The Columbia History of British Poetry (56 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 235
"The Anniversarie" is even more startling in its double awareness. Love "keepes his first, last, everlasting day" in the face of full knowledge of death. This poem sees the lovers' finite lives on earth as more special than their anticipated lives in heaven (where
everyone
will be "blest"), and it acknowledges and then discounts, as ignoble, the thought of "treason in love." Fully enjoyed finitude seems better than eternity. "Loves growth'' develops this perspective further and celebrates, non-cynically, the impurity and earthliness of human love.
"A valediction forbidding mourning" explores the outer limits of the nontranscendental. absolute. Donne explains that among the prerogatives of lovers who are "Inter-assured of the mind" are the capacities to survive the pain of absence and to remain (somehow) connected through it. The famous image of the "stiff twin compasses" occurs in this context. The imagery in these poemsdrawn from alchemy, astronomy, physics, and so onled many critics, from the later seventeenth to the twentieth century, to speak of Donne as a "metaphysical" poet. This is an appropriate term only if it designates a favored frame of reference, not if it indicates a subject matter or intellectual ambition. The "metaphysics" in these poems explicates the emotion. Metaphysics and science were things that Donne was interested in, but he was mainly interested in them as ways of thinking about things that he was more interested in.
It is hard not to think that many of the celebratory love poems were written after Donne's marriage. This perhaps adds to their poignance. In 1601 Donne secretly married the niece of his employer, Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Probably to Donne's surprise, this marriage brought an abrupt end to his career as a rising courtier or civil servant. In the enforced retirement that followed, Donne had time to read and study. He returned to the questions that, along with sex and politics, dominated his life in the early 1590s, the questions on which the third satire meditated so boldly.
Turning his poetic focus (at least at times) from his erotic to his religious life, Donne proceeded, probably in the years 16071610, to do in this context what he never did in the erotic one, namely, to write sonnets. The sonnet, unlike the stanzaic lyric, did seemin the terms of "The Triple Fool"to "fetter" Donne. Or perhaps the choice of a form in which he was not fully comfortable unconsciously reflected a deeper discomfort. Donne had become a Protestant by this time, yet he had trouble fully inhabiting the Protestant devotional stance, the stance that
 
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devalued agency and threw itself entirely on grace. This stance presented itself to Donne as a form of willed (and willful) submission to violence: "Burne me o Lord, with a fiery zeale"; "like Adamant draw mine iron heart."
The most brilliant expression of this vision occurs in the sonnet that begins, "Batter my heart," and ends with an eroticized version of this prayer: "I / Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee." Yet even this poem does not maintain the stance of the opening and closing prayers. Between these images of regeneration through violence, Donne expresses a different vision, that of the self or soul struggling "to'admit" God. Both visions are coherent; to put them together is not. Yet this occurs repeatedly in the Holy Sonnets. Donne often seems uncertain of his tone or stance. He is best when he can make these instabilities his subject, as in "If poysonous mineralls," in ''O might those sighes and teares," and in the wonderfully baffled self-analysis of "Oh, to vex me, contraryes meete in one".
When, a decade later, Donne turned from holy sonnets to stanzaic religious lyrics, he was able to recapture some of the spontaneity and range of his great love poems in three "hymns." Yet even these poems have difficulty maintaining their affirmative stance. "A Hymne to God the Father"possibly Donne's last poemis like "Oh, to vex me" in its candid self-bafflement. Donne's lifelong self-scrutiny and self-fascination culminates in a brilliant, self-mocking refrain about the difficulty of selfabandonment: "When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more."
Ben Jonson and the New Social Lyric
Donne and Jonson were exact contemporaries. They were born within a year of each other (around 1572) and both died in the 1630s. Many literary histories contrast them, and there are, as we shall see, significant differences in their poetic modes. There are also significant similarities. It is important to start with the similaritiesnot only to set the record straight but to understand the way in which the influences of Donne and Jonson complemented each other in the later history of the seventeenth-century lyric. To give full weight to Donne as satirist and elegist is to understand his connections to Jonson. Neither of them wanted to be either Shakespeare or Samuel Daniel in the 1590s. They
 
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wanted to be more classical, more colloquial (these often go together), more "tough-minded," more worldly.
Jonson wrote three poems either to or about Donne. In the two addressing him Jonson praises Donne's poems as especially challenging"longer a-knowing than most wits do live"and praises Donne as an especially discriminating judge of poetry. In the third poem Jonson praises his addressee for desiring to see Donne's satires; her taste in literature attests to her human value: "Rare poems ask rare friends." Jonson was, not surprisingly, especially fond of Donne's earliest poetry, and he claimed to know "The Bracelet" by heart. Donne, for his part, contributed to the first edition of
Volpone
a Latin poem praising Jonson as equal, through both labor and genius, to the ancients. It is worth pondering, for our literary history, that one poem we have, a rather vigorous elegy, "The Expostulation," was ascribed to both Donne and Jonson in the seventeenth century. It may be by neither, but the significant point is the common attribution.
Unlike Donne, Jonson was a professional writer. He operated within both the patronage and the market systems of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. As a playwright, he wrote for the public theaters; as a masque writer, he wrote for the court; as a lyric poet, he wrote both for specific individuals and for the general reading public. In 1616 Jonson took the extraordinary step of arranging and overseeing the publication of
The Works of Benjamin Jonson
. This seems normal enough to us, but it was a surprising cultural event at the time. A contemporary poet was claiming that his writings in the vernacular were "works," including his plays ("What others call a play, you call a worke," as one contemporary wit put it). "Works" were the product of labor and art, were meant to last, and most of all, were what classical authors produced.
Jonson, in other words, was claiming that his writings were classics. They deserved the dignity (not stigma) of print and the careful editing that the classics received.Jonson's productions were Literature and he was an Authorcategories that he was helping to invent. We can see some of the force of this if we compare Jonson's relation to his poems with Donne's (who published only his poems directly funded by a patron), and Jonson's relation to his plays with that of Shakespeare, who made no effort to publish his plays and clearly saw them as scripts for his production company. But Jonson wrote Literature.
The Works
is a magnificent folio.
 
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This folio includes two volumes of poems, each volume bearing a classical title
Epigrammes
and
The Forrest
(Latin:
Silva
). Jonson did not consider his epigrams ephemeral (as Donne almost certainly did his own); for Jonson, his epigrams were "the ripest of my studies." One of the things that Jonson was constantly doingin the prologues to his plays and in many of his poemswas instructing his audience on how to appreciate Ben Jonson's "works" properly. "Rare poems ask rare friends" was actually a very deep principle for Jonson. The first of the epigrams is addressed "to the reader," and it is a typically brilliant, understated, and hectoring Jonsonian performance: ''Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my booke in hand, / To reade it well; that is, to understand." Every word, every syllable, every accent, every punctuation mark here is fully meant.
The "care" that the reader is exhorted to "take" in taking up this bookthe two kinds of "taking" are thereby equatedis to answer in kind the care that the author of this poem and "my booke" has already taken. Jonson imagines his reader in the world, "booke in hand." A single couplet must ring at the end, and Jonson has built this tiny poem to culminate in its final word. He professed to hate rhyme (a nonclassical feature) but made brilliant use of itin "A Fit of Rime against Rime," in many of the poems, and here. He explains what he means by taking care and reading well"that is, to understand." This final word is the only clear polysyllable in the poem; it takes up almost half of the second of the poem's two lines. The reader is not being enticed but challenged; he or she is being offered not delight, or pleasure, or escape but intellectual work. It is no accident that the printer of Donne's poems similarly addressed that volume not to the readers but "to the Understanders."
But what is it that we are supposed to "understand"? Jonson's poetry is not arcane in its conceits like Donne's "sullen Writ / Which just as much courts thee, as thou dost it." What we are to understand is precisely Jonson's art. We are to see that it takes art to write such straightforward-seeming poems, and we are to appreciate the "weight," not the difficulty, of his words. "Weight" was very important to Jonson. He was a very fat man, and he portrayed himself in his poetry as such. He did this for a number of reasons: to locate himself and his poems in an actual, historical world; to take advantage of the centrality of food in social life; to avoid involvement with the erotic (he has a poem about how his "mountain belly" interferes with a lady's reception of his excellent lan-
 
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guage); and perhaps most of all, to present himself as a figure with moral weight, that is,
gravitas
, a figure who understands "weighty" matters.
Jonson praises his teacher, the great historian William Camden, by exclaiming, "What sight in searching the most ancient springs! / What weight, and what authoritie in thy speech." Weight and authority in speech are what Jonson most covets. Praise is much more important in Jonson's epigrams (and his poems in general) than is blame. This may seem odd in an author of satirical plays, but Jonson seems to have used his poems primarily to articulate the positive ideals that are only implicit in the folly or vice-ridden world of the plays. He censures those who think his "way in
Epigrammes
" is new (not ancient), and also those who expect his epigrams to be merely satiric ("bold, licentious, full of gall"). Although he creates some fools in the
Epigrammes
(see "On Gut" and "On Court-worme''), the most ambitious of the epigramsJonson would have liked the paradox that small poems can be ambitiousare not satirical.
Jonson was as self-obsessed as Donne was, but where Donne's self-obsession was psychological and emotional, Jonson's was professional and ethical. Judging rightly, responding appropriately, speaking aptlythese were Jonson's great aims and obsessions. In "Inviting a Friend to Supper," a classically based epigram, Jonson's stress is on imagining an occasion that will perfectly balance food, wine, and learned exchange. In mourning the death of his first son, Jonson is haunted by a sense of having made, as in his classical source, an inappropriate emotional investment. The poem is oddly moving in its sense of guilt and inability to attain the detachment that it seeks"O, could I loose all father now." He cedes the dead boy highest honor by calling him (his namesake) "Ben. Jonson his best piece of poetrie." Pride in authorship is both used and rejected here.
The fact that Jonson repeatedly put his name into his poems is part of the relentlessly social focus of his world. The speaker of "The good-morrow" has no name; the speaker of Jonson's poem to his son is identified with the historical author. The longer poems that compose most of
The Forrest
continue the ethical and social themes of the
Epigrammes
in other formsthe verse epistle ("which," Jonson says, "as yet / Had not their forme touch'd by an English wit"), the ode, the epode, and the "country house poem." Jonson may not have invented this latter form in English (it existed in classical Latin)the honor of origination may
 
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go to a woman poet, Aemilia Lanierbut his two poems of this kind established the mode in English. These poems are among his greatest "works." The first and better known of them, "To Penshurst," is a remarkable evocation of a self-sufficient manor in which nature, culture, and economic activity are all in benign and happy harmony. Partridges willingly sacrifice themselves; eels ''leap on land"; the tenant farmers on the estate bring produce that is not in fact needed and they are welcomed as guests. Social differences disappear (or fail to signify) in the face of abundance. Jonson's role is to "remind" the owners of these places of the value of what they have. Since the object of the hyperboles here is not an individual but an imagined form of life, the result is not flattery but the creation of a social myth.
Donne was a skeptic and a revolutionary in the love tradition; Jonson barely participated in it. Yet Jonson, too, made some contributions to love poetry in English. First, he added a new range of sentimentnot erotic love but
philia
, friendship and rational affection. Jonson said that he loved Shakespeare "this side idolatry," and the poem that he wrote for the 1623 Folio that attempted to make Shakespeare's plays Literature (though not Works) bears out Jonson's claim. It is a work of measured love and of literary criticism in verse. It is the tribute of a classicist to a poet who had "small Latine and lesse Greeke," and it finds a way of praising Shakespeare that does not "give Nature all." Jonson's second contribution to English love poetry is in his songs. These mostly occur in the plays and masques, but they define a mode of elegant, classicizing, consciously artful eroticism.
Finally, Jonson wrote some remarkable poems to potential love objects. It is a tribute to the power of Jonson's influence that the best of these (beginning "Faire Friend, 'tis true") is ascribed in one manuscript not to Jonson but to one of his followers. The stance of the poem verges on impertinence ("I neither love, not yet am free"); its tone is that of a benevolent lecturer. The central stanza is pure Jonsonwhether he wrote it or not. The speaker's feeling for the addressee "is like Love to Truth reduc'd, / All the false values gone, / Which were created, and induced / By fond imagination." Love without mythology is the idea. The speaker offers a nonhyperbolic response"you may collect, / Th' intrinsique value of your face, / Safely from my respect." "Respect" is the name that this poem ultimately gives to its stance, but the possibility of unhyperbolic love will be of as much interest to poets later in the century as Donne's extraordinary hyperboles.

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