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40 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
not peculiarly Shakespearean. It is constantly met with not merely in contemporary narrative poetry, but in ballads and lyrics of the popular anthologies, as well as in ‘words’ for madrigals and part-songs in song-books.¹ But Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis* was the most notable example of its employment within Jaggard’s and Leake’s experience.
None of Jaggard’s five poems in six-lined stanzas are met with in print elsewhere. All are pitched in a more or less amorous key, and treat without much individuality of the tritest themes of the Elizabethan lyrist.
No. VII (‘Fair is my loue’) is an indictment of a beautiful mistress’s fickleness; No. X (‘Sweet rose, faire flower’) is an elegy on the premature death of a fair friend; No. XIII (‘Beauty is but a vaine and doubtful good’) is a lament on the evanescence of beauty; No. XIV (‘Good night, good rest’) is a lover’s meditation at night and dawn; No. XVIII (‘When as thine eye hath chose the dame’) is an ironical lecture on the art of wooing. The sentiment and phraseology of each of these poems can be paralleled as easily as the metre. Greene, who wrote many songs in the six-line stanza, anticipates Jaggard’s seventh and thirteenth poems in two lyrics which are inserted in two of his romances, respectively *Perimedes the Blacke-Smith* (1588) and *Alcida, Greenes Metamorphosis* (licensed for the press 1588). A song in the former romance begins with the same words as Jaggard’s poem No. VII, viz. ‘Fair is my loue’, and continues in a like strain:—
Faire is my loue for Aprill is her face,
Hir louely brests September claimes his part,
And lordly July in her eyes takes place,
¹ In John Farmer’s *First set of English Madrigals*, which appeared in 1599 at the same time as Jaggard’s volume, twelve of the seventeen numbers, and in Weelkes’ *Madrigals in six parts*, which came out a year later, seven of the ten numbers, are in six-line stanza.
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41
# THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
But colde December dwelleth in her heart;
Blest be the months, that sets my thoughts on fire,
Accurst that Month that hindreth my desire.¹
In Greene’s second tract, *Alcida*, the verses beginning:
Beauty is vaine, accounted but a flowre,
Whose painted hiew fades with the summer sunne.²
adumbrate Jaggard’s thirteenth poem:
Beauty is but a vaine and doubtful good...
A flower that dies when first it ’gins to bud.³
Again, the ironical advice to the wooer, which constitutes Jaggard’s poem XVIII, is little more than a repetition of passages in two poems in the six-lined stanza, which were already in print.
¹ Greene’s Works, ed. Grosart, vii. 90.
² Ib. ix. 87.
³ There are endless Elizabethan poems in the six-lined stanza which are in sentiment and phrase as well as metre hardly distinguishable from this effort of *The Passionate Pilgrim*. The stanza numbered xxxiii in the ‘Sonnets’ appended to J. C.’s *Alcilia*, which appeared in 1595, runs:
Though thou be fair, think Beauty but a blast!
A morning’s dew! a shadow quickly gone!
A painted flower, whose colour will not last!
Time steals away, when least we think thereon.
Most precious time! too wastefully expended;
Of which alone the sparing is commended.
Cf. the sonnet attributed to Surrey in *Tottel’s Miscellany* (p. 10), headed ‘The frailtie and hurtfulness of beautie’, which opens:
Brittle beautie, that nature made so fraile,
Wherof the gift is small, and short the season.
In Davison’s *Poetical Rhapsody* (1602) was first printed ‘An invective against love’, which contains the stanza:
Beauty the flower so fresh, so fair, so gay,
So sweet to smell, so soft to touch and taste,
As seems it should endure, by right, for aye,
And never be with any storm defaced;
But when the baleful southern wind doth blow,
Gone is the glory which it erst did show.
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