Properties
- end_line
- 7440
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T06:24:48.288Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7393
- text
- Of the twenty-six lines, which appear in all three books, the text in *England’s Helicon* varies little from that in the other collections. *England’s Helicon* in line 22 reads ‘Ruthless beasts they will not cheer you’, instead of ‘Ruthless Beares’, &c., as in both the earlier printed versions.
¹ There was a crude sort of justice in the attribution of Barnfield's verse to another. Thoroughly well read in contemporary poetry, Barnfield had
<!-- [Page 321](arke:01KG6QFYF71H4RHXABPRF4KNXB) -->
32
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.
<!-- [Page 322](arke:01KG6QFYFKDPW9X0Z451EM7ES2) -->
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 33
The text in Weelkes' Madrigals, 1597.
followed in that anthology by the first half (twenty-six lines out of fifty-six of Barnfield's fully accredited ‘Ode’—‘As it fell upon a day’), which bore the heading ‘Another of the same shepherds’. Though the editor of *England’s Helicon* appended to the fragment of Barnfield’s ‘Ode’ the signature ‘Ignoto’, the authorship of those verses is not in doubt. ‘The same shepherd’ is Barnfield, and there is no valid ground for rejecting the attribution to his pen of the preceding poem, ‘My flocks feed not.’
It seems unlikely that Jaggard drew the ‘copy’ of ‘My flocks feed not’ directly from Weelkes’ volume. Apart from three misprints and minor differences in spelling for which Jaggard’s printer may be held responsible (e.g. ‘nenying’ for ‘renying’, l. 4; ‘woven’ for ‘women’, l. 12; ‘blacke’ for ‘backe’, l. 28), there are textual discrepancies between his and Weelkes’ versions which suggest that Jaggard employed ‘copy’ other than that which Weelkes followed. In neither volume are the words carefully printed, and the sense is in both texts difficult to follow. At the end of the first stanza (ll. 11–12), Weelkes reads:—
For now I see inconstancie
More in women then in many men to be:
Jaggard reads:—
For now I see, inconstancy,
More in woven [i.e. women] then in men remaine.
Here the rime with ‘dame’, though not good, is improved by Jaggard.
- title
- Chunk 18