“Love
is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds”;
or, as XVIII.:—
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?
Thou art more lovely and more
temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds
of May,
And summer’s lease bath all too
short a date.
*
* * * *
But thy eternal summer shall not fade.”
Sonnets came to be used in much the same way as a
modern love letter or valentine. In the latter
part of Elizabeth’s reign, sonnets were even
called “merchantable ware.” Michael
Drayton (1563-1631), a prolific poet, author of the
Ballad of Agincourt, one of England’s
greatest war songs, tells how he was employed by a
lover to write a sonnet which won the lady. Drayton’s
best sonnet is, Since there’s no help, come
let us kiss and part.
Outside of the sonnets, we shall find love lyrics
in great variety. One of the most popular of
Elizabethan songs is Ben Jonson’s:—
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for
wine.”
The Elizabethans were called a “nest of singing
birds” because such songs as the following are
not unusual in the work of their minor writers:—
“Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark,
aloft
To give my love good morrow!
Winds from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I’ll
borrow."[4]
Pastoral Lyrics.—In Shakespeare’s
early youth it was the fashion to write lyrics about
the delights of rustic life with sheep and shepherds.
The Italians, freshly interesting in Vergil’s
Georgics and Bucolics, had taught the
English how to write pastoral verse. The entire
joyous world had become a Utopian sheep pasture, in
which shepherds piped and fell in love with glorified
sheperdesses. A great poet named one of his productions,
Shepherd’s Calendar and Sir Philip Sidney
wrote in poetic prose the pastoral romance Arcadia.
Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd
to his Love is a typical poetic expression of
the fancied delight in pastoral life:—
“...we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow
rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.”
Miscellaneous Lyrics.—As the Elizabethan
age progressed, the subject matter of the lyrics became
broader. Verse showing consummate mastery of
turns expressed the most varied emotions. Some
of the greatest lyrics of the period are the songs
interspersed in the plays of the dramatists, from
Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays of Shakespeare,
the greatest and most varied of Elizabethan lyrical
poets, especially abound in such songs. Two of
the best of these occur in his Cymbeline.
One is the song—
“Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s
gate sings,”
