THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

with fertile Roman, Saxon, and Norman soils and is amply watered by streams each of
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which has its tutelary nymph. Poly-Olbion, which was dedicated to King James’s eldest son Henry, Prince of Wales,
perpetually finds occasions for sermons in stones and, thanks to the Arthurian pretensions of the Stuart dynasty, seeks
to discover evidence of present good in all historical precedent.
Placed beside the self assertion, the ebullience, and the nationalism of much of Drayton’s work, the poetry of Fulke
Greville, first Lord Brooke (1554-1628), seems, to use Drayton’s phrase, ‘deduced to chambers’, excessively private,
even despondent. Greville, who published little in his lifetime, made clear how he wished posterity to remember him
in the epitaph he composed for his tomb: ‘servant to Queen Elizabeth, councillor to King James, and friend to Sir
Philip Sidney. Trophaeum Peccati [the trophy or the spoils of sin].’ Greville’s friendship with, and profound
reverence for, Sidney conditioned not simply the flattering biography he wrote of his upright friend but also the
censorious remarks that the Life contains concerning the reign of Elizabeth and the comparative moral turpitude of
the court of King James. Sidney’s religious opinions and the example of Astrophil and Stella also helped to determine
the themes and patterns of Greville's own verse. The earliest lyrics in the posthumously published miscellany, Caelica
(printed as part of Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes in 1633), appear to have circulated in the Sidney circles in
the 1580s; the later poems probably date from the early seventeenth century. Taken as a whole, however, the 109
lyrics (41 of them sonnets) radically re-explore Sidneian models and charge them with a distinctive intellectual
earnestness and, increasingly, with a Calvinistic gloom. Where Astrophil addresses a single, distant Stella within the
developing narrative of a sonnet sequence, Greville’s lover focuses his emotional and mental energy on a variety of
situations and mistresses (variously named Caelica, Myra, and Cynthia), and interweaves his randomly placed sonnets
with other lyrical forms. Love may be, as he describes it in the first of the poems, ‘the delight of all well-thinking
minds’, but throughout the early part of the miscellany he returns again and again to the ideas of impermanence and
insecurity in the world, in the individual, and in human relationships. If, as he grants in poem 7, the world is ever
moving and the beloved Myra alone seems constant, even she carries in her eyes ‘the doome of all Change’. In poem
18 he allows that Caelica finds him changeable but he then turns the accusation round by insisting that it is she who is
dominated by ideas of change and contempt. In poem 30 Myra’s inconstancy is boldly compared to that of the shifting
systems of government in ancient Rome and the sonnet concludes with the reflection that by ‘acting many parts’ both
Rome and Myra have managed to lose their ‘commanding arts’. What relates these ostensibly amorous poems to the
later religious meditations on the corruption of all human aspiration is the insistent idea that the only unchanging
reality is that of a stern, unsmiling, judgmental God. When Greville contemplates the finality of death in poem 87 he
is also haunted by the embarrassed exposure of human frailty before the throne of a perfect and sinless Creator:
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When as Mans life, the light of humane lust,
In socket of his earthly lanthorne burnes,
That all this glory unto ashes must,
And generation to corruption turnes;
Then fond desires that onely feare their end,
Doe vainly wish for life, but to emend.
But when this life is from the body fled,
To see it selfe in that eternall Glasse,
Where time doth end, and thoughts accuse the dead,
Where all to come, is one with all that was;
Then living men aske how he left his breath,
That while he lived never thought of death.
The poem’s shivers of horror at the prospect of eternal condemnation are to some extent conditioned by the
intellectual control of the theological drama. Where he had once argued with and on behalf of his mistresses, Greville
ends by debating the niceties of the human condition before the tribunal of the last and universal Judge. In poem 98
he sees himself ‘wrapt up ... in mans degeneration’ and only released from ‘this depth of sinne, this hellish grave’ by
the mercy of God; in poem 99 he is pinioned and condemned on a ‘sp’rtuall Crosse’ from which only the sacrifice of
Christ will deliver him, and in poem 109 he looks to a ‘God unknowne’ to redeem ‘that sensuall unsatiable vaste
wombe | Of thy seene Churche’ (the flawed body of believers) from the consequences of the Fall. If, like Donne,
Greville attempts to confront God with metaphors which express the paradoxes implicit in theological definition, in
certain of his late poems (most notably poem 102, ‘The Serpent, Sinne, by showing humane lust | Visions and