The Columbia History of British Poetry (58 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
11.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 247
while Vaughan becamepoetically (though not politically)almost a "new man." Crashaw's
The Delights of the Muses
was published together with
Steps to the Temple
in 1646. His editor, finding this conjunction something of an embarrassment, insisted that
The Delights
, "though of a more humane mixture" are ''as sweet as they are innocent." He need not have worried. There is as little sense of actual sexuality in this volume as in
Hesperides
.
In an epigram in
The Delights
Crashaw writes that he "would be married" but "have no wife"; he would be "married to a single life." This seems (as "mere" wit often does) profoundly true. Crashaw wanted warmth, intimacy, and above all, passion, but not in any ordinary sexual or social sense. Crashaw wanted ecstasyit is his great notebut ecstasy of a sensual-intellectual not physical-sexual sort. "Music's Duel," Crashaw's translation of a neo-Latin poem by an Italian Jesuit, opens
The Delights
in both the 1646 and the 1648 editions. It is a paean to the ecstatic power of music; both the nightingale and the human musician are "ravisht" by the sounds they produce.
In Christianity Crashaw sought this same experience (or imagination) of sensual, spiritual, and largely noncognitive ravishment. He found Protestantism too negative. He wanted a religion of love, and love conceived as eros rather than agape. He found what he sought in the Church of Rome, to which he became a convert, and especially in the writings of the greatest female saint and mystic of the Counter-Reformation, Teresa of Avila. Crashaw's poems to Saint Teresa are among his most distinctive achievements. There is almost nothing else like them in English (except perhaps Keats at his most "embarrassing" or Shelley). Crashaw celebrates the experience that Saint Teresa recounts; he imagines "sweet and subtle pain," delicious mystical wounds. For Crashaw (who is ambivalent about Teresa's actual status as a woman), the saint is a spiritual Anacreon, celebrating the "strong wine of love" which we can drink "till we prove more, not lesse, then men."
Vaughan remains very much within the Protestant fold, but he, too, celebrates and personally claims extraordinary religious experiences. Vaughan was a more than competent (and quite upright) "Cavalier" and classical poet, but his decisive experience with Herbert's poetry in the late 1640s produced a situation unique in English poetry. Herbert's poetry became the material of Vaughan's. In his best poems, however, Vaughan establishes a distinctive vision. What makes this vision distinctive is his engagement not only with Herbert, the Bible, and Protes-
 
Page 248
tant theology but also with the rich and sometimes contradictory traditions of Platonism in the West.
Platonism could work either to value or to devalue the physical world. The material could be valued as the means for spiritual ascent, or it could be devalued as merely the (initially) necessary and disposable means. Vaughan wrote great and distinctive poems expressing each pole of this dichotomy as well as great poems that shift between them. The world of white light is the world of harsh, world-rejecting Platonism. One of Vaughan's poems of this kind, "The World," famously opens, "I saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light." The ''world" is harshly devaluedalthough this means primarily the social worldand the poem ends on a moment of Herbertian revelation when an authoritative "one" wittily converts the opening "great Ring" into a Calvinist sign of election. At the opposite pole is what might be called "the green world," the world of nature conceived of as benign and, most of all, as filled with, even participating in, the Spirit. Mornings seem to have had a sacramental quality for Vaughan"the quick world / Awakes and sings" ("The Morning-watch").
"They Are All Gone into the World of Light," perhaps Vaughan's greatest poem, exists somewhere between the poles. Its primary thrust is longing for the soul's freedom"They are all gone into the world of light! / And I alone sit lingring here"but the world "here," sunset on a hill (probably in Wales), is rather tenderly evoked. Unlike Herbert, Vaughan is not regularly at his bestone of T. S. Eliot's criteria for a lyric poet truly being "major"but when Vaughan is at his best, he is quite a remarkable poet.
Women Lyric Poets from Lanier to Philips
Women are constantly, of course, talked to and about in seventeenth-century lyrics, but we also have a significant body of lyric poems produced by women in the period, much of it of high quality. It was, as we have seen, a very good period for the lyric. Much but by no means all of the better poetry by women is, not surprisingly, religious. "Souls no Sexes have," a poem very late in our period strongly asserts, but in practice this does not seem to have been a widely held view. Jonson ascribed "a learned and a manly soul" to his female ideal, and, perhaps even more troublingly, the "effeminate" and gynophilic Crashaw worried that in the picture of Saint Teresa with a seraph that normally accompanied the
 
Page 249
Vida
, Teresa might be taken to be "some weak, inferiour, woman saint," rather than a mighty (potent and masculine) seraph herself.
In general, seventeenth-century women who write poetry are quite self-conscious about doing so. They are constantlyand understandablyon the defensive. They almost always identify themselves as women. A related effect is that the familiar topos of the poem as a child to which the writer has given birth is used with special force and frequency by writers who can invoke their status as actual or potential biological mothers (we have seen Jonson, as father and poem maker of his son, appropriating this.)
Aemilia Lanier grew up in the Elizabethan court (she was the daughter and the wife of court musicians), and was an exact contemporary of Donne and Jonson. Her book of poems
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
, published in 1611, was an attemptlike so many other volumesto win patronage. Her opening poem to Queen Anne speaks of "that which is seldom seene, / A woman writing of divinest things." She speaks of her verse as "rude unpolisht lines," although she was in fact quite an accomplished metrist. She disclaims "that I Learning to my selfe assume, / Or that I would compare with any man." She appeals to Nature and, in another poem, to God's power which "hath given me powre to write." She sees virtuous women as having a special relation to the Muses, whom (with a fine enjambment) she sees as ''living alwaies free / From sword, from violence, and from ill-report." The best of the dedicatory poems is "To the Ladie Anne, Countess of Dorset," a stanzaic poem that is rather like a Jonsonian epistle in developing a moral theme"God makes both even, the Cottage with the Throne"and insisting that the gentry must "for all the poore provide."
Salve Deus
, a seminarrative poem on the events surrounding the Passion, contains a remarkable defense of Eve and of women by Herod's wife, culminating in the plea: "Then let us have our Libertie againe, / And challenge to your selves no Sov'raigntie. . . . Your faults being greater, why should you disdaine / Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?" Lanier ends her volume with the country-house poem that may precede "To Penshurst," a "Description of Cookeham," which especially emphasizes a private, pastoral, female society of learned friendshipa theme we will see developed very fully by a later woman poet.
Lady Mary Wroth, whose father was the owner of Penshurst, is the only known female author of a sonnet sequence in the England of our
 
Page 250
period. The sonnets of
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
are smooth and competent in their versification. They give us a Petrarchism without irony, without comedy, and without visionary release. They are a poetry of pure loss and constancy"wittness I could love, who soe could greeve." It is an interesting question whether these poems can be seen to represent a distinctively female interiority. Wroth did not stand entirely alone as a Jacobean woman poet. There is a lucid dream vision defending women's learning prefixed to Rachel Speght's
Mortalities Memorandum
(1621), and a superb and politically shrewd historical poem on the first part of Queen Elizabeth's reign by Diana Primrose (
A Chaine of Pearle
) published in 1630, but the great burst of published (and unpublished?) woman's poetry before the Restoration takes place in the interregnum. Bradstreet's
The Tenth Muse
appears in 1650;
Eliza's Babes
in 1652; Ann Collins's
Divine Songs and Meditacions
and Margaret Cavendish's
Poems and Fancies
in 1653. Many of Mary Carey's unpublished "Meditations and Poems" must have been written in this period, as were many of Katherine Philips's poems (published in 1664).
Anne Bradstreet, by virtue of being an American émigrée, has received a good deal of critical attention. She is not primarily a lyric poet. Her most ambitious and best poemslike those of Margaret Cavendishare expository and encyclopedic in design. The learning and ambition of these poems are more impressive than her better-known personal lyrics, which are moving and dignified in their plainness, but rarely striking in language or thought. "Eliza," Ann Collins, and Mary Carey are all more impressive as lyric poets. The author of
Eliza's Babes: or the Virgins-Offering
is a very accomplished mock-"Cavalier" religious poet. In "The Dart" she uses the title image as effectively as Crashaw does, and with Herrick-like succinctness: ''Shoot from above / Thou God of Love, / And with heav'ns dart / Wound my blest heart." "To a Friend for her Naked Breasts" is tonally a very complex poem combining admiration for audacity with an intense awareness of sin.
Ann Collins does not show the direct influence of Herbert, but his volume is clearly prominent among the cultural preconditions for hers. Collins brings a powerful intellectual grasp of Calvinist theology to bear on the details of her own psychological experience. In a "Song" beginning "The Winter of my infancy being over-past" Collins uses winter and spring imagery in as sophisticated and striking a way as
 
Page 251
Vaughan does in "Regeneration." The "fruit most rare" ("That is not common with every woman") of her ''garden . . . enclosed" is that "Which Grace doth nourish and cause to flourish." Syntactic elegance and theological precision come together here.
Mary Carey's meditations and poems exist only in manuscript. She is a witty and audacious religious poet. In a poem on the death of her fourth (and, until then, only surviving) child she "commands" God: "Change with me; doe, as I have done / Give me Thy all; Even thy deare sonne." In a remarkable poem, "Upon ye Sight of my abortive Birth" Carey both keeps the actual "little Embrio, voyd of life, and feature" in mind and transforms it into a metaphor that helps her come to terms with her experience. The culminating prayer is "Lett not my hart (as doth my wombe) miscarrie." This is one of the most convincingly triumphant "affliction" poems of the seventeenth century.
Katherine Philips was the most celebrated woman poet of the century; she deserves a prominent place among the "Cavaliers." Like Carew, Suckling, Cartwright, and others, she easily assimilates the influences of both Donne and Jonson. She is very fond of both the couplet style of the Jonsonian epistle and the short quatrains of Donne's "Exstasie." She has a gift for phrasing, for cadence, and for poetic designfor creating whole poems with an intelligible movement and a genuine conclusion. Along with Lovelaceto whom she is perhaps most poetically kinPhilips ranks as one of the great poets of the "Cavalier winter," and especially, of friendship. She makes "coterie poetry" into an ideology; she is probably to be believed when she expresses horror at the fact that her poems have been (and therefore must be) printed. She applies Donnean metaphysics to the theme of friendship"Souls are grown, / By an incomparable mixture, One." Her sense of the social nature of identity is profound"We are ourselves but by rebound." For "Friendship in Embleme," Philips adopts Donne's famous compasses (from "A valediction forbidding mourning"). She sees friendship as both better than marriagepurer and freer from constraintand necessary to marriage, which must either "turn to Friendship or to Misery." "Sympathy" is the virtue or quality that she primarily celebrates. That "Souls no sexes have" (see "A Friend") is fundamental to her conception of friendship. No wonder the elegists praising Philips had problems with traditional gender distinctions. Cowley solved the problem by upping the ante: "'Tis solid, and 'tis manly all, / Or rather, 'tis Angelical."
 
Page 252
Epilogue: Marvell and the Restoration
If Andrew Marvell had not existed, a survey like this might have had to invent him. Marvell wrote at least one major lyric in each of the major modes of the English lyric from Donne to the Restoration. "On a Drop of Dew" is an emblematic nature poem that gracefully balances immanence and transcendencebetween which poles, as we have seen, Vaughan's poetry shuttled. "The Garden" continues and deepens the philosophical theme, but adds to it the theme of retirement so important to the ''Cavalier" tradition (though Marvell was never a royalist). Again, Donne and Jonson are both strongly in evidence. "The Definition of Love" uses Donnean quatrains and Donnean imagery (drawn from mathematics, mapmaking, and astronomy) to "define" a rather un-Donnean state of mind, "Magnanimous Despair." "To his Coy Mistress" develops one of the great Jonsonian and "Cavalier" themes, carpe diem, in a most un-"Cavalier" way, so that the "persuasion to enjoy" turns into a mutual suicide pact.
Marvell inhabited poetic traditions with remarkable completeness. He even, in one poem, "The Coronet," adopted the mode of Herbertian self-mocking narrative, andfollowing "Jordan" (II), but in his own termsconfronted the essential impurity of his own poetic piety. But Marvell did not remain a lyric poet. Just as we see Donne moving from satire to lyric at the beginning of our period, we watch Marvell moving from lyric to satire at the end of it. Marvell continued to write after the Restoration, but his modes became satire and prose.
After the much-desired Restoration, Vaughan noted somewhat bemusedly (in a poem celebrating Katherine Philips as a pre-Restoration poet): "since the thunder left our air / [The] laurels look not half so fair." Not until the first half of the twentieth century did the lyric regain the position that it had in the first half of the seventeenth.

Other books

Whispers of Betrayal by Michael Dobbs
City Girl by Judy Griffith Gill
Le Divorce by Diane Johnson
The Seduction by Laura Lee Guhrke
Johannes Cabal The Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
The Cost of Lunch, Etc. by Marge Piercy
Spirit's Chosen by Esther Friesner
Lulu Bell and the Circus Pup by Belinda Murrell
Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson