Nameless

By Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

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:
Ay me, while life did last that league was tender;
Tracing whose steps thou saw’st Kelsal blaze,
Laundersey burnt, and battered Bullen render.
At Muttrell gates, hopeless of all recure,
Thine Earl half dead gave 1in thy hand his Will;
Which cause did thee this pining death procure,
Ere summers four times seven thou couldn’st fulfil.
Ah Clere, if loved had booted, care, or cost,
Heaven had not won, nor Earth so timely lost.


This poem is a Shakespearean Sonnet. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Clere, his squire and companion, fought together in expeditions to Kelsal in Scotland, Landrecy in the Netherlands, and Boulogne in France. At the siege of Montreuil, on 19 September 1544, Clere received wounds while protecting Surrey, from which he died the following spring. He was buried at Lambeth, in the chapel assigned to the Howards.
This Shakespearean Sonnet has the defining rhyming couplet at the end. The poems employs alliteration heavily, such as in line 2 with the hard “c” sound (Clere, County, and Cleremont) and then again in line 6 with a hard “l” sound (life, last, and league). There is also consonance of the “s” sound in line 7 and line 12. As the Earl participated in the battle, he uses lots of allusions to the specific people and places that were related to the events.
The poem is describing what led to Clere’s death during a medieval siege, which is strongly related to the theme of war.