Episode 83 Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son’ by Sir Walter Raleigh.

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Sir Walter Raleigh

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son

By Sir Walter Raleigh

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;
And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.
Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

 

Podcast transcript

So, today we have a poem by someone you’ve almost certainly heard of, but whose poetry you may well not have come across before. Sir Walter Raleigh was much more famous for being a courtier, adventurer and explorer, for popularising the smoking of tobacco, and for generally cutting a dashing swathe through the Elizabethan era.

These days we wouldn’t expect our politicians and military leaders to be poets as well, but it was perfectly typical of English gentlemen of the period that they would be at least competent at writing poetry, and many of them were very good at it. On the podcast, we have already encountered the work of other gentleman courtiers: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer. If you’ve heard those episodes, you’ll know that those poets write in what to us looks like a very conventional, courtly style that is associated with Petrarchan love poetry, going back to Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian poet. A lot of these 16th-century poets were very much writing in the mode of, in imitation of, using the same poetic forms as Petrarch, among which the sonnet, was very prominent.

And so, in this poem, we have another knight from Elizabeth’s court writing a sonnet, but it’s in a very different style. It’s much more down to earth, much more pithy, and there is a vein of pretty dark humour in this poem. In tone, it’s much closer to Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne’s poetry. Raleigh was a very worldly-wise character, very ambitious and very cunning in his military exploits and political scheming. So, we get none of the elaborate, florid language that we would find in Sidney or Wyatt; we’ve got this terse, epigrammatic style instead.

An early manuscript of this poem has the title ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to his Son.’ It is often anthologised under the title ‘The Wood, the Weed, the Wag’. And it begins by posing a riddle:

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;

So the speaker tells us there are three things that prosper and flourish as long as they are apart, but on a certain day, they’ll meet all in one place, and when they meet, they will mar one another, meaning they will harm or destroy each other.

So this obviously begs the question: what are those three things? If we were Bilbo or Gollum playing the game of riddles, we’d invite the other player to guess, but in the second quatrain Raleigh helpfully gives us the answer to the riddle:

And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.

The wood makes the gallows tree where criminals were hanged. The weed is hemp, which was used to make rope. Here Raleigh says it ‘strings the hangman’s bag’. But it’s obviously also suggestive of the rope that makes the halter, which he used to hang criminals. And the wag, in 16th-century slang, meant a young man, especially one who was mischievous and full of humour. A related word, ‘waghalter’, meant someone who was likely to swing in the hangman’s halter.

And the speaker of the poem says, ‘the wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.’So if we take the title ‘Sir Walter Raleigh to his Son’ at face value, then ‘thee’ must refer to Raleigh’s son. And it’s quite a dramatic moment in the poem when the quatrain ends with that word, thee, because all the way through, it’s been a fairly abstract argument – ‘Three things there be…’ talking about generalities. But there’s no sense of personal connection until we get to that line. The fact that he calls him ‘my pretty knave,’ shows that the speaker has something at stake personally here, and if that’s his son, the stakes could hardly be higher. And the fact that he ends this quatrain with thee is the moment where we realise, ‘Oh, he’s speaking to his son.’ Even if we didn’t have the title to nudge us, this would still be the moment where the poem becomes personal, where all of these abstract circumstances cohere. We have a sense of the father speaking directly to his son – and by implication, a sense of the son’s presence, listening to his father.

Moving on to the third quatrain, as seasoned sonnet readers, we know that in the classic Petrarchan sonnet, and very often in the English or Shakespearean version, there is a turn, a shift of tone or emphasis or perspective that typically comes between the eighth and ninth line. The octave, made up of the initial eight lines, sets up a situation or proposition, and then the remaining six lines, known as the sestet, give us a different perspective or a counterargument. And what we get here is a pretty abrupt shift into the imperative: from this point, the speaker is giving advice, telling the wag what to do:

Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

There’s a lot going here in just four lines. Let’s slow down and take it line by line.

‘Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not’ means ‘Notice, dear boy, that as long as these three things have not been brought together…’ Then we get this wonderful next line, ‘Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild.’ It’s a delightful line with a lushness and a zest that is very untypical of the rest of the poem. It’s the one moment where we get a bit of poetic lift-off. It makes me think of ‘Greensleeves’ and I can hear viols playing in the background. So, the tree and the hemp are springing and growing, and the wag, the young man, can go off and be as wild as he likes, sow his wild oats, go on adventures, and so on.

And then the next line hits us really hard with a but:

But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

That’s a pretty brutal come-down from ‘Green springs the tree and the wag is wild,’ isn’t it? He’s saying that when these three things come together, the gallows wood with the rope, it makes the timber rot, it ‘frets’ meaning ‘frays’ the hangman’s noose, and it chokes the child. It might seem a bit odd that the timber rots and the noose frays; if we take these images literally, they would arguably prevent the hanging. But Raleigh’s using a bit of poetic licence here and the images are meant to be suggestive of ruin and destruction. And while ‘frets the halter’ could mean that the rope is frayed, it could also mean that it tightens under strain and gnaws into the child’s neck, which is a pretty grisly image.

But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

The ‘it’ here is the circumstance of these three things coming together. It’s the meeting. ‘You’ve got the wood, you’ve got the weed, and you’ve got the wag. When they’re apart, they can all flourish in their separate ways, but when they come together, they’re all destroyed.’

So this is the full grisly solution to the riddle: the timber rots, the halter frays or tightens, and it chokes the child. When he says ‘child,’ the idea of a child being hanged is so much more dramatic and visceral than the idea of a man being hanged. The fact that he’s rhyming ‘wild’ with ‘child’ really shows the contrast between freedom and being choked. And the alliteration in chokes and child really adds force to the line, it’s the moment where the stool is kicked away or the trapdoor opens, and the body slams down at the end of the rope.

But Raleigh is not done yet, because, as we know, an English sonnet, also known as a Shakespearean sonnet, ends in a final rhyming couplet that is designed to either sum up what has gone before or offer a counterpoint to what has just been proposed. What we get in this case is quite a startling shift in tone:

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

It’s significant that ‘bless thee’ comes before ‘beware’ because it could easily have been the other way round. But it’s much softer this way. We can feel the fatherly love. He’s saying ‘I love you, but you’ve got to watch out’. He ends with a fairly conventional invitation to prayer, ‘then let us pray’, but the syntax runs on into the final line, revealing that it’s a very specific prayer:

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

So he’s saying ‘let us pray that we are not parted from you’. The ‘we’ here clearly suggests more than one person is going to part with the son, so at a minimum, I’d guess the speaker is thinking of his wife, the boy’s mother. Perhaps he’s also thinking of the wider family and community. There’s also a clever antithesis, a contrast, in the final line, between parting and meeting. The whole poem is premised on the idea that the wood, the weed, and the wag are fine as long as they’re apart, but if they meet, they will mar each other. So he’s saying that if that meeting happens, then there will also be a parting. So this is a beautifully economical and emotionally freighted couplet:

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

The poem states that the meeting will certainly happen – gallows definitely exist and young men will definitely be hanged – but the implication is clear: make sure the wag at the gallows is not you.

So that’s the basic argument and movement of the poem, and we can see how skilfully Raleigh uses the sonnet form as a way of thinking through and making his point. Sonnets are so common in English literature that the form is a kind of thinking device for poets. They pick it up and use it to work through problems or situations that are a certain shape or size. Raleigh clearly uses it very skilfully, but what I want to focus on is this remarkable riddle of the wood, the weed, and the wag, which he first poses and then solves.

The obvious question, I think, is, why use such a weirdly abstract, convoluted way of warning the child? Why not cut straight to the chase and lay things out in more explicit terms?One reason is that this was the convention of the day. Poets tended to use what we’d consider very elaborate and artificial devices in their poems, as a display of wit and ingenuity.

But also, thinking about this as a warning from a father to a son, any parent will be familiar with the problem of how to warn a child about potential consequences without being the boring old fogey. How can you get them to listen and take you seriously?

Parental advice was a well-worn genre in Elizabethan literature. Raleigh himself wrote a much more straightforward and conventional prose piece of advice to his son, Instructions to His Son, where he goes through the conventional advice: choose your wife carefully, don’t just be seduced by beauty; avoid quarrels, but be brave if you do engage in a duel; avoid flatterers, fancy clothes and strong drink; and be honest and true to yourself.

If this advice sounds familiar. you may be thinking of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who was a bit of a figure of fun, chuntering on with his well-meaning advice to his son Laertes:

                                                             Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

So this was a familiar enough genre at the time for Shakespeare to be able to parody it within Raleigh’s lifetime. And it’s easy to see why a father would want to avoid sounding too much like Polonius. So maybe the elaborate device was simply Raleigh’s way of trying to get his son’s attention. Setting him a riddle, is like an invitation to a game. If you’re a parent, you’ll know it’s much easier to get a child to join in a game than it is to listen to some advice. I think we can pick up the anxiety of a parent trying to get the child to understand that this is something that could happen to you. He’s trying to bring home consequences to a child who doesn’t grasp them because he doesn’t have the life experience that the parent does.

So those are possible reasons for Raleigh’s use of such an elaborate riddle. In terms of the effect of the riddle, it allows for some very different readings of the poem. On one hand, it’s possible to have quite a cynical reading because the speaker does not offer his son moral instruction. He doesn’t mention any of the crimes you could be hanged for, or explain why they might be intrinsically bad. Instead, the speaker uses this elaborate conceit to basically say, ‘don’t end up swinging from a rope’. So we could read this quite cynically: ‘Do what you like, just don’t get caught!’ We do know from Raleigh’s other writings, including the Instructions to His Son, that he had a strong ethical code, but that’s not in this poem. So, if we take this poem purely on its own terms, that cynical reading is very much alive, and it’s not inconsistent with the wily, scheming, piratical aspect of Raleigh’s character.

However, a much more sentimental reading is also available. You could read it as being written by a father who is so fond of his son that whatever he may be guilty of, the father wishes fervently that his son is never caught and hanged. A bit like the Kate Bush song ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’ where the mother is turning a blind eye to the fact that her son is a murderer; she’s going to protect them regardless. And I think it’s a sign of a brilliantly written poem that Raleigh’s sonnet is open to such widely diverging interpretations.

Now if you’re a long-time listener to this podcast, you’ll know that I am always careful about reading poems as versified biography, but since this one is titled ‘to his son,’ we are entitled to ask: was this really addressed to Raleigh’s son?

Raleigh was a father to three sons. One sadly died as an infant. Another, Walter, was a soldier and adventurer like Raleigh, who was killed on an expedition to South America. He also had a third son, Carew, who died at home in his sixties; one account says that he was ‘killed’, but there is no evidence that he was executed. So it’s conceivable that the poem was written with either Walter or Carew in mind. The good news is neither of his sons were hanged, so if either of them did read the poem, I guess you could say it had the desired effect.

The bad news, as you may well know, is that Raleigh himself, the author of this poem on how to avoid being executed, was in fact executed. He was beheaded for treason. It’s debatable whether he deserved the charge. He liked to bend the rules, and on this occasion, he bent them too far. When a soldier under his command sacked a Spanish town when there was supposed to be a truce between the two countries. He was executed in 1618 when, under heavy pressure from the Spanish, James I revived an earlier sentence of treason.

Now there is an important distinction to be made between being hanged and being beheaded. In Elizabethan society, to be hanged was a punishment for common criminals, for thieves, robbers and murderers. To be beheaded was a much higher-status form of execution – a gentleman’s death. So, for instance, if you were a commoner convicted of treason, you were liable to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but a gentleman could be granted the privilege of only being beheaded, which was a quicker and less painful death.

That large caveat aside, I do think there is a dramatic irony in Raleigh writing a poem to warn his son against being too wild and waggish when he was the one who failed to heed his own advice, who failed to avert the circumstance where the wood of the executioner’s block, the steel of the axe, and the wag, Walter Raleigh himself, would all come together. And at that meeting, there would also be a parting of Raleigh’s head from his shoulders.

Now at this point I’m veering into speculation, but I can’t help imagining Raleigh recalling this poem on the eve of his execution, puffing away on his pouch of tobacco, and savouring the irony that it was he, rather than his son, who had failed to heed his own warning. I imagine Raleigh taking a puff and chuckling at the joke, as if he were saying to fate, ‘Ha! That was a good one’. And we do know that Raleigh’s maintained his dark humour and wit in the face of death. Just before his execution, when he was shown the axe, he is recorded as saying ‘This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries’. Imagine being that witty just moments before someone cuts your head off! So he was a true poet to the bitter end.

So let’s have another listen to Raleigh’s sonnet and savour the cleverness, the irony, and also, I think, the courage with which he plays with words, with wit, with riddles, and with the sonnet form, in a game where the stakes could not be higher.

 

Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son

By Sir Walter Raleigh

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;
And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.
Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

 

Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Ralegh was an English courtier, soldier, explorer and writer who was born around 1552 and died in 1681. A favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, he rose rapidly at court and was celebrated for his voyages to the Americas and his role in popularising tobacco. But he fell from grace under James I and was eventually executed for treason. Alongside his political and colonial ambitions, Ralegh was a gifted prose stylist and poet. His verse – often short, epigrammatic, and sombre – circulated in manuscript among courtiers, while his prose works include The History of the World and the didactic Instructions to His Son. He remains emblematic of Elizabethan wit and ambition.

 

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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