Renaissance Literature

The Green Knight: The Life and Work of the Poet George Gascoigne

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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the remarkable achievements of the greatest Elizabethan poet nobody reads

George Gascoigne wrote the first original poem in blank verse, the first prose comedy, and arguably the first English novel. He wrote the first treatise on prosody (the study of versification) in English. He was also the author of the first major sonnet sequence in English; he, not Sir Philip Sidney, should get that credit. The twentieth-century critic Yvor Winters considered George Gascoigne to be one of the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the entire sixteenth century. But who was George Gascoigne? Given this roll-call of achievements, why do so few people know his name?

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A Short Analysis of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s ‘The Pillar Perished’

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote the earliest sonnets in English, and was a key figure in English Renaissance poetry. ‘The Pillar Perished’, as the sonnet beginning ‘The pillar perish’d is whereto I leant’ is sometimes known, is one of the most widely anthologised of Wyatt’s sonnets. At least, it’s now largely attributed to Wyatt, and certainly sounds like his work. Closer analysis of the sonnet’s language and imagery opens a window onto the world of the Tudor royal court, and reveals a heart-breaking expression of a man’s world that has crumbled around him.

The pillar perish’d is whereto I leant,
The strongest stay of my unquiet mind;
The like of it no man again can find,
From east to west still seeking though he went,
To mine unhap. For hap away hath rent
Of all my joy the very bark and rind:
And I, alas, by chance am thus assign’d
Daily to mourn, till death do it relent.
But since that thus it is by destiny,
What can I more but have a woeful heart;
My pen in plaint, my voice in careful cry,
My mind in woe, my body full of smart;
And I myself, myself always to hate,
Till dreadful death do ease my doleful state.

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