Surely this must have been written for a musical setting, though I don't know
if it's survived. You can almost hear it.
The sound of tolling bells in the first line of each stanza, especially the
parallel first four syllable of each, is an onomatopoeic effect unsurpassed in
any poetry I know:
Ring out your belles, let mourning shewes be spread ...
Weepe neighbours weepe, doe you not heare it saide ...
Let Dirge be sunge, and Trentals richly read ...
And in the last, the tolling is replaced by the dismayed cry of a human
voice:
Alas, I lye, rage hath this errour bred ...
(When I say things like that some people usually accuse me of being fanciful.
I've noticed that such people are almost always literary scholars specializing
in the poetry I'm talking about. Actual readers usually think such comments
are fine.)
(Lierary scholars usually think that what you can't prove about a poem can't
be true. I think that what you can prove about a poem can't be very
interesting.)
Sydney's poem seems like it might be distantly modelled on Bion's Lament for
Adonis, but I don't know if that was available to him.
The variant spellings "femall/female" are in the original. Maybe a
typographical error, but then I get the impression that Elizabethan spelling
wasn't very consistent.
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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