by Mario Praz

There are few themes more harped on by sixteenth century poets than
the time-honored one of the love-dream. Its formula, as it was broadcast
throughout Europe by the Italian sonneteers, amounted to this: the poet
dreams that his cruel beloved has relented and comes to solace him, but
just when he is about to enjoy this godsend, sleep forsakes him. This
being the bare outline, one was left an extensive choice of trimmings.
You could start with a brief and elegant description of night, or with
a complaint addressed to Sleep, or with a cry of joy: "Is this the fair
hair . . . ?" combined with the usual Petrarchan description of the lady;
if you were at pains how to fill up the quatrains, mythology came to your
rescue, with Morpheus, Endymion and Diana, Ixion, and similar pleasant
purple patches; or you could quibble on the disappearance of the sun,
and the rise of that other sun, the beloved, in the dead of night. When,
in the eighties of the sixteenth century, Thomas Watson picked up (from
the Latin poems of Hercules Strozza) "this kinde of invention . . . usuall
among those that have excelled in the sweetest vaine of Poetrie," he set
out with a mythological embroidery on the circumstances of his dream:

In Thetis lappe, while Titan tooke his rest,
I slumbring lay within my restless bedde,
Till Morpheus us'd a falsed soary jest,
Presenting her, by whom I still am ledde:
For then I thought she came to ende my wo,
But when I wakt (alas) t'was nothing so.

Alas, vain hope! Like Ixion's

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