On the Eve of His Execution
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen, yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and found it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Commentary
Chidiock Tichborne is a name as obscure as it is odd. The antiquarian syllables, remembered only by a few, are difficult to place and harder to locate. Tichborne does not appear in either The Golden Treasury or the Oxford Book of English Verse or the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Yet he wrote one of the most moving poems of his century.
Tichborne was not pre-eminently a poet but a conspirator. History is not sure of the part he played in the attempt to do away with Queen Elizabeth. Conjecture has it that he was born about 1558 somewhere in Southampton, and it is said that his father, Peter Tichburne, traced his descent from Roger de Tichburne, a knight in the reign of Henry II. His family was ardently Catholic and both Chidiock and his father were zealous champions of the Church of Rome; they did not scruple to abet the king of Spain in “holy” attacks on the English government. In 1583, Chidiock and his father were questioned concerning the possession and use of certain “popish relics”; somewhat later they were further implicated as to their “sacrilegious and subversive practices”. In April 1586, Chidiock joined a group of conspirators. In June, at a meeting held in St.Giles-in-the-Fields he agreed to be one of the six who were pledged to murder the Queen and restore the kingdom to Rome. The conspiracy was discovered in time; most of the conspirators fled. But Tichborne, who had remained in London because of an injured leg, was captured on August 14th and taken to the Tower. On September 14th, he was tried and pled guilty. He was executed on September 20th. In a grim finale, history relates, he was “disembowelled before life was extinct” and the news of the barbarity “reached the ears of Elizabeth, who forbade the recurrence.”
On September 19, 1586, the night before he was executed, Chidiock wrote to his wife Agnes. The letter enclosed three stanzas beginning:”My prime of youth is but a frost of cares.”
This elegy is so restrained yet so eloquent, so spontaneous, and so skillfully made that it must be ranked among the little masterpieces of literature. The grave but not yet depressing music of the lines is emphasized by the repetition of the rhymed refrain, as though the poet were anticipating the slow tolling of the bell announcing his death.
He was twenty-eight years old.
[Louis Untermeyer]
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Amit Chakrabarti · 11 July 1999
Brilliant! The finest I’ve read in the last few weeks, I think.
And what music… “masterpiece” is right.
Ian Davidson · 5 January 2001
An interesting riposte, reputedly by Thomas Kyd, borrows interesting imagery from Tichborne’s poem:
Cygneam Cantionem Chidiochi Tychborne.
By T.K.
Thy prime of youth is frozen with thy faults, thy feast of ioy is finisht with thy fall:
Thy crop of corne is tares auailing naughts,
thy good God knowes, thy hope, thy hap and all Short were thy daies, and shadowed was thy sun T’obscure thy light unluckelie begun.
Time trieth trueth, & trueth hath treason tript, thy faith bare fruit as thou hadst faithles beene: Thy ill spent youth thine after peares hath nipt, and God that saw thee hath preserude our Due
Her thred still holds, thine perisht though unspun, And she shall liue when traitors liues are done.
Thou soughtst thy death, and found it in desert, thou look oft for life, yet lewdlie forcd it fade: Thou trodst the earth, and now on earth thou art, as men may wish thou never hadst beene made.
Thy glorie and thy glasse are timeless runne, And this, O Tychborne, hath thy treason done.
master · 26 May 2002
ahh sick,
I just read bellow the poem and felt so much
“On September 19, 1586, the night before he was executed, Chidiock wrote to his wife Agnes. The letter enclosed three stanzas beginning:”My prime of youth is but a frost of cares.”
Im doing this peace in a exam today and cant believe how much you have opened up this poem from being “sad man feeling sorry for himself” to a “mad conspicuous piece that have sides i had never seen before”
Thanks and keep on writing on about poetry it was so clear i am dazzled, ha ha!
Kent Nickerson · 19 July 2002
Rodney Sharman, a Canadian composer, has set this poem to choir in a short (about 3 minute) piece called, “Anthem: The Passing of the Claimant”.
Dafydd Evans · 31 May 2003
Chidiock Tichborne, born in Hampshire in 1558, was a member of a junior branch of the old Tichborne family of Tichborne, Hampshire. His great-grandfather was Sir Henry Tichborne from whom the main line of baronets descended. The family remained, in the troubled religious times of sixteenth century England, staunch Catholics. They and a number of landed and noble families refused to renounce Rome and, throughout the years of religious intolerance up till the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829 continued in their faith. Chidiock was involved in the ‘Babington Plot’ of 1586. Execution by ‘hanging, drawing and quartering’ was the fate visited on the most heinous offenders such as those found guilty of treason, and involved cutting down the convicted person’s body before he was death and disembowelling him. The dead body would then be ‘quartered’. Chidiock left no children.
Though the Tichbornes were fervent royalists, ironically one Tichborne was a regicide, ie one of the signatories to the death warrant of Charles I.
I noted that a Canadian composer set the poem to music as ‘Anthem: The Passing of the Claimant’. Is this a reference to the so-called Tichborne Claimant? If so, it is totally misplaced as that person was an imposter who arrived in England from Australia in the late nineteenth century to assert his claim to be Sir Roger Tichborne, who had in fact disappeared and presumed drowned at sea some years earlier.
Mark Brown · 24 July 2003
Mention has been made of musical settings to Chideock Tichborne’s words. The first was probably William Byrd’s madrigal of the same title, whose music so well matches the mood of the poem. William Byrd was an English composer who lived from 1505 to 1585 - very much an Elizabethan and a Tudor.
Gwen Room · 13 March 2004
hey, i’ve been asked to research Chidiock Tichbourne by my english teacher, and have been told that it will help me in my up coming exams…..i was just wondering if any body would know any usefull information that i could use
CWBandBuff · 1 April 2004
my fav poem
bob
TMWDesigns · 22 March 2005
the line missing from Chidiock Tichborne’s poem is this one “I am the self consumer of all my woes”
I do not know why it is left out everywhere on the web. T
Ralph Maliphant · 29 May 2005
Through researching Chidiock Tichborne, discovered Minstrels, looked with interest at your web pages, Amit, and enjoyed them very much. But please note that some hyperlinks don’t work (eg music on your personal page) as Princeton U has made changes that invalidate them.
May I suggest that you include a link on your page to email you?
Kind regards,
Ralph (Gloucestershire, England)
Clare Asquith · 22 July 2006
…have just checked dates, and the Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) pre-dates the execution of Tichborne (1585), so the debt is the other way round, if at all. The lines are: And yet alas, but now my spring begun, And yet alas, it is already done.
Clare Asquith
Clare Asquith · 22 July 2006
There is an article on the Tichborne family in the May 2006 edition of History Today. It notes that he and his poem were celebrated by ‘high Protestant society’.
Spenser quotes the poem in the first eclogue of the Shepherd’s Calendar, relating Colin Clout’s sorrows to the fate of men like Tichborne.
Clare Asquith