[1009] Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night (Delia LIV)

Guest poem submitted by David Nothnagle, <davidnothnagle@>:
This is my favourite poem by my favourite poet, who is sadly
under-represented on your site:

    Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to death, in silent darkness born:
Relieve my languish, and restore the light,
With dark forgetting of my cares' return
    And let the day be time enough to mourn,
The shipwrack of my ill-adventur'd youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
    Cease Dreams, th'imagery of our day desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow:
Never let the rising Sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
      Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
      And never wake, to feel the day's disdain.

	-- Samuel Daniel

I have always really loved short poems--poems of which it is possible to
experience every word, every line, with more intensity than is really
possible (for me anyway) in a longer poem.  Of course, this means that every
word, every line, is really important, and makes a short poem very difficult
to write well.  However, a good short poem will always have a certain
special intensity.  This sonnet by Samuel Daniel approaches perfection of
form.

It is, of course, a sonnet, of the English variety; made up of three
quatrains and a couplet, in iambic pentameter.  A good sonnet will build up
feeling in the quatrains, each delving a little deeper, and reachng a climax
and resolution, a summing-up, or sometimes an ironic "turn," in the final
couplet.  In this particular sonnet, the "turn" reveals that the true,
subconscious desire of the poet is for the oblivion of death.  Sonnet form
is a particularly good medium for delving ever deeper into feelings, and it
is no fluke that it remained a form of choice, in its various varieties,
throughout England and Western Europe, for hundreds of years.

In the last couple of centuries, however, this kind of strictness of meter
and rhyme has slowly fallen out of favour, as the Romantic hatred of
classical forms, and wild lust for "originality" has become ever more
extreme.  Mark Twain famously ridiculed poems in which the only image evoked
is a dried-up little man sitting in a dusty chamber, counting off on his
fingers as he writes.  However, there is a certain special kind of
originality, which is only possible within constraints and conventions.  For
me, and I suspect for many, it is easier to have a more focused grasp of a
poem, and appreciation its unique virtues, if it is written in a form we
understand, rather than something which is altogether alien to us.

As for this poem itself, I have nothing to add to it, and don't know what to
say.  Anyone who has ever felt depressed for any reason, will understand it.
Most of the sonnets in Delia are about the Lady's cruelty to her unrequited
lover; and this sonnet can be read with that in mind, but I think it
achieves a kind of universality which transcends this context.  Never has
depression--the sort of depression that causes you to lie in bed late into
the day, calling in sick to work, dreading the inevitable time when you must
leave your bedroom and face whatever it is that has caused you such
anguish--never has depression been more perfectly captured in poetic form.

I should add that there is a great musical setting of this poem in the
twentieth-century composer Dominick Argento's song-cycle, "Six Elizabethan
Songs."

Dave Nothnagle.

From: "David Wright" <David.Wright@>

The comment about Mark Twain's critique of the sonnet reminded me of one of
my favorite sonnet satires, this from the Elizabethan Age itself, a cycle of
parodies called 'The Gullinge Sonnets.'  Below are two of the best, in which
he hoists overworn rhetorical tricks on their own petards.  Try reading them
aloud.


Gulling Sonnets, III
by Sir John Davies


                 WHAT Eagle can behould her sunbrighte eye,
                 her sunbrighte eye that lights the world with love,
                 the world of Love wherein I live and dye,
                 I live and dye and divers changes prove,
                 I changes prove, yet still the same am I,
                 The same am I and never will remove,
                 never remove untill my soule doth flye,
                 my soule doth fly, and I surcease to move,
                 I cease to move which now am mov'd by you,
                 am mov'd by you that move all mortall hartes,
                 all mortall hartes whose eyes your eyes doth veiwe,
                 Your eyes doth veiwe whence Cupid shoots his darts,
                 whence Cupid shootes his dartes and woundeth those
                 that honor you and neuer were his foes.


Gulling Sonnets, VI.
      by Sir John Davies

      The sacred Muse that first made love divine
      Hath made him naked and without attire,
      But I will clothe him with this pen of mine
      That all the world his fashion shall admire.
      His hat of hope, his band of beauty fine,
      His cloak of craft, his doublet of desire,
      Grief for a girdle, shall about him twine,
      His points of pride, his eyelet holes of ire,
      His hose of hate, his codpiece of conceit,
      His stockings of stern strife, his shirt of shame,
      His garters of vainglory gay and fleet ;
      His pantofles of passions I will frame,
      Pumps of presumption shall adorn his feet
      And socks of sulleness exceeding sweet.


     fleet, quick.
     pantofles, slippers.
     pumps, slipper-shoes. 


Davies is probably best know for the following well-stated stanzas.  


                          I know my soul hath power to know all things, 
                          Yet she is blind and ignorant in all: 
                          I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, 
                          Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

                          I know my life's a pain and but a span; 
                          I know my sense is mock'd in everything; 
                          And, to conclude, I know myself a Man -
                          Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

There is quite a good webpage on him, with links to biographical stuff,
poems, essays (including an essay by T.S. Eliot) etc.
It is at:
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/davies.htm

David Wright