A Sonnet a Day - 2

Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,
Clere, of the County of Cleremont, though hight,
Within the womb of Ormond's race thou bred,
And saw'st thy cousin crowned in thy sight.
Shelton for love, Surrey for Lord thou chase;
Aye, me! whilst life did last that league was tender.
Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsall blaze,
Laundersey burnt, and batter'd Bullen render.
At Muttrel gates, hopeless of all recure,
Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will;
Which cause did thee this pining death procure,
Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfill.
Ah, Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost,
Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost.

This, of necessity, heavily notated poem is by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey from the mid-16th century, and is a tribute to one of his soldiers, Thomas Clere. Even after getting past all the references and the englished placenames (Bullen = Boulogne, for example), I find it hard to warm to this. I imagine it spoke better to an age when brotherhood in arms was more important and the list of military triumphs was enough to evoke the love two comrades would have developed. We're given a list of experiences rather than personal qualities. We have to infer a lot. What I find most interesting is that Anne Boleyn turns up again: she was the "cousin crowned in thy sight". She was also often known as Anna Bullen, I believe, something that the editors seem to have missed.