The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me

By Bloodaxe Books

Fairoz is a book-length poetry sequence in which Moniza Alvi explores an imagined teenage girl’s susceptibility to extremism. The book’s fragmented, collaging narrative draws together fairytale elements, glimpses of Fairoz’s thoughts, and pieces of dialogue. A folkloric representation of God and the devil acts as a wry counterpoint, touching on questions of morality. Fairoz is a powerful portrayal of human vulnerability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Apr 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781780375618

Book preview

25

SIR THOMAS WYATT (1503–1542)

‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame and meek

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better, but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,

And softly said ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned through my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking.

And I have leave to go, of her goodness

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was a poet and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII. He was the first great English lyric poet, and introduced the sonnet, terza rima and ottava rima into English poetry, drawing on Italian models, principally the work of Petrarch. He narrowly missed execution because of his relationships with Anne Boleyn and later with his mistress Elizabeth Darnell, maid of honour to Katherine of Aragon, as well as his association with Thomas Cromwell, and was imprisoned for treason after Cromwell’s execution in 1541. Like 26other court poets of Tudor times, he circulated his poems in manuscript among friends. His poetry wasn’t published in book form until 1557. This poem may be an imitation of Ovid’s Amores III, 7.

BK Wyatt carries a nagging burden of what Delmore Schwartz called ‘withness’: living with the fact that he has changed, or been forced to change, from being a desirable lover to a repulsive object, in the eyes of those women who actively pursued him ‘with naked foot stalking within my chamber’. To go from being sought after to being avoided is dramatically depicted over three stanzas. The poem speaker’s plight is condensed into the poem’s opening line:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

There’s a collective, pluralistic feeling in this first stanza; further, there’s a primitive, animalistic throb, a sense of creatures stalking their prey, even using self-endangering devices or postures to achieve their ends, their prize. But they’re gone now, ranging ‘wild’, seeking different sexual prey.

From that pluralistic climate we turn, in the second stanza, to a very particular situation. This is intimate, sexually warm and sweet. One woman, out of all the crowd, lives in his memory. She

all sweetly did me kiss,

And softly said ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’

But now, ‘all is turned’ into ‘forsaking’. This desolate feeling of being forsaken fills the third and final stanza. Ironically, Wyatt says that it is his ‘gentleness’ which has brought this about, and has made him a victim of the search for ‘newfangleness’. His gentleness puts him outside the prowling sexuality of those in search of ‘continual change’; and the poem ends with the quiet irony of his private speculation concerning her who once said softly ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’ before forsaking him for ‘newfangleness’ (inconstancy). The calm, ironic wondering of the sexual outcast fills these final lines:

But since that I so kindly am served,

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

This poem creates a memorable portrait of the sexual pariah, the person quietly enduring sexual rejection and aloneness. It is a portrait marked by considerable self-knowledge and no self-pity.

27

HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY (1517–1547)

‘Wyatt resteth here’

Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest;

Whose heavenly gifts increasèd by disdain

And virtue sank the deeper in his breast:

Such profit he by envy could obtain.

A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame;

Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain

As on a stithe, where that some work of fame

Was daily wrought to turn to Britain’s gain.

A visage stern and mild; where both did grow,

Vice to condemn, in virtue to rejoice:

Amid great storms, whom grace assurèd so

To live upright and smile at fortune’s choice.

A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme;

That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit;

A mark the which, unparfited for time,

Some may approach, but never none shall hit.

A tongue that served in foreign realms his king;

Whose courteous talk to virtue did enflame

Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring

Our English youth by travail unto fame.

An eye, whose judgement none affect could blind,

Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile;

Whose piercing look did represent a mind

With virtue fraught, reposèd, void of guile.  28

A heart, where dread was never so impressed

To hide the thought that might the truth advance;

In neither fortune lost nor yet repressed,

To swell in wealth, or yield unto mischance.

A valiant corse, where force and beauty met;

Happy, alas, too happy, but for foes;

Lived and ran the race that nature set;

Of manhood’s shape, where she the mould did lose.

But to the heavens that simple soul is fled,

Which left with such as covet Christ to know

Witness of faith that never shall be dead;

Sent for our health, but not receivèd so.

Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost.

The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost.

c. 1542 [1542]

stithe: anvil (also a forge or smithy); unparfited for time: unfinished for want of time; corse: body

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was elder son of the third Duke of Norfolk. Wyatt and Surrey are often paired together as the fathers of the English sonnet, Wyatt coming first with the Petrarchan form and Surrey then developing what became known as the Elizabethan or Shakespearian sonnet. Surrey also introduced blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) into English poetry in his translations of Virgil. His tribute to Wyatt was probably his first appearance in print, originally forming part of an eight-page memorial pamphlet printed shortly after Wyatt’s death in 1542.

Surrey was another courtier who fell from grace in Henry’s court. Despite distinguishing himself in the king’s campaigns in France as well as in anti-invasion defences, he was out of favour several times. In 1532 he married Lady Frances de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, and they had five children. In 1536 he witnessed the trial of his first cousin, Anne Boleyn; in 1537 he was imprisoned at Windsor for striking Sir Edward Seymour; and in 1542 he had to attend the execution of another first cousin, the 29king’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard. In 1543 he was imprisoned again, this time for riotous behaviour in the streets of London (eating flesh in Lent and breaking windows), but later that year served, with the Emperor Charles V, at the siege of Landrecy. Eventually the long-running family rivalry with the Seymours for the king’s favours caused him to be charged with treason for allegedly plotting to have Henry’s son Edward set aside when the king died and have the former heir apparent, his father the Duke of Norfolk, assume the throne. Like Wyatt, he was imprisoned in the Tower, becoming the last person to be executed on the orders of Henry VIII, in 1547, at the age of 30. His father was saved only because the king died before he could be executed. Surrey’s elder son Thomas later became the fourth Duke of Norfolk, in 1554, and was beheaded in 1572 for plotting with Mary, Queen of Scots against Elizabeth.

BK A tribute, to be convincing, should capture a sense of the total character of the person to whom the tribute is being paid. Some tributes degenerate into flattery and are ultimately empty, even incredible. The Earl of Surrey’s tribute to Wyatt is moving because it conveys what feels like a complete portrait of the man. In this poem, Surrey presents Wyatt as a restless person finally at rest; a gifted, decent, wise and lively man. Wyatt is both stern and mild, graceful, intrepid, smiling, witty, hard-working, loyal, a courteous model for English youth, distinguished for his unifying power through the workings of a balanced mind and a truth-loving heart. And yet this man was rejected by his peers, arrested in 1541 on charges of treason and, though released soon after, was never again in favour. Wyatt died in 1542, struck down by a fever while on a diplomatic errand for the king.

Surrey’s line, ‘Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost’ gives a striking validity to his tribute to Wyatt because it means that in recognising Wyatt’s intrinsic value, a strong element of self-accusation – and of accusation of an entire society – ends this poem. The honest portrayal of Wyatt’s worth causes Surrey to question his own.

30

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554–1586)

‘Thou blind man’s mark’

Thou blind man’s mark, thou fool’s self-chosen snare,

Fond fancy’s scum, and dregs of scattered thought;

Band of all evils, cradle of causeless care;

Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought:

Desire! Desire! I have too dearly bought,

With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware;

Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought,

Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare.

But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought,

In vain thou mad’st me to vain things aspire,

In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire,

For Virtue hath this better lesson taught:

Within myself to seek my only hire,

Desiring nought but how to kill Desire.

c. 1581 [1591]

Sir Philip Sidney was a courtier, soldier and poet, the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney and his wife, Lady Mary Dudley, daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, and godson of King Philip II of Spain. His uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was one of Queen Elizabeth’s most trusted advisors, while his wife Frances was the daughter of her secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham.

Sidney became the quintessential Elizabethan gentleman, an excellent horseman who aspired to a life of heroic action but was mostly confined to ceremonial duties. He wrote to amuse himself and his friends, not allowing his work to be published in his lifetime, and was a patron of writers including Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge. When Spenser brought him a copy of The Faerie Queene, Sidney was said to have been too busy to read it at first, but had him called back, according to John Aubrey, and ‘ordered his servant to give him many pounds in gold’. 31

Sidney’s best-known work of poetry is his witty sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella, which tells of a courtier’s passion and self-denial in the cause of virtue and public service, inspired by his unrequited love for Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich (described by James I as ‘a fair woman with a black soul’), whom he had first met in 1581, when his sonnet ‘Thou blind man’s mark’ is said to have been written. Like his pastoral romance Arcadia, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella wasn’t published until the 1590s. Written around the same time, his Defence of Poesie (also known as An Apology for Poetry) was a pioneering work in Elizabethan literary criticism setting out poetry’s role in instilling virtue, drawing on classical and Italian writers, but not published until after his death, in 1595. A collected edition of his works followed in 1598, and was reprinted in 1599 and nine times during the 17th century.

In 1585 Sidney was appointed joint master of the ordnance, administering the Queen’s military supplies ahead of her despatch of a force to support the Dutch rising against Spanish occupation. As governor of Flushing, Sidney commanded a company of cavalry in a series of actions against the Spaniards, in the last of which, on 22 September 1586, he charged three times through enemy lines, riding wounded from the battlefield with a bullet-shattered thigh. He died in Arnhem a month later from an infected wound. On his deathbed he sought again to kill desire: ‘There came to my remembrance a vanity wherein I had taken delight, whereof I had not rid myself. It was the Lady Rich. But I rid myself of it, and presently my joy and comfort returned.’

BK For a man with a reputation for nobility and virtue Sir Philip Sidney is a dab hand at cursing. His ability to curse gives this poem its enraged energy, its abusive conviction. Like all poets accomplished in the art of cursing, Sidney piles it on, develops a maledictory momentum, has no mercy on the object of his wrath and finally works himself into a state of triumph over desire, the battered victim of his cursing.

I just wonder if the man doth protest too much when he asserts that he desires nothing ‘but how to kill desire’. Without desire, would he have written such an impassioned poem? And is not his desire as essential a part of himself as his ‘virtue’?

What would desire say if it got the opportunity to answer back?

32

EDMUND SPENSER (1552–1599)

‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washèd it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay

A mortal thing so to immortalise,

But I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wipèd out likewise.

Not so (quod I) let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;

My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.

[Amoretti, 1595]

Edmund Spenser was another Elizabethan courtier poet, but not of noble standing. Born in Smithfield, he was probably the son of a clothmaker. Admitted as a poor student to the University of Cambridge in 1569, his later rise to literary eminence – which enhanced his social status – would not have been possible without the learning he acquired there, particularly his knowledge of Latin and Greek classics along with the great European works of his time.

His greatest contribution to English literature was to be his allegorical epic The Faerie Queene. Set in the land of Faerie with a queen, Gloriana, the poem is a romance narrative cast in nine-line stanzas, Spenser’s own invented form (now known as Spenserian stanzas). It presents the virtuous life as a Christian quest, and was in part a response to the conflict between Protestant England and Roman Catholic Spain, to a war between good and evil, a stance which later Irish readers might find morally ambiguous in view of his position as one of Queen Elizabeth’s officials responsible for 33securing her rule in Ireland. Spenser was no Cromwell, but serving as secretary to Arnold Lord Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland, he was involved in ruthless military campaigns against resistance to English occupation, and was probably present at the Siege of Smerwick in 1580 when a Papal invasion force of 600 men surrendered and were massacred on Grey’s orders, the executions led by officers including Walter Ralegh. During the second half of the 1580s Spenser assisted the English governors of Munster in the colonisation of the province, receiving a large plantation for himself at Kilcolman near Cork, west of lands owned by Ralegh who had been similarly rewarded. Ralegh helped Spenser publish The Faerie Queene, travelling back to England with him in 1589 so that he could present the completed part of the work to Queen Elizabeth. The first three books of the work were printed in 1590 with a dedication to her.

Rather than seek advancement in England, Spenser chose Ireland as the land of opportunity where he could gain power and privilege. Apart from The Shepheardes Calender (1579), all his major work was written while living as an English gentleman colonist in Ireland. ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’ is LXXV in his sonnet sequence Amoretti, published in 1595 with his Epithalamion, both dedicated to his new wife, Elizabeth Boyle, sister of the Earl of Cork. Written in 1595-96, his tract A View of the Present State of Ireland (1633), advocates a scorched earth policy to enforce English rule, including the destruction of crops and animals and the eradication of the Irish language. In 1598 Spenser was driven from Kilcolman when the forces of Hugh O’Neill burned the castle. He returned to London in 1599, where he died, aged 46.

BK Spenser is not slow to claim that his poem will ‘eternise’ the name of the woman to whom it’s addressed. When she sees him writing her name in sand, twice, she considers him a ‘vain man’ trying to immortalise ‘a mortal thing’. His reply is that his verse will write her name not in sand but ‘in the heavens’ and that when death will conquer ‘all the world’ the couple’s love will live in poetry and ‘later life renew’. Future life will be further animated by this poem. Yet I’m struck by the irony that while Spenser promises that the woman’s ‘glorious name’ will be written ‘in the heavens’, he doesn’t actually write her name in this sonnet. Nevertheless, in celebrating the power of poetry, this fine poem endows the woman with immortality.

34

CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE ( c .1558–1586)

Tichborne’s Elegy

written with his own hand in the Tower before his execution

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;

My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;

My crop of corn is but a field of tares;

And all my good is but vain hope of gain:

The day is past, and yet I saw no sun;,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard, and yet it was not told;

My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green;

My youth is spent, and yet I am not old;

I saw the world, and yet I was not seen:

My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun;

And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my womb;

I looked for life, and saw it was a shade;

I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb;

And now I die, and now I was but made;

My glass is full, and now my glass is run;

And now I live, and now my life is done.

1586 [Verses of Praise and Joy, 1586]

Chidiock Tichborne was a Catholic conspirator against Queen Elizabeth I. His fame – or notoriety at the time – rests on this one poem written on the eve of his execution and sent to his wife in a letter. Only two other poems by him have survived, neither particularly distinguished.

Tichborne came from a landed family in Hampshire. Arrested with his father in 1583 for being in possession of ‘popish relics’ brought back from an unauthorised trip abroad, he was clearly under 35suspicion as a possible traitor. In June 1586 he agreed to take part in the Babington Plot to kill Elizabeth and give the English crown to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was next in line to the throne. The conspiracy was uncovered by Elizabeth’s secretary of state and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, who was also Sir Philip Sidney’s father-in-law. Chidiock (pronounced Chidik) Tichborne was arrested on 14 August 1586, three days after Mary herself had been captured while out riding.

On 20 September Tichborne was taken from the Tower of London to St Giles Field to be executed with Anthony Babington and five other conspirators, knowing that the stipulated punishment for high treason was to be drawn, eviscerated, hanged and quartered. When Elizabeth learned that their gruesome executions were gaining support for the Catholic cause, she ordered that the seven remaining conspirators were only to be disembowelled once they were dead. Mary was executed at Fotheringhay Castle in February 1587.

Tichborne is one of four poets in this anthology who were executed for treason, the others being Surrey, Ralegh and Southwell, while Wyatt was very lucky not to share their fate.

BK It is unusual to find a poet writing an elegy for himself; elegies are usually written by others, by friends or admirers of those who’ve died. In writing an elegy for himself, in his late 20s, just before his execution, Chidiock Tichborne confronts his life in a brave, concise, candid way. His response recognises that he is considering and describing a life that has hardly happened, so brief does it seem.

My youth is spent, and yet I am not old

My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun

And now I die, and now I was but made

And now I live, and now my life is done

This repeated recognition of the sheer brevity of his existence is made without a shred of self-pity. The lines are strong and clear-cut, lucid statements of a terrible fact. The sharp images underline the desolation of Tichborne’s elegy for himself.

36

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564–1593)

Elegia VI

(Ovid’s Elegies, Book III)

Quod ab amica receptus cum ea coire non potuit, conqueritur

Either she was foul, or her attire was bad,

Or she was not the wench I wished t’have had.

Idly I lay with her, as if I loved not,

And like a burden grieved the bed that moved not.

Yet though both of us performed our true intent,

Yet I could not cast anchor where I meant.

She on my neck her ivory arms did throw,

Her arms far whiter than the Scythian snow.

And eagerly she kissed me with her tongue,

And under mine her wanton thigh she flung.

Yea, and she soothed me up, and called me ‘Sir’,

And used all speech that might provoke and stir.

Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk,

It mockèd me, hung down the head, and sunk.

Like a dull cipher or rude block I lay,

Or shade or body was I, who can say?

What will my age do, age I cannot shun,

When in my prime my force is spent and done?

I blush, that being youthful, hot and lusty,

I prove neither youth nor man, but old and rusty.

Pure rose she, like a nun to sacrifice,

Or one that with her tender brother lies.

Yet boarded I the golden Chie