Sid Lubow reminds us via Nina Green‘s Phaeton list that the date of March tenth was memorialized in the anonymous Elizabethan publication of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres bound up in one small Poesy — Gathered partely (by translation) in the fine outlandish gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others: and partly by invention out of our owne fruitefull Orchardes in Englande: Yelding sundrie sweete favours of Tragical, Comical, and Morall Discourses, bothe pleasaunt and profitable to the well smelling noses of learned Readers.
Regardless of the speculation on which sundrie gentleman might be the author of this springtime poem, it is a pretty piece for this day so fair:
This tenth of March when Aries receyv’d,
Dame Phoebus rayes, into his horned head:
And I my selfe, by learened lore perceyv’d,
That Ver approcht, and frostie winter fled.
I crost the Thames, to take the cherefull ayre,
In open feeldes, the weather was so fayre. . . .
For more information about this collection see A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres from the Original of 1573, Second Edition by Ruth Loyd Miller, Editor (Minos Publishing, 1975). This website presents the Miller book as a “facsimile with additions” of Captain Bernard M. Ward’s 1926 edition advancing the theory that Flowers was a first attempt in Elizabeth’s reign of a poetical anthology compiled by Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford.
B.M. Ward’s article “Further Research on A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres” from The Review of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 13 (Jan., 1928), pp. 35-48 is available on JSTOR.
Read the entire poem online in Michael Delahoyde’s essay on the book “A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres”.
G.W. Pigman’s edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford U. Press, 2000) is previewed on Google Books.
