One for the booklist: My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough, Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile, reviewed this morning in the Guardian.

By the time Henrietta was in her 30s her gilded life had lost its shine. In 1727 she married Robert Knight, the son of the chief cashier of the infamous South Sea Company. Robert was pompous and vulgar, and Henrietta suddenly found herself in the company of men who talked only of money instead of poetry, gardens or art. She found companionship with a young poet, though she insisted that “the passion was platonick”. When the scandal broke in 1736, her furious husband sent her to his Warwickshire estate, Barrells, to “moulder and die”. Virtually imprisoned, she was not to see London, her two children or most of her friends for many years. Gardening helped her to keep her sanity, and My Darling Heriott reminds us of the unrivalled therapeutic value of nature, muddied fingers and the sprouting of seedlings.

John Friend, a gentleman commoner at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, died of a fever in March 1673. His father, Nathaniel, after arranging his funeral, returned home “on his cousin’s advice” to tell his wife:

“I came neare home mine owne care and sorrow redoubled in relation to my poore wide and how I should acquaint her with soe heavy a Providence, I therefore called upon the Widdow Margaret Holliser acquainting her with my poore sonnes death and entreated her to goe to our house before and by discourse a little prepare my wife for it which shee honestly did, supposing to her the worst, I in the meantime lingered and about a quarter of an houre after (which was neare 9 at night). I came in bringing both to my wife and to my father the heaviest tidings that ever brought them in my life.”

His wife understandably took it “exceeding heavily”, “the presence and company of my loving Neighbour stood us in good stead.”

I can’t but wonder how recent a widow Margaret Holliser was. Did she not suffer too from her close involvement in the tragic scene, so like one she had herself endured?

(Quoted in A. Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006, p. 33.)

I’m trying to teach myself to analyse the formats of Renaissance poetry, as you do. I’ve got a piece that I thought might be poulter’s measure (a 14-syllable line followed by a 12-syllable one), but it seems instead by my count to be straight fourteener. Do you agree? All thoughts and suggestions welcome …!

This world is full of snares and trappes, temptations unto sinne,
As well in generations past, as this that we live in.
Compare our selves unto a tree, which springeth up with sap,
And brings forth branches goodly ones, which taste of Adams hap.
And as this tree doth grow to strength, the owner of the wood,
May lop away the branches faire as them which are not good.
So hath he lopt away from us a Ladie Branch of price,
That Lived here right worshipfull, disdaining every vice:
Whose lacke her friends do much bewaile, but especially the poore,
Whom she continually did feede, aboard and at her doore.

(This piece doesn’t have stanzas, so I’ve just taken what seems a logical chunk out of it.)

And no, I’m not claiming this as a lost literary masterpiece…

I’ve been reading a very handy 1956 thesis – happily available on microfilm – Conventions and Characteristics of the English Funeral Elegy of the Earlier Seventeenth Century, (University of Missouri). And I just had to share what the author, H.H. Hale, describes as the “most graceless” example, Francis Beaumont’s “Elegy on the Lady Markham” a relative of the influential Lucy, Countess of Bedford.

The poet tells his readers that although he never saw Lady Markham in life he fell in love with her corpse, and likes the fact he can now…

Her grassgreene mantle, and her sheet display,
And touc her naked, and though th’ envious mould
In which she lies uncovered, moist and cold,
Strive to corrupt her, she will not abide
With any art her blemishes to hide…”

He directs the worms to gently eat her flesh, to eat into her ear-lobes to form holes for earrings, and finally to eat her epitaph upon her forehead: “Living, she was young, faire, and full of wit / Dead, all her faults are in her forehead writ.”
p. 38-39

Seriously sick!