William Drummond
(1585 - 1649) Scotland
Poet
William Drummond, laird of his native Hawthornden, was the first Scots poet of note to use southern English.
The homosexual themes in the work of William Drummond, chronologically the last member of the School of Spenser, are largely relegated to mythological allusions. In Iolas' Epitaph he compares the beauty of Hercules' "dear Iolas" to that of Adonis and Narcissus. In The Rose he discusses the flower that sprang from the blood of Adonis, "the sweet Cynarean youth," and concludes with the interesting emblematic interpretation that the rose's thorns symbolize "the Boars' tusks, perhaps, his snowy flank which rent." In Sonnet XLIX he anachronistically compares his departure from his mistress to the rape of Ganymede:
"So wailing parted Ganymede the fair,
When eagles' talons bare him through the air."
And in Narcissus he alludes to some secret forbidden love that is not merely narcissism:
"Floods cannot quency my flames! ah! in this well
I burn, not drown, for what I cannot tell"
- suggest of "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name".
In "An Hymn of the Fairest Fair," in the Flowers of Sion, Drummond attempts to discuss the glories of God and Christ in sensuous Ovidian terms, and awkwardly presents a picture of Zeus and Ganymede, in which Christ is both puer aeternus and formosus puer:
"... not far from [God's] right side,
With curled locks Youth ever doth abide;
Rose-cheeked Youth, who, garlanded with flowers
Still blooming, ceaselessly unto thee pours
Immortal nectar in a cup of gold,
That by no darts of ages thou grow old,
And, as ends and beginnings thee not claim,
Successionless that thou be still the same."
This passage very much resembles Giles Fletcher's comparison of Christ's ascent into heaven to the rape of Ganymede in Christ's Victorie and Triumph (1610). What Douglas Bush, in Mythology and the Reanissance Tradition, says of Fletcher's Christ could be said of many a Renaissance poet's portrayal of Christ: "Fletcher's Christ in the wilderness might be another Leander or Endymion, Narcissus or Hermaphroditus, with his black hair in short curls, and 'His cheekes as snowie apples, sop't in wine.'"
All of these figures coalesce in the boy-surrogate Hylas, whom, according to Drummond, it is indeed a glory for men to behold if their are fortunate enough to glimpse him rising from the mirror of the collective unconscious:
"Over a crystal source
Amintas laid his face,
Of purling streams to see the restless course:
But scarce he had o'ershadowed the place,
When (spying in the ground a child arise,
Like to himself in stature, face, and eyes)
He rose o'erjoyed, and cried,
Dear mates, aproach, see whom I have descried;
The boy of whom strange stories shepherds tell,
Oft-called Hylas, dwelleth in this well."
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