Samuel Daniel

Samuel Daniel was born in 1562 near Taunton in Somerset. He was the son of a music master, had a brother named John Daniel and a sister named Rosa who married John Florio. Rosa was Edmund Spenser’s model for Rosalind in The Shepherd's Calendar. In 1579, he was admitted to what is now known as Hertford Collage at Oxford College, but was then known as Magdalen Hall. After remaining there for about three years, he then devoted himself to the study of poetry and philosophy.

1592, Daniel’s first known volume of verse that contained the cycle of sonnets to Delia and the romance called The Complaint of Rosamond. Without his consent, twenty seven of his sonnets where printed at the end of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Later on in 1599, Daniel published a volume that was entitled “Poetical Essays” which contained “Musophilus”, “Civil Wars”, and “A Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius.” In 1601 the PanegyrickeCongratulatorie, the first folio volume of collected works by a living English poet, was published in a presentation folio. When Daniels was appointed master of the Queens revels he brought out a series of masques and pastoral tragic-comedies. Some of these works that were printed were the vision the Twelve Goddesses, The Queens Arcading an Adaptation of Guarani’s, Hymens Triumph, and some others.

Daniel’s poetic works are numerous and it is surprising to some because during the 18th century, so little Elizabethan Literature was read. However, despite this fact, he was able to retain his prestige and was very popular poet at the time. Nowadays his sonnets are the most read of his literary works. His sonnets were different from regular Italian Sonnets because his sonnets departed from ending in a capping couplet. In one of his higher order works, “The Complaint of Rosemond,” was the story where a murdered woman’s ghost appears and tells her fate in stanzas of exquisite pathos. Another work that Daniel was well known and acknowledged for was “Epistles to Distinguished Persons.” This piece was especially remarkable because it was composed in genuine terza rima.

Daniel died on October 14, 1619 and was acknowledged as a leading writer of his time. He was considered by many to be a great innovator in verse with a style that is full, easy and stately, without being very animated. It has been rumored that Daniel is a possible author of the anonymous play The Maid’s Metamorphosis but no concurrence has been reached on this matter.



From
Delia
by Samuel Daniel
1592


XLV

CARE-CHARMER Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish, and restore the light ;
With dark forgetting of my care return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth :
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow ;
Never let rising Sun approve you liars
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow :
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

An Explication of the Sonnet

This sonnet is a part of the Delia sonnet sequence. The Delia sonnet sequence is a series of sonnets that have been written to a woman. The majority of the sonnets in the sequence all have a depressing and gloomy tone over them as the speaker expresses their hurt that she has caused him. This sonnet is organized into three quatrains and a couplet structure and is a Shakespearean, or English, style sonnet. It follows the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

Let’s take the first quatrain and look more closely at it. In the first line, sleep is being personified and given the characteristic as a care-charmer. Sleep is the son of Night and a brother to Death. These words are capitalized because they give reference to the classical mythology of Hypnos, who is the god of sleep. That part alone tells the reader that there is a lager connection between sleep, death, and night for they all have a dark connotation to them. In fact in the second line, the speaker goes on to mention that Sleep is born “in silent darkness.” The speaker then asks to “relieve [his] languish and restore the light.” The speaker is directly talking to Sleep, which in this case refers to a woman. With her being compared to sleep, she has taken way the light in his life and he wants it back for he is wilting away. The fourth line of the quatrain tells that the speaker has forgotten his dark cares in his life but when Sleep comes, the pain of the past returns to him. The imagery in this quatrain quite dark with shades of blacks and grey. This puts the reader into a depressing state and can understand what the speaker is feeling.

The second stanza makes a continuation of the first stanza. The first line of this stanza begins with “and” which gives the signal of a list and a continuation. The speaker wants day to be enough time to cry and enough time to mourn all of the things that has happened in his “shipwrecked” and “ill-adventured youth.” In other words, the speaker wants the time when he is awake to be about coping with the past because it was a mess and compares it to a shipwreck. On top of that, it was unadventurous. Lines seven through eight say that eyes that are waken will be enough to “wail their scorn without the torment of the night’s untruth.” From this, the reader can see that the speaker cries at night but the night tells lies and it is tormenting.

The third stanza is the turning point of the entire poem. It starts off with the word cease, which really almost stops the entire sonnet because it is such a bold word. The dreams are the things that are ceasing in the poem because they are the images of the desires of the day and things that cannot be attained in the night. They are also the model for the passions of tomorrow and the substance of the things hoped for. The next line is a point of conviction where the speaker is firm in telling the reader to not let the sun prove them to be liars. The sun gives light and light is a revealer of truths. For the speaker, if truths are revealed, then it will add more weight and strain on the speaker and will “aggravate [his] sorrow.” The revealing will simply add more pain and make the pain worse.

The couplet wraps the entire sonnet up by telling Sleep, or the woman, to let him sleep and to embrace the clouds in vain so that he will never have to wake and feel the scorn of the day. It is like the speaker desires death rather than to face the light of day where the truths are revealed. It is almost as if the speaker wants to protect the woman from being exposed as a liar and someone who inflicts pain on others, so instead of telling on her, he would rather let death come for him.