The poem by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey that begins Alas, so all things now is based on

an original poem by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch. In this
poem, the speaker contrasts his own inner torment with the peacefulness of the rest of Gods
creation. The speakers restlessness is caused by his selfish desire for a beautiful woman.
This desire, known as cupiditas, puts him at odds with Gods teachings as well with non-
human creations, which follow the patterns God intends them to follow.

Line 1 opens with an expression of emotion (Alas), but it then quickly asserts that
everything surrounding the speaker is at peace. Line 2 reports that

Heaven and earth [are] disturbd in no thing. Unlike the speaker himself, each aspect of
physical creation is quiet and calm (3). Even the non-rational beasts are at peace, as the
human speaker (endowed with the great gift of reason) is not. The stars move in the patterns
God appointed for them (4). Even the ocean a standard symbol of mutability and
unsettledness (5) is calm. However, after emphasizing the calm of the physical universe,
the speaker proclaims,

So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring,

Bringing before my face the great increase

Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing,

In joy and woe, as in a doubtful ease. (6-9)

The speaker explains that his own lack of peace results from being tortured by love (6).
This love, however, is not true love (caritas) at all; it is not, in other words, the kind of
selfless love of God, and of Gods creatures, that God intends humans to display as the chief
virtue of their characters. The false love felt by the speaker, which is rooted in selfish
desires (8), causes him to experiences the kinds of conflicting emotions so typical of
speakers in Petrarchan poems (8-9).

Although the speaker calls his thoughts sweet (10) because they are sometimes pleasurable
(10), ultimately he acknowledges that the cause of his disease (sickness, with a pun on
dis-ease, or lack of ease [11]), causes him inward pain. The cause of his lack of ease is,
superficially, the woman he desires, but the real cause of disease is his own selfish
(presumably sensual) longings. In the final couplet, the purely physical nature of his passion
is emphasized when he thinks about the thing that he thinks is capable of ridding him of his
pain. The word thing, in Howards day and in such a context, had specific sexual
overtones, referring to the vagina (as when Emilia in Shakspeares Othello tells her husband,
Iago, I have a thing for you, and he interprets the comment as a sexual invitation).

Howards poem, like its Petrarchan original, mocks the false love that controls (and
disturbs) the speakers thoughts. The poem is essentially a satire on a foolish male whose lust
puts him out of synch with the rest of Gods creation.