The Project Gutenberg EBook of Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles, by
Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable

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Title: Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles
Delia - Diana

Author: Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable

Editor: Martha Foote Crow

Release Date: July 16, 2006 [EBook #18842]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ELIZABETHAN SONNET-CYCLES

EDITED BY

MARTHA FOOTE CROW

DELIA

BY SAMUEL DANIEL

DIANA

BY HENRY CONSTABLE

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER AND CO.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE LONDON W.C.

1896

DELIA

BY

SAMUEL DANIEL

SAMUEL DANIEL

Daniel's sonnet series has been by many regarded as the prototype of
Shakespeare's. It is true that several of Daniel's themes are repeated
in the cycle composed by the greater poet. The ideas of immortality in
verse, the transitoriness of beauty, the assurances of truth, the
humility and the woes of the lover, the pain of separation and the
comfort of night thoughts, shape the mood of both poets. But these
motives are also found in the pages of many other sonneteers of the
time. All these devotees seem to have had a storehouse of poetic
conceits which they held in common, and from which each poet had the
right to draw materials to use in his own way. In fact Shakespeare's
sonnets are full of echoes from the voices of Sidney, Constable, Davies,
Lodge, Watson, Drayton and Barnes, as well as from that mellifluous one
of Daniel; and these poetic conceits were tossed forth in the first
place by the Italian sonnet makers, led by Petrarch. It is evident that
Daniel's _Petrarch_ has been well-thumbed. Wood says that Daniel left
Oxford without a degree because "his geny" was "more prone to easier and
smoother studies than in pecking and hewing at logic," and we may
believe that Italian was one of these smoother studies. His translation
of Paolo Giovi's work on Emblems, which was published in 1585, was
doubtless one fruit of this study, a work that since it took him into
the very realm of the _conce