Today’s Poem: The Book of the World

Pay no attention to the man doodling in the margin

Workshop of Jacquemart de Hesdin, drolleries from Les Grandes Heures de Jean de Berry, 1407 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Book of the World

by William Drummond of Hawthornden

Of this fair volume which we World do name, 
If we the sheets and leaves could turn with care, 
Of him who it corrects, and did it frame, 
We clear might read the art and wisdom rare; 
Find out his power which wildest powers doth tame, 
His providence extending everywhere, 
His justice which proud rebels doth not spare, 
In every page, no, period of the same. 
But silly we, like foolish children, rest 
Well pleased with colored vellum, leaves of gold, 
Fair dangling ribbons, leaving what is best, 
On the great Writer’s sense ne’er taking hold; 
Or, if by chance we stay our minds on aught, 
It is some picture on the margin wrought. 
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The timeline of the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) overlaps fascinatingly with the lives of the great poets of the late 16th century and the first half of the 17th, and with the turbulence of the same era. Born roughly twenty years after Shakespeare and Marlowe, Drummond received his M.A. from the new University of Edinburgh in 1605 and joined the court of the Stuart King James I (who had been James VI of Scotland since 1567) at Greenwich Palace, on the Thames just downstream from London, the following year. Before his return to Scotland on his father’s death in 1609, to take up the estate he had inherited, he studied law on the Continent, where he would return for significant periods of travel before settling at Hawthornden for good in 1630.

He had come of age with the flowering of English drama and poetry: Shakespeare and Ben Jonson on the London stage, the poems of Sir Philip Sidney, who had died the year after Drummond’s birth, in wide circulation at last, as well as those of Edmund Spenser. Drummond’s own first published poems appeared in 1613, and as that decade progressed, he developed friendships with both Jonson and Michael Drayton, with whom he carried on a lively correspondence for over a decade, until the latter poet’s death in 1631.

An ardent royalist, Drummond wrote celebratory verses on the occasion of King Charles I’s coronation visit to Scotland, as well as helping to organize the king’s procession through Edinburgh. In the last fifteen years of his life, he devoted himself to the composition of a history of Scotland, based largely on his own genealogical research, and to pamphlets in service of the royalist cause. The shock of King Charles’s execution, in 1649, is said to have delivered a final blow to Drummond’s health; he died the same year.

Anonymous, William Drummond of Hawthornden, c. 1609 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, alternately titled “The Lessons of Nature,” or simply “The Book,” appeared as part of his fourth collection, Flowers of Sion: Or Spirituall Poems, published in 1623. Not surprisingly, in an era reaping the benefits of the 16th century’s great initial gush of sonnet innovation, “The Book of the World” is a sonnet, mostly in the Shakespearean mold, but with a significant tweak in the second quatrain.

In that second quatrain, Drummond reiterates the ab rhymes of the first quatrain but inverts them. This second envelope abba quatrain both develops the proposition introduced in the previous one — We might find out all kinds of true things about God by reading the book of the world — and integrates both quatrains into a cohesive octave, after the manner of the Petrarchan sonnet.

In line 9, then, with the introduction of a new end-rhyme, the sonnet’s volta delivers the about-face. We could find out all these things — BUT DO WE? “Silly we!” Of course we don’t. The closing sestet, really a cdcd quatrain plus a couplet to hammer the point home, shows us as, according to Drummond, we really are: “children” seduced by the gilt-edged pages, playing with the bookmark ribbons, less interested in the edifying text than in a doodle in the margin.

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