Today’s Poem: Shall I Wasting in Despair
Unromantic romance, for a lighter Wednesday poem
“Shall I wasting in despair / Die because a woman’s fair?” asked George Wither around 1622, in rejection of all the old I-pine-away-to-nothing tropes of unrequited love in chivalric romance. It was the era for such a turn against what was perceived as the medieval. The first part of Don Quixote, appearing in 1605, contained the loudest and most successful mockery of the romance stories, but even Richard II, Shakespeare’s 1595 history play, shows that medieval forms had become openly suspect. Wither was never a trend-making figure (more a leaf, albeit an irritable and attention-demanding leaf, blown hither and yon by the winds of his time), but in “Shall I wasting in despair” he gives memorable expression to anti-romance sentiment: “If she be not so to me, / What care I how fair she be?”
Living from 1588 to 1667, Wither somehow managed to survive the bloody days of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I — along with the Civil War, Cromwell’s protectorship, and Charles II’s Restoration. His survival is astonishing, given that he was something like the anti-Vicar of Bray, falling afoul of each new set of powers and choosing sides just as they were doomed.
Imprisoned twice and barred by the Stationers Company over a quarrel about his book of metrical psalms for church singing, Wither nonetheless produced over a hundred works of satire, lyrical verse, hymns, and prophetic pamphlets. In his Brief Lives, John Aubrey (1626–1697) writes that Sir John Denham (c. 1614–1669) asked the king to spare Wither’s life, “for that whilest G.W. lived [Denham] should not be the worst poet in England.”
That’s unfair — and not just because Denham wasn’t that great a poet himself. At least, with Wither, something interesting looms into view from time to time in the trudging journeys of his verse. As, for instance, Today’s Poem, “Shall I wasting in despair,” one of the lighter poems we offer on Wednesdays here in Poems Ancient and Modern. In five eight-line stanzas of tetrameter couplets, Wither walks through the reasons a courtier might pursue a woman: her looks, her kindly temperament, her virtues, her wealth. And in each he asks the question of anti-romance: “For if she be not for me, / What care I for whom she be?” After all, “If she slight me when I woo, / I can scorn and let her go.”
Shall I wasting in despair
by George Wither
Shall I wasting in despair Die because a woman’s fair? Or make pale my cheeks with care ’Cause another’s rosy are? Be she fairer than the day, Or the flow’ry meads in May — If she be not so to me, What care I how fair she be? Shall my foolish heart be pined ’Cause I see a woman kind? Or a well-disposed nature Joinèd with a lovely feature? Be she meeker, kinder, than Turtle dove or pelican, If she be not so to me, What care I how kind she be? Shall a woman’s virtues move Me to perish for her love? Or her merits’ value known Make me quite forget mine own? Be she with that goodness blest Which may gain her name of Best; If she seem not such to me, What care I how good she be? ’Cause her fortune seems too high Shall I play the fool and die? Those that bear a noble mind Where they want of riches find, Think what with them they would do That without them dare to woo; And unless that mind I see, What care I how great she be? Great or good, or kind or fair, I will ne’er the more despair: If she love me, this believe, I will die ere she shall grieve; If she slight me when I woo, I can scorn and let her go; For if she be not for me, What care I for whom she be?
A total delight!
Earlier this day, read Lord Byron's words at his grave: “Here lies the poet, who, in his own despite, / Was forced to sing of love, and not of spite.”
To appear and write and be so far ahead of one's time seems so unfair.