In the Seventeenth Century, in England, all the religious lyrists who were Protestants were Protestants.To put it another way, as many poets as drew inspiration for their religious lyrics from the Bible drew it from the Bible. To attempt to prove these tautologies would appear to be a modest aim, but strangely enough, Barbara Lewalski manages to bungle it anyway.
The abstractions also destroy the meaning on p.ix. First it was the Bible that inspired the poets, but then it was "contemporary, English, and Protestant influences." This is a deplorable change.Contemporary influencesis so vague that it could mean anything or nothing, and the same is true of the other two words. Having read the book to the end, I can aver that in spite of her confusing verbiage, what Lewalski means here is the Bible; she keeps insisting, chapter after chapter, that her favorite poets are inspired by the Bible.
Hence a dichotomy is set up: either the Bible or "Counter Reformation, continental, and medieval Catholic resources" inspired the poets, and Lewalski sets out to prove that it was the first, not the second. I have already deplored, in this website, Professor Stanley Fish's untenable dichotomy separating the frivolous puns from the etymological puns in Paradise Lost, because a pun could be frivolous and etymological at the same time. So here; a poem could be inspired by the Bible and the Counter Reformation at the same time. In fact, it seems inevitable. Lewalski's contention that Donne was not inspired by the Counter Reformation denies Louis Lohr Martz's theory that Donne used the compositio lociof Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises to write "Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side."But if he did use Loyola's method, he could not possibly avoid using the Bible to help him envision Christ's passion. The idea, then, that "Counter Reformation" is one thing, and the Bible is another excluding it, is absurd. A closely related point is that if Lewalski collected many religious lyrics from seventeenth-century France or Spain or Italy and demonstrated that they never quoted the Bible, that would be something. And in fact, she has the audacity to suggest that somebody else do this. On page 427 she says that the comparison of Protestant poetry with Crashaw "might...be usefully extended to other national literatures in the period, most notably the French religious lyric." But she never produces a syllable of evidence that English religious poets, in comparison with continental ones, are outstanding in their preoccupation with the Bible.
She continues to cling to her idee fixe, that a poem can be inspired either by popery or by the Bible, but never both, to the end of the book. Concerning Donne's Holy Sonnet VI,"This is my play's last scene,"she writes "the speaker vividly imagines himself at the moment of death, but not by evoking a deathbed scene in the manner of an Ignatian compositio loci. Instead, the speaker calls upon the very familiar biblical metaphors of life as a pilgrimage and as an athletic race"(p.268). Take heed of that; no poet could ever imagine a scene using Loyola's method and simultaneously remember a verse from the Bible. It just isn't done.
We left her at page ix, setting up an untenable dichotomy. She proses on to page 12 where she suddenly produces a shocker.In her attempt to prove that English religious lyrists in the seventeenth century were all Protestants, she will omit Milton and Marvell because they wrote "very few" religious lyrics. This is a rule change. The class posited earlier was seventeenth-century English religious lyristsbut now it is prolific seventeenth-century English religious lyrists.Nor does Lewalski allow Herrick in her book "for he does not scrutinize his soul and his art." Now our universe is prolific seventeenth-century English religious lyrists who scrutinized their souls. But this is not the end;she throws Crashaw out because he "writes out of a very different esthetics emanating from Trent and the continental Counter Reformation," and now it is prolific seventeenth-century English religious lyrists who scrutinized their souls and were Protestants.The scope of the book has narrowed drastically,but how the research has been expedited! Undertaking to prove that these men were all Protestants, and finding one of them a papist,she just waves her magic wand and he disappears. Researchers of the world, imitate Barbara Lewalski! What results you will get, and in how little time! For example":"We shall demonstrate that all the major American novelists were born east of the Mississippi. We discount Steinbeck because he was born west of it." "We have found that tobacco is harmless by studying the histories of 10,000 healthy smokers. We threw the histories of 5,000 dying smokers in a dumpster."
I should like to look more closely at the four excluded lyrists--Milton, Marvell, Herrick and Crashaw--but first let us look again at these two entities, one roughly tantamount to Bible-reading or contemporary, English and Protestant things, the other to Counter Reformation, continental, and medieval Catholic things, of which the first now supplants the second for purposes of interpreting seventeenth-century religious verse.
"...he does not scrutinize his soul and his art in the serious terms the Protestant aesthetics demands"(p.12).
"...firmly Protestant, even Calvinist..."(p. 13). In this sentence Protestantism is opposed to "the emerging spirit of Anglicanism."
According to Protestants "Christians are at one with the Israelites of old in regard to the essence of their spiritual lives"(p. 129).
Protestant preachers exhorted their flocks to apply the psalms to themselves (p.138).
"This emphasis (on the Bible) contributed to the creation of poetry with a new depth and sophistication of psychological insight, and a new focus on the symbolic significance of the individual" (p.150).
"...biblical poetics..." (p. 147)
Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions"has often been discussed in terms of the Ignatian meditative tradition, but is more obviously related to contemporary Protestant meditation upon experience" (p.168).
"Whereas Crashaw renders an atmosphere by evoking a myriad of fleeting images from Baroque sacred art and Jesuit emblem books, the Protestant poets often interpret biblical and sacred metaphors in images which are, like the Protestant discrete emblems,strongly visual, logically precise, and elaborately detailed"(p. 197).
"Though [Donne] is in some sense a transition figure,in that his early poems display liturgical and Counter Reformation influences, the later and finerpoems are strongly imbued with characteristic Pauline themes, biblical allusions, Protestant meditative modes, and above all, the characteristic Protestant 'application to the self' of typological, meditative and emblematic patterns (p.282; italics added).
This series of quotations is already too long, but I could double it. From it, it should be plain that neither the word Protestant nor the word Counter Reformationever becomes clear at any time in all the 428 pages of Lewalski's book. There is no quotation from Knox, Calvin, Luther, or Bellarmine to clarify them; nor is there any quotation from a poet to clarify the meaning of scrutinize his soul, essence of their spiritual lives, symbolic significance of the individual, Pauline themes, application to the self of emblematic patterns. It's all a fog.
Lewalski assures us that Protestantism makes better poetry than the Counter Reformation because Protestants scrutinize their souls, because at their best they are even Calvinists, because they avoid Anglicanism (surprising, that), they are at one with the Israelites in their spiritual lives, their poetry has psychological insight, they meditate on experiences rather than on the set topics in Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, they invent logically precise metaphors, they apply emblematic patterns to themselves.No wonder Donne's finer poems are all Protestant. But Lewalski supplies not one line of poetry that clearly and unequivocally supports any of these magnificent claims. As the statements are vague and undefined, so is the intent with which she brings in her quotations. They do not pierce the fog with a beam of understanding, but thicken it.
It may be well to remember here a maxim of the New Criticism: "Poetry is one poem at a time."Hence any attempt to prove that a whole group of poets is better than another group, as for example, because they invent metaphors that are more precise, is bound to be more or less nonsense anyhow.
Having said that, I proceed to consideration of the four excluded poets and why they were excluded; and first, Milton.
In "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" here are the biblical themes: the son of heaven's eternal king,the virgin mother, the prophets (holy sages), the wise men(star-led wizards), hallowed fire from the altar touching the prophet, the shepherds, the angels, the cross, the last judgment, Mount Sinai, the old dragon, Peor, Baalim, Dagon, Moloch, Bethlehem, the virgin and her babe.
And here are the themes that are "Counter Reformation, Continental,and Medieval Catholic": heavenly muse, nature doffing her gaudy trim, the sun as her lusty paramour, the allegorical figure of Peace and her association with olives and myrtles,the halcyon, the stars' precious influence, the mighty Pan, the shepherds' loves, Cynthia, the music of the spheres, the golden age, the allegorical figures of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, wisest fate, the cessation of the oracles,Apollo leaving Delphi, the genius, the nymphs, the lares, lemures, and flamens, Thammuz, Isis, Orus, Anubis, Osiris, Typhon, the yellow-skirted fays.
That makes 30"Counter Reformation, continental and medieval Catholic" images and themes and 16 biblical ones. I readily admit that the division is artificial; for example, "the mighty Pan" in line 89 is Christ, and hence is both biblical and "continental" at the same time.Indeed, in this, the greatest religious lyric of the century or one of the half-dozen greatest, the biblical and "Counter Reformation, continental, and medieval Catholic"images and themes, pouring forth in brilliant profusion, make a work of such perfect unity and harmony as to compel the conclusion that the more a seventeenth-century religious lyric succeeds, the more perfectly the "biblical" or "Protestant" elements fuse with the "Counter Reformation, continental, and medieval Catholic" ones. Hence, Barbara Lewalski's attempt, on page ix of her book, to hypothesize that "the spectacular flowering of English religious lyric poetry in the seventeenth century" was inspired by the Bible, and to overthrow the idea that it happened in response to "Counter Reformation, continental, and medieval Catholic resources," because this attempt presupposes that these things are distinct, and pits them against one another, is the most misconceived and disastrous enterprise she could have found, had a fiasco been her sole aim.
She seems unable to decide why she left Milton out of her book. First she says he wrote "very few" religious lyrics (p.12).A brief check, however, shows 39 titles in Donne's "Divine Poems,"and 32 religious lyrics in Milton's collected poems, if the translations of the psalms are counted--and Lewalski counts Thomas Traherne's translations of the psalms as religious lyrics. So, in quantity as in quality, Milton certainly challenges comparison with Donne, who is one of five poets who get a chapter each from Lewalski. As if aware that her allegation about quantity can't be defended,on p. 427 she gives another reason for slighting Milton: his religious lyrics "mix elements derived from Protestant poetics with other generic resources." The idea is to prove that a certain kind of poetry, limited by century and genre, is all full of Protestantism, so poets in that genre and century, no matter how great, whose poetry contains stuff that is not Protestantism, must be disregarded. Had she wished, Lewalski could have used the same circular reasoning to prove that the religious lyrics of seventeenth-century England were all Catholic.
This brings us to Herrick,who is excluded because he "does not scrutinize his soul and his art." As to scrutinizing his soul, let us consider Herrick's "Litany to the Holy Spirit":
When (God knows)I'm tossed about,
Either with despair, or doubt;
Yet before the glass be out,
Sweet spirit comfort me!
When the tempter me pursu'th
With the sins of all my youth,
And half damns me with untruth;
Sweet spirit comfort me!
The holy spirit is "sweet" to Herrick, which means the poet has undergone the experience of adoption, i.e., assurance of election, without which none of the three persons of the Trinity can be "sweet" to anyone. In a moment of reflection, the poet foresees the hour of his death and prays that during that crucial time he will experience an afterglow of adoption, an echo of that certainty of salvation. Donne puts exactly the same thought in different metaphors:
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more ("A Hymn to God the Father").
A Calvinist who feared he might despair, or doubt his election, on his deathbed was actually being unusually conscientious. The Calvinist whose certainty of his own election made him presumptuous was a recognizable social type, as Shakespeare's Malvolio and Jonson's Zeal-of-the-Land Busy attest. The most earnest Puritan feared the crisis of death; Bunyan's Christian nearly drowns while crossing the river of death.
This being so, what reason have we to say that Herrick was less careful in scrutinizing his soul than Donne was?We are left to conjecture that Lewalski objects to the paganism of Hesperidesto all those verses praising Perilla, and Anthea, and Julia, often (but not always) so superior to theNoble Numbers poems that they are all of Herrick many people read; these poems might suggest that he was guilty of a certain moral frivolity or that his inspiration was "continental." But, as Herrick stated, "I write of youth, of love, and have access By these, to sing of cleanly-wantonness."His wantonness was indeed cleanly; often, as in "Corinna's Going a-Maying," it consisted only of youths and maids rolling in each other's arms in the grass before finding a priest and marrying. To find what is called in modern advertising "tough sex" one must go to the elegies and satires of Lewalski's admired Donne:
How happy were our sires in ancient time,
Who held plurality of loves no crime!
With them it was accounted charity
To stir up race of all indifferently;
Kindreds were not exempted from the bands;
Which with the Persian still in usage stands.(Elegy
XVII:Variety)
Our sires were completely promiscuous and practiced incest regularly, as they still do in Persia. Herrick's paganism is tame compared to this, and cannot be used as a pretext for excluding his poetry while including Donne's.
Inspecting the Noble Numberswe find the most probable explanation for Lewalski's statement that Herrick failed to "scrutinize his art." There are many poems on Anglo-Catholic themes. One about the virgin Mary says that the power of God penetrated her to impregnate her as a sunbeam passes through a pane of glass without cracking it, a metaphor for which Herrick is indebted to Saint Jerome's Commentary on Luke("Another," in J. Max Patrick, ed., The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick [W.W. Norton:New York, n.d.], p.509.)"The Parasceve" refers to the worshipper's preparation for the eucharist, a ceremony to include "a figured damask, or pure diaper/Over the golden altar.../The sacred towel and the holy ewer"(p.470).A poem on the virgin Mary begins "The virgin mother stood at distance there/From her son's cross, not shedding once a tear"(p.508),obviously adapting the medieval Catholic hymn "Stabat mater dolorosa."There are carols and songs for Christmas and the Feast of the Circumcision. There are also, to be sure, poems on biblical themes such as "The Dirge of Jephthah's Daughter, Sung by the Virgins." But my lasting impression is that the poems on "Counter Reformation, continental, and medieval Catholic resources" equal or preponderate over the others. In short, Herrick's Noble Numbersis yet another instance to show that it makes no sense to pit Catholic against biblical imagery and themes in these poets, much less to try to argue that the latter predominate.
Speaking of Mary,Herbert apologized to her for ignoring her, a fact that Lewalski should have noticed.Despite his desire to unfold his soul (his phrase)to Mary, Herbert was restrained by the Calvinist principle that only God could be invoked in prayer and that the cult of saints was idolatry. This principle also embarrassed Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, inasmuch as thousands of British churches were named for saints and "not a few" for Mary:
"Touching the names of Angels and Saints whereby the most of our churches are called; as the custom of so naming them is very ancient, so neither was the cause thereof at the first,nor is the use and continuance with us at this present, hurtful.That churches were consecrated unto none but the Lord only, the very general name itself doth sufficiently show, inasmuch as by plain grammatical construction, church doth signify no other thing than the Lord's house...their [the founders'] commendable purpose being not of everyone understood,they have been in latter ages construed as though they had superstitiously meant...that those places which were denominated of angels and saints should serve for the worship of so glorious creatures..." ed. Roland Bayne, London:Macmillan, 1902,p. 52.
As usual, Hooker defends pre-reformation customs while denying that they are worth anything.Herbert is franker and vents his frustration ("alas, I dare not") that James I or Charles I forbids him to unfold his soul to Mary.
Not out of envy or maliciousness
Do I forbear to crave your special aid:
I would address
My vows to thee most gladly, blessed Maid,
And Mother of my God, in my distress.
Thou art the holy mine, whence came the gold,
The great restorative for all decay
In young and old;
Thou art the cabinet where the jewel lay:
Chiefly to thee would I my soul unfold:
But now, alas, I dare not, for our king
Whom we do all jointly adore and praise,
Bids no such thing:
And where his pleasure no injunction lays,
('Tis your own case)ye never move a wing.--"To All Angels and Saints"
He says he dares not pray to Mary, yet he prays to her ("Thou art the holy mine..."), employing the rhetorical trope of negatio , described by Abraham Fraunce as "A kind of irony, a denial or refusal to speak ,... when nevertheless we speak and tell all."(Quoted in Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook of Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric,p. 131) Herbert not only laments, but subverts the ban on prayers to saints.
Henry Vaughan, trampling on Herbert's scruples,offers a lyric to Mary that threatens to put the papists in the shade:
Bright Queen of Heaven! God's Virgin Spouse
The glad world's blessed maid!
Whose beauty tied life to thy house,
And brought us saving aid.
Thou art the true loves-knot; by thee
God is made our ally...("The Knot")
(As often in Mariology, Jesus seems to disappear.)
Mary is proverbially refugio peccatorum, the person to whom one can flee when he sees no more hope for himself in Christ or his father. Who knows how many Protestants cultivated a relationship with her as a fire escape or a secret vice? John Donne kept a painting of her, an Immaculate Conception by Murillo, in his deanery; two other paintings, an Assumption and "a Madonna with Angels," were kept in Whitehall Palace by Oliver Cromwell (yes, reader, Oliver Cromwell--Antonia Fraser, Cromwell,Dell Publishing, New York, 1975, p. 529). This raises the further possibility, that, to the extent the religious lyrists of the Seventeenth Century were Protestant,it was because it was illegal to be anything else.Herbert's reason for not writing Catholic verse is clear; "I dare not." He may have spoken for many; Donne, too, implies that his reason for not praying to angels and saints is that he is forbidden to do so.(God "fears lest[he] allow" his love to them, Holy Sonnet IX, ll. 11-12).Robert Herrick's mariolatry has been noted.
Crashaw gives an indication of the pressure an English poet experienced after composing praises of a Catholic saint:
Souls are not SPANIARDS too, one freindly floud
Of BAPTISM blends thm all into a blood.
CHRIST'S faith makes but one body of all soules
And love's that body's soul, no law controwles
Our free traffique for heav'n,we may maintayne
Peace, sure, with piety, though it come from SPAIN.
What soul so e're, in any language, can
Speak heav'n like hers is my souls country-man.
Clearly, some angry critics had told him Teresa of Avila was burning in hell, and others had reminded him that her country had attacked his in 1588.
In the cases of Herrick and Milton, I have shown that poets usually considered Protestant included Catholic imagery and themes in their poetry. In the case of Crashaw I shall do the reverse, so easily that I find it embarrassing. Crashaw wrote 242 epigrams, many of them quite beautiful, each on a single verse of the Bible, such as "Luc. 2:7.Non erat iis in diversorio locus. Matth. 1:23. Dominus nobiscum. Matth. 2. Ad Infantes Martyres. (Luke 2:7.There was no room for them in the inn. Matthew 1:23. God with us. Matthew 2:16-18. To the infant martyrs."--George Walton Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw , Doubleday:Garden City, N.Y., 1970, pp. 264, 266, 288.) On p. 147 of her book Lewalski mentions something called "biblical poetics" which she says is central to the kind of poetry she values, and beyond a doubt Crashaw becomes the Hercules of this kind of poetics by turning 242 different verses of the Bible into poetry. Yet Lewalski defies this obvious fact by excluding Crashaw from her survey, thus slighting with startling indifference many recent editions of Crashaw that include the biblical epigrams, including an edition by Andrew Sabol and (are you ready for this?)Barbara Lewalski (Major Poets of the Earlier Seventeenth Century,
New York:Odyssey Press, 1973).Her complaint against Crashaw is that his inspiration is from "Trent and the continental Counter Reformation,which stresses sensory stimulation and church ritual (rather than scripture)"(p.12). By this time, what I think of opposing all these things ("Trent," etc.) to scripture needs no repetition. Is Lewalski equating the 242 epigrams with "Trent" because they are in Latin? As a reason for ousting Crashaw from her survey,that will not do. George Herbert, one of the chosen five exemplars of "biblical poetics,"wrote religious lyrics in Latin ("In Natales et Pascha Concurrenta" and "In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris G. Herbert").
The last of the four excluded poets is Marvell, and in this case Lewalski's excuse for leaving him out, that he wrote "very few" religious lyrics, must be allowed; by my count, only seven. Yet still I must insist that Lewalski probably found Marvell embarrassing owing to his failure to fit into her stereotype of the Protestant poet inspired by the Bible. He is neither biblical nor Protestant; he is not even Christian. Instead of a fallen world, he gives us a pastoral world; and instead of hymning a savior who can rescue us from it, he describes the longing of our souls for a Platonic heaven, which longing can be quite easily gratified; for example, by a gentle and painless suicide:
Then let us give Clorillo charge o'th sheep,
And thou and I'll pick poppies and them steep
In wine, and drink on't even till we weep,
So shall we smoothly pass away in sleep.("A Dialogue
between Thyrsis and Dorinda," ll. 45-48.)
To recapitulate, it would appear that Lewalski set out with a theory that seventeenth-century religious poetry was a matter of Protestant poets, inspired by the Bible, showing both their Protestantism and their biblicism when they wrote, and shunning the allure of Rome. As soon as she got started, she ran into enormous difficulties. It soon appeared that something had to go, either the theory or the facts. So she coldly plunged on, repressing the facts,
which comprised the poetry of the greatest religious lyrist of the century and three others all equal to the ones she did include.
That should be all, but this book seems to be an inexhaustible cornucopia of intellectual misdemeanors; among them, that Lewalski, as a religious believer, imagines that God inspired her school of Bible-reading poets. She says of the typical member of this school that he "seeks, strives, hopes to become a genuine correlative type with one of the biblical poets--as he may, if God so ordains"(p.245; italics added). Why does language like this go unprotested? A critic who says her favorite poems are inspired by God will soon claim her own criticism is.
Although she claims to hold the Bible in such reverence, she quotes it from memory and gets it wrong. She states that Donne's Holy Sonnet VII, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners,"contains "agents of death drawn in part from Revelation 6:8 and Ezekiel 14:21: war, famine, age, agues, tyrannies, despair, law, chance"(p.268).In fact, Revelation 6:8 has sword, hunger, death, beasts;and Ezekiel 14:21, sword, famine, beast, and pestilence. The only items which are shared by these Bible verses with Donne's list are "sword" (making the concession that that can be taken to mean "war,") and "famine" (making the concession that that is tantamount to Donne's word, "dearth.")The other six--age, agues, tyrannies, despair, law, and chance--are Donne's and are not mentioned in the Ezekiel and Revelations verses. In her eagerness to prove that her favorite poet read his Bible, Lewalski failed to read her own, and drifted from scholarship into fiction.
And lastly, there is her blithe decision in what particular order to arrange Donne's "Holy Sonnets." As with Shakespeare's sonnets, they can be put in any order, according to the editor's biographical theory, because the chronology of their composition is lost. Lewalski first argues that the "Holy Sonnets" present "the Protestant paradigm of salvation"(p.235),consistently with her grand presupposition that all this poetry is Protestant through and through; and then she announces that, of several arrangements, she prefers that of the 1635 editor because he "perceived the essential thematic concern of the twelve [sonnets] to be the analysis of states of soul attendant upon Christian regeneration"(p.235). The inclusion of the editorial labors of the 1635 editor, like the exclusion of Milton and the rest, is nothing but the gratification of a preconceived notion. She favors the 1635 editor's work because it is just what she would have done. In place of evidence supporting her conclusion, she simply offers the conclusion.