Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
In the golden twilight of the English Renaissance, when the echoes of Shakespeare's verse still rang through London's theaters and the madrigal reached its most exquisite flowering, Thomas Weelkes emerged as one of the most distinctive and emotionally powerful composers of his generation. Born around 1576 and dying in 1623, Weelkes lived through one of the most extraordinary periods in English cultural history, creat…
“It were needless to commend the worth of music to a noble and understanding disposition: for in the natures of arts and generous spirits there is a sympathy.”
William Browne of Tavistock, born about 1588 and traditionally thought to have died about 1650, is one of the most attractive and elusive figures in early seventeenth-century English poetry. He was not a major public presence on the scale of Ben Jonson, John Donne, or George Wither, nor did he leave behind the unusually full documentary record that allows historians to reconstruct the lives of some contemporaries. Ye…
“In my poor cell and sequestration from all business, I bless God and pray for more such members in the Commonwealth.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Renaissance Poets
They overlapped for 36 years (1588–1623).
When William Browne, of Tavistock was born, Thomas Weelkes was about 12.
William Browne, of Tavistock was about 35 when Thomas Weelkes died.
Thomas Weelkes:
elstead, winchester college, chichester cathedral, as vesta was from latmos hill descending, the triumphes of oriana, madrigals to 3, 4, 5, & 6 voyces, ayeres or phantasticke spirites, edmund spenser.
William Browne, of Tavistock:
devonshire, britannia's pastorals, the shepherd's pipe, george wither, exeter college, inner temple, pastoral writing, classical pastoral.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
