Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He was an English nobleman, politician, and poet,

and was a Renaissance poet. In fact, he was one of the key elements in Renaissance

poetry. And he was the first cousin of both Queen Anne Boleyn and Queen Catherine Howard, the second

and fifth wives of Henry VIII. So there was a lot of drama going on in his family. He lived from 15, 16, or 17 to 1547. They don't know

exactly when he was born based on the research that I did. But the poem that I'm going to read today

is from his translation of the Aeneid. I mentioned in a podcast, I think last week, that Henry Howard

was one of the inventors of blank verse in English,

that he took it from Italian during the Renaissance period. He brought it to English and

harnessed its power in our language. So I wanted to read a selection of that, a famous passage

from his translation of the Aeneid. It goes like this. It was then night.

The sound and quiet sleep had through the earth the wearied bodies caught. The woods,

the raging seas were fallen to rest. When, that the stars had half their course declined,

the field twist, beasts and fowls of diverse hue and what so that in the broad lakes remained or yet among the bushy thicks of briar laid down to sleep

by silence of the night can sway their cares mindless of travels past.

Not so the sprite of this Phoenician.

Unhappy she, that on no sleep could chance,

no yet nice rest enter an eye or breast.

Her cares redouble.

Love doth rise and rage again, and overflows with swelling storms

of wrath.

I mentioned last week when mentioning Blank First that Blank First often, because of its lack of

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