Some thoughts on a Michael Drayton poem

• HOW MANY PALTRY, FOOLISH, PAINTED THINGS

  (Michael Drayton, 1563-1631)

  How many paltry foolish painted things,

  That now in coaches trouble every street,

  Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings,

  Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet!

  Where I to thee eternity shall give,

  When nothing else remaineth of these days,

  And queens hereafter shall be glad to live

  Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.

  Virgins and matrons, reading these my rhymes,

  Shall be so much delighted with thy story

  That they shall grieve they lived not in these times,

  To have seen thee, their sex’s only glory:

  So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng,

  Still to survive in my immortal song.

  Michael Drayton’s ode speaks to posterity, speaking to what he believes is the likelihood that this fair woman will be remembered, gloried and virtually worshipped as womanly perfection in ages yet to come by virtue of his poem. The ladies who now clutter the streets “shall be forgotten” by poets and this miss will be the envy of women of future elegant pretense because Drayton’s directly addressed ideal is “their sex’s only glory”. A harsh judgment, but it plays to vanity and a person’s feeling of being unjustly ignored. There is resentment here to be exploited and Drayton’s technique, effective or not, is a masterful piece of exploitation. It takes a man, after all, to make the world aware of the genius of the woman who has taken his arm in companionship, in romance, in matrimony. The woman is anonymous, a cipher without the right man to make the powers that are innate in her bosom radiate fiercely, proudly, for the world to praise and to cater to. “So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng,/Still to survive in my immortal song.” This is to cleverly say that the woman will be remembered forever because of the man’s immortal song, which is also to say that only a man, this man, could have written. Without the man’s words, his voice, the woman being seduced is unknown, without the power he extols in the lyric, which is to say that she is without her own voice, bereft of even a language to command. rather classically, both these quick-witted sonnets display less the feeling of spontaneity, of genuine play, than they do the feeling of a well-constructed presentation, an argument mulled over, finessed and converted into a poeticized template intended for the means of endearing oneself to women by appealing to their perceived vanity. This makes you consider the old cartoon line when Olive Oyle says to Popeye and Bluto, as they try to woo her, “I bet you say that to all the girls.” The speakers, the wooers, the orators that profess the unqualified beauty, brilliance, charm, grace, and sublimity of their objects of affection, deliver their testimonies with it in mind to present themselves in an exceptional light; the sonnets are, in essence, sales pitches, imbuing the speakers with qualities compatible with the ones they’ve ascribed to their ladies dearest without so much as one self-glorified personal pronoun being used in either of these artfully cantilevered proclamations. It’s a subtle argument to be made that requires the most skillful of tongues, that the qualities , the talents that are being attached to the would be betrothed have not been noticed by the the rabble, the masses, those who live a generic existence, and that only the men who have broached and spoke to the subject of the ladies beauty are intelligent, sensitive, caring, dynamic enough to speak these truths. It is artful indeed, requiring a fine a balance, of knowing when to let one’s voice trail off, to end on a soft syllable, awaiting a response. This is bragging through the flattering of another.I rather like the wit and spare and adroit verbal sharpness that mark both of these poems; graceful, preening, softly boasting and flattering the women to whom they are addressed in terms that bestow qualities exceptional, unique, miraculous to behold, these are the testimonies of horn dogs working their way into a woman’s favor. And, perhaps, the respective beds they sleep. in.

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    By chattel, I mean to say that the women of this historical period, even the ones singled out for plain-tho-generous praise in verse, are considered property. From Merriam Webster’s On-Line dictionary ” something (such as a slave, piece of furniture, tool, etc.) that a person owns other than land or buildings.” While I do believe that the real world sensibilities were a saner as regards the treatment of women, but there is the tendency in cultures dominated by the will, wishes, wiles, and whinings of men to treat women as if they were accessories, an extension of a man’s personality and little else. In the grander rhetoric of love poems and protestations of virtues bordering on sheer virtuosity, we realize that that the man who seeks to woo may as well be talking to a car salesman as he describes the vehicle he’d like to drive off the lot and bring home where he keeps his other stuff. On occasion, I am of the mind that love poems of the period were, in essence, projections of fragile egos confronting a Hobbesian universe where life was nasty, brutish and short. Again, this is a seduction that works in two different directions, to an audience that wishes to think well of itself and the ability of their cultivated readings and wit to make disruptive realities remain at bay, or at least out of mind, and , of course, for the women addressed directly, bluntly and yet with a spare poetry that resembles a truth the subject has denied.                
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  A woman can indeed sing the verse for a man and have no real confusion as a result if the situation were our current period, the here and right now. It’s a dubious proposition that a woman to man address, at least in what there was of the public sphere, would have done well with a readership, or listenership, as the case may be. Drayton’s verse survives because the word choices travel well through the centuries and the changes in how the culture leans. So yes, a woman may serenade a male with few changes to this lyric, but such was not always the case. I have my doubts Drayton had adaptability on his mind when he wrote his song; the constraints of songwriting likely had more to do with its genderless brevity. And yes, all seductions need willing partners for there to any kind of dominant/submissive relationship, but we must remember all the same that it is men writing these verses, not women and that it is a world of moral, aesthetic and philosophical imperatives that are created by generations of male poets. We may turn all of this on its head all we may care to and say a is really y, but that is really knee-jerk deconstruction at best.

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