietie of matter, and seuerall inuentions, that maie bee as delitefull to the reader, as it was a charge and labour to the writer, sette forthe for a péece of pastime (1580).

~ ‘delightful’ to the writer, and a ‘charge and labour’ to the reader, surely?

Over and over again, New Year’s gift books were political. This one has a particular pathos in its complete failure to anticipate (amid its heartfelt wishes that the King come to London and make reconciliation with Parliament) the very near and impending future:

A new-yeers gift for the Kings most excellent Majesty now at Windsore, from his loyall and faithfull subjects residing in and about the cities of London and Westminster; and a declaration of the Kings Majesties speedy coming to London., (1649).

In the end I opted for:

THE NEW-YEERES GIFT: PRESENTED AT Court, from the Lady PARVULA to the Lord MINIMUS, (commonly called Little JEFFERIE) Her Majesties Servant, with a Letter as it was penned in short-hand: wherein is proved LITTLE THINGS are better then GREAT. Written by MICROPHILVS. (1636).

As you see, this is addressed to one of the few people at court capable of making King Charles look tall, his pituitary dwarf Jeffrey Hudson, and it is the kind of predictable ragging that finally led Hudson to shoot one of his tormentors dead:

“SIR, MAY it please your diminutive eminence, permit a devoted lover of your concise dimensions, to present very lowly, as most fitting to your person, (in remembrance of this New-yeare) a small Token of my unparralleld affection. Confesse I must Compendious SIR my gift is somewhat of the least, but my hope is, being there in so like your selfe it will not displease you.”

It is indeed an appropriately diminutive volume, mainly taken up with a paradox in praise of littleness: “little women (as most nimble-spirited) best for generation” and such factoids. There’s a more immediately relevant passage about the meaning of having dwarf-attendants in a royal court: ‘Master Slater’, the author, adds deeper possibilities to the overt reason:

“Your little low person (me thinkes) is natures humble pulpit, out of which shee reads graces diviner lectures to High-aspiring Mortals: and whereas some in the world (wedded to errour) may fondly imagine your residence at Court, to bee rather for wonder and merriment, then for any use or service; you may require from them no lesse satisfaction then a publique recantation: For as it hath beene the custome of famous Princes to use (at chiefe times) some ceremony which represented some hidden Morall … So (at all times) the residence of dwarfes in Courts hath a twofold Representment, Theologicall, and Politicall, the first to the Soveraigne, the second, to the Subiect: For the first, as Philip King of Macedon betimes every morning had a little boy came unto him, and cryed, Philippe, memento te esse mortalem, O Philip, remember how thou art mortall: So little dwarfes (boyes in proportion, though perchance men in discretion) being about a Monarch, though silent, yet their very persons (being with Princes of the same naturall extraction) are as a voice crying, Rex, memento te esse minimum: O King remember how thou art little, borne like others little, to teach thee to Heaven, humility, to Earth, humanity: For the second, the civill regard in relation to the subiect: the residence of dwarfes about Monarchs hath beene by those who are grounded Politicians accounted emblemattically necessary, to denote those who desire to approach neere Princes ought not to bee ambitious of any Greatnesse in themselves, but to acknowledge all their Court-lustre is but a beame of the Royall Sunne their Master, which when, and to whom, he please hee can send forth or withdraw.”

I did enjoy (at this time of sales and credit squeezes) the digression onto “Peripateticall madcaps” who shop high and purchase low:

“another, who going to the Faire, after hee stately stalked thorow the chiefe Streets, cheapning Orient Iewels, choise pictures, new-fashion'd plate, rich hangings, and the dearest imbroideries, departed home with the buying only of a woodden dish: or of a third, who going to their shops that sell costly apparrell, calls confidently to see a suit of an hundred pounds, and when they were agreed of the price, quarrels with his boy for following him without his purse.”

~ which more or less describes my habitual promenade from John Lewis to TK Maxx. I wonder when the 'New Year's Gift' lost out to present-giving on Christmas Day? I recall once reading through all the exchanges of gifts between Elizabeth Tudor and her courtiers, which gave me a strong impression that you gave gold, and got back 'parcel-gilt'.

A New Year's Gift, 1607

My hundredth post starts 2007.


My illustration puts together into one composite image the tiny title page, colophon, and three miniscule openings from Automachia, evidently presented as a 'small New-yeres-Gift' at the start of 1607 to Mary Neville - 'Alia Minerva' ("Another Pallas", which the poet adroitly finds as an approximate anagram of her name).


The writer may be George Goodwin, or Joshua Sylvester; the dedicatee is the daughter of Thomas Sackville, First Earl of Dorset, part author as a young man of Gorboduc, contributor to The Mirror for Magistrates, and who, as Lord High Treasurer of England would die at the Council table in April 1608, aged around 72.


Automachia, 'self-conflict', isn't the work of a negligible poet:

"Both right and Wrong with me indifferent are:
My Lust is Law: what I desire, I dare:
(Is there so foule a Fault, so fond a Fact,
Which Follie asking, Furie dares not act?),
But Art-lesse-hart-lesse in Religion's cause
(To doo her Lessons, and defend her Lawes)."

It could be a bit of the wordy moralising in Lucrece; George Herbert would have approved. The poet is aware that the vociferous self-rebuke and the dainty format are at odds, but asks his dedicatee to accept the 'poore MITE' he humbly offers:
'Too small a Present to so great a GRACE,
And too unworthy of your Worthinesse

Saue that the Matter so exceeds the Masse'.

I am not sure that I could do a bibliographical description of this book even if I had it in front of me: it seems to run [A1-6]; B-B4 [B5-8]; C-C4 [C5-8]; D-D4 [D5,D6], the EEBO copy does not have a rule on the title page image to show just how small the book is. But a graceful present for a devout lady.

I wonder when it was that New Year's Day gifts were supplanted by present-giving on Christmas Day? I quite like the notion of starting the New Year with gifts, though perhaps they might all be rather forward-looking and improving. I recall liking in the Elizabethan Court records how, if you could manage it, your new year's gift to Gloriana had best be gold, while in return, you generally got something 'parcel-gilt' from the thrifty old girl.