laureate

Samuel Daniel's monument in the north aisle of St. George's church, Beckington, Somerset

Between stormy showers this morning I had time to make only my second visit to Samuel Daniel's monument in Beckington church. Daniel (1562 - 1619) retired to Beckington around 1610.

About the monument

Let others sing of knights and paladines
In aged accents and untimely words;
Paint shadows in imaginary lines
Which well the reach of their high wits records:
But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes
Authentic shall my verse in time to come,
When yet th' unborn shall say, "Lo where she lies
Whose beauty made him speak that else was dumb."
These are the arks, the trophies I erect,
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark, and time's consuming rage.
Though th' error of my youth they shall discover,
Suffice they show I liv'd and was thy lover.
(Delia, XLVI)

[Daniel's Delia was published in 1592. Shakespeare's debt to the Delian sonnet tradition is manifest.]

*

Daniel is said to have become "poet laureate" -- whatever that may have meant at the time  -- on the death of Edmund Spenser in 1599. He seems to have resigned the post, not long afterwards, to Ben Jonson.

St George's, Beckington, showing the impressive Norman tower