Notes on the Life of Earl of Surrey

Tudor poet Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, was born in Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, England.
He was the son of the third Duke of Norfolk. Associated with the royal court, he grew up at
Windsor, where he was a childhood companion to the Duke of Richmond, son of Henry VIII.
Surrey was also a first cousin to Anne Boleyn. Educated by tutors, he lived an eventful life as
a soldier and a courtier, eventually marrying Lady Frances de Vere, daughter of the Earl of
Oxford.

In 1532, he traveled to France with Henry VIII and stayed at the French court for almost a
year. He was made Knight of the Garter in 1541 and served as a soldier in France. After Anne
Boleyn’s execution, Surrey and his father ran afoul of the new English court on several
occasions. Eventually charged with treason, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and
executed in 1547.

Surrey’s poetry is often associated with that of Thomas Wyatt, whose work was published
alongside Surrey’s in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). A major poet of the 16th century, Surrey is
credited with developing the Shakespearean form of the sonnet. He wrote love poems and
elegies and translated Books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid as well as Psalms and Ecclesiastes from
the Bible. He also introduced blank verse to English—a form that he used in his translations
of Virgil.
SONNET Earl of Surrey – Love that doth reign and live within my thoughts
Love that doth reign and live within my thought
And built his seat within my captive breast,
Clad in arms wherein with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
But she that taught me love and suffer pain,
My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire
With shamefaced look to shadow and refrain,
Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.
And coward Love, then, to the heart apace
Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and ‘plain,
His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.
For my lord’s guilt thus faultless bide I pain,
Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove,–
Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.
The poem is translated from Petrach, but not litteraly.
Rhyme scheme:
Abab
Cdcd
Ececff
Explanation of this poem:

First, you have to realize that love is (made human, a character) in the poem.

It is the lord that builds his seat (his thrown) in the speakers breast. The speaker is saying that
he/she is subservient to love and that this love is so profound that it shows visibly in his/her
person (perhaps, as indicated by others, in a blush).

The object of the speaker’s desires sees this on his/her face, and she rejects that love. Then
love removes itself from its visible manifestation on the speaker’s face and hides in his/her
heart. The speaker is hurt by this love, but he/she will not show it.

The poem ends by stating that death brought on by love is sweet. This is all put into martial
(military) language.

This is used to show the conflict that love creates within the speaker. Reign, seat (in this
context), captive, coward, lord, and banner all add to the idea that the speaker is a kind of
soldier being lead by love, and though it may cause him/her pain and though it may bring
about his/her death, the speaker won’t stop to love.
arl of Surrey (ca. 1543) Surrey's "Love that doth reign and live within my thought" is a
translation of Petrarch's sonnet 140 of Canzoniere. In translating Petrarch's SoNNET, Surrey
has changed the rhyme to take the English sonnet form.

In the first quatrain, the speaker declares how the personified Love has conquered and
consumed his body. Now Love, quite physically, lives in the speaker's thought and breast.
Love has erected a banner on the speaker's face. In the second quatrain, the female beloved
objects to such open display of love on the speaker's face, and she looks angrily at the speaker
and Love. In the sestet, Love retreats from the speaker's face and hides in his heart. The
speaker notes that he is suffering because of Love's boldness, yet he will not leave his fallen
lord, Love but, instead, is happy to die at his master's side.

Surrey's translation uses several Petrarchan images that became fashionable in poetic
representations of love. The simile of "love as a battlefield," is central to Petrarchanism.
Words like captive, arms, banner, and coward create a military confrontation between Love
and the beloved woman in which the speaker suffers. The beloved as "cruel fair" is a related
Petrarchan idea. The object of affection inspires both desire and terror with her gaze. The
lover may feel desire but must refrain from any outward show of it; here, the speaker unfairly
suffers the withering gaze of his beloved when in fact it is the personified Love who is boldly
showing himself, although the beloved is not likely to accept that excuse.

Surrey uses fairly regular iambic pentameter in this poem, although some lines begin with a
trochee before

256 "LuLLABIE"

returning to iambs: "Clad in the arms . . ."; "Sweet is the death" (ll. 3 and 14). Most lines are
smooth, predictable, and composed of 10 syllables, especially when compared to Sir Thomas
Wyatt's "The Long Love that in my Thought Doth Harbor," which is a translation of the same
Petrarch sonnet. Surrey's translation puts a greater emphasis on Love as martial conqueror.
His Love "reign[s] and live[s]" in the speaker's thought, while Wyatt's Love merely "harbors"
in his thought; Surrey's Love has a "seat" in the speaker's "captive breast," while Wyatt's Love
keeps "his residence" in the speaker's "heart."

The Petrarchan ideal of the lover languishing in and reveling in unswerving service to a cruel
mistress is well illustrated in the final line of Surrey's sonnet: "Sweet is the death that taketh
end by love." Wyatt's translation uses life as the operative word in the final line, and he uses
the more neutral good instead of sweet: "For good is the life ending faithfully." Surrey's
translation puts a somewhat greater emphasis on the pain and pleasure of the Petrarchan
lover's pose, even as his more regular pentameter lines may suggest more artifice than
emotion.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Soote Season
The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes,
With grene hath clad the hill and eke the vale:
The nightingale with fethers new she singes:
The turtle to her make hath tolde her tale:
Somer is come, for euery spray nowe springes,
The hart hath hong his olde hed on the pale:
The buck in brake his winter cote he flinges:
The fishes flote with newe repaired scale:
The adder all her sloughe awaye she slinges:
The swift swalow pursueth the flyes smale:
The busy bee her honye now she minges:
Winter is worne that was the flowers bale:
And thus I see among these pleasant thinges
Eche care decayes, and yet my sorow springes.
Summery
Line 1-2: “The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale.”
The poem starts by describing “The sweet season,” which could be either summer or spring,
but it is generally interpreted as summer because they believe in England summer is the
better season, and the fact that later in the poem the poet mentions the arrival of summer.
The sweet season is brought by blooming of flowers and the green grass covering the hills
and vales.

Line 3-4: “The nightingale with feathers new she sings;

The turtle to her make hath told her tale.”
The description continues. The young nightingale sings. The turtledove is telling her story to
her mate.

Line 5-6: “Summer is come, for every spray now springs.

The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;”
Here it becomes settled that “The sweet season,” is summer as the poet makes it clear that
it’s summer that has come, and the deer has hung his head on the fence. This line can be
interpreted in different ways, one of them being that it’s about hunters hunting deer and
hanging their heads on pales, or it could simply mean that the deer is out in the wild again
and hanging his head on the fences. The second one doesn’t really make sense since deer
don’t come near humans that easily.

Line 7-8: “The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;

The fishes float with new repairèd scale;”
Again with another deer, or horned animal running around with enthusiasm because it’s
finally Summer, and the fish swimming in new directions, or with new scales.

Line 9-10: “The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the fliès small;”
And now the snake is shedding her skin, and some kind of creature (possibly one with a long
tongue like a frog) is pursuing small flies.

Line 11-12: “The busy bee her honey now she mings.
Winter is worn, that was the flowers’ bale.”
And now the bees are busy with their honey gathering. And the evil winter is gone, that
tormented the flowers.

Line 13-14: “And thus I see among these pleasant things,

Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.”
Finally, the poet states even though he sees all these happy things, and all the bad things
going away, but still, alas, still his sorrow, his sadness remains.

Analysis
This poem is very straight forward, the poet describes all the things that are happy and good,
and that everything is starting anew, his sadness still remains. This tells us of the fact that no
matter how happy the surrounding can be if we are not content inside, we will still be sad.
It’s all a state of mind.
The techniques used in this poem are end-stopped lines which can be found in all the lines,
Caesura, Alliteration in the second line, and archaic words like eke.

Henry Howard’s summery sonnet, in summary, is about the coming of summer and the
various ways in which a world previously in a sort of stasis or hibernation is now springing
into life. (‘Soote’ in ‘Soote Season’ means ‘sweet’.) However, despite this, the poet’s sorrow
also springs into new life at this time. We usually associate autumn and winter with sorrow,
but not the summer. The Earl of Surrey makes his sorrow all the more piquant precisely
because it is surrounded by reminders of joy, life, activity, and vibrancy. Isn’t our own sorrow
sometimes all the more keenly felt when everything else around us is joyful, and we know
we should be happy too? But as Diana Wynne Jones once remarked, ‘Happiness isn’t a thing.
You can’t go out and get it like a cup of tea. It’s the way you feel about things.’ Sometimes
there is no rhyme or reason – or season – to unhappiness.
‘The soote season’ takes up the literary legacy of Middle English poetry and, specifically,
alliterative verse. These move between the soft sibilance that strike an appropriately
summery note (‘soote season’, ‘spray nowe springes’) and harsher sounds conveying the
vivid activity going on in the natural world (‘tolde her tale’, ‘buck in brake’). In a sense, the
final phrase in the poem, ‘sorow springes’, combines this soft sibilance and the harsher
plosives in two words, just as, earlier in the poem, ‘bringes’ and ‘singes’ had merged into
‘springes’.

That last word, ‘springes’, is especially poignant, given the seasonal focus of the poem: spring
and summer should not give rise to sorrow. And it is all the more arresting given that it comes
hot on the heels of many previous ‘inge’ rhymes: bringes, singes, flinges, slinges, thinges, and
– indeed – springes: ‘Somer is come, for euery spray nowe springes’.

‘The soote season’ is not only one of the first English sonnets written in English; it was written
by the very man who invented the sonnet form that Shakespeare would later put his indelible
stamp on. But Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey is not as celebrated as the Bard. Even a
preliminary analysis of ‘The soote season’ shows, however, that he didn’t simply prepare the
way for Shakespeare: he wrote a powerfully affecting and technically accomplished sonnet
in his own right.

A Short Analysis of Henry Howard’s ‘In Cyprus Springs’

A summary of an early English sonnet Although he gets the credit for it, William Shakespeare
didn’t invent the Shakespearean sonnet. That specific poetic form – also known as the English
sonnet – was instead the innovation of a Tudor courtier and poet named Henry Howard, Earl
of Surrey (1517-47),…

A Short Analysis of Henry Howard’s ‘Alas, so all things now do hold their peace’
A summary of an early English sonnet As we’ve mentioned before, although he gets the credit
for it, William Shakespeare didn’t invent the Shakespearean sonnet. That specific poetic form
– also known as the English sonnet, and rhyming ababcdcdefefgg – was instead the
innovation of a Tudor courtier and poet…