Gascoignes Lullabie George Gascoigne (1573)

“Gascoignes Lullabie” George Gascoigne (1539-77)

George Gascoigne’s “Lullabie” appears as one of the poems attributed to him in the 1573 anthology A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, and again in the same anthology revised and attributed exclusively to him in 1575, entitled Posies. In the latter volume, the poem appears among the “Flowers,” section, which Gascoigne notes as reserved for those poems “invented upon a verie light occasion,” and having in them “some rare invention.” Yet “Lullabie” only seems light on the surface, while conveying to the reader a very dark understanding of human mutability and loss. It connects the nurturing notion of mothers singing their babies to sleep with the stark and fretful one of losing a personal sense of youth, beauty, imagination, and even sexual virility to old age. All of these qualities are ‘lullabied’ to rest in the poem.

“Lullabie” is comprised of six eight line stanzas, rendered in iambic tetrameter. In its substance the poem echoes the lamentations over loss made epic by the sufferings of the biblical Job and the classical Roman Boethius, yet more on the personal rather than the epic scale, and without at the same time offering any of the spiritual consolation those two received. Moreover, because Gascoigne maintains the hushed tones of a soothing lullaby to woo babes off to sleep, the poem grows increasingly cynical with each additional loss the poet describes. This cynicism is further instantiated through the softly ironic repetition of “lullabie” from beginning to end, where the moralizing poet extols the reader to “welcome payne” and “let pleasure pass,” because we must all recognize the inevitability of old age and loss in a world where lullabies of the soothing kind deceive our very dreams.

Gascoigne’s use of hushed tones and soothing repetition to create an ironic tension helps “Lullabie” succeed where other poems of his do not. At the same time, “Lullabie” suggests the gloomy state of the poet, who spent much of his adult life playing the spendthrift dandy at Elizabeth I’s court, only to realize his folly later in life, cast off by the court and by many of the friends his unruly lifestyle helped him make there. The poem thus also serves as a vehicle for the kind of emotionally dark honesty that critics have long recognized as a signature of his work.

SEE ALSO: Elizabeth I’s Translation of Boethius; The Book of Job; Mutability;