I WAS idly leafing through an anthology of Elizabethan verse when I came upon George Peele’s lovely lyric “A Farewell to Arms”, and suddenly it summoned a poignant memory of my mother reciting that poem to my father, on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary. My mother, who had a vast reservoir of poetry within her, perhaps drew it out simply because of the word “golden” in its opening line. I remember her looking fondly at my father, and his silver hair, and not so much reciting as chanting those opening lines:

His golden locks Time hath to silver turn’d.
O Time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
His youth ’gainst Time and Age hath ever spurn’d,
But spurn’d in vain; youth waneth by increasing. . .

And then, when it came to the couplet that follows those lines and concludes that first stanza, it seemed to me that she was summing up their long marriage, but also so much of what she had tried (sometimes in vain) to teach me:

Beauty, strength, youth are flowers but fading seen;
Duty, faith, love are roots, and ever green.

My mother was quoting from the version of that poem as it was set so beautifully as a song by John Dowland, which my parents had an old 78 of someone singing; so I had heard it from my childhood. But Peele originally wrote the poem in the first person: “My golden locks time hath to silver turn’d”, though not for himself. It was written to honour a knight on his retirement. Peele composed it so that Sir Henry Lee could recite it to Elizabeth I, on his retirement from her court.

The Elizabethan age was still an age of tournaments, of tilting and jousts, and of an ornate and deeply remembered tradition of chivalry; and Sir Henry had been appointed “The Queen’s Champion”, with the honour of jousting on her behalf, in 1559, right at the beginning of her reign. Now, in 1590 he was retiring at last.

So, Peele gave him the words that he needed to bow decorously out of the Queen’s service. After the verse about his silver locks, he goes on in the next verse to say:

My Helmet now shall make a hive for bees;
And, lovers’ sonnets turn’d to holy psalms,
A man-at-armes must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers, that are Age his alms.
But though from Court to Cottage I depart,
My Saint is sure of mine unspotted heart.

Reading the poem again, in Peele’s original version, I could not help but apply it to myself, as my mother had once applied it to my father; for my own locks are entirely silvered over, and, strangely, I, too, have recently turned from sonnets to psalms, in David’s Crown, my sequence of poetry in response to the Psalter. Now, I sense the truth of that golden poem more deeply than ever I did in youth, and hope that those roots of “duty, faith, love” are still deepening and “ever green”. Lent is, I suppose, just the time for deepening such roots.