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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
No. XVII.
There is a likelihood that much else in *The Passionate Pilgrim*, besides the two poems which he included in his printed collection of poems, were by Barnfield. At any rate, the seventeenth poem in *The Passionate Pilgrim*, ‘My flocks feed not,’ may be confidently set to his credit. In three twelve-line stanzas it had appeared anonymously with minor differences of text in ‘Madrigals to 3, 4, 5, and 6 voyces’ by the musical composer Thomas Weelkes, which was printed and published by Thomas Este (or East), in 1597. In no instance did Weelkes give the name of the author whose words he set to music. ‘My flocks feed not’ again appeared in *England’s Helicon* (1600) with the new title ‘The Unknown Shepherd’s Complaint’. It was immediately
already shown himself an unblushing plagiarist. His popular ode beginning ‘As it fell upon a day’ secretly levies heavy loans on a poem by a little-known versifier, Francis Sabie. In his ‘Pan his Pipe: conteyning three pastorall Eglogues in Englyshe hexameter; with other delightfull verses’ (London. Imprinted by Richard Jones, 1595, 4to) Sabie opens his volume thus:—
It was the moneth of May,
All the fields now looked gay,
Little Robin finely sang,
With sweet notes each green wood rang;
Philomene, forgetfull then
Of her rape by Tereus done,
In most rare and joyfull wise
Sent her notes unto the skies:
Fish from chrystall waves did rise
After gnats and little flies:
Little lambs did leape and play
By their dams in medowes gay:
Barnfield was also a silent debtor to Shakespeare, and in two of his earlier works—*The Affectionate Shepherd* (1594) and his narrative poem *Cassandra* (1595)—not merely adopted the common six-line stanza of *Venus and Adonis*, but borrowed many expressions and turns of phrase both from that poem and from Shakespeare’s *Lacrece*, as well as apparently from some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which were as yet unpublished and were only circulating in private transcripts.
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