Cynthia's Revels: Queen and huntress, chaste and fair
Ben Jonson
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia's shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.
Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever:
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright.
I could kind of make sense of the poem by myself after going over it several times, but I looked further about the web...Hesperus is another name for the goddess Venus...Cynthia is another name for Artemis or Diana, the goddess of hunting, often depicted with a bow and quiver...don't know but the Hunger Games movie star, Jennifer Lawrence, is our modern manifestation!...Cynthia comes from a hill on Delos named Cynthus...Artemis was the twin of Apollo, and Delos was where Apollo and Artemis were born...Cynthia too is the Moon...and there is a constellation to Artemis and to her story...
Artemis
Multiple versions of the Actaeon myth survive, though many are fragmentary. The details vary but at the core they involve a great hunter, Actaeon who Artemis turns into a stag for a transgression and who is then killed by hunting dogs. Usually the dogs are his own, who no longer recognize their master. Sometimes they are Artemis' hounds.
Artemis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 'hart' in the poem likely refers to Actaeon as a stag...oh...and here the tale of Orion, who met much the same fate as Actaeon...
orion artemis constellation
The god of the sun Apollo was jealous of Orion because of Artemis' love for him, and looked for a way to kill him. Apollo challenged Artemis to hit a speck far out in the ocean, teasing her about her archery skills. Apollo knew, although Artemis didn't, that the speck was really Orion swimming. Artemis killed him with a single arrow. When she realized it was Orion, she was overcome with guilt and placed him up in the heavens as a constellation. His faithful hunting dog, Sirius, would not stop searching hysterically for his master Orion, so Artemis placed him, the Dog Star, at Orion's heels.
The Sirius Myth
Ben Johnson lived and wrote at the time of Shakespeare, and they had an audience that was familiar with Greek myths, along with the stories from the Bible...reading these old poems nowadays, one needs a crib, notes and such...Poetry lost much when audiences no longer had easy familiarity with the Myths and Bible stories...the poem is part of a play, called Cynthia...and I learn that Queen Elizabeth I was nicknamed Cynthia, as she was compared to Artemis/Diana...Johnson was trying to win favor with Elizabeth, to have his plays become part of the entertainments she put on...these were after dark entertainments in her court, so this may be the reference to day in night in the poem...
"Thou that mak'st a day of night
Goddess excellently bright."
Johnson may be identifying himself with the 'hart'...and as it happened the play was controversial, being too critical/satirical of Elizabeth's courtiers..
Ben Johnson Queen Elizabeth
That link is a pdf...and has a long account of Ben Johnson and Queen Elizabeth...too long to copy/paste!...from the book:
The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson
By Richard Harp, Stanley Stewart
and no, I don't have easy familiarity with Myths and Bible stories, and like most, google!
DavidDavid
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