The young son of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and his wife Anne died shortly after birth. In her poem “In doleful ways I spend the wealth of my time...,”Anne speaks of “the two days of my son”. In the Shakespeare Sonnet #33, Edward de Vere refers more poetically to the briefness of the life writing “he was but one houre mine,...”
I include here all of the poems Anne is known to have written on the subject. The final quatrain seems clearly to have been written years after the event.
Rosalind Smith details what portions of these poems were translated from Phillipe Desporte's Cartels et Masquarades and his Epitaphes all published in 1573. Anne was obviously highly educated, and used to being around poetry, but not herself particularly well practiced.
HAd with moorning the Gods, left their willes vndon,
They had not so soone herited such a soule:
Or if the mouth, tyme dyd not glotton vp all.
Nor I, nor the world, were depriu'd of my Sonne,
Whose brest Venus, with a face dolefull and milde,
Dooth washe with golden teares, inueying the skies:
And when the water of the Goddesses eyes,
Makes almost aliue, the Marble, of my Childe:
One hyds her leaue styll, her dollor so extreme,
Telling her it is not, her young sonne Papheme,
To which she makes aunswer with a voice inflamed,
(Féeling therewith her venime, to be more bitter)
As I was of Cupid, euen so of it mother:
" And a womans last chylde, is the most beloued.
IN dolefull wayes I spend the wealth of my time:
Féeding on my heart, that euer comes agen.
Since the ordinaunce, of the Destin's, hath ben,
To end of the Saissons, of my yéeres the prime.
With my Sōōne, my Gold, my Nightingale, and Rose,
Is gone: for t'was in him and no other where:
And well though mine eies run downe like fountaines here,
The stone wil not speak yet, that doth it inclose.
And Destins, and Gods, you might rather haue tanne,
My twentie yéeres: then the two daies of my sonne
And of this world what shall I hope, since I knoe,
That in his respect, it can yéeld me but mosse:
Or what should I consume any more in woe,
When Destins, Gods, and worlds, are in my losse.
THe heuens, death, and life? haue coniured my yll:
For death hath take away the breath of my sonne:
The heuens receue, and consent, that be hath donne:
And my life dooth kéepe mée heere against my will.
But if our life be caus'de with moisture and heate.
I care neither for the death, the life, nor skyes:
For I'll sigh him warmth, and weat him with my eies:
(And thus I shall be thought a second Promët)
And as for life, let it doo me all despite:
For if it leaue me, I shall goe to my childe:
And it in the heuens, there is all my delyght.
And if I liue, my vertue is immortall.
" So that the heuens, death and life, when they doo all
" Their force: by sorrowfull vertue th'are beguild.
I Dall, for Adon, neu'r shed so many teares:
Nor Thet', for Pelid: nor Phoebus, for Hyacinthus:
Nor for Atis, the mother of Prophetesses:
As for the death of Bulbecke, the Gods haue cares.
At the brute of it, the Aphroditan Quéene,
Caused more siluer to distyll fro her eyes:
Then when the droppes of her chéekes raysed Daisyes:
And to die with him, mortall, she would haue béene.
The Charits, for it breake their Peruqs, of golde:
The Muses, and the Nymphes of Caues: I beholde:
All the Gods vnder Olympus are constraint,
On Laches, Clothon, and Atropos to plaine.
And yet beautie, for it dooth make no complaint:
For it liu'd with him, and died with him againe.
My Sonne is gone? and with it, death end my sorrow,
But death makes mee aunswere? Madame, cease these mones:
My force is but on bodies of blood and bones:
And that of yours, is no more now, but a shadow.
Amphiôns wife was turned to a rocke. O
How well I had béene, had I had such aduenture,
For then I might againe haue béene the Sepulcure,
Of him that I bare in mée, so long ago.
Sources: Soowthern, John. Pandora, the musyque of the beautie, of his mistresse Diana (1584).
Wynne-Davies, Marion. Women Poets of the Renaissance (1999). 16-7.
Smith, Rosalind. Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence (2005) 65-9.
Also from the Library of Babel:
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
Also from Virtual Grub Street:
Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
A Thousand Years of English Terms. June 2, 2019. ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”. There was no clock to be o’. But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’
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