The death of his wife Suzanna van Baerle on 10 May 1637 muted the lyrical voice of Constantijn Huygens. From 28 April until 28 October, he did not write one single poem. In September 1637, Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher wrote a sonnet that aimed to break the silence caused by the grief that had captured the poet. Yet, she did not address and send her poem to Huygens himself, but to Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, a mutual friend and fellow poet. In the poem, the sender asks the addressee to convey a message to Vastaert (l. 5), a Dutch variant to ‘Constanter’, the Latin name that Constantijn Huygens used for himself.
The address of this sonnet displays an interesting combination of intimacy and indirectness. The poem was never intended for any audience apart from the intimate friends involved in it. In what follows I want to argue that Tesselschade's choice for a lyrical form in her intimate communication is related to the vital role of the musical dimension of language in what Tesselschade aims to achieve: that Constanter will use lyric to heal himself.
Grief in measure: images and sound
In the first quatrain the addressee, uw (l. 3), is placed between two grievous waters: a sea of sadness and a lake of billowed mourning. The former contains the sender, the latter the receiver, but between their situations a difference can be discerned. The sender is compared to a beacon detained within the sea. A beacon is a fixed object, but it is floating and as such at least partly above the water. In opposition to this, the receiver in the lake is submerged, under water. The suggestion is thus that the ‘frail aid’, swack behulp (l. 3), the sender offers by means of the poem is not to save the receiver from the water, but to save him from drowning in it.
In historical reality Tesselschade lost both her eldest daughter Teetgen and her husband Allard Crombalch on the same day in May 1634. The nineyear-old girl died of smallpox and this upset her father so much that the doctor gave him a tranquilizing drink which instantly made him cough up large amounts of blood until he was dead too.