The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

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  • From Hugh Holland, Pancharis (1603), Ode ἀλληγοριϰκὴ (‘Who saith our times nor have, nor can’)

From Hugh Holland, Pancharis (1603), Ode ἀλληγοριϰκὴ (‘Who saith our times nor have, nor can’)

[From Hugh Holland, Pancharis, 1603]

  Ode ἀλληγορικὴ

Who saith our times nor have, nor can,

Produce us a  black swan?

Behold where one doth swim,

Whose note and hue

Besides the  other swans’ admiring him, 5

Betray it true:

A gentler bird than this

Did never  dint the breast of  Thamesis.

Mark, mark, but when his wing he takes,

How fair a flight he makes! 10

How upward and direct!

Whilst pleased Apollo

Smiles in his sphere to see the rest  affect

In vain to follow.

This swan is only his, 15

And Phoebus’ love cause of his blackness is:

He showed him first the  hoof-cleft spring,

Near which  the Thespiads sing;

 The clear Dircaean fount

Where Pindar swam; 20

The  pale Pyrene, and the  forkèd mount;

And when they came

To brooks and broader streams,

 From Zephyr’s rape would close him with his beams.

This changed his down, till this as white 25

As the whole herd in sight,

And still is in the  breast;

That part nor wind

Nor sun could make to vary from the rest,

Or alter kind. 30

So much doth virtue hate,

 For style of rareness, to degenerate.

Be then both rare and good, and long

Continue thy sweet song.

Nor let  one river boast 35

Thy tunes alone;

But  prove the air, and sail from coast to coast.

Salute old  Mone,

But first to  Clwyd stoop low,

The vale that bred thee pure as her hills’ snow. 40

From thence display thy wing again

Over  Iërna main,

To the  Eugenian dale;

 There charm the rout

With thy soft notes, and hold them within  pale 45

That late were out.

 Music hath power to draw

Where neither force can bend, nor fear can awe.

Be proof, the glory of his hand,

Charles Mountjoy, whose command 50

Hath all been harmony,

And more hath won

Upon the  kern and wildest Irishry

Than time hath done,

Whose strength is above strength, 55

 And conquers all things, yea, itself, at length.

Whoever  sipped at Baphyre river,

That heard  but spite deliver

His far-admirèd acts,

And is not rapt 60

With  entheate rage, to publish their bright tracts?

(But this more apt

When him alone we sing)

Now must we ply our aim; our swan’s on wing.

Who (see!) already hath o’er-flown 65

The Hebrid isles, and known

The scattered  Orcades;

From thence is gone

To  utmost Thule, whence he  backs the seas

To  Caledon, 70

And over  Grampius mountain,

To  Lomond lake, and  Tweed’s black-springing fountain.

 Haste, haste, sweet singer: nor to Tyne,

Humber, or Ouse  decline,

But over land to Trent; 75

There cool thy plumes,

And up again in skies and air to vent

Their  reeking fumes;

Till thou at Thames alight,

From whose proud bosom thou began’st thy flight. 80

Thames, proud of thee, and of his fate

In entertaining late

The choice of Europe’s pride:

The nimble  French,

The  Dutch, whom wealth, not hatred, doth divide, 85

The  Danes that drench

Their cares in wine, with sure

Though  slower Spain, and Italy mature.

All which, when they but hear a strain

Of thine, shall think the  main 90

Hath sent her mermaids in,

To hold them here;

Yet, looking in thy face, they shall begin

To lose that fear,

And, in the place, envy 95

So black a bird, so bright a quality.

But should they know (as I) that this,

 Who warbleth Pancharis,

Were  Cygnus, once high flying

With Cupid’s wing, 100

Though now, by love transformed and daily dying

(Which makes him sing

With more delight and grace);

Or thought they  Leda’s white adult’rer’s place

Among the stars should be resigned 105

To him, and he there shrined,

Or Thames be rapt from us

To dim and drown

In heaven the sign of old  Eridanus;

How they would frown! 110

But these are mysteries

Concealed from all but clear prophetic eyes.

It is enough their grief shall know,

 At their return, nor Po,

Iberus, Tagus, Rhine, 115

Scheldt, nor the Maas,

Slow Arar, nor swift Rhone, the Loire, nor Seine,

With all the race

Of Europe’s waters can

Set out a like, or second, to our swan. 120

Ode The last of four dedicatory poems prefixed to Pancharis: The First Book (entered in the Stationers’ Register 1 Aug. 1603) by Jonson’s friend, fellow Catholic, and fellow former pupil of Westminster School, Hugh Holland (1563–1633). It is possible that Holland introduced Jonson to John Salusbury, another native of Denbighshire in Wales, to whom he was presenting poems in this period (see Forest 10 and 11, and Und. 25). Pancharis predates 1603 by a couple of years; Holland describes it as ‘long since intended to her maiden majesty’ Queen Elizabeth. Jonson’s poem, however, was probably composed between 3 April and 26 May 1603 (see lines 44–56n.). The majority of Holland’s works are dedicatory verses (including pieces for Coryate’s Odcombian Banquet, Jonson’s Sej., and the First Folio of Shakespeare). Pancharis is an incomplete epic romance which relates at length the courtship of Owen Tudor and Queen Margaret, and is a celebration of the Welsh origins of the Tudor dynasty. Jonson was experimenting with the ode in this period; here he unites it with the growing vogue for chorographical poems (which describe landscapes and their mythic histories), and presents his Welsh friend as providing a commanding overview of the British Isles and the whole of Europe.
ἀλληγοριϰκὴ Allegorical.[Editor: Colin Burrow]
2 black swan Holland had black hair and beard. The swan was associated with Venus (hence with love) and with Apollo, and hence with poetry (Alciati, Emblemata cum commentariis, 768). Horace makes the association with poetry as he imagines his own metamorphosis into a swan, Odes, 2.20.1–20, and compares Pindar with a swan, Odes, 4.2.25–7; for a discussion of earlier examples of the topos, see Horace, Odes II, ed. Nisbet and Hubbard, 332–5. Spenser’s Prothalamion and Leland’s Cygnea Cantio associate swans with the Thames and London. Black swans were notoriously rare (see Juvenal, 6.165) and were not known in Europe at this time.
5 other swans’ Pancharis also includes dedicatory poems by Andrew Downes, Nicholas Hill, and E. B. (probably Edward Bolton, for whom Holland composed dedicatory verses).
8 dint dent.
8 Thamesis The river Thames (here pronounced to rhyme with ‘nemesis’). Camden, Britain (1610), 384 derived the name from the combination of two rivers: the Isis (the name given to the river Thames at Oxford) and the Thame.
13 affect aspire (OED, †1).
17 hoof-cleft spring Hippocrene, the spring of the muses on Mount Helicon, which sprang out of a hoofprint of Pegasus. Holland himself modestly protests ‘My lips I never yet have soused / In Hippocrene . . . / The climate where I was begotten / Of father Phoebus is forgotten’ (sig. A12).
18 the Thespiads the muses (from Thespia). (Two syllables.)
19–20 Dirce was killed by a mad bull, and a spring (‘Dircaean fount’) welled up from the place of her death in Thebes, where she was queen. Pindar was born in Thebes; Horace terms him ‘the swan of Dirce’, Odes, 4.2.25. The allusion to this ode, in which Horace modestly contrasts himself with the torrents of Pindar, is a powerful compliment to Jonson’s friend.
21 pale Pyrene Spring sacred to the muses at Corinth. Cf. pallidamque Pirenem, Persius, Prol. 4 (to which Holland alludes in his own dedicatory poem). Pyrene is three syllables.
21 forkèd mount Parnassus had a double summit. Cf. the reference to biceps Parnassus in Persius, Prol. 2.
24 Apollo would surround Holland with his beams to stop the winds raping him.
27 breast metaphorical: the wind and sun could not make his spirit less white.
32–3 ] this edn; marked as sententiae in Pancharis
35 one river The Thames, described in Pancharis, sigs. B7v–B8 and mentioned four times in the poem.
37 prove test.
38 Mone Anglesey (Mona).
39 Clwyd The valley in Denbighshire, Holland’s home.
42 Iërna main the Irish sea.
43 Eugenian dale Munster in Ireland, named after an anglicized form of the Eoghanachts. The Munster plantation had been overturned by Hugh O’Neill; by 1601 the English settlement was being re-established.
44–56 Hugh O’Neill, second Earl of Tyrone, inflicted a major defeat on the English in the battle of the Yellow Ford in Aug. 1598, and the Earl of Essex was sent to subdue him. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, took over as Lord Deputy of Ireland in Oct. 1599. In Dec. 1601 he defeated a large group of Irish rebels and Spaniards at the battle of Kinsale. He received the submission of the Earl of Tyrone on 3 Apr. 1603, and on 26 May 1603 he was recalled and did not return to Ireland. This poem must have been completed before that date, and probably after the submission of Tyrone in April. Mountjoy was praised after his death by Samuel Daniel in his Funeral Poem on the Earl of Devonshire (1606) and by John Ford in Fame’s Memorial (1606).
45 pale The boundary that marked the outer limit of English jurisdiction over Ireland. Mountjoy’s strategy was to pen Tyrone inside Ulster.
47–8 ] this edn; marked as sententiae in Pancharis
53 kern light-armed and poor Irish foot-soldier.
56 Cf. the proverb ‘Time devours all things’ (Tilley, T326).
57 sipped at . . . river i.e. composed poetry. ‘There is also a river called Helicon. After a course of seventy-five stades the stream hereupon disappears under the earth. After a gap of about twenty-two stades the water rises again, and under the name of Baphyra instead of Helicon flows into the sea as a navigable river’ (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 9.30.8).
58 but spite even spite, which could have been inspired by Mountjoy’s association with the Essex rebellion of 1601, by his liaison with Penelope Rich, or by his ferocious treatment of the Irish.
61 entheate inspired. (A Latinism; predates first citation in OED by almost three decades.)
67 Orcades Orkneys.
69 utmost Thule Translates the Latin ultima Thule. A mythical island in the extreme north, associated in Latin poetry with extreme remoteness (e.g. Virgil, Georgics, 1.30); here possibly the Shetland Islands. Thule is two syllables.
69 backs the seas goes back over the seas.
70 Caledon Caledonia; Scotland.
71 Grampius The name of the Grampian mountains derives from a misreading by the historian Hector Boece of Tacitus’s reference in his Life of Agricola, 29.2.4 to the ‘montem graupium’ at which the Romans defeated the Picts in ad 24; Grampius mons, Granzebein prisca lingua Scotorum, id est mons incurvus, asper, intractabilis a Deae fluminis ostiis, qui Aberdoniam percurrit ad lacum Loumund extenditur, ‘Grampius mountain, “Granzebein” in old Scots, that is a curved, rugged and intractable mountain which runs from the mouth of the Dee, past Aberdeen to Loch Lomond’ (Boece, Scotorum historiae, 1574, sig. 4¶3v).
72 Lomond lake For Loch Lomond, see Informations, 313–14.
72 Tweed’s . . . fountain H&S identify with ‘Twede’s Well’, the source (OED, Foutain 1) of the Tweed. The river marks the border between Northumberland and Scotland. The swan is now wheeling south.
73–5 The Tyne, Humber, Ouse, and Trent are rivers in the north of England, arranged so as to imply a gradual movement south.
74 decline deviate (OED, †1a).
78 reeking fumes Donaldson (OSA) suggests an allusion to the potteries, which were known to be firing china and using ‘sun kilns’ from 1600 (see S. Shaw, 1829, 98). The most likely antecedent of ‘their’, however, is the singeing plumage.
84 French H&S suggest an allusion to the visit of the Duke of Biron on 5 Sept. 1601; he was accompanied by about three hundred attendants. See J. Nichols (1823), 3.565.
85 Dutch On the religious and political divisions in the Low Countries see Epigr. 32.3n.
86 Danes Generally regarded as drunken; see Hamlet, 1.4.16ff. (Q2 only). Nashe, Works, 1.180 describes them as ‘bursten-bellied sots, that are to be confuted with nothing but tankards or quart pots’.
88 slower Spain Bacon’s essay ‘Of Dispatch’ notes ‘The Spartans and the Spaniards have been noted to be of small dispatch . . . “Let my death come from Spain” for then it will be sure to be long in coming’ (Bacon, Essays, 1985, 77). Tilley does not record a corresponding proverb.
90 main sea.
98–100 Pancharis begins with an invocation to love, and asks Cupid to ‘a pinion pluck me out of thine own wing’ (sig. B1).
99 Cygnus Jonson appears to fuse two Cygnuses: (1) a son of Apollo who was scorned by a lover and then flung himself off a cliff; he was transformed by his father into a swan (Ovid, Met., 7.371–9); (2) the son of Neptune who was strangled by Achilles and then transformed by his father into a swan (Met., 12.72–145), and then (in some versions of the story) into the constellation that bears his name.
104 Leda’s . . . place Jove transformed himself into a swan in order to rape Leda.
109 Eridanus the ‘king of rivers’ the Po (Virgil, Georgics, 1.482) and also a constellation which was associated with the tears of the Heliades; see R. H. Allen (1963), 215–17.
114–17 The sequence of European rivers artfully inverts the list of nations in lines 84–8: the Po is in Italy; the Iberus and Tagus are rivers of Spain; the Scheldt is in the Low Countries; the Maas is in Holland. ‘Arar’ is the Latin name of the Saône in France.