Laudator Temporis Acti

Michael, regarding this charming poet William Lathum (for whom I feel much indebted to you), I wonder if you’ve noticed two places where the meter seems to betray a printer’s error, because it lacks a syllable? E.g. in the first poem you quote, line 4 “Is all of clay, the floor and the roofe” – that could have been e.g. “Is all of clay, the floor, <walls> and the roofe”. And in “Post mortem” line 10, “That none can safely say, this was his, or his”. That perhaps should be, “That none can safely say, <that> this was his, or his”. Then the poem more plainly has two parts, 1-10 and 11-20, each of 9 pentameters and 1 hexameter. (For he likes to end sections with long lines; compare the poem “I feel a tingling chillness”, where the first half is 6 pentameters + 1 hexameter, the second, 6 pentameters + 1 heptameter. And the first poem is all pentameters + 1 hexameter at the end.)

Of course, verse by amateurs teems with extra or missing syllables, but poets as careful as Lathum never, ever do. (Not at least in my opinion. Reading Donne, for example, I am now and then astonished to find even a good editor preferring an unmetrical variant, when the plainly right reading is right there in his apparatus.)

In the first poem, re 23 “premier main” – acc. to the OED “main” is an English word, in heraldry; so I suppose the adj. doesn’t need to show a gender. And at line 13 it might be well to gloss “and selfe Miller’s”, which I guess means “and the Miller itself”.

I looked up the article by Marshall you mentioned. He is surely right that this poet ought to be better known. That dialogue between body and soul has immense charm; it has a sort of mingling of sadness and subtle humor that in verse I always love.