Abram: Hello, I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: And today we are going to discuss Tichborne's Elegy by Chidiock Tichborne. And before we do that though, Abram, can I just say a word about the Podcast Academy Ambies Award winner for this year? For Best DIY podcast, I just wanna give a shout out to Anna Deshaun. As some of our listeners might recall, a few weeks ago we found out that the Poetry for All podcast was nominated in the best DIY podcast category. I think they say it's for podcasts that have a budget of under $3,000. Abram: That would be us. Joanne: We have a budget of about 30 cents, so we definitely qualified for this category. We were nominated. It was so much fun. And we went on Zoom. We did not win the best DIY podcast. I just want to acknowledge the winner Anna Deshawn for Queer News. I've been listening to this podcast for the past several weeks, and I love everything about it. Beautiful production quality, excellent coverage in really short, digestible episodes, and it is what it sounds like. It's news about LGBTQ plus issues all around the country, briefly reported and analyzed by Anna Deshawn. And so I encourage our listeners to subscribe to that podcast and support that work because it's really pretty terrific. Abram: Excellent. Congratulations. Joanne: All right, Abram. So shall we spend some time traveling back into the renaissance to read Tichborne's Elegy? Abram: Absolutely. Here is the Elegy. [To read the poem, visit this link: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/tichbornes-elegy/] Joanne: Ooh, that was a good reading. Abram, give us a little bit of context for Tichborne, who he was, and the moment at which he allegedly wrote this poem. Abram: Absolutely. So as we said, this is an elegy, but it's a weird elegy because it's an elegy for himself. And usually we think of an elegy as writing for a lost loved one. And the elegy is its own sort of reaching back, trying to make connection, trying to hold on to someone who has been lost. And in this case, he's writing an elegy. for himself. And he's doing that because the next day he's going to be executed. So as best we know, this poem was written literally the day before his execution. Chidiock Tichborne was a devout Catholic. He came from a pretty high standing Catholic family. And was born around 1558 when Queen Elizabeth took over and made England, you know, more thoroughly Protestant. There was at first some tolerance of Catholics and then less tolerance of Catholics. And then he went so far as to join what is called the Babington plot, which basically sought to assassinate people. Queen Elizabeth, and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots, and return England to being Catholic. So he did, in fact, attempt to kill the Queen. He was caught, put in Tower of London, and he was given an execution day, and on the night before his execution, wrote a letter to his wife, and in that letter was included this elegy for himself. He died in his 20s, so it's a young person who is going to his death and writing an elegy for himself. Joanne: That's pretty incredible, the outline of what you describe, and there's a way in which the poem as an utterance carries across the centuries and feels so universal in its expression, and yet, of course, it's also very unique to its time period, and I'd love to talk about some of that. Speaking of things that are unique to the time period, could you say a word about what he was anticipating as far as his death was concerned. Abram: Yes. So the death that was coming for him was as gruesome a death as can possibly be imagined. He was hung, drawn and quartered, which is an unpleasant way to go. Just very briefly (and we don't need to dwell on the details here), but he was, he was choked, but not to death and then disemboweled while still alive. And in fact, he was, it was such a gruesome death. As the spectators were watching it, they began to sympathize with the people being executed and he was the first and when Queen Elizabeth saw that this manner of death was actually winning the crowd over to those being executed, she said, no, no, no more of that, just kill all the rest quickly. Joanne: I don't mean to laugh at something so gruesome, but I love that she decided to stop that kind of execution, not because it was inhumane, but because it was garnering sympathy for her enemies, you know? Abram: Yes, there is a manner of gruesomeness that actually is so repellent that people begin to wonder, “maybe this isn't so good”. Joanne: Yes. Right. And so he knew this was his end. And so maybe we can get into the poem with all that you've set in mind and try to understand what exactly he's articulating here, right? So let's look at that first stanza and maybe we could just explain, for listeners who may not have the poem in front of them, this is a three stanza poem. And in each stanza, there are six lines. So it's a very beautiful, balanced shape. Very nice. And here's the first stanza. “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, / My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, / My crop of corn is but a field of tares, / And all my good is but vain hope of gain. / The day is past and yet I saw no sun, / And now I live, and now my life is done.” What do you notice right away? Abram: So, the first thing I notice is the rhyme scheme. I mean, that's easy thing to notice, but it's a very effective rhyme scheme because it's the same in every stanza, A, B, A, B, C, C, and by ending with that C, C, that couplet, it has a sense of closure to it, and of course, what we're talking about in this poem is a sense of closure of the most extreme form. And so every stanza has this powerful closing off. And I'm sure we'll talk about this again, but every stanza also ends with the same line. And so you come to this finality “and now I live and now my life is done” at every stanza. The other thing I noticed very quickly, if we just go to that first line, “my prime of youth is but a frost of cares,” there's so many other poems that immediately spring to mind. This is still part of a tradition. He's still living in the same sort of poetic atmosphere as other people. We just did a podcast episode on Queen Elizabeth, and she has all the same imagery, which she draws from Petrarch of freezing and burning. This going back and forth, this “both and…”, this sort of paradoxical, I'm one thing and the other thing at the same time, it's the same tradition that Chittick Tichborne is pulling off of. Joanne: Yes, those Petrarchan contrasts are absolutely key to what he's trying to identify in his emotional and psychological extremes, right? “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares”. He's 24 years old when he's writing this book. poem, right? And so to suggest that, yes, he is in the prime of his youth, but all he feels is the frost of cares. There's that suggestion of frost as wintry, end of life, almost elderly in the connotation, right? Can you, and also look at this, “my feast of joy is but a dish of pain”. It ought to be abundant, but all he sees on his dish is suffering. Can you talk to us about “my crop of corn is but a field of tares”. And again, if you don't have the poem in front of you, it's not T E A R S. It's T A R E S. What, what is that line referring to, Abram? Abram: Yeah, that's a direct reference to the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew 30. And there you have Jesus talking about the wheat and the tares and these things are sewn together. And folks come along and say, “Hey, shouldn't we pull out all the tares, the weeds, basically?” And he says, “No, cause if you do that, you might get the wheat, too. Let it be, and we'll sort it out at the end.” And you know, what I find interesting about that line in this poem, there's almost some admission in that line. It feels to me as though he's allowing for the fact that he might've erred. As righteous as his cause might have been, and he clearly thinks his cause was righteous, he was willing to kill the queen for his cause, for his faith. Yet there is a kind of admission that there are possibly errors within this field. And at the end, which is coming the next day, it's going to be sorted out at that time. Joanne: Okay. That's really helpful. Now I'm thinking about what you established at the beginning of the podcast, where you were saying this is a kind of pre-elegy, and I think that's really important. Some of what you're saying about his acknowledgement that what he's done is at least problematic, because this poem to me feels like it is part of not just the elegy tradition, but the ars moriendi tradition, which is to say in the medieval and Renaissance periods, there was this Latin phrase, ars moriendi, and it referred to the art of dying well. And you know, in the 21st century, I think death generally makes us uncomfortable. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to dwell on it too much. We generally as a culture do not do well when we talk about death, we're good at avoiding it, but not really understanding it. But in the medieval and Renaissance periods, the centuries during which people were struggling with plague and pandemic much as we have been in, in recent years they had to confront it all the time. And one of the ways they understood it was by thinking about all the ways we can prepare for death by settling our accounts, by saying our final farewells, by meeting with our spiritual counselor or priest or minister by saying our prayers. Making sure you're ready for it. And I feel like in this poem, there's a way in which he's preparing himself for it, even if the circumstances of his death are beyond his control at this point. Abram: Unlike most people, he actually knows the day of his death. It is tomorrow. And so it's a kind of urgency to this preparation. So with that in mind, let's take a look at the second stanza. And you tell me what you see happening here. “The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung. / My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green. / My youth is gone, and yet I am but young, / I saw the world, and yet I was not seen, / My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun, / And now I live, and now my life is done.” Joanne: You know, by the time I get to this second stanza, it reminds me of what's both peculiar and fascinating about this poem and also initially, maybe, not so exciting, you know, when you first shared this poem with me, by the way, I had not read this poem before you recommended it, Abram. And so it was new to me, even though this is a time period that I think I study from time to time (by no means an expert, but certainly a fangirl), but the point is I thought I knew a few things about the Renaissance, but I didn't know this poem. When you first shared it with me, I was like, eh, I don't know. And I think the reason I felt a little meh about it is because it feels a bit repetitive. The repetition is in that refrain “and now I live and now my life is done”. The repetition is in the syntax. “My thread is cut, comma, and yet it is not spun, comma, and now I live, comma, and now my life is done period”. It's very symmetrical in that way, but also every single word in this poem is a monosyllable. Just one syllable. I don't know if I've ever read a poem that's done that before. Have you? Abram: No. And also just thinking about the discipline it would take. Joanne: Well, and to a certain extent, who knows how long he may have been meditating upon some of these themes. But let's look at what this second stanza does. “The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung. / My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green. / My youth is gone, and yet I am but young, / I saw the world, and yet I was not seen, / My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun, ” What is he saying here about his youth? Abram: So for me, these lines link up really well with another podcast episode we did on Anne Bradstreet and her elegy for her granddaughter in which she compares her granddaughter who died in infancy to nature and says, look, by nature, things grow up, get ripe, then fall. And that's the sort of natural cycle of things. But to cut things short, to mow them down, requires some kind of external intervention. And I feel like the same thing is happening here. He's sort of saying my life is over, but it's hardly begun. The leaves are green and yet they're being cut down. The paradoxes that he's building into this show how unnatural this execution is. To die in your youth is so unnatural. And the best way to show how unnatural it is is to compare it actually to nature. Joanne: Yeah. And I'm also interested in his concern. Literary immortality and visibility. So “my tale was heard and yet it was not told”, “I saw the world and yet I was not seen”. He sort of writing his own epitaph here, you know, and he's presenting himself as perhaps a cosmopolitan, sophisticated person. I saw the world and yet I was not seen. This sense that he's been missed or overlooked, you know? Abram: Yeah. And to. Build off of your earlier point about the monosyllables and the repetitions and the balance. I mean, part of the power of the poem comes out when you have so many structured repetitions and so many monosyllables, and then there's a change. And in this stanza, you get that with the first five lines of this stanza, the middle part is, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet. And then you say, “and now”, and the last line is, and now. The first stanza is, is, but, is, but, is, but, is, but, and then you get “and now”. And the last stanza, and we can transition into that now. Suddenly we have all these verbs that we didn't have in that, in that middle transition of the first two stanzas, the middle transition in each of these lines is and found and saw and knew, and now, and now, and now, and now. And that's how the poem ends with those repetitions in the end. So you get, “I sought my death, and found it in my womb, / I looked for life and saw it was a shade, / I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb, / And now I die, and now I was but made, / My glass is full, and now my glass is run, / And now I live and now my life is done.” Joanne: Yeah, do you feel it accelerating in this poem? This final stanza, it feels much more dramatic, much more momentum here, right? Abram: Yeah. And I think the “and now” just becomes so incredibly powerful because yes, you have “and now” once in each of the first two stanzas, but look how many times you get it in those last three lines and now, and now, and now, and now, and five times in the last three lines you get “and now”. So it's all coming to a point. It's all coming to a head. Joanne: Wow. Okay. That's really remarkable because it really brings us to the precipice between life and death, you know, by the time he gets to that final iteration of the refrain, “and now I live, and now my life is done”. And that's the end. There is no language after that, you know very, very powerful. Abram: Absolutely. Yeah. You know, one of the things I see him doing in this poem is I talk about poetry as processing all the time. Poetry as a process that is moving the poet, even as it moves the reader. And you can sense a variety of. tones going on in this poem. There's anger at the injustice of it. There's also a sense of the justice of it, right? Like, he lost. There's consolation. There's an attempt to comfort himself at what's coming. There's an attempt to steel himself and, and, and bolster his confidence. There's a kind of defiance and even a kind of peace with it. So all of these various tones are going on here, but there's also this sense. So for me, looking at this poem, there's a great poem by Anne Bradstreet called “As Weary Pilgrim”, one of the last poems that she wrote and it's her preparation for death. And it's a way of interpreting earthly life as full of cares. My private youth is but a frost of cares so that you can depart from it. Yes. It's a way of looking back and saying, you know what, actually earthly life is full of misery and now I'm ready to go. And you can see him doing that throughout here too. But the last thing I'd say about this stanza is that that third to last line, “and now I die, and now I was but made,” it's a reversal of the last line. And it's his attempt to say, actually, there's a kind of birth or a life after what's coming tomorrow, and there's a way in which I'll be made again in this death even as the last line returns to the death itself, “and now I live, and now my life is done”. Joanne: Which is true, because here we are discussing the poem, like, 500 years later, isn't that extraordinary, right? Abram: With all that said, would you be willing to read this poem for us again? Joanne: Yes. Tichborne's Elegy. [Poem] Abram: So good. Joanne: Yeah, I learned a lot from this one. I always learn a lot from you, Abram. I mean it. This one, I like it so much, I might add it to my classes in the fall. This one’s a beauty. Abram: That’s great. And I just want to thank all the listeners for listening to us for the past couple of years. We are DIY as mentioned in the beginning. But we actually also require you. So we’d really appreciate it if you’d leave reviews, spread the word, let others know about our podcast, and just spread the news. That would be terrific. Joanne: Yes, and you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and we hope that you’ll subscribe. Abram: Thank you for listening. Joanne: Thank you.