Surrey, "Alas! so all things now do hold their peace"

NAVIGATION:

Surrey, "Alas! so all things now do hold their peace."

Lecture Topics:

Love's isolation — compare to Georgia on my Mind
The English sonnet form

  1     Alas! so all things now do hold their peace,
  2     Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing
  3     The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease;
  4     The nightès chare the stars about doth bring;
  5     Calm is the sea, the waves work less and less,
  6     So am not I, whom love, alas, doth wring,
  7     Bringing before my face the great increase
  8     Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing,
  9     In joy and woe, as in a doubtful ease:
10     For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring,
11     But by and by the cause of my disease
12     Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
13       When that I think what grief it is, again,
14       To live, and lack the thing should rid my pain.

4: "chare": — chariot. In Surrey's time, one of the names of what we call the "Big Dipper" was "Charles's Wain." A "wain" is a wagon, which is similar to a chariot. In the Big Dipper the cup can be seen as the body, in which the driver rides, and the handle as the tongue, to which the horses would be harnessed. Maybe the Big Dipper was called "Charles's Wain" by association with "Charlemagne" (literally, "Great Charles"), crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor in 800.