Abram: Hello, I'm Abram Van Engen, Joanne: And I am Joanne Diaz, Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: Today we are going to focus on a very famous poem by Queen Elizabeth I titled “On Monsieur's Departure”. Abram: Would you be willing to read that for us, Joanne? Joanne: Yes, I will. “On Monsieur’s Departure” [to read the poem, go here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44221/on-monsieurs-departure] Abram: That's fantastic. Joanne: My students love this poem. They really do. Abram: What do they love about this poem? Joanne: Okay. I share this poem with students in a survey of English poetry that goes from like 1500 to 1700, right? And when I prepare students for Queen Elizabeth's poetry, I often show them portraits of her. And they're so iconic. Queen Elizabeth, she was the reigning monarch of England for decades and she was very careful about how she wanted her image to be presented to her people. She wanted to show strength, resolve, the wealth of England and of its burgeoning empire. She wanted to show certainty of and sense of purpose and confidence. And in many of her paintings, you'll see she's facing us in the portrait, right? She's facing the viewer and anything that is to her back is tempestuous and cloudy and stormy, and anything that she's looking upon, it's bright and radiant and sunny, and so they're very propagandistic portraits and they show her body as the body politic. This notion that when English viewers looked at her portrait, they saw the power of England, right? So not just her as an individual, but her as a political entity, as the representative of the empire. Abram: She is unmovable, unflappable. To look at a portrait of her, to look at her in power is to see yourself stable, secure, all the iconography is to show her in a state of complete control. And then we get this poem. Joanne: Yeah, and I think that's why students enjoy it. So readers in general have enjoyed it over the years. And we should say this is a poem that was never published in Queen Elizabeth's lifetime. It was found in her manuscripts after she died. There's some evidence that suggests that she might've written it in the early 1580s. And so we don't know how many people saw this poem, but what interests me about it is, I just finished talking to you about how fixed and purposeful and strong she was in these portraits, how often in some of her speeches to her troops and to her counselors, she would say “think of me as a man, think of me as a Prince, think, don't think of me as womanly or weak,” and then there's this softness that's in this poem, but maybe we could say a little bit more about her context and her cultural moment. Abram: Great. So just to get a sense of who Queen Elizabeth was, start here. Your dad murders your mom. Then your half sister has you imprisoned. Then one of your cousins, Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to want your job and wants to become queen. And then another cousin, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk wants you assassinated and then one of your best and most loyal advisors, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, stages a rebellion against you. That's what the, just in a nutshell, that's a little bit of what you're dealing with. So Queen Elizabeth was of course the daughter of Henry the eighth and Anne Boleyn, and this was the period when England is becoming Protestant, but trying to decide for itself what it's going to be, and so that's a little bit about who Queen Elizabeth was. So who is she writing to in this poem? Joanne: Numerous bits of circumstantial evidence suggests that she's writing this poem probably after the departure of the Duke of Anjou and the Duke of Anjou was one of many suitors that tried to court Queen Elizabeth. She never married. She never had children. There's some evidence that suggests that perhaps this was her plan all along. She understood her vulnerability as a woman. monarch. She understood the dangers of foreign alliances. She was very savvy in her diplomacy, and that's really great for the history books. But I think one of the reasons that this poem is so interesting is because we get a sense of the cost of that very savvy strategy. The kind of isolation that a monarch like this might feel, the need for autonomy, but also the need for companionship. And what she has to sacrifice for her nation. Abram: Maybe that's a great way to just jump into the poem and see exactly what she's saying here. So the poem for those who don't have it in front of them is divided into three stanzas. Each stanza has six lines. So we call them a sestet and each has the same kind of rhyme scheme. So A, B, A, B, C, C. is the first stanza. And that same kind of rhyme scheme repeats itself in each of the other two stanzas. We've talked many times on this podcast before about how a stanza is a little room and each stanza is accomplishing its own kind of task or setting up its own kind of room. So maybe we should just start with that first stanza and that first line, “I grieve and dare not show my discontent,” What do you see happening in this first stanza? Joanne: I'm very interested in how much attention is being given to showing and seeming, right? “I grieve and dare not show my discontent, / I love and yet am forced to seem to hate, / I do, yet dare not say I ever meant, / I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate. / I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned, / Since from myself another self I turned.” I'm so intrigued. by appearances versus reality. I'm very interested in selfhood and what's behind the facade that she's created for herself. What do you see? Abram: I find it interesting that in this period, there is a great deal of thought going into interiority, selfhood. Selfhood, what it means to be a self, the fashioning of a self that others see versus the real self that's inside. And a lot of this is coming out of different religious contexts, poetic contexts, and so forth. This is the period in which English language begins for the first time to have the word sympathy. And if you just think about what sympathy means, it means to both know what another person is feeling and to be able to feel that sympathy yourself inside. So they called it a fellow-like feeling, but they didn't have a word for it until the late 1500s. So there's a great deal going on here with the development of what a self really is. And this great opening stanza with the seeming happening twice. Joanne: Yes. We all have those multiple selves. But a monarch has to have multiple selves. The monarch has to have at least a dual body, a dual spirit, right? So the body politic is the stand in for the nation. But then there's the body, natural, the body, the one that we all manage and live with in the world. And I love the way she is playing both sides of that in this first stanza. Abram: I also love the way this stanza reveals the limitations of power. That is, she's the most powerful person in the kingdom. And yet she's not able to show the way she really feels. Precisely because of her power, because of her position, she has to hide and even she has to act in a certain way. So this is, the reason why this marriage never happened is because the person who was wooing her was a French Catholic and the people were not going to have it. There's this sense in which if she goes through with this marriage, there could be a rebellion. You even in that second stanza, you get this word suppressed. And she talks about what she's talking about. There's suppressing feelings that are in her breast, but that's a word that has a pretty strong political overtone to it, right? Like she might have to suppress a rebellion if she goes through with this marriage, right? And so she's playing on both sides of that right there. Joanne: The other thing to mention is that in stanza one she sets up a Petrarchan contrast when she says, “I freeze and yet am burned.” Any lover of Petrarch's poetry will hear something familiar there. The poets of the English Renaissance were obsessed with Petrarch, and he was an Italian poet. Poet Francesco Petrarca. He had written 150 years earlier in the 1300s. He was the innovator of the sonnet form in Italian. And by the time we get to the 1500s in England, there are courtiers in the court of Henry VIII and then Queen Elizabeth that were all just obsessed with translating Petrarch's Italian poems into English. And as they did, they encountered these contrasts, these extremes. I freeze and yet I'm burned. You're cruel, but you're kind. I feel like I'm floating, I'm sinking. So all of these extremes are meant to just give us a sense of how turbulent the poet's inner life are. Abram: That turbulence going off of Petrarch also opens up the paradoxes that they love to play with. And so in that third stanza, and we'll get there in just a minute, but be more cruel and so be kind. So there's these wonderful paradoxes that if you could just, shun me entirely, that would actually be the kindest thing that you could do for me. But this in between thing is both cruel and kind at the same time. Joanne: Oh, that's nice. And then she continues that in stanza two look at that first line in stanza two, “my care is like my shadow in the sun.” And so when she says my care, she doesn't mean my caring for others. She means the burden that I feel, right? The struggle inside me is like my shadow in the sun. Of course, I'm thinking of sun as monarch, so she's always in the sun. She's like the sun to her court and to her people. But this feeling that she has for this Monsieur who has departed, it's a shadow in that sun. I'm really interested in that. Abram: And then I just love the way that metaphor, that image plays itself out. “It follows me flying, flies when I pursue it.” Again this wonderful paradox of if I try to ignore this thing, it follows me around. But then if I try to pursue it, it flees away from me because I can't actually have it. And so it's just a wonderfully done metaphor for this thing that she both wants and can't have, pursues but can't reach, tries to ignore and leave behind, but then it won't leave her mind. Joanne: Of course she knew, “fainting I follow.” She knew that the Petrarchan conceits of Thomas Wyatt and other poets of King Henry's court. She's picking up on those and as I hear, think about this second stanza, I'm thinking of a poem by Petrach, his Rima Spiros, number 164. “I am awake. I think I burn, I weep. And she who destroys me is always before me to my sweet. pain. War is my state, full of sorrow and suffering, and only thinking of her do I have any peace.” Again, that extremity of feeling, she's definitely picking up on that. Abram: And so she asks for a gentler passion, right? So as we move into the stanza three, we've got all the turbulence of the first two stanzas, and then she starts off by saying, “Some gentler passion slide into my mind / For I am soft and made of smelting snow.” What do you see happening in the final stanza here? Joanne: Gentler when we hear that in the 21st century we think softer, milder maybe kinder But that word gentle also is the same word that's in gentlemen. So she's looking for something more civil, more courtly, more appropriate, perhaps to her position. She feels undone by this. She feels like it's lowering her and she, I think she wants to be elevated again, no? Abram: Yeah. Then she moves into these great repetitions of the word “or be more cruel.” “Love and so be kind. Let me or float.” Or sink, be high, or low, or let me live with some more sweet content, or die and so forget what love ever meant, right? It's great because she's trying to resolve the turbulence, and yet I feel like there's a complete, almost like a complete loss of control by the poet. This or this, either way. Oh, this or this, maybe over here. The turbulence almost becomes more extreme in the poem. In the very desire to resolve it by the end of this poem. Joanne: What you just did with your voice and the way you read that final stanza was terrific, because I think you were emphasizing the dramatic import of this poem. You could imagine this being a kind of soliloquy on the stage, and you could imagine each of those oars. Being a gesticulation or a turning of the body or a shifting of the face or the head. And there's something performative there that does feel like clearly the language is representative of how overwhelmed and chaotic she's feeling, because she's trying to give so many options, either do this or this or this. And she's almost out of breath as she says it. And I like how theatrical that is. And it goes back to, again, this notion of her as both monarch who has to perform and as individual who's suffering. Abram: Just to touch on the use of repetition in this poem, we see how effective it is here in the final stanza with or, but just to make sure, that listeners hear the I in that first dance. So we move from a stanza filled with I to a stanza filled with or and that's not by accident. So the I becomes this either, or this thing caught in between. And the opening stanza, I grieve. I love, I do. I seem, I am, and not, I freeze. I turned right. So this I, and then becomes “or this” by the end. And one other way that the last stanza kind of echoes or turns us back to that first stanza is the final rhyme of the poem, content and meant, is the first rhyme of the poem, discontent and meant. And so the discontent is trying to be a more sweet content by the end. And either way, what we're dealing with is what was meant. And so the poem loops back on itself in that way. Joanne: What a well made poem. It's just, it's amazing what she's doing here. The range of expression is very nice. Would you be willing to read this poem now that we've discussed it? Abram: Absolutely. [poem] Joanne: Wow, that was a good reading. I love that. It's so dramatic. Oh, gosh. Abram: Thank you. Joanne: To learn more about Queen Elizabeth and her cultural moment, please visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. Abram: And you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Joanne: Thank you for listening.