returning to iambs: “Clad in the arms.. .”; “Sweet is
the death” (ll. 3 and 14). Most lines are smooth, pre-
dictable, 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 trans-
lation puts a greater emphasis on Love as martial con-
queror. 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 resi-
dence” 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 fi nal 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 fi nal
line, and he uses the more neutral good instead of sweet:
“For good is the life ending faithfully.” Surrey’s transla-
tion 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 arti-
fi ce than emotion.
See also PERSONIFICATION; SURREY, HENRY HOWARD,
EARL OF.
FURTHER READING
Jones, Emrys, ed. Poems. Clarendon Medieval and Tudor
Series. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
Woods, Susanne. Natural Emphasis: English Versifi cation from
Chaucer to Dryden. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library
Press, 1984.
Kreg Segall
“LULLABIE” GEORGE GASCOIGNE (1573) GEORGE
GASCOIGNE’s “Lullabie” appears as one of the poems
attributed to him in the 1573 anthology A Hundreth
Sundrie Flowres and again in the same work revised
and attributed exclusively to him in 1575, entitled
Posies. In the latter volume, the poem appears among
the “Flowers” section, which Gascoigne notes as
reserved for those poems “invented upon a verie light
occasion” and having in them “some rare invention.”
Yet “Lullabie” only seems light on the surface, while
conveying to the reader a very dark understanding of
human mutability and loss. It connects the nurturing
notion of mothers singing their babies to sleep with the
stark and fretful one of losing to old age and the grave
a personal sense of youth, beauty, imagination, and
even sexual virility.
The poem is comprised of six eight-line STANZAs,
rendered in iambic tetrameter, and in its content it
resembles a LAMENT, echoing the lamentations of the
biblical Job and the classical Roman BOETHIUS, without
offering any of the spiritual consolation they received.
Moreover, because Gascoigne maintains the hushed
tones of a soothing lullaby used to lull babies to sleep,
the poem grows increasingly cynical with each addi-
tional loss the poet describes. This cynicism is fur-
thered through the haunting repetition of “lullabie”
from the beginning to the end, where the moralizing
poet extols the reader to “welcome payne” and “let
pleasure pass,” because all must recognize the inevita-
bility of old age and loss in a world where lullabies of
the gentler kind deceive even dreams.
Gascoigne’s use of soft tones and soothing repetition
contribute to this poem’s cynical effect, in addition to
suggesting the gloomy state of the poet himself. Gas-
coigne had spent much of his adult life playing the
spendthrift dandy at Queen ELIZABETH I’s court, only to
realize his folly later in life, when he was cast off by the
court. The poem thus also serves as a vehicle for the
kind of emotionally dark honesty that critics have long
recognized as a signature of his work.
FURTHER READING
Cunliffe, J. W. The Complete Works of George Gascoigne. 2
vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907–10.
Robert E. Kibler“LULLAY, LULLAY, LIKE A CHILD” JOHN
SKELTON (1528) The available evidence suggests
that “Lullay Lullay, Like a Child” was composed dur-
ing JOHN SKELTON’s fi rst period at court (1485–1504),
though it was published in 1528 in a collection entitled
Dyvers balettys and dyties solacyous (Diverse Ballads and
Salacious Ditties). The title of this collection (of “ballet-
tys” and “dyties”) and the poem’s regular tetrameter
and REFRAINs both suggest that “Lullay” was a lyric. If
so, the music it was set to has been lost.256 “LULLABIE”