A Rhyme for Myrtle

by Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The room we had at Corpus was on the ground floor of the old court, and it had been a storehouse before it was a chamber, and it had not altogether forgotten. In wet weather the wall by the bed sweated, and there was a smell in the plaster of malt and of something under the malt that Simon Kerridge said was apples and I said was rats. We were both right, as it turned out, the March the carpenter took the skirting off.

There were three of us on the books for that room and two of us in it. The third was a Norfolk boy who had gone home at Michaelmas with a fever and been kept there by his father, who did not think Cambridge good for the lungs. So there was the great bed, and there was the truckle bed under it, which ran out on wooden wheels and had been made for a smaller man than either of us; and in the first week of the Lent term, when the frost came down so hard that the water in the jug had a lid on it in the morning, we stopped running it out. Nobody thought anything of that. Half the college slept two to a bed and the other half wished it could. A bed is the warmest thing a scholar owns.

Kerridge was a pensioner, which is to say his father paid, and I was a Parker scholar, which is to say a dead archbishop did. He came from a house near Bury with a moat round it and a chapel in it that had not been used, he said, since his grandfather's time. He said it the first week, before I had asked, in the voice a man uses for something he has said often, and I did not ask after that. He had a long face and fair hair cut close and a way of reading with his finger under the line, which he had been beaten for at school and had never given up. He was a better Grecian than I. I was a better liar. We had agreed, without saying so, that this made us about even.

✾

The Virgil was set us by Mr Johnes, who lectured on the poets on Tuesdays in the hall, and who had a theory of the Eclogues that he had been perfecting for eleven years and that admitted of no exceptions. The second was to be construed, and Englished, and a short exercise made upon it, in prose or in verse, to be shown him by Friday.

"He will want Augustus," Kerridge said. He had the book open on the table between us and a candle on each side of it, which was extravagance, but a fellow of the college had died at Candlemas and we were rich in his candle-ends. "Corydon is the poet. Alexis is the Emperor's favour. Corydon sues for it and is refused. He told us so in October."

"And the gifts?"

"The gifts are the poems. The lilies are the poems. The chestnuts are the poems." He put his finger under the first line. "Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin."

"Construe."

"The shepherd Corydon burned for the beautiful Alexis." He stopped. "For the fair Alexis."

"Why fair?"

"Because beautiful is a girl's word."

"Formosum is not a girl's word," I said. "Formosum has a very definite opinion on the matter."

He went red, which he did easily, from the collar up, like wine going into water. Then he turned the page, to where the old commentary was printed under the text in small letters, a thicket of it, and put his finger under that instead, and read it out, slowly, in the flat voice of a boy reading in hall. Servius says that Alexis was a boy belonging to Asinius Pollio. That Virgil loved him. That Pollio, hearing the poem, made Virgil a present of the boy, who was well taught afterwards and became a grammarian under his own name of Alexander.

He shut the book on his finger.

"Mr Johnes," he said, "does not lecture on Servius."

"Mr Johnes has been eleven years making the boy into an Emperor. You cannot expect him to make him back into a boy because a dead grammarian says so."

"Two dead grammarians. Servius and the boy."

That was the first time I liked him, properly, as distinct from finding him warm. I have been asked since, by men with reasons, what drew me, and I have given them answers they could write down. That was not one of them. It was that he had seen in a moment that the boy in the poem had grown up and kept a school, and had read his own master's poem to his own pupils, and had had to decide what to tell them it meant.

We construed the rest. O crudelis Alexi. The sullen Amaryllis, the thousand lambs on the Sicilian hills, the reed pipe with seven stops that old Damoetas left him. Then the gifts. Huc ades, o formose puer. Come hither, beautiful boy, the Nymphs are bringing you lilies in full baskets. Violets, poppies, narcissus, dill, the downy quinces, chestnuts, waxen plums. Et vos, o lauri, carpam, et te, proxime myrte. And I will pluck you, laurels, and you, myrtle, growing next to them, because set together you mingle your sweet smells.

"He is offering him a garden," said Kerridge. "He is a shepherd with nothing, and he is offering him the whole of the country, a basket at a time."

"He is offering him what grows where he lives. That is what a shepherd has."

"And it does no good."

"It never does, in the poem." I took the pen. "Corydon, Corydon, quae te dementia cepit. What madness has taken you. If this one scorns you you will find another Alexis. That is how it ends. He goes back to his vines, which want pruning."

"Then what shall we make upon it?"

I had known what I would make upon it since the first line. That is the honest answer, and I give it here because there is nobody now to whom it can be of any use.

✾

I wrote it that night at the table while he slept, and in the morning I gave it him with his beer.

It was not the poem that goes about now. I have heard that one sung in Shoreditch by a boy with a broken voice, at the door of a house where it was not the kind of singing they were paying for, and I have seen it copied into a lady's table-book in a hand finer than mine, with the spelling improved. It was most of that poem. The rocks were there, and the shallow rivers, and the birds singing madrigals at the falls, which was a rhyme I was pleased with then and am pleased with still. The beds of roses were there, and the thousand posies. The gown of the finest wool was there; we all wore gowns. The slippers lined against the cold were there, and that was not invention, for our floor was flags and it was February.

And then the third stanza ended, in that first copy:

A cap of flowers, and a turtle
Nesting all in leaves of myrtle.

A turtle-dove, I mean. A bird is a lover's gift, and the turtle is faithful and keeps one mate, and it would sit very well on a cap of flowers in a nest of Virgil's myrtle. There was no she in the poem anywhere. There was no he either. There was a thee, which in English will do for anybody, and there was a me.

Kerridge read it standing by the window with his gown on over his shirt, and I sat on the bed and watched him read it, which is a thing I have done since with a great many men and a great many papers. The trick is not to watch the eyes, which go where the lines go. The trick is to watch the hand that is not holding the paper. His was at his collar, turning the button, and it went on turning it after he had come to the end and gone back to the beginning, and after he had come to the end again.

"Mr Johnes will want to know which of us is Augustus," he said at last.

"Mr Johnes will not see it. I shall give him a prose exercise on the allegory of the chestnuts."

"Then who is this for?"

"For the boy," I said, "who became a grammarian."

He folded it twice and put it inside his shirt. He did not say anything more about it, then or later that day, and at dinner he talked to the man on his other side about the price of coals. But that night the truckle bed stayed where it was, and the next night, and on the third night it was very cold, and I would not have known by then how to tell anyone, if asked, which of us had been the warmer.

✾

The man who called himself Leake found me on the Thursday. He found me by the river below the Mills, where I had gone to be out of the court for an hour, which he must have known, since there is no other reason for a man to be standing in the wind on the King's Ditch side in February looking at ducks.

He was perhaps forty. He had a plain cloak and a good hat and a London way of standing, as if the ground were his for the afternoon at a fair rent. He said he had dined at Corpus at Christmas as somebody's guest, which may have been true, and that he had heard me dispute in the schools, which was certainly true, because he repeated a thing I had said there, and got it right, and that is rarer than you would think.

We walked. He asked me what I meant to do after my degree. I said, to go into the Church, as the Archbishop's money intended. He said that was a fine thing, the Church, and the Archbishop had been a fine man, and there were other ways of serving the Queen besides the pulpit that a Cambridge man with Latin and a good memory might find answered better, and paid sooner. He did not say what they were. He did not need to. I had been three years at a university in a time when men left it for Rheims in the middle of a term and did not come back, and I knew perfectly well that somebody was counting them.

"Your chamber-fellow," he said. "Kerridge. A Suffolk family."

"Near Bury."

"He has letters from home."

"Every man has letters from home. Mine come from a shoemaker in Canterbury and ask whether I have yet been made a bishop."

He smiled at that, briefly, as a man smiles at a coin he has been handed that he did not expect to be good. "And his come by the Bury carrier, on a Saturday, to the Falcon. And they are from his mother, who has paid a good deal of money to the Exchequer these three years for not going to her parish church. You know all this."

"I know he has a mother."

"Who brings them? The letters. Is it always the carrier?"

There it was. It was a small question, and it was the whole of the conversation; the rest had been the hall a man walks through to get to the room where the business is. I looked at the ducks. I have looked at other things since, in the same way, while I decided which true thing to say. It is the one skill I have that nobody taught me.

"Always the carrier," I said. "A man called Pask, with a wall eye. He drinks at the Falcon until two and then goes back up the road. I have never seen any letter come by any other hand, and I share his room."

All of which was true. Leake knew it already; I could see that he had known it before he asked, and that he was not interested in Pask, and that what he was interested in was whether I would say it, and how quickly, and in what voice. I said it in the voice of a young man who would like to be thought useful by an older man in a good hat. That is the voice a young man in my position generally has, and I had only to let it out.

He nodded. We walked a little further. Then he said, still looking at the water:

"It is a cold room, I hear. That one on the old court. The storehouse."

"Cold enough."

"Well. Men are glad of company in a cold room. Nobody thinks anything of it." He drew his cloak round him. "Nobody thinks anything of a great many things, Master Marley, until they are asked to think, and then you would be surprised what they find they always thought."

He said good day and went off along the bank towards the town, and I stood by the ducks until the bell went at St Bene't's, and understood that I had been offered employment, and that the wages had been named, and that they were not money.

✾

I rewrote the stanza that night, after Kerridge was asleep.

It is not a hard thing to do. Myrtle wants a rhyme, and English is poor in them. There is turtle, and there is hurtle, which will not go into a pastoral, and there is kirtle. A kirtle is a woman's garment, a gown worn under the gown, and it can be embroidered all over with leaves of anything you like, and the moment it is in the poem there is a she in the poem, and every line before it falls into place behind her like sheep behind a gate. The beds of roses are for her. The gown of finest wool is hers. The slippers are hers. The lady with the table-book has never once wondered who the thee was, because the kirtle told her in the third stanza, and she was grateful, and went on.

Two letters. You take out the t and the u and put in the k and the i. I made a fair copy with the new line, and I gave that copy to Thomas Hannam of Caius, who had asked to see what I was making for Johnes, and who copies everything and loses nothing, and by the Monday there were four copies in the college and somebody had set it to a tune that fitted it very badly. By Shrove Tuesday the cook's boy was singing it in the buttery hatch, with his eyes shut, at a girl who came in with the bread from Trumpington. She laughed at him. Kerridge was standing behind me at the hatch with his commons in his hands when the boy got to the kirtle, and I did not turn round.

He said nothing that day. He said nothing the next. On the Saturday, when he came back from the Falcon, he did not take off his boots, but sat down on the end of the bed with them on, and the mud of the Trumpington road on them, and took out a letter, and did not open it.

"I am to go home at the end of term," he said.

"Your mother."

"My mother. And the subscription." He turned the letter over. "You cannot have the degree without the oath, and you cannot take the oath without saying the Queen is the head of the Church, and my mother says that if I say it with my mouth, I will have said it. She says it is better to go without the letters after one's name than to have them and have lied for them."

"That is a very fine opinion, and an expensive one."

"She can afford it. She has been affording it these three years." He looked up. "There was a man asking about me in the town. In a good hat. Pask said."

"There are a great many men in good hats."

"He asked Pask whether I had a friend at the college. A particular one."

I have learned since, in other rooms, that the worst questions are not the ones that are asked; they are the ones that are left lying on the table, for you to pick up or not, so that whichever you do will be counted. He had left it there. He had not asked me whether I had spoken to the man in the good hat. He had not asked what I had said.

"What did Pask tell him?"

"That I was a Grecian, and kept myself to myself, and he did not know." He put the letter back in his doublet. "Pask is a better friend to me than he knows."

"Pask is a man with a wall eye who drinks until two."

"Yes," said Kerridge. "That is what I mean."

He stood, and took off his gown, and hung it on the nail. Then he went down on his knees on the flags, the way a man kneels who has knelt a good deal in a chapel that has not been used since his grandfather's time, and he took hold of the frame of the truckle bed and drew it out on its wooden wheels, and it came out squealing, as it always did, and stood there between us on the floor, smaller than either of us.

✾

He went down to Suffolk the week after Lady Day. I took my degree. Leake I saw twice more that spring, and then not again for a year, and then a great deal.

The night before he went, I came in late from the schools and found the room dark and Kerridge asleep in the truckle bed with his face to the wall, and on the table, under the candlestick, a copy of the poem. It was not one of mine. It was in Hannam's hand, I think, one of the four that had gone about the college, with the cook's-boy tune written above the first stanza in letters for the notes. Somebody had taken a pen to the third stanza. The k and the i had been struck through, very neatly, once each, in a black ink that was not Hannam's, and above them, in a small hand that I knew, that had been beaten at school for keeping its finger under the line, two other letters had been written in.

I stood a while with it. There is only one thing to do with a paper like that, in a hand like that, and it was nearly two years before anyone thought to teach it me, but I knew it already. I am told this is the sign of a natural aptitude.

I held the corner of it in the candle. It took slowly, the way rag paper does when the room is damp, and went brown along its edge before it went black, and the third stanza was the last of it to go; so that for the length of a breath, by the light of the thing itself, I could read it as he had mended it: a cap of flowers, and a turtle, embroidered all with leaves of myrtle. Then the two struck letters under his curled, and went black, and fell into the dish.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Christophorō Marlōvō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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