Matthew Palatnik: Elizabethan Poet, Fulke Greville’s deeply humane portrayal of love in “Poem IV from Caelica”

Fulke Greville (October 1554 – September 1628) was an Elizabethan poet and dramatist, best known for being the biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, who served in the House of Commons and as the treasurer of the navy and chancellor of the Exchequer under Elizabeth I and James I. Per Capita’s Matthew Palatnik explores Greville’s seemingly straightforward love poem conceals frustration and ambivalence towards his monarch and his God.

Fulke Greville is something of an oddity in English poetry, both in his own time and in hindsight, compared with his contemporaries. Despite his outsized influence on later poets like Donne, Marvell, and the other Metaphysical writers, he never achieved fame equal to theirs. This has been attributed to an icily intellectual quality in his tone, the gnarled complexity of his syntax, and his obscure use allusions, which he often layered on top of one another, creating linguistic and conceptual horror vacui, to suggest multiple or even contradictory meanings. Yet the traits for which he is sometimes criticised add to the allure of his writing and have contributed to his gradual resurfacing in critical writing on the period. Despite its impersonal, intellectual reputation, Greville’s work acts as a mirror for his own, contradictory character: Greville is known to have had pseudo-democratic sympathies and openly read Machiavelli, yet also acted as a career public servant under Elizabeth I—who disliked and mistrusted him—and James I, whom he served as chancellor of the exchequer. Greville was intensely Calvinist yet likely involved romantically with male friends, while he inserted explicitly erotic imagery and themes into his poetry, even when it was directly addressed to God. Greville’s greatest artistic achievement was his ability to present the tensions in his own character and his frustration at his position, transforming his poetry from conventional renaissance lyric poetry into literature of profound psychological and political insight. His observations of the anxieties of political life and the struggle of authoritarian leadership have only contributed to awareness of his importance. I think it’s high time he got his due. 

Poem IV from Caelica  

By Fulke Greville 

You little stars that live in skies, 
And glory in Apollo’s glory ; 
In whose aspects conjoinèd lies, 
The heaven’s will and Nature’s story, 
Joy to be likened to those eyes : 
Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry ; 
    For when you force thoughts from above, 
   These over-rule your force by love. 
 
And thou, O Love, which in these eyes 
Hast married Reason with Affection, 
And made them saints of Beauty’s skies, 
Where joys are shadows of perfection ; 
Lend me thy wings that I may rise 
Up not by worth but thy election ; 
    For I have vowed in strangest fashion, 
    To love, and never seek compassion. 

This poem, from Greville’s poetic sequence Caelica balances the political, religious, and Petrarchan elements which defined his mode of writing. The title of the sequence, Caelica, is itself a joke, one which plays on an earlier sequence composed by Greville’s close friend Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, whose title means ‘Star-lover and star’. Caelica meanwhile means ‘the whole sky’, a witty counterplay to reinterpreting the straightforward idea of comparing one’s lover to a star in the sky by inflecting it with Greville’s own multifaceted nature and imbuing it with irony. 

This same conceit underlies Greville’s fourth poem in Caelica, which is among his most famous and most anthologised. Greville divides his thoughts into two stanzas of ottava rima, verse form then-popular among members of the English elite for its associations with Italian courtly writing. And, as all masterful writers do, Greville employed its internal logic to structure his reasoning, and propel the poem forward. Ottava rima’s use of a final couplet after a connected series of six lines followed by a couplet propels the poem forward while suggesting introspection. 

Greville begins the poem by telling the stars that it is they who should feel glad to be compared to his lover’s eyes. This is an inversion of a standard device, since Renaissance court poetry more often compares eyes to stars than vice versa. This subtle, witty reversal establishes Greville’s philosophical, fate-related themes. Greville’s more abstract, religious concerns also emerge early in the poem, with the phrase ‘In whose aspects conjoined lies / the Heaven’s will and Nature’s story’. By drawing an astrological reference to the power of the stars over human life into the poem, Greville destabilises the analogy he has just established in the preceding metaphor. The will of ‘Heaven’ or God merged with the laws of nature seems to question to what degree the actions of the beloved are detached from the behaviour of the lover, suggesting the arbitrary qualities of both the divine and the natural world.  

This has fundamentally political, Calvinist implications. The Calvinist doctrine of election, to which Greville adhered, states that those who go to heaven are predestined to be saved; because of this, it does not matter how sinful they may appear, as it is God’s will that they ascend, with those God chooses representing a tiny, arbitrary minority of human beings on earth. Meanwhile, Greville’s contemporaries such as Francis Bacon dwelled on the cusp of the scientific revolution, one which presented a more deterministic, amoral universe than had traditionally been supposed. Greville combines these worldviews to suggest his own feelings of powerlessness in the face of a beloved whose actions seem as random as acts of God or natural phenomena, possessing an internal logic obscure to the poet, who is powerless to flee. While the idea of being powerless in the face of the lover goes back as far as Petrarch, Greville deploys it for more distinctly political ends. As the literary historian Ronald Rebholz argued, Greville’s style reflects his position at court as much as it does his religious, philosophical, or artistic interests. Rather, Greville’s poetry deliberately lends itself to a two-way reading of the lover as tyrant, in which the beloved can instead be metaphorically described as a merciless and unrequiting monarch whom the poet has no choice but to obey.  

As is known from his later writings Greville’s feelings about his position as a government official were mixed. This was particularly acute under Elizabeth I, whose mistrust of Greville led her to obstruct his entrance into her inner circle and eventually sideline him until her death in 1603. With this in mind, while this poem could be read as a simple love song, it more likely possesses a dual purpose as an instrument for expressing Greville’s own frustration in a form whose plausible deniability made discontent acceptable. Greville’s use of ‘over-rule’—a clever play on words which could mean to overrule or to rule too harshly— in his closing couplet seems to confirm this. He implies, in ironic fashion, that despite his anger at the lover or ruler figure, or even the external, supernatural influence of destiny embodied through the stars which ‘force’ other thoughts onto the speaker, it is impossible to defy the reach of a love which is neither wholly rational nor escapable. Greville’s interest in duty and his obsession with difficult and even hostile emotional ties recurs again and again in his work, and the recurrence of a strand of thought focused on tyrannous love and service could equally apply to a dictator or to the random acts of arbitrary favour the Calvinist god they offered to the elect few. 

These multifarious strands of thought are clearer still in the second half, which shifts towards a more evidently religious and philosophical posture, directly addressing the personification of love.  Greville then integrates philosophical ideas into his layered allusion, positing that love has brought together, in the shifting eyes of the beloved, reason and affection, sometimes opposed in courtly poetry, and sanctified them in the metaphorical heaven of beauty. Greville’s abstract metaphor suggests the Platonic domain of forms, an idea which continues in the next clause which declares the joys of beauty to be ‘shadows of perfection’, explicitly recalling the Platonic metaphor of reality as a shadow of a higher, purer metaphysical realm. Yet Greville complicates his seemingly straightforward reference through a blend of Puritan religious vocabulary and the odd implications of the political subtext of the first stanza. Greville next asks love to ‘lend me thy wings that I may rise / up not by worth but by election,’ using the explicitly Calvinist term ‘election’ to refer to an unvirtuous and even undeserved ascent.  

The doctrine of election effectively removes free will from redemption, presenting salvation as a gift given to the specially favoured rather than the virtuous. By introducing this religious subtext into the work, Greville presents a subtle, ironic window into his own crabbed psychological state and reveals the difficulties of his life of political service. In suggesting that the sole path of ascent to his lover—a synecdoche for Elizabeth I or political status—is by random favour rather than genuine worth, Greville casts in relief his earlier reference to ‘heaven’s will and nature’s story’. Greville’s presentation of love as a site of tyranny, randomness, and disempowerment at the hands of a lover represents his deep misgivings about political life, while his use of Calvinist the concept of election in ironic terms also suggests additional degrees of doubt, confusion, and personal difficulty. His final couplet seems to confirm this, referring to his ‘vow’ to ‘love, and never seek compassion’.  

Knowing all of this, the depth of this innocuous poem and the value of Greville’s oeuvre is far more obvious. Despite the complex intellectual, political, and stylistic influences on his work, Greville presents a portrait of his own divided beliefs, psychology, and feelings of frustration and powerlessness at the hands of his own culture, allies, and religion. Just as an unrequited lust’s irrational pull seems to tyrannise, so too does political and religious service and conviction. His ‘vow’, which could mean a marital vow, or perhaps more likely his oath to serve his monarch and his vow to serve his God, places him in an impossible position, in which there can be no hope of worthy advancement, while escape is impossible, whether from the commands of his queen or damnation by his deity. 

It is rare literarily and historically for a writer to present, albeit in carefully concealed form, so naked a vision of personal and emotional difficulties in the face of systems of belief and politics which must be obeyed, yet which appear unfair. Greville’s success at depicting the personal trials and stress of living at the Elizabethan court resemble nothing so much as accounts of those living under modern dictatorships, for whom double-speak, the concealing of true opinions, and constant fear of random reprisal represent sources of near-constant anxiety. Greville’s skill at interweaving his many and contradictory influences and interests adds to this, revealing the depth of his own, personal sense of crisis beneath a cool, intellectual surface. 

Though Greville himself would eventually return to politics under Elizabeth’s successor, James I, to great success in the form of offices, the title earl of Warwick, and the awarding of large estates, Greville republished his Caelica poems, retaining their original focus on a sense of powerlessness and subjection to royal or divine authority. Yet despite his relative obscurity compared to contemporaries such as Shakespeare and Donne, Greville’s place in English-language literary history deserves greater recognition. His observations of the suffering engendered by his own beliefs and the belief-systems of those in power not only present a deeply humane, humanistic portrait of his own life, but remain insightful for their capacity to depict politics, service, religion and their many discontents.