Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Samuel Daniel and the art of outliving death

from Delia

When winter snows upon thy golden hairs,
And frost of age hath nipped thy flowers near;
When dark shall seem thy day that never clears,
And all lies withered that was held so dear;
   Then take this picture which I here present thee,
Limned with a pencil not all unworthy;
Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee;
Here read thyself, and what I suffered for thee.
   This may remain thy lasting monument,
Which happily posterity may cherish;
These colours with thy fading are not spent;
These may remain, when thou and I shall perish.
   If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby;
   They will remain, and so thou canst not die.












Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portraits are bewitchingly beautiful. Look at one today and it’s easy to feel that we connect with the subject in a way we don’t with a full-size painting. The informality of the poses helps (like a snapshot taken with a camera-phone) but so does the size. Their delicate ingenuity seems almost too fragile to have survived four hundred years.  Whilst many ingenious lovely things are gone, these jewel-like shadows of the dead blaze on, like butterflies hovering over the edge of some great storm.

The Elizabethans of the 1590s were hungry for artists’ promises of a permanence that would survive them. Aristocratic patrons paid for pictures like Hilliard’s and savoured the work of poets who argued that, whilst the beauties of the body would soon be dust, the beauties of a good poem would live forever. And if that poem is about you, then you too will live forever. In a way.

Like Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel explicitly worked this promise into his own sonnets. As he tells Delia (the subject and the addressee of his sonnet cycle) – ‘If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby’.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in