Today’s Poem: Autumn

London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn

William Trost Richards, October, 1863 (Wikimedia Commons)

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“Autumn hath all the summer’s fruitful treasure”

by Thomas Nashe

Autumn hath all the summer’s fruitful treasure; 
Gone is our sport, fled is poor Croydon’s pleasure. 
Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace,
Ah, who shall hide us from the winter’s face? 
Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease, 
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease. 
From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord deliver us! 

London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn;
Trades cry, Woe worth that ever they were born. 
The want of term is town and city’s harm;
Close chambers we do want to keep us warm. 
Long banished must we live from our friends;
This low-built house will bring us to our ends. 
From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord deliver us!
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Thomas Nashe (1567–c. 1601). What are we to make of him?

He was certainly once considered a major Elizabethan. In 1861, Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) published The Golden Treasury, which would become the standard Victorian anthology of English lyrical verse — and the first poem in the book was Nashe’s “Spring, the sweet spring.”

These days, however, Nashe ranks among the least read of the once-famous Elizabethans: Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, even Marlowe and Webster, have all far surpassed the forgotten poet. Except perhaps for “In Time of Plague” — with its debated couplet “Brightness falls from the air; / Queens have died young and fair” — the man is gone from popular memory.

Still, to read about that era is to come across Nashe’s name again and again. Whenever something was happening in the Elizabethans’ literary world, he was sure to pop up. Plays, poetry, fiction, ecclesiology, social satire: At some point Nashe was involved. It’s uncertain how much he contributed to Shakespeare’s 1591 Henry VI, Part 1, but Nashe’s 1592 Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Divell, a satirical prose tale, was among the most popular pamphlets of his time. And then there’s his 1594 The Unfortunate Traveller, a picaresque proto-novel, and then his erotica, and then his defenses of the state church, and then . . .

A woodcut from Richard Litchfield’s 1597 The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Gentleman, showing the poet in prisoner’s chains (Wikimedia Commons)

Along the way, Nashe also wrote a masque called Summer’s Last Will and Testament, which contains such lyric poetry as “Fair summer droops.” Published in 1600, the play was acted in 1592 for the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift — which is why Today’s Poem, another lyric from the play, references the archbishop’s properties: Croyden (in line 2) was home to his summer residence, and Lambeth (in line 8) his palace in London (also dubbed “this low-built house” in line 13, the “this” signaling where the masque was performed).

Two stanzas of three couplets each, in an irregular pentameter with a tag added to each as a seventh line, Nashe’s “Autumn” has its flaws. “London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn,” for example, misses (especially with that “quite”) being the good line it could have been.

Still, with such lines as “Close chambers we do want to keep us warm. / Long banished must we live from our friends” and “Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease, / And here we lie, God knows, with little ease,” the poem reminds us of the hardship of winter in Elizabethan England.

That concluding tag, “From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord deliver us,” has several possible metrical readings. Reading it aloud, I actually hear it as eight stresses (From wìn-ter, plàgue, and pè-sti-lènce, // gòod Lòrd de-lìv-er ùs), though Nashe may have meant it as six feet. Regardless, it gives a strong sense of the fall of autumn into winter.

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