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De Nieuwe Taalgids. Jaargang 87 (1994)

De Nieuwe Taalgids. Jaargang 87

(1994)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Taalgids, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Thoughts on ‘Vroegh in den dagheraadt’

Leonard Forster

The song book Apollo of Ghesang der Musen appeared in 1615 in Amsterdam. It was one of many, which contained poems by several authors, many of them sonnets but mostly designed to be sung. Some of those in Apollo are signed with Bredero's motto. Many are anonymous, among them the cycle of twelve sonnets entitled Van de Schoonheyt. The first of these was later included in the collection of Bredero's poetry which the printer van der Plasse published after the poet's death in 1622, the Groot Lied-boeck, although there is nothing in Apollo to suggest that the poem is by Bredero.1

In 1913 J.B. Schepers made a very eloquent claim for Bredero as the author of the whole cycle. This gave rise to a series of polemical articles dealing with the question of authorship by very distinguished authorities - Prinsen 1919, de Vooys 1924, Verwey 1932.2 Contemporary opinion has decided, regretfully, that the cycle is not by Bredero (Stuiveling-Damsteegt 1986). The poems themselves seem to have slipped through the meshes of literary criticism. On the authorship question I have nothing to say except this: if the author was not Bredero it was somebody very like him, living in his world, combining like him the poet's gift of significant expression with the painter's eye for visual detail. It is this combination which concerns me in what follows.

The cycle consists of twelve sonnets ‘Van de Schoonheyt’. This beauty is not abstract beauty but, inevitably at this period, feminine beauty which is, equally inevitably, expressed in petrarchistic terms; the whole an elegant presentation of the icon of the petrarchistic lady, who is evoked in the first line of the first sonnet as ‘de schoone’, the fair one, the beautiful girl. The terms in which she is described are those fashionable at the time, what German critics have called ‘Pretiosenmotivik’3 as practised by G.B. Marino, who in 1615 was still alive. There is much play with diamonds, emeralds, pearls, gold, silver, jet, crystal, marble, alabaster, porphyry, coral, amber, ivory, rubies etc, all summed up in the final sonnet. There are early examples of this in Petrarch himself, e.g. in sonnets 46 (L'oro e le perle) and 220 (Onde tolse Amor l'oro). These motifs are conventional by 1615, and no conclusions of a biographical nature can be drawn from them: the whole is an

accomplished play with glittering images, apparently very concrete but in fact very abstract, at several removes from reality. It does however start from a real scene brilliantly outlined in the first quatrain of the first sonnet, by the end of which the poet has attained to an exalted level which he then maintains throughout.

The lady is portrayed in the approved medieval manner, starting with her head and going down to her feet (with one slight variation). The medieval scheme often includes praise of Nature who has created such perfection; this usually at the beginning.4 Our poet does the same, but uses it as a climax to his first sonnet, and again in the sixth and twelfth: the numbers are significant. All this goes to show that these poems are firmly rooted in convention, much more firmly than seems to have been realised. They start from the conceit of ‘la belle matineuse’.

The visual aspect is important throughout, especially in the first sonnet, and indeed it is the germ of the whole cycle, which starts with the visual impression of the girl taking down her golden hair in the morning sun. This gives the poet a starting point both for the conventional top-to-toe description and for the ‘Pretiosenmotivik’. In the final sonnet he repeats the visual motif: ‘Ick hebbe't al ghesien al wat hier is gheschreven’.

Sonnet
Het eerste van de schoonheyt
 
Vroegh in den dagheraadt, de schoone gaat ontbinden,
 
Den gouden blonden tros, citroenich van coleur,
 
Gheseten in de lucht, recht buyten d'achter-deur,
 
Daar groene wijngaart loof, oyt louwen muyr beminden.
 
 
 
Dan beven amoureus, die lieffelijckste winden,
 
In't ghele sijdich hayr, en groeten met een geur,
 
Haar Goddelijck aanschijn, op dat sy dese keur
 
Behieldt, van daghelijcx haar daar te laten vinden.
 
 
 
Gheluckigh is de kam, verguldt van Elpen-been,
 
Die dese vlechten streelt, dit waardigh zijnd' alleen;
 
Gheluckigher het snoer, dat in haar dicke tuyten
 
 
 
Mijn ziele mee verbindt, en om 'thooft gaat besluyten,
 
Hoewel ick't liever sie wildt-golvich na sijn jonst,
 
Het schoone van natuyr passeert doch alle konst.

Early, at daybreak, the girl goes outside to take down and comb her hair, ‘den gouden blonden tros’. The epithet is conventional: the petrarchistic lady, like Laura herself, was normally blond. This is not enough for the poet; the hair is important to him, out of the fourteen lines at his disposal he devotes one whole line to it, he wants to get the colour right and even uses the word ‘coleur’. He finds the unexpected epithet ‘citroenich’. Lemons in the seventeenth century were warmer in colour than they are now, as Dutch still life paintings show; the girl is not flaxen

haired, like many Dutch girls, and the poet is at pains to convey this. She is sitting outside, by the back door in a courtyard such as Dutch seventeenth-century houses had, with a green creeper on the warm sheltered wall. The scene is vividly, intensely and lovingly rendered. It is, one might say, straight out of Vermeer or de Hooch, an everyday genre scene, and indeed in the second quatrain we are told that the girl does this every day - ‘daghelijcx’ (weather presumably permitting). But as with Vermeer and de Hooch this everyday scene has higher significance. This is already indicated by the adjective ‘citroenich’: citrus fruits were sacred to Venus, and Dutch stilllife painters were aware of this.5 The creeper is said to embrace the wall lovingly (‘beminden’). This may be a reference to the emblem of the vine and the tree as symbol of love and marriage.6

In the second quatrain this is quite explicit: ‘de lieffelijckste winden’ breathe ‘amoureus’ into the silken hair and greet what has now become her ‘Goddelijck aanschijn’. With the epithet ‘divine’ we are in the realm of the petrarchistic lady; so far ‘de schoone’ was non-specific, she could be anybody. Now there is no doubt: the comb and the snood are ‘fortunate’ in their association with the hair, in which the poet's soul is held captive. In the last line of the sonnet all this is negated: the lady herself in her natural existence surpasses all art - a cunning use of the medieval praise-of-nature topos, which is repeated in the last line of the sixth sonnet and that of the whole cycle. The poet assures us that he has seen these things with his own eyes. This does not of course mean that he has actually seen the precious metals and the gems; he has seen the lady's divine attributes, which surpass them all. This is no fantasy, he cannot be accused of lying. He has celebrated the lady's visible charms, which he has seen, but not the hidden charms, which he has not seen, but they of course are even more deserving of praise and so, by not describing them, he surpasses all the others he has described.

Let us look at the text a little more closely.

Vroegh in den dagheraadt: we are in the year 1615. Christiaan Huygens did not invent the pendulum clock until 1673; ordinary people regulate their lives by the sun.

de schoone: at this stage the words could refer either to the embodiment of ‘schoonheyt’, evoking the subject of the whole cycle in the first line, or to any girl the poet or indeed the reader has in mind. As the poem proceeds it is clear that the first is intended, but she is presented to us in concrete natural form.

Den Gouden blonden tros: ‘tros’ is a ‘bunch’, as of grapes, with associations of sweetness and fruitfulness; or a ‘rope’ suggesting that she is undoing her plait. This is a recurrent petrarchistic image, and indeed Petrarch himself had a similar vision of loosed golden hair in sonnet 90:

 
Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi
 
Che in mille dolci nodi gli avolgea.

His sonnet 213 is also appropriate to this scene:

 
Sotto biondi capei canuta mente
 
E in umil donna alta beltà divina.

Elsewhere he refers to ‘treccie’ and ‘laccie’ which are echoed in the first tercet of this sonnet-‘vlechten’ and ‘tuyten’.7

Gheseten in de lucht: the girl is out of doors, ‘recht buyten d'achter-deur’. She is in fact in a small courtyard or curtilage. As it is a Dutch scene there is of course a plant:

groene wijngaart loof: either a grape-vine or a creeper. It is conceived of as loving the warm wall. Here we leave factual description for the realm of petrarchistic fancy which dominates the rest of the cycle.

It is already present in the second quatrain: the sweet winds play amorously with the ‘yellow silken’ hair and greet the divine visage with their scent, grateful that she has kept up her habit of performing this function. The sweet breezes are Petrarchan too (‘aura suave’ often). We have moved from the naturalism of the first quatrain to manieristic artificiality, but this in its turn is negated by the final line: the lady herself surpasses all comparison.

Het schoone van natuyr passeert doch alle konst. Nature here is not the nature of Rousseau but the medieval praise-of-nature topos, nature as God created it, God the supreme creator and artist. Here too Petrarch is in the background: his sonnet 248 begins ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque po natura’. The point is important to our poet, for he makes it at three decisive places in his cycle.

There are several genre paintings preserved of people combing hair, usually mothers with children (one by ter Borch in the Mauritshuis), and there are plenty of courtyards with people engaged in various occupations, especially by Pieter de Hooch, and plenty of young ladies at their toilet, especially by de Hooch and Gabriel Metsu, but all of them indoors. There is a scene in a courtyard by de Hooch which shows what is identifiably a vine growing up a wall (in the Metropolitan Museum New York). I have not found an exact parallel to the poem, but the atmosphere and even the palette-the golden hair, the green creeper and the red (as we must suppose) of the warm wall - is strikingly reminiscent of the great genre painters.8 The poet has a painter's eye, but he was not imitating a fashionable trend of painting. Vermeer, Metsu, de Hooch did not begin painting for another forty years: de Hooch was at his best from 1652 onwards. Our poet is writing in 1615. The vision he had of the intimate domestic scene was entirely his own, as was the

power and the love with which he evoked it. He then immediately transposed it into the fashionable petrarchistic mode, feeling perhaps that the time for it was not yet ripe. But the vitality of his evocation is still with us.9


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