but the best of it has great sweetness and grace. The exultant Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines, And if the earth can show the like again, Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men. Next to Browne may be mentioned his friend, George Wither. Wither (1588-1667), much beloved of Lamb and of good critics before him and after. After a youthful volume of satires, which caused him to be imprisoned in the Marshalsea, he published successively the volumes which contain his best work-The Shepherd's Hunting (1615), Fidelia (1617), and Philarete (1622). Wither's pastorals have all the joy of Browne's, with something more of intimacy. Lacking Wordsworth's high transcendentalism, he used poetry after Wordsworth's fashion to show the beauty of simple thingsan English Christmastide, a child in its cradle, the humble grace of the grateful and obsequious marigold'. The religious poetry of his later years has been unfairly disparaged. Though not of his best, it contains much that is beautiful and characteristic of his quiet, happy genius. High place among the Spenserians must be accorded to the Giles and brothers, Giles and Phineas Fletcher (1588-1623 and 1582- Phineas 1650), sons of Giles the sonneteer, and cousins of the more Fletcher. famous John. The chief work of Giles the younger is his long poem, Christ's Victory and Triumph (1610), written in an eightlined stanza of his own devising. Giles, like Phineas, was a strongly religious man, and his religion has passed into his verse and helped to give it its distinctive fervour and beauty. Particularly impressive is the passage in the first book, in which Mercy pleads to God for Man, and overcomes the stern prompting of Justice. Spenser's influence may be seen in Fletcher's fine use of allegory, in the high purpose of his work, in the sweep and flow and majesty of his stanza, and in the frequent exquisiteness of his descriptive passages. Here, for instance, is the stanza describing the joy of earth at the Saviour's resurrection : Th' engladded Spring, forgetful now to weep, The waking swallow broke her half year's sleep, And every bush lay deeply purpured With violets; the wood's late-wintry head Wide flaming primroses set all on fire, And his bald trees put on their green attire, Among whose infant leaves the joyous birds conspire. Phineas Fletcher has left much more work than Giles, and. a good deal of this is of the lighter kind. To this class belong The portal hard and dry all hung around Whose open gate drags in each voice and sound, The entrance winding, lest some violence Might fright the Judge with sudden influence, Or some unwelcome guest might vex the busy sense. It is curious to find amid metrical descriptions of the bile, spleen, phlegm, and gall, stanzas in praise of Elizabeth, and some really fine passages of natural description. When Fletcher passes from humanity's outward case to the soul within, poetry results more naturally, and there are some impressive Spenserian personifications, as, for instance, that of Despair in the Twelfth Canto. The Apollyonists and The Purple Island, as well as Christ's Victory and Triumph, were familiar to Milton, and their influence is evident in Paradise Lost. Campion. Thomas Campion (1567-1619) is memorable for his treatise on English prosody, for a few masques, and for the lyrics contained in his four Books of Airs (1601, 1612, 1617). The treatise, as has been shown elsewhere, attempted to demonstrate the superiority of rhymeless over rhymed English lyric. Campion's own practice disproved the contention, for his best lyrics are rhymed-for instance, the beautiful 'Follow your saint', There is a garden in her face', and 'Now winter nights enlarge'; yet a handful of his rhymeless lyrics-as Rosecheeked Laura, come' and 'Hark all you ladies '-are so exquisite as to more than justify his use of this form. Many of his metrical ambiguities are accounted for when it is remembered that his songs were written to music of his own composition. He had the true lyric gift, and Henley is less than just to him when he dismisses him as a curious metrist'. Dɔnne. In John Donne (1573-1631) we encounter a mightier than Campion, a great poet who had a profound influence on succeed ing poetry. Comparatively little of Donne's verse was pub. lished during his lifetime: a full edition of it appeared in 1635. The most important of his earlier poems were his Songs and Sonnets, his Elegies, and his Satires. The Satires were written in a style of deliberate harshness-a harshness adopted, we can hardly doubt, in direct imitation of the style of Persius. Like the satires of Marston and Hall, they hit hard at certain characters and customs of the time. Perhaps the most vivid of them is the fourth, with its picture of the tedious, travelled 'Macaron' or fop. The third is serious and reflective; throughout the series there are constant gleams of wit and vision. They are written in a loose and freely overrun form of the couplet, which clearly aims at a conversational effect, and is in striking contrast to the stricter form used by Donne in the Anniversaries and elsewhere. For a great while the Satires were regarded as Donne's most important and characteristic work. Their influence is strongly evident in Dryden, and they were copied by Pope. Our own age attaches more importance to the songs and elegies. In these Donne 1 breaks with the Petrarchan tradition in so far as it involves the use of formal and courtly compliment; yet much of Renaissance Platonism survives in his constant sense of the ideal world behind the visible, and in his contempt for the flesh as that which thwarts the soul. Occasionally in these earlier poems-as in the famous 'Sweetest love, I do not go' addressed to his wife-the ideal is foremost, and the beauty and power of the soul, and of love, are exquisitely vindicated; but in very many of them contempt has become the motive force, and the poet interprets life and love cynically and sensually. Yet Donne's cynicism is no cold principle of negation; it has intensity and passion; and the fierce defiant sensuality of the elegies is lightened by his constant wit and strange possessing imagery. Occasionally, too, love, even in these poems, wins free of cynicism, and renders the pure homage of The Picture. The Progress of the Soul, a curious study in metempsychosis, is thoroughly characteristic of Donne's genius. His Verse Epistles are largely autobiographical, and contain The Calm and The Storm, of which the first was justly approved by Jonson. His later devotional poems, like his earlier love poems, are strained and artificial in form, but sincere in their craving for utter self-revelation. Perhaps the most profound and beautiful of all his poems is the second of the two Anniversaries, nominally a funeral elegy upon Mistress Elizabeth Drury, but actually a passionate affirmation of the soul's worth, and of its triumph over death. The music of Donne's verse is often as unearthly as the quality of his thought. Frequently it baffles the ear; yet much in him that may at first seem dissonance is in reality the subtlest melody. At its best his lyric has an intensity and Cf. H. J. C. Grierson, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iv, p. 195 Drummond. Jonson. a strangeness which are without parallel in our literature. But it was rather by his imagery than by his rhythm that he made his profound effect upon English poetry. His verse is packed with symbols, now fantastic, now startling through their very homeliness, but nearly always fraught with haunting suggestion. Two quotations from the second Anniversary will serve to show the range of his imagination : and : Think then, my soul, that death is but a groom her pure and eloquent blood The moods expressed in Donne's poetry were infinitely various, ranging from desire and jealousy to adoration, and that brooding on death which is part of the Renaissance soul. He is the first of the poets styled by Johnson' metaphysical'. Many men of the next generation hold of him, though too often with a difference; for in their poetry the form constantly persists after the soul has departed, so that symbolism becomes mere 'conceit'. Donne is a poet of the 'decadence'; but with him, as with so many others, decadence is a variation, and not a failure, of strength and beauty. In many moods we may prefer his broken yet intense music to the organ roll of Milton. A true poet, though a lesser one than either Donne or Jonson, is William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). Drummond's chaste gift of expression and finely imaginative habit of mind are perhaps seen at their best in the madrigals, sonnets, songs, and elegies which were published in the second edition of his Tears on the Death of Moeliades (1616). Many of the poems in this collection attain a very high level of beauty, and display their author's poignant sense of tragedy in life. Under the title of Forth Feasting (1617) Drummond published some admirably turned but uninspired verses on the occasion of the king's visit to Scotland. His Flowers of Sion (1623) consists of religious verse which is often of quite remarkable beauty. Drummond, with a little more strength, would have been a very great poet indeed. His sonnets and those of his friend, the Earl of Stirling, are noticed elsewhere. Lord Stirling is also memorable for his interesting Monarchical Tragedies of Croesus, Darius, Alexander, and Julius Caesar. An influence even more important than Donne's is that of Ben Jonson, whose lyric poetry is chiefly contained in his collections The Forest, Underwoods, and Charis, and in numerous passages of his plays and masques. He, no less than Donne, represents a reaction against the Petrarchan tradition, with its formal and outworn imagery; but in his case the cure was provided, not through the substitution of a new and more vital symbolism, but by recourse to the clear and balanced beauty of the best classical lyric. Jonson strove to bring into English poetry the restraint, simplicity, and strength of Greek and Latin song. Several of his own songs are paraphrases of classical originals; and even where there is no direct debt of this kind, the influence of the old lyrists is powerful. It appears in the beautiful Hymn to Diana and Song to Celia ('Drink to me only with thine eyes'), in the famous elegy, Though beauty be the mask of praise', and in the Ode on Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison. Jonson's massive virility is evident even in his more delicate and highly wrought verse. Perhaps his least satisfactory poems are his satirical epigrams, written in imitation of Martial, yet showing little of Martial's wit and neatness. In respect of lyric poetry as of much else, Jonson's influence is strongly evident in the practice of the young men who gathered round him at the Devil Tavern and were proud to be styled his 'sons'. Notice of these must be reserved for a fresh chapter. CHAPTER XV CAROLINE POETRY Fashions in contemporary poetry - Herrick, Carew, Randolph, Suckling, Lovelace - Religious Poetry: Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan, and others Developments of the Couplet - Waller, Denham, Cowley, Marvell Minors. As has been indicated in the previous chapter, the dominating influences in Elizabethan lyric poetry, the Petrarchan and the Spenserian, were towards the end of the period giving way to the new forms and forces exemplified after widely different fashions in the poetry of Jonson and Donne. The greatest poet of the school of Jonson-in some ways the greatest lyrist of the English Renaissance was Robert Herrick (1591- Herrick. 1674), whose fame rests upon his two volumes of poems, respectively religious and secular, Noble Numbers (1647) and Hesperides (1648). Herrick was a sworn disciple and admirer of Jonson, and had partaken of those lyrick feasts' held at 'the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun' where each verse of his Master's outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine'. To Jonson he prays: When I a verse shall make, His prayer is not merely an outburst of personal affection, but a profession of artistic faith. The classical grace and perfection |