ABSTRACT

Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, twelve sonnets in the Spenserian form, opens with a sonnet in which the dreaming poet meditates on the wickedness and folly of an age that despises the mean and humble. The next ten present ‘strange showes’ that depict what the poet has thought: a bull is vexed by a brize (gadfly); a crocodile is forced to allow the tiny ‘tedula’ to feed upon his jaws; a scarab beetle destroys the offspring of the proud eagle; a small swordfish wounds the ‘huge Leviathan’ of the ocean, the whale; a spider poisons a huge dragon; ‘a goodly Cedar… Of wondrous length, and streight proportion’ is destroyed by a worm that feeds upon ‘her sap and vitall moysture’; an elephant, proud that he bears a ‘gilden towre’ on his back, is undone by an ant that creeps into his ‘nosthrils’; a swiftly moving ship is suddenly retarded by ‘a little fish,’ the remora (sucker-fish) that attaches itself to the hull; a lion that had feasted on other beasts is defied by a wasp (‘So weakest may anoy the most of might’); a goose (the traditional bird of foolishness) saves ancient Rome from an invasion of the Gauls. The final sonnet offers advice prompted by ‘these sad sights’: ‘Learne…to love the low degree… For he that of himselfe is most secure,/ Shall finde his state most fickle and unsure.’