"A Time To..."
Mosaic 2.0 is now seeking submissions of poetry, prose, non-fiction and visual artwork for its second issue.
The theme for Issue #2 is “A Time to...”. Submissions should deal with seasons in some way. You may interpret "seasons" in the broadest possible manner.
Please see the Submissions page for more information.
We look forward to reading your work!
The Editors
Showing posts with label Fall 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fall 2010. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
From the Editor
Welcome to the first edition of Mosaic 2.0!
In 2008, the Advanced Writing Centre (AWC) at College of the North Atlantic-Qatar (CNAQ) launched a community outreach writing program. It consisted of a series of workshops offered free of charge to members of the general public in Doha, Qatar, including citizens as well as members of the expatriate community. Participants were invited to submit their poems, stories, and essays to Mosaic, a print publication whose name accurately represented the diversity of authors living in the country. The response to the writing workshops and to the publication was overwhelmingly positive. It highlighted a need for a forum where writers in Qatar could have a voice, and so Mosaic 2.0 was born!
In addition to supporting new voices, Mosaic 2.0 also aims to provide an outlet for experienced creative and scholarly writers. It is meant to be a forum where writers’ purposes - whether to provide entertainment, give information, or spark debate - can be expressed and explored.
The theme for this debut edition is “new beginnings,” and in keeping with the intended eclectic nature of Mosaic 2.0, the writers whose work appears represent various interpretations of that idea. Experienced writer Matthias Krug’s short story provides a glimpse of an immigrant’s first days, while the new voice of M. Hari
Subbiah’s poem on war gives us cause to reflect. Scholarly writing from Dr. Alan Weber gives new life to English poets who might otherwise have remained obscure.
Bringing to reality the dream of an online journal that welcomes such diversity in authors and genres has been the work of the enthusiastic AWC team at CNAQ. Matthew Stranach has provided all the technical design and support; he has been joined by Adam Larson and Kevin Pittman in working with me to review and select the work that appears.
I hope you enjoy Mosaic 2.0 and that you are inspired to share it with others!
Sincerely,
Paula Hayden
Coordinator, Advanced Writing Centre
College of the North Atlantic-Qatar
In 2008, the Advanced Writing Centre (AWC) at College of the North Atlantic-Qatar (CNAQ) launched a community outreach writing program. It consisted of a series of workshops offered free of charge to members of the general public in Doha, Qatar, including citizens as well as members of the expatriate community. Participants were invited to submit their poems, stories, and essays to Mosaic, a print publication whose name accurately represented the diversity of authors living in the country. The response to the writing workshops and to the publication was overwhelmingly positive. It highlighted a need for a forum where writers in Qatar could have a voice, and so Mosaic 2.0 was born!
In addition to supporting new voices, Mosaic 2.0 also aims to provide an outlet for experienced creative and scholarly writers. It is meant to be a forum where writers’ purposes - whether to provide entertainment, give information, or spark debate - can be expressed and explored.
The theme for this debut edition is “new beginnings,” and in keeping with the intended eclectic nature of Mosaic 2.0, the writers whose work appears represent various interpretations of that idea. Experienced writer Matthias Krug’s short story provides a glimpse of an immigrant’s first days, while the new voice of M. Hari
Subbiah’s poem on war gives us cause to reflect. Scholarly writing from Dr. Alan Weber gives new life to English poets who might otherwise have remained obscure.
Bringing to reality the dream of an online journal that welcomes such diversity in authors and genres has been the work of the enthusiastic AWC team at CNAQ. Matthew Stranach has provided all the technical design and support; he has been joined by Adam Larson and Kevin Pittman in working with me to review and select the work that appears.
I hope you enjoy Mosaic 2.0 and that you are inspired to share it with others!
Sincerely,
Paula Hayden
Coordinator, Advanced Writing Centre
College of the North Atlantic-Qatar
The pain, the war is
By M. Hari Subbiah
The neighing of horses,
The clanging of bells on elephants
This is a mighty war,
Out hangs the blood’s scent.
The background is the sunrise,
The stage is the battleground,
The audience is the innocent citizens,
Who watch the drama when their hearts pound
Brave soldiers struggling everywhere,
The ground is stained red
The victorious are praised and given honours,
Ones who gave their best now lie dead.
The mourners say:
O, war! There is no need of you,
Let us all live in unity,
Innocent lives are saved,
Let us rewrite our fateful destiny.
The neighing of horses,
The clanging of bells on elephants
This is a mighty war,
Out hangs the blood’s scent.
The background is the sunrise,
The stage is the battleground,
The audience is the innocent citizens,
Who watch the drama when their hearts pound
Brave soldiers struggling everywhere,
The ground is stained red
The victorious are praised and given honours,
Ones who gave their best now lie dead.
The mourners say:
O, war! There is no need of you,
Let us all live in unity,
Innocent lives are saved,
Let us rewrite our fateful destiny.
The New Arrival
By Matthias Krug
Pablo Nerudo Matias Hernandez was his name in its inflated entirety, but despite its obviously Spanish origins, he had never stepped foot inside that country of bloodied bulls and sensual flamenco, of eloquent Don Quixote and the elegant world champions of football before. In many ways, he was like the deflated hot-air balloon his friends lovingly compared him to; always pronouncing his departure on that foreign adventure but never actually having the means to take off into the clear blue sun-stained sky.
But now, approaching thirty-three years and with a full moon of baldness beginning to shine whitely on the top of his rounded head, he paced with nervous anticipation above the city in which he had landed just a few hours earlier. Behind him were twenty hours of sometimes precarious travel. Awaiting him was a fresh start, a new world in this old world of Europe. He had a vague whisper of a job waiting for him, but nothing entirely concrete to him apart from the one hundred Euros, freshly emitted from the exchange booth at the airport. He examined the small balcony of his cheap room. There would be enough money for a few more nights yet. Then he’d have to figure out something. But the hard part, getting here, was done now. Behind him a greasy bed beckoned, not entirely convincingly, but with the power of exhaustion weighing in on the decision. He tugged at the bristly tips of his fine macho moustache. Looking down from his fifth floor balcony, the humming city called up melodically in its seductive manner. This was a difficult call: sleep or certain seduction.
Then he saw a black man running. The black man was carrying handbags wrapped in a white sheet which looked much cleaner than the one Pablo saw behind him on the wobbly bed. That did it. His decision was taken. He would explore the fascinating streets below, just a little. He took the control. The small box television mounted up in the corner of the room eked out its last insignificant words and then turned a nightly black.
2
On the street below the motel, there was a smell in the air which positively burnt the nostrils of the unacquainted. Perhaps it was the perspiration of the deep sea-monsters which lurked in the alley next to the cinema, awaiting their certain death in green, bubbly tanks of water. Or it may well have been the sweet rusty odour of the paella rice dish, swimming with chicken pieces in a yellow rice sea.
But it was not this which the running black man smelt. He smelt fear. Pure, instinctive fear, which was raw and like blood, only more metallic and ended up insignificant and weightless up your nostrils. The policeman, running heavy-footed after him, smelt the deep sea-monsters, or perhaps even the paella, and stopped the chase to catch a quick snack at the tapas restaurant before getting back to work. It would be a long night and there would be plenty more chases of black street sellers. The streets were full of them. Best to get some snacks on the way, before the restaurants closed.
The black man kept running. He had lost his fake handbags along the way, clutching now only to the lily white sheet in his right hand. What he had not lost was his will to live. It had never been stronger in him and it had no fake Gucci sticker on its glossy, grotesque snakeskin surface. It was very real. Everywhere he saw beautiful manifestations of security and contented life, something he was unaccustomed to in his hometown. Then this vision of security escaped him momentarily. His eyesight was failing again now. He tried to keep running with some sense of purpose, but when everything blurred like this he became a gazelle, running wildly without any hope of escape. He ran by smell, avoiding dangerous objects at the last moment by how they reverberated in slanted tangents into his gaping nostrils. He did not see that the policeman had long since been shaken off.
3
In his patchy dream in the cross-Atlantic flight some hours earlier, whilst fighting the twin demons of the engine’s incessant roar and his seat neighbour’s terrible snore, Pablo had been running too. Fast as he could, fingers outstretched, through the streets of La Paz at night. They were running after him with burning torches, screaming ‘go home, foreigner, go home.’ They had called him by his nickname: ‘El Extranjero’. That was in the dream. In life he walked through that soft Spanish city. He was entirely weightless now from the tiredness creeping through his body like a stealthy thief, pick-pocketing his senses. But the city was certainly something. He liked the clean, light, airy feel of the city and he liked that the weather was fine and balmy and that the buildings were large and drawn and chirpy as birds flapping effortlessly from his imagination into reality and back again. It was this beauty, this impulse to discover his new surroundings, which made him walk on. This was a fine city to arrive in. Valencia. Beautiful, seductive Valencia. Lady Val, he would call her. Thinking that nick-naming nonsense was how he came across the beggar man in the side street leading into the big central plaza. It was a beautifully curved square.
The man was holding a cup from a burger shop. Pablo, basking in this cloud of complete tiredness, which grew in hairy bushes from each of the pores of his body and threatened to enshroud his reason, wondered what had happened to the man. This wonderment made him stop walking. Why was he there? He did not look like a bum. Harsh and probably politically incorrect, that word. But people refer to people who live on the streets as bums. Probably because they sit there on their bum often, Pablo thought, remembering his English from the time spent in the USA.
But not this one. He was kneeling. He looked well kept and not at all scary. Not demanding. Not accusing. Just kneeling there with a cup from one of those burger joints in his hands. Pablo detested the burger joints.
His girlfriend, who he had met on the central plaza in La Paz five years ago next week, and who he had first kissed on the side of a street which buzzed with cars, pulled him into burger joints sometimes. He had left her behind, as with everyone else, promising not to return soon, but to offer them a chance to come too when he was rich and influential. But she would be first, he had promised her, when he had a house or at least a flat into which they could marry.
‘Come on, come in,’ she would say with a hurt look on her face when, on the verge of entering the burger joint in La Paz, he hesitated gravely at the door.
‘No, I don’t like the look nor the smell of it,’ Pablo would say. It smelt of oily capitalism and fried corporations, he told her. But he would enter anyway just to please her and because he liked the smell of it when he kissed her, softly, in the midst of a burger joint. Now without her he felt that kiss and tasted it and felt her absence acutely, like the lack of clean boxers, like the lack of clean air in a bursting metropolis. But this Lady Val was not such a bursting voluptuous lady. Lady Val was fine and refined and tenderly dressed in elegant robes. Which could not be said of his lady. But no mind. She had her own dark fizzle. He thought of when he drank the Coke she always ordered in the burger joint.
That same cup made of plastic paper was now in the bum’s hand. Not full of black, fizzy love, but empty of yellow, clinking coins. There is never enough money to go around, or if there is, it never goes around, Pablo thought with regret. He observed the old man from a doorway in the street. He did not have the courage to go and talk to him and ask why he was there. Maybe he was just afraid of catching something if he came too close, as if poverty might somehow be contagious. And on a first day like this, fraught with difficulties and tiredness and unknown challenges, it was not advisable to catch poverty. No, sir. But he stayed to watch, somehow captured in the kneeling man’s miserable web.
Someone walked past the kneeling man now. His eyes were closed all the time. He muttered something, presumably prayers. Pablo encountered a fleeting feeling of home in those prayers, of his strictly religious upbringing and the festivals in church. A couple passed by. The man kneeled. He wore no sign to describe his plight, just a thin nightgown of pride. Apart from that a full green jacket, very smart, and blue jeans. That was all. Respectable office shoes too.
The lady of the couple turned back on a whim and dropped a coin in the burger joint cup.
Clink. It hit another small coin and settled.
The man crossed himself and said a prayer in her direction. Then he went back to his former kneeling meditation. Pablo watched as the black man he had observed earlier, the very same one he thought, came running up to the cup. He saw that the bum had no chance. He had his eyes closed and held the cup softly, eloquently, almost as an afterthought to this terrible state of poverty. The black man had come running softly too, but with quiet intent, and snatched the cup cleanly from his hands. It made a brief whooshing noise and then the black man was already gone around the next corner, and the bum who had been kneeling opened his eyes in great forlorn surprise.
All this happened in such a rush-blink-rush that Pablo had exactly one moment to decide what to do. In that moment he did not think about his tired, plane-squashed legs, about the loose nothingness in his numb arms, nor about the sleepiness which was creeping upon his mind in great stealthy steps. In that moment he looked into the bum’s crumpled face and saw a hopeless void. It was such a dreadful void that Pablo began running.
For Pablo the chase was unusual, because he was not accustomed to spilling his lungs out onto the pavement on a daily basis. For the black man it was as in almost every day in his life; he was running blindly and with a bad conscience just for being alive in a country where he was obviously unwanted. But this time his conscience was justifiably bad and he despised himself for what an animalistic instinct in him had made him do. He had taken revenge for his lost bags, his lack of money, by robbing a poor, helpless old man.
Pablo did not think much. He only sprinted to catch the black man. He did not always want to think of him as a black man, but there was no other description he could think of whilst running at full gasp through these heaving hordes of gawking people. Perhaps he should call him illegal immigrant instead, because surely he was here without papers. This was funny coming from an immigrant on his first day in Spain, but that’s what immigration laws did to you.
But he had no chance, really, to catch the illegal immigrant. He quickly lost sight of the man between arms and legs and people and baby baskets and little cuddly dogs. Pablo slowed down. Now a deep oceanic hunger ached inside his stomach, augmented by the breathless wheezing bringing up bunches of stale air from inside his lungs. He thought he saw some bronze angels fluttering above the building he walked past now. Shaking his head sceptically at his strange vision, he slipped a leaf of chewing gum into his mouth. This helped momentarily against the hunger.
He walked past two other street bums on the way to find a restaurant. One of them got up, shaking her wrinkle-riddled hand at the other, younger bum.
‘Go and find some work: you are young, you can work, you little tramp!’ she shouted.
The other woman mumbled something back. It was hardly audible above the steady tremor of the street but she left anyhow and then there was just one beggar woman on the street upon which Pablo walked for the first time. He would have mentally called her a bum too, but that was politically even less correct, to call a woman a bum. That might even be considered sexist in this new place. You had to be careful with what you said in new places, he knew from his American years.
Pablo walked on and watched now as a few people reached for their pockets to give the only remaining beggar lady some coins for her troubles. But all of them had run out of coins all at once. The beggar lady shook her wrinkled hands at those no-good people who had run out of coins at the same time. She did not believe it. Not for one moment. She thought it was another cheap trick, like looking away or talking suddenly on the mobile phone, without having received a call.
But perhaps it was no cheap trick. The same pattern was repeated everywhere Pablo raked his tired gaze through the mounds of gently swaying people. At the flower stand which was just closing for the night, the good paying customers suddenly found that they had not a single coin in their pockets to pay for the array of flowers on display. But he did not give it significance. Now he just needed to get some food and retreat to his motel bed.
Pablo walked on with faltering legs. He came across a restaurant and decided to turn in there, whatever the price, because he could not possibly walk any further. He saw that some kind of commotion was happening inside.
He walked up to the order counter. I’ll have a Caesar salad to take away, he said, in Spanish. His Spanish. Their Spanish. Everyone’s Spanish.
‘Nada.’ The man at the order counter said. He looked stressed. He also looked Spanish. A tiny crab of racism stirred inside Pablo’s mind.
‘Como que nada?’ Pablo inquired. How could it be nothing? But now he looked more closely at the commotion which was taking place.
‘You might want to check that you have enough money,’ the waiter said. ‘Or any money for that matter. Check it and then order.’
This was flagrant racism. Did he look like a foreigner, really? At home they called him “the foreigner” because of his time in America. It wasn’t the most inventive nickname, for South America produced plenty of inventive and entirely enviable nicknames like ‘The Barbie Doll’, ‘The Little Pea’, ‘The Stomach Hair’, or even ‘The Flea’. But he was just ‘The Foreigner’. Now he felt like a foreigner too, being treated like this upon stepping into his first restaurant in this new place. Did he have it written across his twisted moustache, stamped upon his beautifully shining moon-forehead, or even typed carefully across his drooping eye-lids? Was this the treatment for a newcomer?
Pablo blinked twice in sheer anger. The waiter left in response. He had to stop a fight at one table. It was between a waiter who had returned a credit card and its owner. It does not work, the waiter said in Spanish. But the violent young man would not have it. Fists were exchanged.
At another table there sat a nice-looking gentleman who had also just received the bill and then taken his leathery wallet out. It was empty of money. Maybe he thought the lovely little kitten sitting across from him had poached the cash because he handily gave the waiter a golden credit card. He smiled suavely.
Incredulously, Pablo turned his gaze again to the other table where the young man had kicked a toss. The waiter had gotten his way and the bloodied young man and his partner were going to the kitchen to wash dishes. The nice-looking gentleman was just getting his golden credit card returned as he saw this taking place. He broke into a sweat as he saw it and did not look at the lovely little kitten sitting across from him. She did not look at him either, but fidgeted awkwardly with her phone.
‘This card does not work,’ the waiter said. This one was an immigrant waiter, but a legal immigrant. His legality brought only a measured improvement in the treatment dished out to him. But now he was keen on dishing back. He had always done this job well and long had waited for a moment like this, perhaps.
‘Try it again,’ the gentleman ordered, not looking nice any longer. He looked like a sneering voodoo mask from Africa now, emitting heavy hues of sweat-air that Pablo could sense from the counter.
‘I tried it four times, sir. Your card does not work.’ He made a gesture towards the kitchen. The whole restaurant was watching this now. They all had checked their wallets and seen the same thing happen. No more money. What now, Pablo thought? Sleep. Go to the motel and get some sleep on an empty stomach. Then try to get to grips with this unusual place in the morning.
The face of the man with the golden credit card blanked and he began to cry. The lovely little kitten made a tutting sound and made as though to leave.
The legal immigrant waiter blocked her way. He shook his head quietly from side to side. His body was strong and lion-like. He was worth a view if you were on safari.
‘You too,’ he said.
Reluctantly she followed the crying gentleman who had wooed her favour until then but suddenly would not look at her any longer. She looked at her red fingernails one last time. They went to the kitchen. The whole restaurant suddenly migrated to the kitchen. It was the waiter’s revenge. The other waiter came up to Pablo at the front desk.
‘Do you still want to order?’ he asked.
‘No, it will be alright,’ Pablo said.
‘Como que no?’ the waiter asked with a smile.
Pablo made a South America hand sign for him to go to such and such a place, which would hardly be understood here, and then left the restaurant.
He popped another leaf of chewing gum into his mouth. Then he walked alone and hungry but very much alive through the mellow Lady Val night and to the motel. He was happy that at least there they would not charge the bill until the end of his stay.
Pablo Nerudo Matias Hernandez was his name in its inflated entirety, but despite its obviously Spanish origins, he had never stepped foot inside that country of bloodied bulls and sensual flamenco, of eloquent Don Quixote and the elegant world champions of football before. In many ways, he was like the deflated hot-air balloon his friends lovingly compared him to; always pronouncing his departure on that foreign adventure but never actually having the means to take off into the clear blue sun-stained sky.
But now, approaching thirty-three years and with a full moon of baldness beginning to shine whitely on the top of his rounded head, he paced with nervous anticipation above the city in which he had landed just a few hours earlier. Behind him were twenty hours of sometimes precarious travel. Awaiting him was a fresh start, a new world in this old world of Europe. He had a vague whisper of a job waiting for him, but nothing entirely concrete to him apart from the one hundred Euros, freshly emitted from the exchange booth at the airport. He examined the small balcony of his cheap room. There would be enough money for a few more nights yet. Then he’d have to figure out something. But the hard part, getting here, was done now. Behind him a greasy bed beckoned, not entirely convincingly, but with the power of exhaustion weighing in on the decision. He tugged at the bristly tips of his fine macho moustache. Looking down from his fifth floor balcony, the humming city called up melodically in its seductive manner. This was a difficult call: sleep or certain seduction.
Then he saw a black man running. The black man was carrying handbags wrapped in a white sheet which looked much cleaner than the one Pablo saw behind him on the wobbly bed. That did it. His decision was taken. He would explore the fascinating streets below, just a little. He took the control. The small box television mounted up in the corner of the room eked out its last insignificant words and then turned a nightly black.
2
On the street below the motel, there was a smell in the air which positively burnt the nostrils of the unacquainted. Perhaps it was the perspiration of the deep sea-monsters which lurked in the alley next to the cinema, awaiting their certain death in green, bubbly tanks of water. Or it may well have been the sweet rusty odour of the paella rice dish, swimming with chicken pieces in a yellow rice sea.
But it was not this which the running black man smelt. He smelt fear. Pure, instinctive fear, which was raw and like blood, only more metallic and ended up insignificant and weightless up your nostrils. The policeman, running heavy-footed after him, smelt the deep sea-monsters, or perhaps even the paella, and stopped the chase to catch a quick snack at the tapas restaurant before getting back to work. It would be a long night and there would be plenty more chases of black street sellers. The streets were full of them. Best to get some snacks on the way, before the restaurants closed.
The black man kept running. He had lost his fake handbags along the way, clutching now only to the lily white sheet in his right hand. What he had not lost was his will to live. It had never been stronger in him and it had no fake Gucci sticker on its glossy, grotesque snakeskin surface. It was very real. Everywhere he saw beautiful manifestations of security and contented life, something he was unaccustomed to in his hometown. Then this vision of security escaped him momentarily. His eyesight was failing again now. He tried to keep running with some sense of purpose, but when everything blurred like this he became a gazelle, running wildly without any hope of escape. He ran by smell, avoiding dangerous objects at the last moment by how they reverberated in slanted tangents into his gaping nostrils. He did not see that the policeman had long since been shaken off.
3
In his patchy dream in the cross-Atlantic flight some hours earlier, whilst fighting the twin demons of the engine’s incessant roar and his seat neighbour’s terrible snore, Pablo had been running too. Fast as he could, fingers outstretched, through the streets of La Paz at night. They were running after him with burning torches, screaming ‘go home, foreigner, go home.’ They had called him by his nickname: ‘El Extranjero’. That was in the dream. In life he walked through that soft Spanish city. He was entirely weightless now from the tiredness creeping through his body like a stealthy thief, pick-pocketing his senses. But the city was certainly something. He liked the clean, light, airy feel of the city and he liked that the weather was fine and balmy and that the buildings were large and drawn and chirpy as birds flapping effortlessly from his imagination into reality and back again. It was this beauty, this impulse to discover his new surroundings, which made him walk on. This was a fine city to arrive in. Valencia. Beautiful, seductive Valencia. Lady Val, he would call her. Thinking that nick-naming nonsense was how he came across the beggar man in the side street leading into the big central plaza. It was a beautifully curved square.
The man was holding a cup from a burger shop. Pablo, basking in this cloud of complete tiredness, which grew in hairy bushes from each of the pores of his body and threatened to enshroud his reason, wondered what had happened to the man. This wonderment made him stop walking. Why was he there? He did not look like a bum. Harsh and probably politically incorrect, that word. But people refer to people who live on the streets as bums. Probably because they sit there on their bum often, Pablo thought, remembering his English from the time spent in the USA.
But not this one. He was kneeling. He looked well kept and not at all scary. Not demanding. Not accusing. Just kneeling there with a cup from one of those burger joints in his hands. Pablo detested the burger joints.
His girlfriend, who he had met on the central plaza in La Paz five years ago next week, and who he had first kissed on the side of a street which buzzed with cars, pulled him into burger joints sometimes. He had left her behind, as with everyone else, promising not to return soon, but to offer them a chance to come too when he was rich and influential. But she would be first, he had promised her, when he had a house or at least a flat into which they could marry.
‘Come on, come in,’ she would say with a hurt look on her face when, on the verge of entering the burger joint in La Paz, he hesitated gravely at the door.
‘No, I don’t like the look nor the smell of it,’ Pablo would say. It smelt of oily capitalism and fried corporations, he told her. But he would enter anyway just to please her and because he liked the smell of it when he kissed her, softly, in the midst of a burger joint. Now without her he felt that kiss and tasted it and felt her absence acutely, like the lack of clean boxers, like the lack of clean air in a bursting metropolis. But this Lady Val was not such a bursting voluptuous lady. Lady Val was fine and refined and tenderly dressed in elegant robes. Which could not be said of his lady. But no mind. She had her own dark fizzle. He thought of when he drank the Coke she always ordered in the burger joint.
That same cup made of plastic paper was now in the bum’s hand. Not full of black, fizzy love, but empty of yellow, clinking coins. There is never enough money to go around, or if there is, it never goes around, Pablo thought with regret. He observed the old man from a doorway in the street. He did not have the courage to go and talk to him and ask why he was there. Maybe he was just afraid of catching something if he came too close, as if poverty might somehow be contagious. And on a first day like this, fraught with difficulties and tiredness and unknown challenges, it was not advisable to catch poverty. No, sir. But he stayed to watch, somehow captured in the kneeling man’s miserable web.
Someone walked past the kneeling man now. His eyes were closed all the time. He muttered something, presumably prayers. Pablo encountered a fleeting feeling of home in those prayers, of his strictly religious upbringing and the festivals in church. A couple passed by. The man kneeled. He wore no sign to describe his plight, just a thin nightgown of pride. Apart from that a full green jacket, very smart, and blue jeans. That was all. Respectable office shoes too.
The lady of the couple turned back on a whim and dropped a coin in the burger joint cup.
Clink. It hit another small coin and settled.
The man crossed himself and said a prayer in her direction. Then he went back to his former kneeling meditation. Pablo watched as the black man he had observed earlier, the very same one he thought, came running up to the cup. He saw that the bum had no chance. He had his eyes closed and held the cup softly, eloquently, almost as an afterthought to this terrible state of poverty. The black man had come running softly too, but with quiet intent, and snatched the cup cleanly from his hands. It made a brief whooshing noise and then the black man was already gone around the next corner, and the bum who had been kneeling opened his eyes in great forlorn surprise.
All this happened in such a rush-blink-rush that Pablo had exactly one moment to decide what to do. In that moment he did not think about his tired, plane-squashed legs, about the loose nothingness in his numb arms, nor about the sleepiness which was creeping upon his mind in great stealthy steps. In that moment he looked into the bum’s crumpled face and saw a hopeless void. It was such a dreadful void that Pablo began running.
For Pablo the chase was unusual, because he was not accustomed to spilling his lungs out onto the pavement on a daily basis. For the black man it was as in almost every day in his life; he was running blindly and with a bad conscience just for being alive in a country where he was obviously unwanted. But this time his conscience was justifiably bad and he despised himself for what an animalistic instinct in him had made him do. He had taken revenge for his lost bags, his lack of money, by robbing a poor, helpless old man.
Pablo did not think much. He only sprinted to catch the black man. He did not always want to think of him as a black man, but there was no other description he could think of whilst running at full gasp through these heaving hordes of gawking people. Perhaps he should call him illegal immigrant instead, because surely he was here without papers. This was funny coming from an immigrant on his first day in Spain, but that’s what immigration laws did to you.
But he had no chance, really, to catch the illegal immigrant. He quickly lost sight of the man between arms and legs and people and baby baskets and little cuddly dogs. Pablo slowed down. Now a deep oceanic hunger ached inside his stomach, augmented by the breathless wheezing bringing up bunches of stale air from inside his lungs. He thought he saw some bronze angels fluttering above the building he walked past now. Shaking his head sceptically at his strange vision, he slipped a leaf of chewing gum into his mouth. This helped momentarily against the hunger.
He walked past two other street bums on the way to find a restaurant. One of them got up, shaking her wrinkle-riddled hand at the other, younger bum.
‘Go and find some work: you are young, you can work, you little tramp!’ she shouted.
The other woman mumbled something back. It was hardly audible above the steady tremor of the street but she left anyhow and then there was just one beggar woman on the street upon which Pablo walked for the first time. He would have mentally called her a bum too, but that was politically even less correct, to call a woman a bum. That might even be considered sexist in this new place. You had to be careful with what you said in new places, he knew from his American years.
Pablo walked on and watched now as a few people reached for their pockets to give the only remaining beggar lady some coins for her troubles. But all of them had run out of coins all at once. The beggar lady shook her wrinkled hands at those no-good people who had run out of coins at the same time. She did not believe it. Not for one moment. She thought it was another cheap trick, like looking away or talking suddenly on the mobile phone, without having received a call.
But perhaps it was no cheap trick. The same pattern was repeated everywhere Pablo raked his tired gaze through the mounds of gently swaying people. At the flower stand which was just closing for the night, the good paying customers suddenly found that they had not a single coin in their pockets to pay for the array of flowers on display. But he did not give it significance. Now he just needed to get some food and retreat to his motel bed.
Pablo walked on with faltering legs. He came across a restaurant and decided to turn in there, whatever the price, because he could not possibly walk any further. He saw that some kind of commotion was happening inside.
He walked up to the order counter. I’ll have a Caesar salad to take away, he said, in Spanish. His Spanish. Their Spanish. Everyone’s Spanish.
‘Nada.’ The man at the order counter said. He looked stressed. He also looked Spanish. A tiny crab of racism stirred inside Pablo’s mind.
‘Como que nada?’ Pablo inquired. How could it be nothing? But now he looked more closely at the commotion which was taking place.
‘You might want to check that you have enough money,’ the waiter said. ‘Or any money for that matter. Check it and then order.’
This was flagrant racism. Did he look like a foreigner, really? At home they called him “the foreigner” because of his time in America. It wasn’t the most inventive nickname, for South America produced plenty of inventive and entirely enviable nicknames like ‘The Barbie Doll’, ‘The Little Pea’, ‘The Stomach Hair’, or even ‘The Flea’. But he was just ‘The Foreigner’. Now he felt like a foreigner too, being treated like this upon stepping into his first restaurant in this new place. Did he have it written across his twisted moustache, stamped upon his beautifully shining moon-forehead, or even typed carefully across his drooping eye-lids? Was this the treatment for a newcomer?
Pablo blinked twice in sheer anger. The waiter left in response. He had to stop a fight at one table. It was between a waiter who had returned a credit card and its owner. It does not work, the waiter said in Spanish. But the violent young man would not have it. Fists were exchanged.
At another table there sat a nice-looking gentleman who had also just received the bill and then taken his leathery wallet out. It was empty of money. Maybe he thought the lovely little kitten sitting across from him had poached the cash because he handily gave the waiter a golden credit card. He smiled suavely.
Incredulously, Pablo turned his gaze again to the other table where the young man had kicked a toss. The waiter had gotten his way and the bloodied young man and his partner were going to the kitchen to wash dishes. The nice-looking gentleman was just getting his golden credit card returned as he saw this taking place. He broke into a sweat as he saw it and did not look at the lovely little kitten sitting across from him. She did not look at him either, but fidgeted awkwardly with her phone.
‘This card does not work,’ the waiter said. This one was an immigrant waiter, but a legal immigrant. His legality brought only a measured improvement in the treatment dished out to him. But now he was keen on dishing back. He had always done this job well and long had waited for a moment like this, perhaps.
‘Try it again,’ the gentleman ordered, not looking nice any longer. He looked like a sneering voodoo mask from Africa now, emitting heavy hues of sweat-air that Pablo could sense from the counter.
‘I tried it four times, sir. Your card does not work.’ He made a gesture towards the kitchen. The whole restaurant was watching this now. They all had checked their wallets and seen the same thing happen. No more money. What now, Pablo thought? Sleep. Go to the motel and get some sleep on an empty stomach. Then try to get to grips with this unusual place in the morning.
The face of the man with the golden credit card blanked and he began to cry. The lovely little kitten made a tutting sound and made as though to leave.
The legal immigrant waiter blocked her way. He shook his head quietly from side to side. His body was strong and lion-like. He was worth a view if you were on safari.
‘You too,’ he said.
Reluctantly she followed the crying gentleman who had wooed her favour until then but suddenly would not look at her any longer. She looked at her red fingernails one last time. They went to the kitchen. The whole restaurant suddenly migrated to the kitchen. It was the waiter’s revenge. The other waiter came up to Pablo at the front desk.
‘Do you still want to order?’ he asked.
‘No, it will be alright,’ Pablo said.
‘Como que no?’ the waiter asked with a smile.
Pablo made a South America hand sign for him to go to such and such a place, which would hardly be understood here, and then left the restaurant.
He popped another leaf of chewing gum into his mouth. Then he walked alone and hungry but very much alive through the mellow Lady Val night and to the motel. He was happy that at least there they would not charge the bill until the end of his stay.
The Minor Elizabethans: Obscurity Deserved?
By Alan S. Weber
Weill Cornell Medical College - Qatar
The Elizabethan Age, named after the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, was truly a golden age in English history. Literature and art flourished; it was a time of relative internal peace, and the country fought off a nearly successful Spanish naval invasion in 1588. During the Elizabethan Era, England began its massive colonial expansion that culminated in the world’s largest empire, stretching to over 33 million square kilometers by 1922. Within only a few decades after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, England was torn apart by a devastating civil war (1642-51) that would leave psychological scars well into the 18th century. Later generations would look back fondly on this extraordinary period of English history presided over by Elizabeth.
The Elizabethan era also produced one of England’s most renowned poets and dramatists, William Shakespeare. But along with Shakespeare, the country also boasted of a number of lesser lights, some–like Ben Jonson–whose reputation equaled that of Shakespeare during the Elizabethan period, and others who have passed silently into obscurity. Today I will look at three artists – two poets, and one composer, who, while not entirely obscure, are studied and admired much less than the towering and better known figures of Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Marlowe. What has led to these minor artists falling out of critical favor and popularity? Why has Shakespeare alone become synonymous with Elizabethan literature?
Adventurer, poet, and scholar Sir Walter Raleigh, poet Michael Drayton, and lutenist and lyricist John Dowland all shared a serious commitment to artistic production. Although well known in their day, currently they are not the subject of much scholarly inquiry, even by Renaissance specialists. The reasons why I have chosen these particular “minor” Elizabethans will become clearer as the discussion progresses.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh has several claims to fame. The source of Sir Walter’s wealth and his rise to social prominence originated in confiscated lands in Ireland where he spent his early years suppressing the Irish rebellions (Hennessy, 2007). He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1585 but fell in and out of favor at court due to his strident behavior and knack for making enemies. Elizabeth banished him to the Tower of London for marrying Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her ladies-in-waiting, without her consent. The marriage was happy, although Sir Walter had the reputation of being a ladies’ man.
Raleigh undertook several journeys to the Americas in search of the famed City of Gold, or El Dorado, which he claimed to have discovered in Guyana on the Orinoco River. He also founded a failed colony on Roanoke Island in Virginia. In 1587, Raleigh’s company tried again to colonize Roanoke with another group of settlers. But supply ships to the colony were delayed for years, and when they finally arrived in 1591, not a trace of the “lost colony of Roanoke” was ever found. The only clue to the colony’s fate was the word Croatoan carved into a tree. This led to speculation that the colony’s inhabitants had been massacred or kidnapped by the native Croatoan Indians. Sir Walter is also credited with bringing tobacco back to England and establishing smoking as a fashionable pastime.
Just as he lived in controversy, he died in it also. Raleigh spent 12 years imprisoned in the Tower of London for plotting against James I. He was released by James to renew the search for El Dorado, but on his return voyage, Raleigh imprudently ransacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Thomé. To appease the outraged Spanish, James I executed Sir Walter on his return to England (Lloyd, 1899, pp. 61-112).
While in the Tower of London, Sir Walter wrote regularly, producing an ambitious History of the World, and a number of poems. Let’s look at one of his productions, a sonnet. This poem, “My Boddy in the Walls Captived,” belongs to the period of his second imprisonment in the Tower.
My boddy in the walls captived
feels not the wounds of spighfull envy.
butt my thralde minde, of liberty deprived,
fast fettered in her auntient memory,
douth nought beholde butt sorrowes diing face,
such prison earst was so delightfull
as it desirde no other dwellinge place,
Butt tymes effects, and destines despightfull
haue changed both my keeper and my fare,
loves fire, and bewtis light I then had store,
butt now closs keipt, as captives wounted are
y(t) food, that heat, that light I find no more,
Dyspaire bolts vp my dores, and I alone
speake to dead walls, butt thos heare not my mone.
(Latham, 1951).
This is not bad poetry – Raleigh certainly possesses an ear for the native rhythms of the English language in his verse. Techniques such as the alliteration in “Fast-fetter’d,” a common feature of native Anglo-Saxon poetry, are fused with the continental traditions of the sonnet form. What is missing in Raleigh’s sonnet is that he has passed over too many opportunities to universalize his experience and to teach the listener something new. One could uncover literally hundreds of similar sonnets during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. In short, the themes and theme development are commonplace in Raleigh’s poem, and speak most eloquently to his own particular case of outrage and mistreatment.
A brief comparison with a poem on a similar theme by John Donne will illustrate some of the failings of Raleigh’s poetic art:
Oh my black Soule! Now thou art summoned
By sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion;
Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled,
Or like a thiefe, which till deaths doome be read,
Wisheth himselfe deliverd from prison;
But damn'd and hal'd to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisioned;
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;
But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?
Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke;
And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne;
Or wash thee in Christ's blood, which hath this might
That being red, it dyes red soules to white.
(Donne, 1991).
Here Donne delves into similar themes explored by Raleigh, including suffering, psychological and physical imprisonment and deprivation, and abandonment, but Donne interlaces religious themes, the medieval contemptus mundi philosophy and the philosophical intricacies of grace and redemption. The line “Thou are like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done Treason,” is a shocking and startling image (in light of several Catholic plots against Queen Elizabeth), typical of the metaphysical style cultivated by Donne. Here is a new and memorable kind of poetry.
“My Boddy in the Walls Captived” does not represent Raleigh’s best poetry and while he could write stretches of outstanding verse, but he certainly was an inconsistent poet. Thus my final assessment remains that although Sir Walter Raleigh did produce some noteworthy poetry, and should also be remembered as a great prose stylist, he must be classed as a minor Elizabethan artist. His reputation will rest on the key historical role he played in English politics and American colonial history and his fame as an early historiographer for his History of the World.
Michael Drayton
Only two comparative studies on Michael Drayton have been written in the last ten years (Galbraith, 2000; Swärdh, 2003), and he is little read except by specialists. The title of Jean Brink’s 1990 book entitled Michael Drayton Revisited is explicitly apologetic. Drayton probably knew William Shakespeare personally since Drayton was born in Hartshill in the same county as Shakespeare, Warwickshire. There are remarkable points of contact between the two authors and their lives and work were strangely parallel:
1) both were born in Warwickshire within one year of each other
2) both came from Yeoman stock, Drayton the son of a tanner, Shakespeare the son of a glove-maker
3) both attended their local grammar school, but not University
4) both men moved to London to write poetry and plays
5) both rose to the rank of gentlemen and received coats of arms.
John Ward, who became the vicar of Shakespeare’s home town Stratford-on-Avon in 1662, reported that "Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted" (Bate, 2010). This story, however, may be apocryphal.
Drayton was prolific and produced poetry from 1591 to 1630, thus he spanned both the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. He was known as “Our English Ovid” for his collection of poetry called England’s Heroical Epistles in imitation of Ovid. So why is Drayton today not regarded as a major poet, or even England’s national poet? Why did this crown pass to Shakespeare, whose primary work was in the realm of drama?
Drayton’s greatest work, which received mixed reviews in his day, was the massive 15,000 line poem Poly-Olbion (1612-22). The title draws on the ancient name for Briton, Albion, or the White Isle, describing the white cliffs of Dover. He drew on standard histories of the day, such as Froissart, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and William Camden’s Britannia, but the author also collected local historical information through his own research. The poetry of Poly-Olbion is well crafted and surprisingly even in quality, which is a difficult feat to maintain given its voluminous size. But more striking is the encyclopedic scope of Poly-Olbion, which not only provides historical background on each of England’s counties but also discusses the character, psychology, and philosophy of England’s various inhabitants. In this sense Drayton’s work provides a valuable sociological and historical sourcebook of the period. Drayton begins in Book I of Poly-Olbion:
Of Albions glorious Ile the Wonders whilst I write,
The sundry varying soyles, the pleasures infinite
(Where heate kills not the cold, nor cold expells the heat,
The calmes too mildly small, nor winds too roughly great,
Nor night doth hinder day, nor day the night doth wrong,
The Summer not too short, the Winter not too long)
What helpe shall I invoke to ayde my Muse the while?
Thou Genius of the place (this most renowned Ile)
Which livedst long before the All-earth-drowning Flood,
Whilst yet the world did swarme with her Gigantick brood;
Goe thou before me still thy circling shores about,
And in this wandring Maze helpe to conduct me out.
(Drayton, “The First Song,” 1961).
Drayton invokes the genius of England to take him on a poetic voyage of discovery throughout the country. The tone is the epic voice, best illustrated in Western literature by Homer, and reaching perfection in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which later eclipsed Poly-Olbion as England’s most recognized poetic epic.
Drayton was bitter about the neglect of his work during his lifetime both by the public and the courts of Elizabeth and James. This failure to attract royal favor could explain why his work is today not better known. Perhaps Drayton had also incurred the displeasure of his influential contemporary Ben Jonson, who did enjoy abundant royal patronage and who was not known for praising his fellow poets. Jonson was disappointed by the Poly-Olbion; he wrote: “Michael Drayton’s Polyalbion if he had performed what he promised to write the deeds of all the Worthies [would have] been excellent; his Long Verses pleased him not” (as cited in Newdigate, 1941, p. 137). So the curious overshadowing of this poet must remain a mystery – one could attribute his decline in popularity simply to the quality of his work, or to his marginalization by the influential London literati as well as by monied patrons. So my final assessment is that Drayton is a poet who should be reassessed. The close parallels of his life and career to Shakespeare has led to an unfair comparison of the two artists.
John Dowland
Dowland was also a very close contemporary of Shakespeare – he was born one year before Shakespeare in 1563. There is no evidence that they ever knew each other, and Dowland never served as a musician at Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant court, possibly because of his Roman Catholic religion. He spent most of his professional career at the court of King Christian IV of Denmark. He was known throughout Europe as one of the greatest lute players of his age. Richard Barnfield wrote in 1598 in the famous lines: “Dowland … whose heavenly tuch / Upon the Lute doeth ravish humaine sense” (Barnfield, “Sonnet 1,” 1876, p. 189).
His melodies are haunting and inspired imitators throughout Europe. Dowland created a close match between the cadence and timbre of the music and his lyrics, as witnessed by his masterpiece “Come, Heavy Sleep,” which describe a man longing for sleep and his ambivalence towards his final and permanent sleep (Dowland, 1597).
When comparing the compositions of Dowland to another famous composer and music theorist of the period, Thomas Morley, Dowland’s artistic merit becomes apparent. Morley’s “It Was a Lover and His Lass” appears in Shakespeare’s play As You like It and is one of the few songs in Shakespeare, whose plays must have been very musical, for which the notated music has survived.
While very pleasant and entertaining, Morley’s light-hearted song, which describes the joys of care-free love, is obviously inserted as a filler to the drama, a musical interlude to provide variety to the action. The lyrics are only very loosely related to the plot, and instead create an atmosphere of spring, love, and festivity, some of the major themes of As You Like It. The verses are interchangeable, and do not create a narrative sequence, as Dowland’s songs often do, unfolding a tale of the introspective inner movement of the soul.
But what other criteria can we invoke to judge Dowland’s art besides my own personal preference for Dowland’s melancholy over Shakespeare’s and Morely’s boundless optimism? We can also invoke the canon of universality and influence. Dowland obviously touched a chord in the English consciousness – centuries after his death, other composers have identified something quintessentially English in his compositions. The well known British classical composer Benjamin Britten, for example, in 1963 took the melodic line from Dowland’s signature piece “Come Heavy Sleep,” and built upon it a new work of theme and variation called “Nocturnal after John Dowland for Guitar.” It was written for Julian Bream, a guitarist and lutenist who was the student of the great Andrés Segovia, and after Segovia one of the greatest 20th century classical guitarists.
Dowland has also resonated with modern British pop artists. Elvis Costello included a recording of Dowland's lute song "Can she excuse my wrongs" as a bonus track on the 2006 re-release of his album The Juliet Letters. And rock artist Sting, of the Police, has also recorded some of Dowland’s songs for voice and lute. In conclusion, my final assessment of John Dowland is that although he played a small part in the development of English court music, his influence on European music was immense as well as on later English composers and musicians. He is a major Elizabethan artist.
Clearly, the question of why some artists are remembered and studied long after their deaths involves complicated questions of history, literary politics and the vagaries of fame. One obvious explanation for the relative obscurity of some very fine Elizabethan artists was the enshrinement of Shakespeare as England’s national writer, which began in the 18th century and intensified in the 19th. One aspect of bardolatry was clearly nationalistic – the ‘natural, untutored genius’ of Shakespeare could be contrasted with the rival French drama which had adopted strict classical rules (‘the unities’) based on Aristotle’s Poetics. Also, Shakespeare always flattered his English audiences for their bravery, patriotism, and native wit.
References
Barnfield, R. (1876). Complete Poems. A. Grosart, (Ed.). London: J.B. Nichols and Sons.
Bate, J. (2010). Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. New York: Random House.
Brink, J. R. (1990). Drayton Revisited. Boston: Twayne.
Donne, J. (1985). The Complete English Poems. C.A. Patrides, (Ed.). London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
Dowland, J. (1597). The First Book of Songs, for 4 parts and lute (1597). London.
Drayton, M. (1961). The Works of Michael Drayton. J. William Hebel, (Ed.). 5 vols. London: Shakespeare Head Press.
Galbraith, D.I. (2000). Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Hennessey, Sir J. P. (1883; rpt. 2007). Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland. Fayetteville, AK: Juniper Grove.
Latham, A. M. C. (1951). The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Newdigate, B. S. (1941). Drayton and His Circle. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press.
Lloyd, C.E. (1899). State Trials of Mary, Queen of Scots, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Captain William Kidd. Chicago: Callaghan and Co.
Swärdh, Anna. (2003). Rape and Religion in English Renaissance Literature: A Topical Study of Four Texts by Shakespeare, Drayton, and Middleton. Uppsala: Uppsala University.
Weill Cornell Medical College - Qatar
The Elizabethan Age, named after the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, was truly a golden age in English history. Literature and art flourished; it was a time of relative internal peace, and the country fought off a nearly successful Spanish naval invasion in 1588. During the Elizabethan Era, England began its massive colonial expansion that culminated in the world’s largest empire, stretching to over 33 million square kilometers by 1922. Within only a few decades after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, England was torn apart by a devastating civil war (1642-51) that would leave psychological scars well into the 18th century. Later generations would look back fondly on this extraordinary period of English history presided over by Elizabeth.
The Elizabethan era also produced one of England’s most renowned poets and dramatists, William Shakespeare. But along with Shakespeare, the country also boasted of a number of lesser lights, some–like Ben Jonson–whose reputation equaled that of Shakespeare during the Elizabethan period, and others who have passed silently into obscurity. Today I will look at three artists – two poets, and one composer, who, while not entirely obscure, are studied and admired much less than the towering and better known figures of Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Marlowe. What has led to these minor artists falling out of critical favor and popularity? Why has Shakespeare alone become synonymous with Elizabethan literature?
Adventurer, poet, and scholar Sir Walter Raleigh, poet Michael Drayton, and lutenist and lyricist John Dowland all shared a serious commitment to artistic production. Although well known in their day, currently they are not the subject of much scholarly inquiry, even by Renaissance specialists. The reasons why I have chosen these particular “minor” Elizabethans will become clearer as the discussion progresses.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh has several claims to fame. The source of Sir Walter’s wealth and his rise to social prominence originated in confiscated lands in Ireland where he spent his early years suppressing the Irish rebellions (Hennessy, 2007). He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1585 but fell in and out of favor at court due to his strident behavior and knack for making enemies. Elizabeth banished him to the Tower of London for marrying Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her ladies-in-waiting, without her consent. The marriage was happy, although Sir Walter had the reputation of being a ladies’ man.
Raleigh undertook several journeys to the Americas in search of the famed City of Gold, or El Dorado, which he claimed to have discovered in Guyana on the Orinoco River. He also founded a failed colony on Roanoke Island in Virginia. In 1587, Raleigh’s company tried again to colonize Roanoke with another group of settlers. But supply ships to the colony were delayed for years, and when they finally arrived in 1591, not a trace of the “lost colony of Roanoke” was ever found. The only clue to the colony’s fate was the word Croatoan carved into a tree. This led to speculation that the colony’s inhabitants had been massacred or kidnapped by the native Croatoan Indians. Sir Walter is also credited with bringing tobacco back to England and establishing smoking as a fashionable pastime.
Just as he lived in controversy, he died in it also. Raleigh spent 12 years imprisoned in the Tower of London for plotting against James I. He was released by James to renew the search for El Dorado, but on his return voyage, Raleigh imprudently ransacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Thomé. To appease the outraged Spanish, James I executed Sir Walter on his return to England (Lloyd, 1899, pp. 61-112).
While in the Tower of London, Sir Walter wrote regularly, producing an ambitious History of the World, and a number of poems. Let’s look at one of his productions, a sonnet. This poem, “My Boddy in the Walls Captived,” belongs to the period of his second imprisonment in the Tower.
My boddy in the walls captived
feels not the wounds of spighfull envy.
butt my thralde minde, of liberty deprived,
fast fettered in her auntient memory,
douth nought beholde butt sorrowes diing face,
such prison earst was so delightfull
as it desirde no other dwellinge place,
Butt tymes effects, and destines despightfull
haue changed both my keeper and my fare,
loves fire, and bewtis light I then had store,
butt now closs keipt, as captives wounted are
y(t) food, that heat, that light I find no more,
Dyspaire bolts vp my dores, and I alone
speake to dead walls, butt thos heare not my mone.
(Latham, 1951).
This is not bad poetry – Raleigh certainly possesses an ear for the native rhythms of the English language in his verse. Techniques such as the alliteration in “Fast-fetter’d,” a common feature of native Anglo-Saxon poetry, are fused with the continental traditions of the sonnet form. What is missing in Raleigh’s sonnet is that he has passed over too many opportunities to universalize his experience and to teach the listener something new. One could uncover literally hundreds of similar sonnets during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. In short, the themes and theme development are commonplace in Raleigh’s poem, and speak most eloquently to his own particular case of outrage and mistreatment.
A brief comparison with a poem on a similar theme by John Donne will illustrate some of the failings of Raleigh’s poetic art:
Oh my black Soule! Now thou art summoned
By sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion;
Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled,
Or like a thiefe, which till deaths doome be read,
Wisheth himselfe deliverd from prison;
But damn'd and hal'd to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisioned;
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;
But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?
Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke;
And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne;
Or wash thee in Christ's blood, which hath this might
That being red, it dyes red soules to white.
(Donne, 1991).
Here Donne delves into similar themes explored by Raleigh, including suffering, psychological and physical imprisonment and deprivation, and abandonment, but Donne interlaces religious themes, the medieval contemptus mundi philosophy and the philosophical intricacies of grace and redemption. The line “Thou are like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done Treason,” is a shocking and startling image (in light of several Catholic plots against Queen Elizabeth), typical of the metaphysical style cultivated by Donne. Here is a new and memorable kind of poetry.
“My Boddy in the Walls Captived” does not represent Raleigh’s best poetry and while he could write stretches of outstanding verse, but he certainly was an inconsistent poet. Thus my final assessment remains that although Sir Walter Raleigh did produce some noteworthy poetry, and should also be remembered as a great prose stylist, he must be classed as a minor Elizabethan artist. His reputation will rest on the key historical role he played in English politics and American colonial history and his fame as an early historiographer for his History of the World.
Michael Drayton
Only two comparative studies on Michael Drayton have been written in the last ten years (Galbraith, 2000; Swärdh, 2003), and he is little read except by specialists. The title of Jean Brink’s 1990 book entitled Michael Drayton Revisited is explicitly apologetic. Drayton probably knew William Shakespeare personally since Drayton was born in Hartshill in the same county as Shakespeare, Warwickshire. There are remarkable points of contact between the two authors and their lives and work were strangely parallel:
1) both were born in Warwickshire within one year of each other
2) both came from Yeoman stock, Drayton the son of a tanner, Shakespeare the son of a glove-maker
3) both attended their local grammar school, but not University
4) both men moved to London to write poetry and plays
5) both rose to the rank of gentlemen and received coats of arms.
John Ward, who became the vicar of Shakespeare’s home town Stratford-on-Avon in 1662, reported that "Shakespear, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted" (Bate, 2010). This story, however, may be apocryphal.
Drayton was prolific and produced poetry from 1591 to 1630, thus he spanned both the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. He was known as “Our English Ovid” for his collection of poetry called England’s Heroical Epistles in imitation of Ovid. So why is Drayton today not regarded as a major poet, or even England’s national poet? Why did this crown pass to Shakespeare, whose primary work was in the realm of drama?
Drayton’s greatest work, which received mixed reviews in his day, was the massive 15,000 line poem Poly-Olbion (1612-22). The title draws on the ancient name for Briton, Albion, or the White Isle, describing the white cliffs of Dover. He drew on standard histories of the day, such as Froissart, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and William Camden’s Britannia, but the author also collected local historical information through his own research. The poetry of Poly-Olbion is well crafted and surprisingly even in quality, which is a difficult feat to maintain given its voluminous size. But more striking is the encyclopedic scope of Poly-Olbion, which not only provides historical background on each of England’s counties but also discusses the character, psychology, and philosophy of England’s various inhabitants. In this sense Drayton’s work provides a valuable sociological and historical sourcebook of the period. Drayton begins in Book I of Poly-Olbion:
Of Albions glorious Ile the Wonders whilst I write,
The sundry varying soyles, the pleasures infinite
(Where heate kills not the cold, nor cold expells the heat,
The calmes too mildly small, nor winds too roughly great,
Nor night doth hinder day, nor day the night doth wrong,
The Summer not too short, the Winter not too long)
What helpe shall I invoke to ayde my Muse the while?
Thou Genius of the place (this most renowned Ile)
Which livedst long before the All-earth-drowning Flood,
Whilst yet the world did swarme with her Gigantick brood;
Goe thou before me still thy circling shores about,
And in this wandring Maze helpe to conduct me out.
(Drayton, “The First Song,” 1961).
Drayton invokes the genius of England to take him on a poetic voyage of discovery throughout the country. The tone is the epic voice, best illustrated in Western literature by Homer, and reaching perfection in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which later eclipsed Poly-Olbion as England’s most recognized poetic epic.
Drayton was bitter about the neglect of his work during his lifetime both by the public and the courts of Elizabeth and James. This failure to attract royal favor could explain why his work is today not better known. Perhaps Drayton had also incurred the displeasure of his influential contemporary Ben Jonson, who did enjoy abundant royal patronage and who was not known for praising his fellow poets. Jonson was disappointed by the Poly-Olbion; he wrote: “Michael Drayton’s Polyalbion if he had performed what he promised to write the deeds of all the Worthies [would have] been excellent; his Long Verses pleased him not” (as cited in Newdigate, 1941, p. 137). So the curious overshadowing of this poet must remain a mystery – one could attribute his decline in popularity simply to the quality of his work, or to his marginalization by the influential London literati as well as by monied patrons. So my final assessment is that Drayton is a poet who should be reassessed. The close parallels of his life and career to Shakespeare has led to an unfair comparison of the two artists.
John Dowland
Dowland was also a very close contemporary of Shakespeare – he was born one year before Shakespeare in 1563. There is no evidence that they ever knew each other, and Dowland never served as a musician at Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant court, possibly because of his Roman Catholic religion. He spent most of his professional career at the court of King Christian IV of Denmark. He was known throughout Europe as one of the greatest lute players of his age. Richard Barnfield wrote in 1598 in the famous lines: “Dowland … whose heavenly tuch / Upon the Lute doeth ravish humaine sense” (Barnfield, “Sonnet 1,” 1876, p. 189).
His melodies are haunting and inspired imitators throughout Europe. Dowland created a close match between the cadence and timbre of the music and his lyrics, as witnessed by his masterpiece “Come, Heavy Sleep,” which describe a man longing for sleep and his ambivalence towards his final and permanent sleep (Dowland, 1597).
When comparing the compositions of Dowland to another famous composer and music theorist of the period, Thomas Morley, Dowland’s artistic merit becomes apparent. Morley’s “It Was a Lover and His Lass” appears in Shakespeare’s play As You like It and is one of the few songs in Shakespeare, whose plays must have been very musical, for which the notated music has survived.
While very pleasant and entertaining, Morley’s light-hearted song, which describes the joys of care-free love, is obviously inserted as a filler to the drama, a musical interlude to provide variety to the action. The lyrics are only very loosely related to the plot, and instead create an atmosphere of spring, love, and festivity, some of the major themes of As You Like It. The verses are interchangeable, and do not create a narrative sequence, as Dowland’s songs often do, unfolding a tale of the introspective inner movement of the soul.
But what other criteria can we invoke to judge Dowland’s art besides my own personal preference for Dowland’s melancholy over Shakespeare’s and Morely’s boundless optimism? We can also invoke the canon of universality and influence. Dowland obviously touched a chord in the English consciousness – centuries after his death, other composers have identified something quintessentially English in his compositions. The well known British classical composer Benjamin Britten, for example, in 1963 took the melodic line from Dowland’s signature piece “Come Heavy Sleep,” and built upon it a new work of theme and variation called “Nocturnal after John Dowland for Guitar.” It was written for Julian Bream, a guitarist and lutenist who was the student of the great Andrés Segovia, and after Segovia one of the greatest 20th century classical guitarists.
Dowland has also resonated with modern British pop artists. Elvis Costello included a recording of Dowland's lute song "Can she excuse my wrongs" as a bonus track on the 2006 re-release of his album The Juliet Letters. And rock artist Sting, of the Police, has also recorded some of Dowland’s songs for voice and lute. In conclusion, my final assessment of John Dowland is that although he played a small part in the development of English court music, his influence on European music was immense as well as on later English composers and musicians. He is a major Elizabethan artist.
Clearly, the question of why some artists are remembered and studied long after their deaths involves complicated questions of history, literary politics and the vagaries of fame. One obvious explanation for the relative obscurity of some very fine Elizabethan artists was the enshrinement of Shakespeare as England’s national writer, which began in the 18th century and intensified in the 19th. One aspect of bardolatry was clearly nationalistic – the ‘natural, untutored genius’ of Shakespeare could be contrasted with the rival French drama which had adopted strict classical rules (‘the unities’) based on Aristotle’s Poetics. Also, Shakespeare always flattered his English audiences for their bravery, patriotism, and native wit.
References
Barnfield, R. (1876). Complete Poems. A. Grosart, (Ed.). London: J.B. Nichols and Sons.
Bate, J. (2010). Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. New York: Random House.
Brink, J. R. (1990). Drayton Revisited. Boston: Twayne.
Donne, J. (1985). The Complete English Poems. C.A. Patrides, (Ed.). London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
Dowland, J. (1597). The First Book of Songs, for 4 parts and lute (1597). London.
Drayton, M. (1961). The Works of Michael Drayton. J. William Hebel, (Ed.). 5 vols. London: Shakespeare Head Press.
Galbraith, D.I. (2000). Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Hennessey, Sir J. P. (1883; rpt. 2007). Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland. Fayetteville, AK: Juniper Grove.
Latham, A. M. C. (1951). The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Newdigate, B. S. (1941). Drayton and His Circle. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press.
Lloyd, C.E. (1899). State Trials of Mary, Queen of Scots, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Captain William Kidd. Chicago: Callaghan and Co.
Swärdh, Anna. (2003). Rape and Religion in English Renaissance Literature: A Topical Study of Four Texts by Shakespeare, Drayton, and Middleton. Uppsala: Uppsala University.
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