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NOTES AND
COMMENTARY
Adapted and
enlarged by Dr. G from David Damrosch, et al.,
Teaching
British Literature
(New York: Longman, 2003)
The
Tudor-Stuart period saw gradual emergence of empire. England was no longer an island off the west coast of France.
Discovery of the new world brought it center-stage in the middle of
world events. The separation of England from the continent was
symbolized not only in the divorce of
Henry VIII from
his Spanish
queen but also in the refusal of his protestant daughter
Elizabeth
to marry into any continental royal family. With Elizabeth's
marriage to her people came a curious outpouring of court poetry, much
of it modeled on medieval romance, with heartsick lovers frustrated by political realities
that prevented sexual fulfillment and offspring.
Raleigh's
Poems
The echo of antique tragic romance is heard, for
example, in
Walter
Raleigh's melancholy expressions of courtly love
addressed to the unapproachable virgin queen.
"To the Queen" follows the courtship tradition dating back
Guinevere and Lancelot, but doomed to failure is
Raleigh's attempt to improve his political fortunes by engaging the
queen in a flirtatious fantasy. Bitterness is boldly expressed in "To Cynthia,"
which rebukes Elizabeth for
indifference to his accomplishments and suggests
her disdain for her subjects. Readiness to die for love
sounds a distant echo of the Saxon thane, but there is less sacrifice
than self-pity in Raleigh.
In
the more general and philosophical poems, the hard-hearted lady takes on
broader significance representing nature.
The inevitable transience of love is the focus of "As
You Came from the Holy Land," and "Nature that Washed
Her Hands in Milk." The first of these poems treats
antiphonally the voices of the pilgrim and the lover;
the lover’s complaint and the pilgrim’s consolation
(such as it is) situate love in the landscape of time
that presages for all lovers its inevitable loss. The
second poem is similarly charged with pathos. In the
third stanza the poet suggests that his love will die
because of the hard heart of his lady, but in the succeeding stanzas
the destroyer is time itself.
Death at last takes center stage in "On the Life
of Man" and the poet’s epitaph, but most of all in
the epilogue to the unfinished History of the World
(1614), written during a final long imprisonment at
the order of
King James I. The
epilogue predicts Raleigh’s own end, and it catches the gloom of a
superseded court whose
gallant ambitions had faded and then passed with the
great queen:
O eloquent just and mightie
Death!
Whom none could advise, thou hast perswuaded;
what none hath dared,
thou has done;
and whom all the world hath flattered,
thou only
hast cast out of the world and despised;
thou hast drawne together all the
farre stretched greatnesse,
all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man,
and covered it over with these two narrow words,
hic iacet [here he
lies].
The Discovery of
Guiana (1596)
Raleigh’s account of his encounter with
the land and peoples of the Americas leads a set of
readings in this lesson about European exploration of
the New World—the abundance of the land, the
competition among explorers and the hardships of their
way of life, the natural simplicity of the
native people, the Christian missionary zeal that
sometimes excused atrocity committed against "heathens"
but sometimes warned against materialism, and the skepticism and
allegations of misconduct with which explorers' stories
were met by stay-at-home rivals at court. Raleigh’s
dedication to the powerful lords Howard and Cecil asks
them to help defend him from detractors who claim that
he has not in fact gone to Guiana, that he has enriched
himself at the expense of the state, that there is no
gold in the New World. Raleigh writes of his expedition,
much as he writes his love poetry, to the practical end
of regaining credibility and power through the force of
his words, even when his actions appear to belie them.
Before they knew much about the New
World, the early moderns saw what they imagined in it. The pipe dream of a city of gold,
El Dorado, drove many of them insane.
Raleigh claims to have found in Guiana
el madre del oro:
not gold itself, but the source of it. English control
of the mother lode, he argues, can cut off Spain's
income and its financial ability to build armadas to
attack England. In this point of view, the quest for gold becomes a patriotic
duty, a moral duty, even a religious duty.
Raleigh
denounces Spanish rule as hateful to the native
Americans, arguing that the English can win their
allegiance by cooperative dealings; he
also—inconsistently—claims that the English can overcome
the poorly defended Indians and whatever Spanish
resistance develops to become lords of the territory.
Raleigh is not above mixing in some fiction when
describing the natives. The account he gives of the life
of the Amazons, the warrior women of classical
mythology, is largely derived from the Greek historian
Strabo (c. 63 B.C.–19 A.D.) and from classical
commentary to book 11 of Virgil's
Aeneid. This
fictive touch may make us wonder how much else in his
account is falsified, and it may have been grist for
Raleigh's enemies, but apparently it was intended to flatter
Elizabeth with a heroic precedent.
Raleigh’s fixation on the power of gold calls to mind
More’s illustration of the Utopian economy, in which
only the smallest children find attractive this inherently useless
metal. The Utopians had it right: iron trumps gold. For further
discussion of the ideology of conquest, see the
brief but very pithy attack on Spanish rule in New Spain
by
Bartolomé de las Casas entitled (in English
translation) The Devastation of
the Indies, first published in
1552. A famous satiric account is found in
Voltaire's
Candide
(1758).
England in the New World
Accounts of very early contact, such as
Arthur Barlow’s, often show
native Americans as friendly and essentially without guile. These
characteristics almost certainly suggested to readers
that trade with natives would result in huge profits:
for trinkets they would receive goods of great value.
Hariot’s
account is remarkable for its interest in technology;
obviously, he is looking forward to the means by which
the English will manage to control a people who remain
defenseless before the guns and powder of the colonists.
He does not
understand microbes and acquired immunity, but he is
fascinated by disease that the Native Americans contract by contact with
Europeans.
 While Hythlodaeus in
More's
Utopia
described an ideal communist society, real exponents of
American colonization (like
Drayton) spoke of a Golden
Age, both figurative and real. Their America was rich in
natural resources; pearls and precious metal lying
everywhere, ready to make the diligent colonist
fabulously rich. But the reports of the men, and
eventually the women, who actually crossed the Atlantic
to colonize its coastal regions also depicted lives of
dire hardship, near escapes, and backbreaking labor.
What had changed in the English vision of the New World
and colonial enterprise between the first decade of the
1500s, when More constructed his state of a rational
“nowhere,” and 1608, when
John
Smith chronicled his
experience in Jamestown?
 Smith’s
unblinking assessment of Virginia’s actual trials of
body and spirit minimizes the riches colonists could
expect. It stresses rather the need for hard work and an
orderly society committed to the preservation of
liberty but not to the promotion of license. This
realistic assessment puts Smith in the forefront of the early writers on
North America.
Smith is
criticized for stretching the truth at various points, especially with
regard to the native Americans. He is not above ventriloquism, as he
tells his readers what Powhatan said to him about the English presence
on his land and their mission there.
 John Donne's sermon
to the Virginia Company reveals yet another aspect of
early colonial literature, its frequent substitution of
religious explanations for unpalatable economic and
political ones. Donne’s moralized account of what caused
the massacre of the colonists in Jamestown in 1622
reflects his understanding of the apostolic mission in
the New Testament's Book of
Acts. How does his sermon give
a new meaning to the idea of “wealth”? And how does his
vision fit with the triumphalism implied in earlier
commentaries, especially that of Hariot, who spoke of
how advantageous it would be for the English to
represent themselves to the Indians as gods?
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Left: Walter Raleigh in London
today
Raleigh's portrait cir. 1585 in
the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Left: Captain John Smith as
depicted in his book on the colonies in Virginia and New England.
Left: Jacobean portrait of Pocahontas. In his narrative
Smith claims to understand her words to him.
Left: poet and Anglican
minister John Donne.
Below: Renaissance
engraving of Raleigh with Indians. |
