A Modest Love by Sir Edward Dyer

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

Episode 75

A Modest Love by

Sir Edward Dyer

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘A Modest Love’ by Sir Edward Dyer.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/75_A_Modest_Love_by_Sir_Edward_Dyer.mp3

Poet

Sir Edward Dyer

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness

A Modest Love

by Sir Edward Dyer

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
And love is love, in beggars as in kings.

Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords;
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move;
The firmest faith is in the fewest words;
The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love:
True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak;
They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.

---

Podcast transcript

This poem is sometimes printed with the title ‘A Modest Love’, and sometimes without, so it may well be that the title was added later. But whether or not it’s called ‘A Modest Love’, it’s definitely a modest love poem: it’s brief, it’s understated, it reveals hardly anything about the speaker and nothing at all about his beloved, and there’s just one little flash of emotion, right at the end. In short, it embodies the virtues it describes.

You could say the poem is too modest for its own good – because you have very likely never heard of Sir Edward Dyer, and I’ve only read a few of his poems. But after considering Emilia Lanyer’s poetry a couple of episodes ago, I thought it would be nice to read a poem by another overlooked poet of the same period.

Dyer was a courtier under Elizabeth I. His poetry was actually well-known and highly regarded among his contemporaries. Gabriel Harvey bracketed him with the great Sir Philip Sidney, who we read in Episode 58, as one of the ‘ornaments of the court’. And in his Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham described him as, ‘Maister Edward Dyar, for Elegie most sweete, solemne, and of high conceit.’ And yet I’ve just been through several of my historical anthologies of English poetry, and couldn’t find him in most of them. It just goes to show how fickle and fleeting poetic fame can be.

To add insult to obscurity, his most famous poem, ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’, is now considered to be quite likely written by someone else. What remains of his corpus is mostly fairly conventional love poetry, featuring lots of nymphs and shepherds, and maidens and swains, and Petrarchan antitheses of the kind we saw in the episode on Sidney. And it’s not a criticism to say he was conventional. He lived and wrote in a time and place when poets generally felt no need or desire to shatter conventions.

And yet… he’s left us a poem that challenges the idea that great passions have to be shouted from the rooftops to be adequately expressed. Here’s how he starts to make his case:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;

So he’s presenting us with a list of things that seem small and insignificant, but which have something that is significant relative to their size: even the shortest trees have a tops; little sparks have heat; ants have ‘gall’ secretion of the liver, which was believed at the time to provoke resentment and resistance; flies ‘spleen’ which was associated with high spirits or courage; ‘And bees have stings, although they be not great’.

Plus there is that delightful detail of slender hairs casting tiny shadows. That line really comes into focus, doesn’t it? I did wonder if Dyer had looked at hairs in a magnifying glass, which is possible, but the microscope wasn’t invented until after his death, so he didn’t live to see the popular fascination with microscopes later in the 17th century.

Another possibility of course is that if you’re close enough to see individual hairs and their shadows, then you’re either looking at your own hair, or you are very close to someone else and their hair. So maybe we can pick up a subtle erotic charge in this line.

So the first four lines of the poem are a catalogue of small and apparently insignificant things that turn out, on a second glance, to have something remarkable about them. The poem is like one of the miniature portraits of Elizabethan courtiers painted by Nicholas Hilliard: its small details reward close inspection. Then in the next line, we get a shift of perspective:

Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;

The seas are the first appearance of something big and huge and deep, suggestive of depth of passion. But then they are immediately contrasted with ‘shallow springs’, as if the poet is skipping past this expansive vision to a more modest image, those ‘shallow springs’.

Then the first stanza closes with a disarmingly direct statement:

And love is love, in beggars as in kings.

Isn’t that wonderful? ‘And love is love’ – surprisingly plain, after all the clever comparisons. Because up to this point, everything in the poem has been an implied comparison: the trees, the ant, the sparks, the hairs, the bees, and the shallow springs each illustrate some aspect of the ‘modest love’ of the title. So it does actually start to matter whether the title, ‘A Modest Love’, is authorial or not.

If we read the first stanza without the title, the way it’s printed in a lot of anthologies, the ending becomes more surprising – it’s like a riddle that keeps us guessing about what he’s talking about, until the answer is revealed in the last line:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
And love is love, in beggars as in kings.

But even if we do have the title as a clue, it’s not really giving much away. After all, this is an Elizabethan courtier, writing in an established lyric mode that is overwhelmingly associated with love poetry, so you don’t have to be Gollum to guess the answer to the riddle.

And either way, it’s a wonderfully candid last line. It’s not remotely revolutionary, but it does suggest that in love at least, everyone is equal, from the beggar to the king. And the speaker is clearly positioning himself as a beggar rather than a king: his love may be more like the shallow spring than the vast ocean of other lovers, more like the beggar than the king, but ‘love is love’, as he says. It’s an element that cannot be reduced, an experience that is the same for everyone.

Part of what makes this stanza work so well, and feel so satisfying at the end, is the skill with which Dyer balances regularity and variation.

It’s written in a six line stanza form, which we can break down into a quatrain rhyming alternate lines, ABAB. So the rhymes go: ‘gall’, ‘heat’, ‘small’, ‘great’; and then a rhyming couplet at the end, ‘springs’ and ‘kings’. To most modern English speakers, of course, at least in this country, ‘heat’ and ‘great’ sound like half-rhymes, but that’s just because our pronunciation has shifted since the 16th century; they would have been full rhymes when Dyer wrote them. And in the second stanza, the same goes for ‘fords’ and ‘words’, ‘move’ and ‘love’, and ‘speak’ and ‘break’.

These days we know this form as the Venus and Adonis stanza, because it was used by Shakespeare in his poem of that name, which was a smash hit bestseller in Elizabethan England. But Dyer didn’t necessarily copy it from Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis wasn’t published until 1593, by which time Dyer may already have written his poem. And the stanza was already so well established that the young King James VI of Scotland, the future James I of England, wrote a treatise on poetry in 1583 in which he described this form as ‘Common verse’, and said it was the correct stanza form to use, ‘In materis of love’. So Dyer probably felt he was simply using the right tool for the job.

So the stanza form and its rhyming pattern are perfectly regular. And the metre is very regular too. The poem is written in iambic pentameter, the familiar ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM we all know from school, and Dyer uses it in a thoroughly regular and conventional way, which you can hear if I read it in an exaggerated way:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs have shadows, though but small,

It sounds awful like that, doesn’t it? But it helps you tune into that rhythm which is ticking away in the background throughout the poem. And this regularity was very typical of 16th century poetry in England, it wasn’t until later in the century when Shakespeare and his friends were using iambic pentameter for drama, that they introduced a lot of variation in the metre, to make it more natural and expressive of their characters’ emotions.

But even courtly lyric poets like Dyer were starting to experiment with some variations in the metre, and we find one example in this stanza:

Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;

Did you hear that? Right at the beginning, I put the stress on ‘seas’, instead of ‘have’, so the line kicks off with a stressed syllable, and disrupts the iambic flow. Now I could have read it with the stress on have:

Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;

But that sounds a bit odd, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t make as much sense. If Dyer had referred to the sea in the previous line, then maybe he could have gone on to say ‘Seas have their source’, expanding on a subject he’s already introduced. But he’s introducing ‘seas’ for the first time, and contrasting it with shallow springs, so makes sense to stress ‘seas’. Plus, of course, it’s the first BIG thing, he’s introduced, to contrast with all the small things. So it makes sense to stress it, as out of step with all the other examples he’s just given.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, and how the iambic pentameter went from being very regular and orderly to much more variable and expressive, then have a listen to episodes 26 and 28, about Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. But the essential point here is that Dyer is using a regular metre with great skill, and varying it with just enough expressiveness to stop it becoming monotonous, and to signal the strength of the speakers feeling in an appropriately modest and subtle way.

Another way Dyer introduces variation in this stanza is in the different classes of image he uses: trees from the plant world; the ant, the fly and the bee, from the animal kingdom; sparks from the element of fire; and seas and springs from the element of water. And all of these are from nature, before we finally enter the human world of beggars and kings.

Yet another way Dyer balances regularity and variation to keep things interesting is in the verbs he uses. For most images, he uses the verb ‘have’ to indicate their properties: ‘the lowest trees have tops’; ‘bees have stings’; ‘Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs’. And in the first two lines, the ant, the fly and the little sparks are all governed by the same verb, ‘have’. But notice how Dyer avoids repetition by only using the word ‘have’ once:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;

Imagine if he’d written:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant has gall,
The fly has spleen, the little sparks have heat;

It sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? But Dyer skilfully avoids this by allowing the first use of ‘have’ to govern the following clauses, and using ‘her’ and ‘their’ to fill out the metre:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;

And in the next line, he changes the verb from ‘have’ to ‘cast’:

The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,

He could have used ‘have’ in this line:

The slender hairs have shadows, though but small,

But it’s just a bit too predictable isn’t it? It feels sharper and nimbler when he shifts the verb to ‘cast’.

And in the final line, of course, the verb changes from ‘have’ to ‘is’:

And love is love, in beggars as in kings.

To appreciate the full effect of all these little variations, just imagine if Dyer had unthinkingly used ‘have’ throughout the stanza:

The lowest trees have tops, the ant has gall,
The fly has spleen, the little sparks have heat;
The slender hairs have shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
We all have love, the beggars and the kings.

It’s like nails down a blackboard, isn’t it? Sometimes you have to break a poem to appreciate how delicately it has been made.

OK hopefully we can agree Dyer has done a terrific job of the first stanza. On to the second and final stanza:

Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords;
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move;
The firmest faith is in the fewest words;
The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love:
True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak;
They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.

I’m not going to spend as much time on this stanza as the first, because a lot of what I said about the first one applies to this one too. It’s as understated in its form as its subject. It’s written in the same regular stanza, with very slight variation in the metre. It uses a similar list of comparisons to expand upon the central point. The image of ‘rivers’ in the first line picks up on the watery imagery of ‘seas’ and ‘springs’ from the previous stanza.

But there is one crucial difference, which we can detect once again in the verbs: the first stanza was very static, with things ‘having’ various attributes, and love ‘being’ love. Even ‘cast’ isn’t really an action; the hairs don’t really ‘cast’ shadows, the shadows are simply a result of light shining on the hairs and being block.

In the second stanza, however, things are in motion: rivers ‘run’, turtles ‘love’ (I’m pretty sure he means ‘turtle dove’, which was conventionally associated with love in Elizabethan poetry, rather than the creature with flippers and a shell) and ‘The dial stirs’ – this shadow is moving, even though if so slowly that ‘none perceives it move’. All of which prepares us for the shift in the final couplet, from hearts that ‘have’ things to hearts that do things:

True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak;
They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.

Ah. That last line gets me every time. It’s literally heartbreaking, isn’t it? And this kind of thing is very hard to do – it could easily have been sentimental or unintentionally comic. And it’s a fine line, but for me it really works. And one reason it works is that it’s a release from the skill and control and sophistication of the rest of the poem. All of that artfulness earns him this moment of honesty, where he blurts out his true feeling:

and then they break.

It’s terribly English, terribly buttoned up. But if you’re aware of the social codes, and alert to the subtlety of Dyer’s language, it’s very moving. I can’t help thinking of Anthony Hopkins in the movie Remains of the Day, playing the repressed butler Stevens, who struggles to confess his love for the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. Sometimes, as Dyer says,

The firmest faith is in the fewest words;

This poem is small but beautifully made, and you have to examine the details carefully to appreciate its workmanship. It’s like a hand made watch that keeps time quietly but steadily, its little mechanisms spinning and whirring and occasionally chiming quietly. A watch that evidently meant a great deal to someone when it was made, many years ago. And maybe a great deal to someone else as well. Even though we never get a glimpse of that person. So let’s wind up Dyer’s watch and have another listen.

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A Modest Love

by Sir Edward Dyer

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great;
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs;
And love is love, in beggars as in kings.

Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords;
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move;
The firmest faith is in the fewest words;
The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love:
True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak;
They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.

---

Sir Edward Dyer

Sir Edward Dyer was an English poet and courtier who was born in 1543 and died in 1607. He served as a diplomat and enjoyed the favour of Queen Elizabeth I, though his ambitions for higher office were never realised. Dyer’s poems are marked by their lyric skill and introspective tone. Some of them have a philosophical depth that embodies the spirit of Elizabethan humanism.

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