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Avec le changement d’une image si belle:

Et peut estre qu’alors vous n’aurez desplaisir

De revivre en mes vers chauds d’amoureux desir,

Ainsi que le Phenix au feu se renouvelle.

This is Daniel’s version, which he sent forth as an original production:

I once may see, when years may wreck my wrong,

And golden hairs may change to silver wire;

And those bright rays (that kindle all this fire)

Shall fail in force, their power not so strong,

Her beauty, now the burden of my song,

Whose glorious blaze the world’s eye doth admire,

Must yield her praise to tyrant Time’s desire;

Then fades the flower, which fed her pride so long,

When if she grieve to gaze her in her glass,

Which then presents her winter-withered hue:

Go you my verse! go tell her what she was!

For what she was, she best may find in you.

Your fiery heat lets not her glory pass,

But Phœnix-like to make her live anew.

In Daniel’s beautiful sonnet (xlix.) beginning,

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,

Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,

he has borrowed much from De Baïf and Pierre de Brach, sonnetteers with whom it was a convention to invocate ‘O Sommeil chasse-soin.’ But again he chiefly relies on Desportes, whose words he adapts with very slight variations. Sonnet lxxiii. of Desportes’ ‘Amours d’Hippolyte’ opens thus:

Sommeil, paisible fils de la Nuict solitaire . . .

O frère de la Mort, que tu m’es ennemi!

Fame of Daniel’s sonnets.

Daniel’s sonnets were enthusiastically received. With some additions they were republished in 1594 with his narrative poem, ‘The Complaint of Rosamund.’ The volume was called ‘Delia and Rosamund Augmented.’ Spenser, in his ‘Colin Clouts come Home againe,’ lauded the ‘well-tuned song’ of Daniel’s sonnets, and Shakespeare has some claim to be classed among Daniel’s many sonnetteering disciples. The anonymous author of ‘Zepheria’ (1594) declared that the ‘sweet tuned accents’ of ‘Delian sonnetry’ rang throughout England; while Bartholomew Griffin, in his ‘Fidessa’ (1596), openly plagiarised Daniel, invoking in his Sonnet xv. ‘Care-charmer Sleep, . . . brother of quiet Death.’

Constable’s ‘Diana,’ 1592.

In September of the same year (1592) that saw the first complete version of Daniel’s ‘Delia,’ Henry Constable published ‘Diana: the Praises of his Mistres in certaine sweete Sonnets.’ Like the title, the general tone was drawn from Desportes’ ‘Amours de Diane.’ Twenty-one poems were included, all in the French vein. The collection was reissued, with very numerous additions, in 1594 under the title ‘Diana; or, The excellent conceitful Sonnets of H. C. Augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages.’ This volume is a typical venture of the booksellers. The printer, James Roberts, and the publisher, Richard Smith, supplied dedications respectively to the reader and to Queen Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting. They had swept together sonnets in manuscript from all quarters and presented their customers with a disordered miscellany of what they called ‘orphan poems.’ Besides the twenty sonnets by Constable, eight were claimed for Sir Philip Sidney, and the remaining forty-seven are by various hands which have not as yet been identified.

Barnes’ sonnets, 1593.

In 1593 the legion of sonnetteers received notable reinforcements. In May came out Barnabe Barnes’s interesting volume, ‘Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, Elegies, and Odes. To the right noble and virtuous gentleman, M. William Percy, Esq., his dearest friend.’ The contents of the volume and their arrangement closely resemble the sonnet-collections of Petrarch or the ‘Amours’ of Ronsard. There are a hundred and five sonnets altogether, interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-one elegies, three ‘canzons,’ and twenty ‘odes,’ one in sonnet form. There is, moreover, included what purports to be a translation of ‘Moschus’ first eidillion describing love,’ but is clearly a rendering of a French poem by Amadis Jamin, entitled ‘Amour Fuitif, du grec de Moschus,’ in his ‘Œuvres Poétiques,’ Paris, 1579.