Today’s Poem: You That Seek What Life Is in Death

Fulke Greville’s Eternity as Paradox

Nicholas Hilliard, Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1575 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Caelica 83: You That Seek What Life Is in Death

by Fulke Greville, Baron Brooke

You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.
New names unknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
            Reader! then make time, while you be,
            But steps to your eternity.
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The name of Fulke Greville (1554–1628), who became the first Baron Brooke in 1621, occurs like a twined monogram with that of his schoolmate, fellow courtier-poet, and friend, Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586). Sidney, though much shorter-lived, remains the more famous of the two, on the strength of his theoretical Defence of Poesie, as well as his seminal sonnet cycle Astrophil (or Astrophel) and Stella. 

It was Sidney’s father who helped Greville — grandson of the Earl of Westmorland but untitled himself — to a court position. With the younger Sidney, who had been his friend since their first day of school at Shrewsbury in 1564, Greville migrated into the circle surrounding Queen Elizabeth I, quickly becoming a favorite. 

With Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Edward Dyer — one of many contenders for the prize of having been Really Shakespeare, if in fact Shakespeare himself wasn’t Really Shakespeare —  Greville belonged to a hypothetical literary clique, the Areopagus Club. This was possibly the earliest school of poets concerned with replicating classical meters in English — or, also possibly, nothing more than an idea bandied about in letters among these friends but never actualized. Aside from those letters, nobody prior to the Victorian revival of interest in classical meters in English has made any mention of the Areopagus Club as an accomplished fact, but Greville has been proposed as a member nonetheless. 

Over the course of a long career, Greville served as a Member of Parliament and held a number of administrative positions under Elizabeth and her successor James I. His friend Sidney died young, of gangrene from an injury sustained in Robert Dudley’s 1586 military campaign in the Netherlands. Greville, forbidden by the queen to participate in the same campaign, lived to write The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1652, almost a quarter-century after his own death. At the age of 74, he was stabbed in his London house by a disgruntled servant and died four weeks later, not of the wounds so much as the medical treatment, which was to pack the affected areas with pig’s fat and wait for infection to set in. 

Edmund Lodge’s portrait of Fulke Greville, c. 1620 (Wikimedia Commons)

Like Sidney’s Stella sonnet sequence, Fulke Greville’s Caelica also grants the woman whom some of the poem address a literally heavenly pseudonym. Published  posthumously in 1633, the same year as the posthumous publication of George Herbert’s The Temple, this sequence seems divided into two loose sections: the first half probably written as Sidney was writing his own sequence, the later most likely composed (as the late-19th-century critic Martha Foote Crowe suggests, in the preface to her 1898 edition of the Caelica) after 1586, when “thoughts of a debased and degenerating court made his mind bitter and memory turned back to the days of glory in his youth.” 

Like those other more famous sequences, the Caelica also consists largely of love poems, with the insertion of at least one finely veiled  encomium to the queen, as was the fashion for the courtier-poet-in-favor. But, as Crowe asserts, in Greville we also find “a sonnet-sequence in which the soul-struggle is also the main theme; in its subject matter Caelica comes nearer to Shakespeare’s philosophical grasp than does the attempt of any other Elizabethan sonneteer.” It is this guise of Greville’s — the later-life Platonic philosopher — that we discover in Today’s Poem. 

This poem, the 83rd of 109 poems in the sequence, is notable first for not being actually, recognizably a sonnet. Not even a demi-sonnet, it consists of six accentual tetrameter lines instead of fourteen pentameter ones, and its rhyme scheme is the couplet. In this brief poem, the speaker poses a series of oppositions, some of which seem to coexist — life in death, for instance — while others entail a trade of one earthly thing for another, better thing, the true (if opaque to us) Platonic form. 

What the living experience as breathing, for example, with its defined rhythms and its finitude, the alive-in-death experience as simply air, a whole surrounding element, the true form of which physical breathing is presumably a shadow. These dead shed their old names, though their names in the afterlife are “unknown” — so perfect, perhaps, that our earthly minds can’t apprehend them. Time ends the body but not the soul. If now we be, what will we be in eternity? This remains a mystery. The pairs of end-rhymes knit up these paradoxes, ending with an injunction to treat Time as “but steps to”  that “eternity,” to which the poem, in all its mortal brevity, makes its gesture. 

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