Å Explication

Edward de Vere (1550-1604) was the Earl of Oxford during the Elizabethan era.  As a member of the Royal Court he was in the company of other learned men who “dabbled” in poetry.  A mere two dozen poems have been attributed to him although he was described as one of the eminent poets and playwrights of his time. George Puttenham, in The Art of English Poesie published in 1589, names him as a poet who writes “excellently well” and is said to deserve “the highest prize” for comedy and interlude.  This is one of his early poems, probably written before 1576, and its subject is a popular topic.  The poet questions where Desire originated, how was it born and what caused it to develop.  This is done in an impersonal manner with no real feeling from the poet being incorporated into the poem. Desire is compared indirectly to a person progressing through the natural stages of life.  It covers conception and birth, although these points are reversed in the first two lines.  From there on it is a straightforward linear progression through the nurturing stages - who nursed the child Desire, then what food and drink sustained it.  The answers are “Sore sighs and lovers’ tears” indicating that Cupid’s path is not an easy one.  When he considers how Desire sleeps and where it rests he is more positive, explaining that words may be the way into someone’s heart. The poet wonders if Desire likes company and if it has any enemies.  The final point he considers is if Desire will ever die and determines that it “both lives and dies a thousand times a day”.  Love is eternal but Desire may wax and wane. 

De Vere was an experimental poet who used eleven different metrical and stanzaic forms in the poems attributed to him.  On first reading this poem I thought it might be a sonnet as it is fourteen lines long.  However, it does not have either the standard Italian or English sonnet structure.  It is quite unusual as it is written in rhyming couplets with alternating lines of iambic hexameters and iambic heptameters.  This is known as Poulter’s Measure, a fashionable meter in the 1570’s but one which has been rarely used since.  Some versions have been printed that show the poem written in four line stanzas of two trimeters followed by a tetrameter and another trimeter.  This is known as ballad meter as it is easy to sing to this rhythm.  The meter of the poem is quite rigid with a possible exception at the start of the third line – “Tell me” is a spondee with equal emphasis on both words.  This is also the case in the final line – “No no!”.  The poem moves along at a brisk pace as it takes the form of questions and answers.  Puttenham describes this as “antiphora” and it is an effective way of conveying the message.  De Vere, a renowned “ladies’ man”, may very well have questioned where his Desire came from.  We must remember that he was only twenty-six when this was written and is in the full flush of manhood. 

This is clearly an Elizabethan poem.  Some of the verbs use Middle English tenses – “wert”, “begot” and “feedeth”.  The personal pronouns are also old fashioned – “thou” and “thy”.   Some tenses also sound out the “ed” endings – “unfeigned” and “rocked”.  The poet uses capitals to denote accepted concepts of his time – “Good Conceit”, “Fresh Youth” and “Sweet Speech”.  Apart from the sustained metaphor of comparing Desire to a person, he makes little use of flowery figures of speech. Alliteration occurs in some mono-syllabic instances – “pomp and prime”, “sore sighs” and “Sweet Speech”.  There are very few adjectives as the poet strives to cover the major questions and answers within the confines of the structure he has set for himself.  It is interesting to note that there is another version of this poem which has an extra opening and closing stanza.  These do not have the strict question and answer format of the “fourteener” and are a little out of character.

This poem is quite representative of its time.  It is a pleasant lyrical poem and it may very well have been set to music as many courtiers wrote songs as well as poems.  We are fortunate that it survived at all as the unwritten code of court life did not allow courtiers to publish their work.  Some used pseudonyms but others had their work attributed to other people.  There is one reference that this poem was written by Anne Vavasour, who was the mistress of Edward de Vere.  She gave birth to his son which caused her to be sent to the Tower.  Desire in this case had serious repercussions and was not just an abstract subject of a poem.  No further works of de Vere have been discovered after this time – unless one subscribes to the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare.  The Oxfordians have some very compelling arguments to back up their claims but if we are to compare the quality of the writing in this poem to any of Shakespeare’s sonnets, then I think the man from Stratford has no competition.  On the other hand, if we consider this to be the work of a young man and we do not have any of Shakespeare’s early works to compare it to, then perhaps there is some merit in the Oxfordian’s claims. 

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Last Updated April 10, 2005