Caroline Poetry: Metaphysicals and Cavaliers
by David Hamilton (August 2014)
This essay on an interesting but ignored aspect of English literature is from my forthcoming book: Some Literary Essays: Comments and Insights (Booklocker).
There were two groups with recognisable styles in the Caroline or the Stuart period (1603–1714) the Metaphysicals and Cavaliers. T.S. Eliot was a great admirer of the movement known as the Metaphysical poets, especially John Donne. His critical appraisal rehabilitated Donne in the second decades of the twentieth century. Donne’s style was crude compared to Ben Jonson and more suited to Verse Satire. Many of these poems show the use of technique but not always depth of meaning.
John Donne (1572 – 1631) in his early life was a womaniser and wrote many love poems. He also wrote verse satires. He travelled widely and later turned to religion. He wrote original secular poems and his love poetry turned on paradox and puns which challenged the hackneyed Petrarchan of Sir Phillip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. He was an intellectual poet in the sense that he used argument and acted in different mental states and also used riddles. His verse was not metrical and he lost favour till rehabilitated by Eliot in the early twentieth century.
Ben Jonson (1572 – 1637), his rival influence used his classical learning in his poetry and drama. Some of his better-known poems are virtual translations of Greek or Roman originals and have an attention to form and style. Jonson avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that pre-occupied Elizabethan classicists and accepted both rhyme and stress and imitated the classical qualities of simplicity, restraint, and precision.
Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell and others not so, like Richard Crashaw, Henry King, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Carew, John Cleveland, Sir Richard Lovelace, Sir John Denham, Edward Waller and Charles Cotton.
These features conversely were admired and imitated by succeeding poets.
The effect was called “Strong line poetry” for Donne and his imitators who could suggest affirmation or criticism. It was not known as Metaphysical until Dryden and Doctor Johnson wrote about it. Thomas Carew, in the most perceptive of the elegies on Donne praised the way his, “Imperious wit and giant fancy had made our stubborn language bend and had produced a line of masculine expression.”
The followers of Jonson spurned strong lines and abstruse fancies and strove for a smooth elegance of style a plainness, even a simplicity of style. They were thoroughgoing classicists. Robert Herrick, a devoted admirer of Jonson, wrote a charming if fawning tribute, “Prayer to Ben Jonson.” He uses religion for this prayer-poem:
When I a verse shall make,
Saint Ben to aid me.
Make the way smooth for me,
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.
When I a verse shall make,
Saint Ben to aid me.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without meed of some melodious tear.
I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize
His artificial grief that scans his eyes;
Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
Confine them to the Muses’ rosary?
I am no poet here; my pen’s the spout
Where the rain-water of my eyes runs out,
In pity of that name, whose fate we see
Thus copied out in grief’s hydrography.
The Muses are not mermaids, though upon
His death the ocean might turn Helicon.
The sea’s too rough for verse; who rhymes upon’t
With Xerxes strives to fetter th’ Hellespont.
My tears will keep no channel, know no laws
To guide their streams, but like the waves, their cause,
Run with disturbance till they swallow me
As a description of his misery.
At that time Abraham Cowley was regarded as the greatest poet since the restoration. He used a philosophical argument about the nature of identity in a love poem that justifies the lover’s lack of constancy. A common metaphysical trait was to produce an outrageous argument against a commonplace of the age like inconstancy:
When Love with unconfinéd wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered to her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.
….
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
His other famous work “To Lucasta Going To the Wars”, is typical of his accommodation of Metaphysical conceits to Jonsonian lyric grace and his cavalier attitude to love, which is a development into the Caroline era of an earlier courtly code of chivalry. This poem has a moderate wit shown in the conceit of the mistress and the metaphor of nunnery:
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast, and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodgëd from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this last kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thy self, so thou again art free;
Thou in another, sad as that, resend
The truest heart that lover e’er did lend.
Now turn from each. So fare our severed hearts
As the divorced soul from her body parts.
The poet begins by lamenting that the love he shared with the lady is ending as if it were like the inconstant and mutable passion of what Donne had dismissed as “Dull sublunary lovers”:
Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodgëd from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this last kiss I here surrender thee
Thou in another, sad as that, resend
Now turn from each. So fare our severed hearts
As the divorced soul from her body parts.
Henry King wrote another great poem, “The Exequy” about the death of his wife. It is lament in the form of an Elegy. His other works are negligible.
Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint,
And for sweet flowers to crown thy hearse,
Receive a strew of weeping verse
Quite melted into tears for thee.
Dear loss! since thy untimely fate
My task hath been to meditate
The library whereon I look,
Though almost blind. For thee, loved clay,
I languish out, not live, the day,
Using no other exercise
By which wet glasses I find out
How lazily time creeps about
My exercise and business is.
So I compute the weary hours
With sighs dissolvëd into showers.
The distinctive cavalier note is in the cynical indifference of the first line. This cavalier is caught exactly in the line from Stanza 3, “Suffer herself to be desired.” The passive construction makes her an object of male lust and not an independent agent. The lady like the rose that blooms in the desert will die uncommended, if she persists in her perverse coyness. This is another construction that makes her the object of another’s action. That long word uncommended is at the end of a mainly monosyllabic constructio stanza has added weight because an art of lyric is placing a long polysyllable in a context of lighter words.
Edmund Waller wrote:
Go, lovely Rose—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.
Here lies wise and valiant dust,
Huddled up ‘twixt fit and just:
Strafford, who was hurried hence
‘Twixt treason and convenience.
He spent his time here in a mist;
A Papist, yet a Calvinist.
His prince’s nearest joy, and grief;
He had, yet wanted all relief.
The prop and ruin of the state;
The people’s violent love, and hate:
One in extremes loved and abhorred.
Riddles lie here; or in a word,
Here lies blood; and let it lie
Speechless still, and never cry.
But till he had himself a Body made.
I mean till he were drest: for else so thin
He stands, as if he only fed had been
With consecrated Wafers: and the Host
Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast.
These lines play on the Thomist teaching that the Body and Blood of Christ are contained under each of the Eucharistic species and with accounts of the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, who it was said, subsisted for several years on only daily Communion and needed neither food nor drink.
Still to be neat, still to be dressed,
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfumed:
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art’s hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes but not my heart.
It is an unadorned, urban classical style. The dominant notes are simplicity and clarity, yet unobtrusively he has barbed every phrase. The structural device of neatly balancing phrases within the line leads us through from the innocuous “Still to be neat, still to be dressed” to the more suspect, “Still to be powdered, still perfumed” to the open condemnation, “All is not sweet, all is not sound”. The same device is used to point contrasting ideals in the second part of the poem:
“Give me a look, give me a face that makes simplicity a grace, they strike mine eyes but not mine heart.”
The indifferent impersonal construction stands out from the song like movement and how in the penultimate line the word “adultery” reaches back ambiguously through the references to sweet neglect, simplicity and powdering and perfuming to make us wonder what kind of feast would keep her in a constant state of readiness.
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility;–
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.
A Gyges ring they bear about them still,
They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall,
They fall like dew, and make no noise at all:
As colours steal into the pear or plum,
And air-like, leave no pression to be seen
–Carpe diem poetry was developed by Horace in Augustan Rome. Carpe diem is Latin for “Seize the day,” and this popular poetry expresses the philosophy of “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Time is fleeting, life is short, and beyond this life lies only the darkness of eternity.
Many of Herrick’s poems on the transience and flowers of youth have effects like, “To Daffodils”:
Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
As yet the early-rising sun
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
“As quick a growth to meet decay as you or anything.”
Religious lyrics
How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing. Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone Where they together All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown. These are thy wonders, Lord of power, Killing and quickning, bringing down to hell Making a chiming of a passing-bell, We say amisse, This or that is: Thy word is all, if we could spell. Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! In the coolness of the day, The old world even, God all undressed went down Without His robe, without His crown, Into His private garden, there to lay On spicy bed His sweeter head. There He found two beds of spice, A double mount of lilies in whose top Two milky fountains bubbled up. He soon resolved: “And well I like!” He cries, “My table spread Upon my bed.” This shows a major poet learning from another but developing what they adopt in new directions. Vaughan began with imitation of “The Flower” but went further than Herbert in completely identifying with the life of a plant, providing an empathic feeling with the nature of the processes of vegetable life which is one of his most distinctive contributions to 17c lyric. This is “Unprofitableness”: But since Thou didst in one sweet glance survey I threaten heaven, and from my cell Though all their merits diverse be O King of kings, give me such strength
Their sad decays, I flourish, and once more
Breathe all perfumes and spice;
I smell a dew like myrrh, and all the day
Wear in my bosom a full sun; such store
Hath one beam from Thy eyes.
But, ah, my God! What fruit hast Thou of this
What one poor leaf did ever I yet fall
To wait upon Thy wreath?
Thus Thou all day a thankless weed dost dress,
And when Th’ hast done, a stench, or fog is all
The odour I bequeath.
Of clay and frailty break and bud,
Touch’d by thy fire and breath; thy bloud,
Too, is my dew, and springing well.
But while I grow,
And stretch to thee, ayming at all
Thy stars and spangled hall,
Each fly doth taste,
Poyson, and blast
My yielding leaves; sometimes a showr
Beats them quite off; and, in an hour,
Not one poor shoot,
But the bare root,
Hid under ground, survives the fall.
Alas, frail weed!
According to their pains,
Yet love doth make that every one’s
Which any other gains,
And all which doth belong to one
To all of them pertains.
In this great war depending,
That I may here prevail at length
And ever be ascending,
Till I at last arrive to Thee
The source of all felicity!
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