Speculum Amantis Love Poems, from Rare Songbooks and Miscellanies of the Seventeenth Century — Reading Notes

Structure and Selection: The Anthologist's Apology

Bullen's preface explains that his earlier Elizabethan lyric collections were 'addressed to all classes of readers' and could 'lie on a drawing-room table without offence.' The present volume, by contrast, gathers songs that 'could find no place' in those decorous collections. He notes that John Attey's audacious verses 'My days, my months, my years' were dedicated to a countess in 1622, yet would now be considered shocking. This historical note frames the anthology as a deliberate recovery of poems that test the boundaries of propriety, offering readers a glimpse of a less restrained era.

Recurring Images: Roses, Time, and the Grave

The rose appears as a symbol of fleeting beauty from the opening epigram onward. In 'A Poem of Sir Walter Rawleigh's,' Nature creates a mistress from 'snow and silk,' but Time, 'made of steel and rust,' turns these to dust. The poem ends with the grave 'shutting up the story of our days.' Similarly, the anonymous 'Nobody's Song' dwells on mortality: 'When we are in grave, / Altho' we rave, / There is nobody needs to bind us.' These poems juxtapose sensual pleasure with an acute awareness of decay, a pattern that recurs throughout the collection.

Movement Between Scenes: From Courtly to Rustic

The anthology shifts between courtly and pastoral settings. 'Cupid's Holiday' addresses 'Ladies, whose marble hearts despise / Love's soft impressions' in a formal, almost theatrical tone. In contrast, 'In summer-time, when birds do sing' presents a rustic scene of haymaking, where 'country maids' are led from their work to 'tumble up and down the green meadow.' This movement between refined and earthy registers mirrors the anthology's own straddling of decorum and license, with each poem offering a different social backdrop for love's pursuits.

Voice and Address: Directness and Defiance

Many poems employ a direct, confrontational address. 'Warning and Welcome' commands the 'grave moralist' to 'pack hence! away!' and the 'coy maiden' to stay away until marriage. 'Cupid's Holiday' tells virgins to 'hence; away!' and 'go, glory in the empty name / Of virgin.' This imperative mode creates a sense of immediacy and exclusion, as if the reader is being sorted into those who belong at the feast and those who do not. The poems often speak to a 'you'—whether a lover, a critic, or a lady—making the reader a participant in the debate over love's propriety.

The anthology's arrangement rewards reading across poems rather than in isolation. Notice how the same images—roses, time, the grave—reappear in different keys, from playful to somber. Bullen's editorial choices, especially his inclusion of poems from manuscript sources alongside printed miscellanies, highlight the fluid boundaries between public and private verse in the seventeenth century. Readers interested in the evolution of poetic decorum will find this collection a revealing counterpoint to more sanitized anthologies.

I found myself thinking of a summer afternoon years ago, pressing flowers between pages, when I read these seventeenth-century verses about roses and the grave. The same quiet ache returned with Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics — A Closer Reading, where beauty feels equally fragile, equally doomed, yet somehow more tender for its fleetingness.