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Thule, the Period of Cosmography

music by Thomas Weelkes

words: Anon

WE DON’T KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT the Elizabethan composer Thomas Weelkes (1576–1623), but his reputation as a drunk appears to be solid enough. As organist of Chichester Cathedral from 1601 until his death, he was dismissed more than once for inebriation, as well as for loudly cursing and blaspheming during a service. On one occasion, he urinated on the dean from the organ loft. The fact that he was always reinstated is doubtless testimony to his talent, and perhaps we may also deduce that he was a passionate man. His music certainly seems to bear this out.

‘Thule, the Period of Cosmography’, his madrigal of 1600, is a song about fire and ice. It’s also about desire, about having a heart frozen with fear yet burning – frying – with love. Its analogies come from the voyages of discovery undertaken by European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and refer to such wonders as the volcano ‘Hecla, whose sulphureous fire / Doth melt the frozen clime’; of merchants bearing ‘cochineal’; and oceans ‘full of flying fishes’.

The poem Weelkes chose for his madrigal was chock-full of unusual words, two of them in the title. ‘Thule’ dates back to the Ancient Romans and Greeks, who used it to name a place six days’ sail north from Britain. At the time this was the Shetland Islands, but later the term came to refer to Iceland, and it is at least partly in this sense the poet intends it here, since Hecla (or Hekla), mentioned in line two, is an Icelandic volcano. The Elizabethans, however, used Thule in a more general sense to refer to the remotest north – ultima Thule, beyond the known world – and in a poem that draws its imagery from the marvels of Renaissance cosmography, that meaning is certainly implied. Here’s the whole text:

Thule, the period of cosmography,

Doth vaunt of Hecla, whose sulphureous fire

Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky;

Trinacrian Etna’s flames ascend not higher:

These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,

Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

The Andalusian merchant, that returns

Laden with cochineal and china dishes,

Reports in Spain how strangely Fogo burns

Amidst an ocean full of flying fishes:

These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,

Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

Even now, part of the magic of this madrigal is the unusual sound of its words, but in 1600 some of these words would have seemed very strange indeed. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the adjective ‘sulphureous’ first appeared in the language less than fifty years before Weelkes’s madrigal, while ‘cochineal’ was an even newer concept, first coined in 1586. More remarkable is that while the names Trinacria (the Greek word for Sicily) and Andalusia, were, if exotic, nevertheless long established, their adjectival forms, ‘Trinacrian’ and ‘Andalusian’, appear to have been later coinages – later than 1600, according to the dictionary – as was ‘china’ (in the sense of porcelain). These words were not merely strange, then, but to all intents and purposes unknown. The poem isn’t just describing things that ‘seem wondrous’, the words themselves seem wondrous.

And then there’s Weelkes’s music.

This six-voice madrigal sets out from the word ‘Thule’, sung by a soprano voice on an isolated B flat. The possibilities of this voyage of discovery seem infinite; the music might go anywhere. Soon enough, however, it settles on the key of E flat as the other five voices join it in elaborate, imitative counterpoint. The music is full of pictorial effects, most memorably flying fishes, which leap melodically and flutter alliteratively. This is standard Renaissance word painting, but wonderfully well done. There’s symbolism too: at the word ‘Trinacrian’, which means three-pointed, the music moves momentarily into a triple metre. And there are musical portraits of the volcanoes too: Hecla’s sulphureous vapours swirling in contrary motion, Etna’s flames ascending in the sopranos, and Fogo drooping with mysterious chromatic harmonies.

But the strangest harmonies are reserved for the poet’s marvelling at his own emotional state, and these arrive without warning each time, taking the listener by surprise in much the same way as the freezing/frying feelings seem to surprise the poet. ‘These things seem wondrous,’ the voices sing, suddenly in slow motion and stepping on to a chord of D flat, before ratcheting up the dissonance for ‘Yet more wondrous, I …’ The chord on ‘I’ is F major. We are by now quite remote from the home key of E flat, in the harmonic equivalent of Thule.

The notion of peppering a love song with long words may not strike us as odd, particularly if we have some knowledge of the so-called Great American Songbook of the mid-twentieth century. In the heyday of Tin Pan Alley, lyricists would inject mystery, sophistication and humour into their love songs by using big words, words the listener would have to think twice about. ‘Yesterdays, yesterdays / Days I knew as happy, sweet / sequestered days,’ wrote Otto Harbach for Jerome Kern. Then, in ‘Mountain Greenery’, Lorenz Hart upped the ante: ‘How we love sequestering / Where no pests are pestering.’

In the musical A Connecticut Yankee, Hart has the twentieth-century Martin woo Alice in King Arthur’s court with a mixture of cod Shakespearean English and American slang: ‘Thou swell, thou witty, thou sweet, thou grand / Wouldst kiss me pretty? Wouldst hold my hand?’ But it’s the slang that wins – ‘Hear me holler, / I choose a / sweet lolla– / palooza / in thee’ – notwithstanding the fact that ‘lollapalooza’ is a kind of grand slang, and in 1927 still relatively new.

Ten years later, for the film Ready, Willing and Able, Johnny Mercer wrote a lyric about this practice for Ross Alexander to sing to Ruby Keeler – actually, not sing, but speak, à la Rex Harrison – during a scene in a library. In ‘Too Marvellous for Words’ (music by Richard Whiting), having first tried and abandoned ‘glorious, glamorous / And that old standby amorous’ as descriptions of Keeler, Alexander insists that she is ‘Much too much / And oh so very, very / To ever be in Webster’s Dictionary’. But he doesn’t give up, his attempts growing ever more recherché as he rejects ‘magical’ and ‘mystical’ as ‘just too apathistical’ (unemotional) and complains that ‘the sweetest words / In Keats or Shelley’s lyric’ are still not ‘sweet enough / To be your panegyric’.