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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Poetry and Ambition

Poetry and Ambition

In 1953 Dr Walter Oakeshott, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, found by chance a hitherto unknown poem in the autograph of Raleigh, which proved to be one of those addressed to Queen Elizabeth under the name of Cynthia. The poem was written on the flyleaf of a notebook compiled by Raleigh himself while he was writing the History of the World, during the long imprisonment in the Tower which preceded the final voyage to Guiana and his execution on his return from it. With the inimitable enthusiasm of the literary historian, Dr Oakeshott has sifted out, from this slender beginning, the relation of Raleigh the courtier to his maiden Queen, in the light of the verses which she encouraged him to write to her. The pity is that the poemspage 453 rarely embody true feelings. It is impossible that they should. The feeling of gratified (or unsatisfied) ambition, in which the court of Elizabeth swam like goldfish in a pond, is a little too coarse for a delicate lyric treatment. Elizabeth undoubtedly demanded expressions of unqualified love and admiration; and, being a Tudor monarch she got what she wanted. Dr Oakeshott writes –

She was on terms of delightful intimacy with many of her administrators and courtiers; not only with Robert Dudley, ‘her eyes’, but with her ‘spirit’, Burghley, her ‘Moon’, Walsingham, and with her ‘Mutton’ or ‘Bell-wether’, Hatton . . . Hatton found reason to suppose that Raleigh, whom she nicknamed ‘Water’, was replacing him in her affections . . . There came a time when some one man, Raleigh it might be, or later Essex, was universally recognised to have attained a dominating, if hazardously insecure position, and when the Court rivalries assumed the aspect of a girl’s school rather than that of an adult society . . .

It follows that this book is about two things: the poetry of Raleigh and the pathology of ambition. As a study of the first, it has its interest; as a study of the second, it lacks a true analytical discernment.

1961 (243)