DeliaSonnet 39, Samuel Daniel
edited by Caine
Grimes
Samuel Daniel was a very successful man not only in the literate
circles of the waning years of Queen Elizabeth the First's rule but in
the social circles of the time as well. Perhaps Daniel owes much of his
poetic noteriety to a publisher who was in need of filler for a book of
another very famous poet's work--Sir Philip Sidney. One might say then
that Daniel's fame was acheived solely by this accident, but on a second
look at his poetry, this belief is completely unfounded. Daniel's poetry
was certainly a beautiful addition by a very talented, but at the time
unknown, poet to Sidney's work.
Born in 1562 to a musician father, Daniel attended Oxford at the age
of nineteen. Although he did not graduate, he had already begun down the
path to a literary life. A translation of the works of Paulus Jovius was
published in 1585. He then travelled to Italy with a friend and enjoyed
experiences some of which he would later write about in sonnets of his
most famous sonnet sequence, Delia.
Daniel would go on to also write such works as The Civil Wars Between
the Two Houses of Lancaster and York(1594-1609), a prose work on
English history, and also A Defense of Rhyme(1603).
Daniel died in October of 1619.
The sonnet that is shown here was one of fifty sonnets first
published in book form in 1592, entitled DELIA. Twenty-eight of
these sonnets were published earlier in 1591 as "filler sonnets" for a
volume of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. These "filler sonnets"
were his first published sonnets.
Read in my face, a volume of despairs,
The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe:
Drawn with my blood and printed with my cares,
Wrought by her hand that I have honored so.
Who, whilst I burn, she sings at my soul's wrack, 5
Looking aloft from turret of her pride:
There my soul's tyrant joys her in the sack
Of her own seat, whereof I made her guide.
There do these smokes that from affliction rise,
Serue as an incense to a cruel Dame: 10
A sacrifice thrice-grateful to her eyes,
Because their power serue to exact the same.
Thus ruins she, to satisfy her will,
The temple, where her name was honored still.
2.Iliads] referring to Greek poet Homer's epic, The
Iliad, a chronicle of the war between the Greeks and the
Trojans, which ended in the burning of Troy.
3.printed] versions from 1601 on read "painted".
4.wrought] performed, worked (here, written work).
5.wrack] destruction, ruin.
7.soul's tyrant] perhaps the speaker's heart, tyrant over the
speaker's resisting soul, forcing him to continue to pursue her;
sack] pillaging.
8. seat] citadel, stronghold.
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