Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Below is provided first a text, then a discussion of the authorship, of a twenty-two-line poem found in BL Add. MS 61435, the only known exemplar. This text is a semi-diplomatic transcription.1 The penultimate line might seem to place the author’s identity beyond doubt, but of course, it is often found that the higher a writer’s standing, the higher the incidence of imitation and even forgery. Waller (1606–87) was commonly regarded as the best English poet of his day: ‘Inter Poetas sui temporis facile Princeps’, ran Thomas Rymer’s epitaph on his tomb. And this manuscript, as will be shown, dates to shortly after his lifetime. Most of this note will accordingly be devoted to showing why this poem may plausibly be considered an authentic work of Waller’s. I discuss elsewhere the content of the poem, including its literary antecedents.2 I have found no indication that anyone has examined this work since it was first catalogued. British Library staff were understandably cautious when they did so after it arrived in the 1980s. This, they wrote, is a poem ‘in rhyming couplets the last of which appears to identify the author as Edmund Waller’.3 While the content could perhaps have been faked, though, the manuscript context implies a highly satisfactory provenance. To understand this we must look at the intertwined histories of two of the most prominent English families of the period around 1700, to which the manuscript, though not the poem, dates. BL Add. MS 61435 is one of the hundreds of volumes of the Blenheim Papers, a collection of manuscripts and some printed items allocated to the library in 1978 after a settlement in lieu of tax following the death of the tenth Duke of Marlborough. His ancestor, England’s military hero who was created first duke, lived from 1650 to 1722. Within the seventy-seven volumes of material relating to Sarah Churchill, his duchess (1660–1744), one of those designated as ‘family papers’ is a series of folio sheets mounted on guards in 1986 to form a bound volume. This poem appears on fol. 25, a single sheet in the hand of Sidney Godolphin, on paper uniform with that adjacent. Sidney Godolphin, first Earl of Godolphin (1645–1712), was one of the most prominent courtiers and politicians of his era. He was James II’s Treasurer until 1688, again Lord Treasurer 1700–1 and 1702–10. Over the last of these periods, Godolphin and Marlborough served together as ministers of state. Godolphin was the nephew of his namesake, a minor poet known today as the co-author of The Passion of Dido for Æneas, a translation of Book 4 of Virgil’s Æneid. This earlier Sidney Godolphin, a member of the ‘Great Tew Circle’ of English writers in the 1630s, died without issue in 1643, fighting for the Royalist cause in the English civil wars. Two generations later the Godolphins and Churchills had intermarried, and in fact, the next volumes in the sequence of the Blenheim Papers contain the Duchess’s correspondence with her son-in-law Francis, second Earl of Godolphin, chiefly relating to their stewardship of Marlborough’s will. Francis Godolphin (1678–1766), the son of the first earl, married Henrietta, the Churchills’ eldest daughter, in 1698. But what did either family have to do with Waller? The first Sidney Godolphin (bap. 1610) was a good friend of Waller’s in the earlier part of Waller’s life. They were both elected to Parliament at a very young age in 1628. Waller was another member of the circle which met at Tew in the 1630s, and another Royalist. He was banished to France for his part in a plot in 1643, the year Godolphin was killed. Their association did not end there, however. Most of Godolphin’s small poetic œuvre did not reach print until the early twentieth century, but one work, his translation of the Fourth Book of the Æneid, left unfinished at his death, was printed, naming Waller as co-author, in 1658. There is doubt about whether and how far the two translators worked together in person, but the production did not appear until fifteen years after Godolphin’s decease.4 The two men’s period of contact, it can be seen, is the 1630s and a couple of years on either side. In any case, the relationship between Godolphin and Waller does nothing to discourage the idea that Godolphin preserved a copy of a poem which Waller chose neither to circulate nor to print. Since no other copies are known, in spite of most of Waller’s work having been widely transcribed for personal use by individual readers, and indeed being first printed, unauthorized, from a single manuscript,5 perhaps his friend had a connection to the poem’s addressee or her family. By this or some other route, a copy eventually found its way to that friend’s nephew (not born until after his uncle’s early death), who while copying out his sizeable collection of manuscript works—seventy-five folio pages—transcribed it in his own hand. I will return in a moment to the identity of the addressee. The dedication of one of the BL manuscript poems dates it to 1702 or later.6 Lord Treasurer Godolphin died in 1712, so these copies do not belong to his youth. This Sidney Godolphin was a writer of sorts too, and his collection consists principally of translations from seventeenth-century French works in prose and verse, a handful of which were posthumously printed over his name.7 He does not put his name on any of them here because he has no need to. He does not specify an author for Waller’s poem because the penultimate line does it for him, and/or because the copy, like the rest, is intended solely for private use. ‘Who knows what to call her?’ Other than suggesting by its rhyme that Waller did not pronounce his name as it is usually pronounced today, the effect of the poem’s last line is one of coyness, not, in this case, the lady’s, but the poet’s. Can any answer to the question be proposed? Two or three other Waller poems have female addressees so young that they count as children: might one of them perhaps be addressed to the same ‘lady’? The addressee of ‘The Bud’ becomes a ‘young flower’ when breathed upon by the poet-speaker: she is older. Similarly in ‘From a Child’, where another ‘Madam’, though still ‘innocent’, is compared to early-ripened fruit, and already ‘affords favours’ to the poet. Only in ‘To a very young Lady’ is sexual allure explicitly disavowed, the speaker’s superior age ‘far remov[ing]’ him from this ‘fairest blossom’ and her ‘dawning beauty’.8 ‘To a very young Lady’ also goes under the title it had in the first printing of Waller’s poems in 1645: ‘To my young Lady Lucy Sidney’. Lucy Sidney was the much younger sister of Waller’s Sacharissa, Dorothy Sidney, courted by Waller in the years 1635–8. Lucy was born in 1630. Thus she was between five and eight years old at this time, and ‘far removed’ indeed from Waller’s age. Might it be that Waller suppressed the BL poem after composing a second (more successful? more decorous?) tribute to Lucy? This speculation is further developed in my fuller discussion of the poem’s content (note 2, above).
Source: Notes and Queries
Author: Stuart Gillespie
Institution: University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,461
OpenAlex ID: W4405719208