The following sonnet demonstrates the Renaissance's conception of itself as an age of resilience. It was originally composed by a French poet during a sojourn in Rome, anthologized in a collection of visionary poetry by a Dutch Protestant writer, and then translated into English by a seventeen-year-old Edmund Spenser. The poem can be read as an example of translatio studii (the transfer of culture from Troy to Rome to France to England), or an allegory for the Reformation. The correspondence between Roman ruins and the decrepit tree is even more explicit in another Du Bellay poem that Spenser translated (“He that hath seen a great Oak dry and dead”), placing great emphasis on the oak's decay. Although these verses influenced Spenser's “February” (see Part ii, p. 177), the sonnet below ends on a more hopeful note with an image of coppicing – cutting trees down to the stump and allowing them to regenerate – an important strategy for preserving England's woodlands in response to the Elizabethan timber crisis.

Source: A Theatre for Worldlings, trans. Edmund Spenser (1569), C3v.

GEORGE WITHER

“A Posteritati:° He that delights to Plant and Set, Makes After-Ages in his Debt” (c. 1620)

A 1611 Dutch emblem book by Gabriel Rollenhagen includes a memorable image of a man planting a tree. In the original, the emblem is accompanied by Latin glosses, encouraging readers to have children who will bless the names of their progenitors and worship God. The version below is not a translation but a radical rewriting of its moral.