Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > Poems of Alexander Montgomerie

NEW SOURCES OF MONTGOMERIE’S POETRY. 289
My hungry hope doth heape my heavy hap ;
My sundry sutes procure my more disdayne ;
My stedfast steppes yet slyde into the trap ;
My tryed truth entangleth mee in trayne :
I spye the snare, and will not backward go ;
My reason yeeldes, and yet sayeth euer, no.
In pleasant plat I tread vpon the snake ;
My flamyng thirst I quench with venomd wine ;
In dayntie dish I doo the poyson take ;
My hunger biddes mee rather eate then pine.
I sow, I sett, yet fruit, ne flowre I finde:
I pricke my hand, yet leaue the Rose behinde.”
—[‘ Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inuentions.’]
It seems reasonable to suppose that the English version is the
original. Procter’s Miscellany was published in London in 1578,
and next to the poem in question is another which is evidently a
companion piece. Although Montgomerie appears as early as
1568 in Bannatyne’s manuscript, it is not until sixteen years later,
in the ‘ Essayes of a Prentise,’ that any specimen of his poetry is found
in print, and then only a prefatory sonnet, and a few isolated passages
to illustrate some of the King’s “ reulis and cautellis.” The possibility
that copies of his poems had been carried into England before the
date of Procter’s publication is remote; and even had this happened
it is unlikely that they would have excited sufficient interest for one
of them to have appeared in Southern form in a collection like the
‘ Gorgious Gallery.’
In the case of another of the Drummond poems—sonnet 40—which
is found in Henry Constable’s sonnet sequence, entitled ‘ Diana :
the praises of his Mistres in certaine sweete Sonnets,’ the circum¬
stances are rather different, although consideration leads to a similar
conclusion.
The two versions are as follows :—
“Thine eye the glasse where I behold my hart;
mine eye the window through the which thine eye
may see my hart, and there thy selfe espy
in bloody cullours how thou painted art.
Thine eye the pyle is of a murdring dart;
mine eye the sight thou tak’st thy leuell by,
to hit my hart, and neuer shootes awry :
mine eye thus helpes thine eye to worke my smart.
Thine eye a fire is both in heate and light;
mine eye of teares a riuer doth become,
oh, that the water of mine eye had might
to quench the flames that fro/« thine eye doth come ;
Or that the fire that’s kindled by thine eye,
The flowing streames of mine eyes could make drie.”
—[‘ Diana: The Praises of his Mistres.]
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