MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES

Delia is perhaps Daniel’s best-known work of poetry, admired for its pleasant lyricism, its textbook examples of Petrarchism, and its employment of the “eternizing conceit,” the celebration of the poet’s ability to immortalize the beloved in his poetry. In Sonnet XXX, the speaker imagines an aged Delia and offers his timeless poetry:

Which then presents her winter-withered hew;
Goe you my verse, goe tell her what she was;
For what she was she best shall finde in you.
   Your firie heate lets not her glorie passe,
   But Phenix-like shall make her live anew.

These borrowed themes Daniel uses to a new purpose: to present himself to the countess of Pembroke as a skillful and ambitious poet. He also refashions commonplaces of Petrarchism to reflect and effect a mutually sustaining patronage relationship; the poet/lover is not the conventional bitter captive but a worshiping lover whose pleas for reciprocity lack the erotic charge of Sidney’s Astro-phil. The Complaint of Rosamond , published with the 1592 Delia , contributes to this purpose; it presents Daniel as no callow lover, but a morally serious poet condemning adultery while raising sympathy for the wronged Rosamond, paramour of Henry II. He also frames the tale with an image of a patron–client relationship, where the ghost of Rosamond asks Delia (the Countess) to grace the poet and thus enable her distressed soul to find rest. Daniel’s 1592 volume apparently succeeded in establishing him in Pembroke’s graces; the dedication of the 1594 Delia calls her “Great Patroness of these my humble Rymes…. Begotten by thy hand, and my desire.”

Daniel’s confidence in poetry’s personal and cultural efficacy does not last, however. Even while he defends poetry and learning in Musophilus (1599) and A Defence of Ryme (1603), he meditates upon human frailty and the limitations of poetry in a world of change and devolution. The dialogue between the learned Musophilus and the worldly Philocosmos addresses the familiar humanist dilemma, the struggle to reconcile the often conflicting values of scholarship and action. Daniel’s solution is to promote the man of learning as most fit for public governance. The Defence of Ryme also gives a humanist emphasis to its subject. It is most often read for its progressive views on language, as Daniel rejects “the authoritie of Antiquitie” and proposes as criteria of judgment “Custome that is before all Law, Nature that is above all Arte.” As I read it, however, the work expresses anxiety about various authorities, as Daniel challenges Thomas Campion (who favored ancient Latin meters), establishes his own poetic authority, and, importantly, engages political issues. The Defence , after all, appeared with the Panegyricke , which praises and admonishes King James* to maintain the commonwealth and avoid tyranny. In the Defence , abandoning custom is linked to the dangers of tyranny; what is customary and common, whether in government or literary practice, is seen as the source of strength and stability (this dedication to preserving the commonwealth and the rights of knighthood is, according to Richard McCoy, also an important theme of the Civil Wars ). Natural and customary rhyme, employed in formal verse, orders and stabilizes language. Ironically, Daniel’s emphasis on naturalness of language eventually leads him away from poetry and rhyming to prose, which he calls the “common tongue of the world.”

The problem, as Daniel and his contemporaries, including Francis Bacon,* realized, is that custom is an ever-shifting criterion. Social and poetic values are changing and relative, and certitude is thus hard to come by. Accordingly, Daniel found insoluble difficulties in the writing of history. Initially, he claimed that his Civil Wars would unfold events “Unintermixt with fictions fantasies./ I versifie the troth, not Poetize.” In the 1609 dedication, however, he is less confident: “I have carefully followed that truth…without adding to, or subtracting from, the general receiv’d opinion.” He feels obliged to report “popular bruites, and opinions, which run according to the time & the bias of mens affections.” The search for certainty and fact has run aground on the rocks of opinion and individual bias, not to mention conflicting evidence, which he elsewhere bemoans. Furthermore, like Sidney, Daniel is aware that the historian cannot escape poetic feigning, as he defends his “poeticall licence, of framing speaches” to historical figures by claiming they are drawn “according to the portraiture of Nature.” Daniel arrived early at the awareness (now shared by some of today’s historians) that history can never retrieve the “truth” of the past, that historians regularly construct fictions of their own.