Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Biography:
Henry, born in 1517, and died in 1547. The ignoble distinction of being the last person executed by Henry VIII's order, convicted of treason after he opposed the Seymours (remember Jane Seymour?) when power swung to them after Catherine Howard was executed for adultery. He was very high born, the eldest son of the duke of Norfolk, a conservative Catholic faction. He served in the French wars as "Lietenant General of the King on Sea and Land." In 1541 he helped free Thomas Wyatt from the Tower of London.

He was well-loved in the sixteenth century, especially after Tottel's miscellany in 1557 (Songs and Sonnets written by the Right Honorable Lord Henry Howard Late Earl of Surrey and Other). He's the first author known to use the English sonnet form, and the first English poet to publish in blank verse (for the Aeneid partial translation). 

Works
"The soote season"
Surrey refers to spring in his translation of Rima 310 by Petrarch. It is beautiful. Summer has come, and various animals are individually renewed and in their accustomed action. Winter is worn away, but "Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs." It's a wonderful juxtaposition.

"Love, that doth reign and live within my thought"
Petrarch's Rima 140, also translated by Wyatt. Surrey differs in that Love's holder conflicts more with it. He resists falling fully into this love, while nonetheless doing so.

"Alas! so all things now do hold their peace"
Translation of Rima 164. Unconventional rhyme here - ababababababcc. It's calm outside - depicting the night. No animals, calm sea. Then the shift in line 6 suddenly, perhaps allowed by the unconventional rhyme in the sonnet. "So am not I." Last poem's "doubtful hope" is this one's "doubtful ease." This is a speaker that is shaken inwardly.

"Th'Assyrians' king, in peace with foul desire"
 An English sonnet. Depicts the Assyrian king growing soft by lust. Depiction of it as "womanish delight." Distortion of his body depicted in the way it no longer takes to swords and armor. ("The dint of swords from kisses seemed strange, / And harder than his lady's side, his targe.") Interesting at the end, where he is depicted as depleted, killing himself is done to show some "manful deed," though the tone set by "some" indicates some amount of scorn or derision, the best of terrible options after a depleted life.

"So cruel prison how could betide"
Quatrains, abab, until the concluding couplet. He is in Windsor, where he spent in childhood, and the poem juxtaposes the nostalgia for his youthful games (like joust?) and the company of friends and ladies. Upon remembering "The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just," he laments.

"Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest"
Same format as the last. The title alone gets the hesitating contradiction - Wyatt lived, but now he has died. In praise of Wyatt, dividing him into body parts - head, visage, hand, tongue, eye, heart, and then the "valiant corpse," the body as a whole. Each part serves to deliver some measure of virtue. The body then turns to the heavens after the famous lines about Nature losing the mold. Finally, it turns back to the speaker, lamenting the loss "for our guilt."

"O happy dames, that may embrace"
A woman (perhaps Surrey's wife) laments that she cannot embrace her husband like the other ladies can embrace "the fruit of your delight." No gender is attributed to the dames' loves, but the wife looks to her love on the ocean, having sailed away. This also transforms her, the lover, into the mariner - "Lo, what a mariner love hat made me!" (28). Her questions indicate her struggle to understand why he leaves. Again, "doubtful hope" recurs in line 38, a state for her worry even when the seas are calm.

"Martial, the things for to attain"
A translation of an epigram (10.47). It, like the last poem, has some preoccupation with happiness. But now it prescribes the state of happiness, which tends to avoid strife by embracing simplicity.