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.
Thomas Tomkins
Thomas Weelkes
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the twilight of the English Renaissance, as the sun dipped behind the hills of a vanishing golden age, there stood a solitary figure whose music shimmered with the last glow of that era’s brilliance — Thomas Tomkins, composer, organist, and quiet poet of sound. Born in 1572, in the cathedral town of St. David’s, Wales, and passing into silence in 1656, in the shadowed aftermath of civil war and Puritan upheaval, T…
“To make the SemBrife Into two minums, The prick semBrife in to three”
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…
“These six dishes full of divers madrigals, the first fruits of my barren ground, unripe in regard of time, unsavoury in respect of others. Therefore taste, and again I pray you: if they like your appetite, spare not my orchard; if they offend your stomach, lay them by to ripen, and you shall prove of my latter vintage.”
About 324 km separate St. David's, Pembrokeshire, Wales from Elstead, Surrey, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Thomas Tomkins: st. david's, wales, william byrd, gloucester cathedral, chapel royal, o sing unto the lord a new song, the triumphs of oriana, a sad pavan for these distracted times. 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.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Thomas Tomkins: Sorrow, Tenderness, Joy. Thomas Weelkes: Longing, Irony, Sensuality.
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