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Drayton's Sirena

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Extract

The troubled tone and unsettled mood of Drayton's The Shepheards Sirena at once calls to the reader's mind Drayton's statement that in his pastoral poems he wrote “of most weightie things.” Rarely ever does this statement seem to be applicable to Drayton's pastorals, for though in many of them there is some veiled allusion to contemporaries, it hardly seems to be “weightie,” even from Drayton's point of view. In The Shepheards Sirena, however, there is the atmosphere of a dark conceit; things of weight, at least to Drayton, seem to be dimly shadowed forth. Dorilus, a shepherd well past his younger days, is cast “in sorrowes deepe” by the necessity of deciding between two courses of action in his relations with a fair shepherdess, the “Bright Sirena”:

      Hard the Choise I haue to chuse,
      To my selfe if friend I be,
      I must my Sirena loose,
      If not so, shee looseth me.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 1924 , pp. 814 - 836
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1924

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