The Complete Poems
Page 73
14. task-master Cp. the parable of the vineyard (Matt. 20. 1–16). Those who began to labour late received the same reward as those who had worked throughout the day.
Sonnet VIII (‘Captain or colonel’)
Date: November? 1642. The Civil War had begun on 22 August 1642. After the battle of Edgehill (23 October 1642), the Parliamentarian army retreated, leaving the road to London undefended. The Royalist forces advanced, causing panic in the city. The London trained bands were hastily assembled, and marched out to face Charles’s army on Turnham Green, just a few miles from M.’s house on Aldersgate Street. Battle was averted when Charles ordered a retreat (13 November). The sonnet is untitled in 1645 and 1673, but in TMS there is a fair copy in the hand of an amanuensis entitled ‘On his door when the City expected an assault’. This is erased, and ‘When the assault was intended to the City’ substituted in M.’s hand (with the date ‘1642’, later crossed through).
1. colonel Three syllables, pronounced ‘coronel’. See the account in OED (which states that the accent in seventeenth-century verse was often on the last syllable).
2. defenceless doors M.’s house lay outside the city walls.
3. If deed of honour did thee ever please] 1673; if ever deed of honour did thee please TMS, 1645.
5. charms both ‘songs’ and ‘magic spells’ (Latin carmina).
6. gentle noble, courteous.
10. Emathian conqueror Alexander the Great. M. is alluding to the sack of Thebes in 335 BC, when Alexander spared only the house where Pindar had lived (Plutarch, Alexander 11, Pliny vii 29). ‘Emathia’ is a district of Macedon.
12. repeated air the reciting of the chorus (Latin idiom).
13. Electra‘s poet Euripides. After Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan general Lysander called a council to decide the conquered city’s fate (404 BC). The Theban envoy proposed that Athens be destroyed and its people enslaved. A man from Phocis then sang the first chorus from Euripides’ Electra. The whole council melted with compassion and could not destroy a city which had produced such great men (Plutarch, Lysander 15).
14. walls Warton objected that the walls of Athens were not saved, but torn down to the sound of flutes. Modern critics therefore take walls to mean ‘houses’. But M. is more accurate than his critics. The Spartans razed the Long Walls and the Piraeus circuit, but spared the Athenian city wall (Plutarch, Lysander 14, Xenophon, Hellenica II ii 20, Diodorus Siculus XIII cvii 4).
Sonnet IX (‘Lady that in the prime’)
Date: c. 1642–45. The poem follows Sonnet VIII in TMS, which suggests that it was written after 1642. The lady’s identity is unknown.
1. prime the ‘springtime’ of human life (OED 8).
2. the broad way Cp. Matt. 7. 13: ‘Broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereat.’
and the green Cp. Job 8. 12–13 on the ‘greenness’ of ‘the paths of all that forget God’. Cp. also Samuel Daniel, Delia 6: ‘green paths of youth and love’.
3–4. those few… Truth Cp. Matt. 7. 14: ‘narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it’. The hill of truth was a commonplace. Cp. Hesiod, WD 287–92, Plato, Republic ii 364, Donne, Satire III 79f.
5. better part See Luke 10. 39–42.
Mary, Martha’s sister, sat at Jesus’s feet while Martha was burdened with chores. When Martha complained, Jesus said: ‘one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen that good part’.
Ruth Unlike Orpah, Ruth chose to abandon her home in Moab and live with Naomi, her Hebrew mother-in-law (Ruth 1. 16).
6. overween are presumptuous.
7. fret their spleen consume themselves with spite.
9–14. Thy… pure alluding to the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matt. 25. 1–13). The wise ones took oil for their lamps and so were admitted to the marriage feast.
11. hope that reaps not shame Cp. Rom. 5. 5 (‘hope maketh not ashamed’) and Gal. 6. 7 (‘whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap’).
12. feastful festive.
Sonnet X (‘Daughter to that good Earl’)
Date: c. 1642–5. The fair copy in TMS is entitled ‘To the Lady Margaret Ley’. Lady Margaret was the daughter of James Ley (1550–1629), Earl of Marlborough from 1626. After a distinguished career as lawyer and judge (he was made Lord Chief Justice in 1622), Ley retired from the Bench in 1624 to become Lord High Treasurer. But proving less useful in this position than Charles had wished, he resigned his post in 1628 to assume the less important office of Lord President of the Council. He died on 14 March 1629.
Most of the Earl’s family supported the King in the Civil War, but Lady Margaret’s husband, John Hobson, fought for Parliament. Edward Phillips, M.’s nephew and biographer, reports that Lady Margaret and her husband were M.’s near neighbours and close friends in the 1640s after his wife had left him.
1–10. M. follows the Horatian tradition of beginning a poem of praise by referring to the addressee’s descent. Cp. Sonnet XVIII (‘Lawrence of virtuous father’) and Sonnet XVIII (‘Cyriack, whose grandsire’).
3. fee bribe (OED sb2 10c). M. may imply a contrast with Bacon, at whose trial for corruption the Earl had presided (1621). Honigmann and Carey cite some gossip about the Earl’s own shady dealings, but M.’s praise is echoed by Thomas Fuller, who in The Worthies of England (1662) describes the Earl as ‘a person of great gravity, ability, and integrity’.
4. left them both Ley retired as Lord President of the Council on 14 December 1628. Clarendon says that he ‘was removed under pretence of his age and disability for the work’.
5–6. sad breaking… Broke him Parliament was dissolved on 10 March 1629 amidst much tumult (the Speaker was forcibly held down in his chair while the Commons passed resolutions condemning the King’s policies). The Earl died four days later, aged seventy-nine. Charles ruled without Parliament for the next eleven years. Breaking came to be a technical term for dissolving Parliament, but the earliest instance is from 1715 (OED ‘break’ 2f).
6. dishonest shameful (OED 1).
7. Chaeronea where King Philip II of Macedon conquered the Thebans and Athenians in 338 BC.
8. old man eloquent the Athenian orator Isocrates, aged ninety-eight in 338 BC. M. probably errs in thinking that he mourned the battle’s outcome. Isocrates had urged Philip to unite the Greeks, and (if Letter 3 is genuine) he did so again after Chaeronea. Patterson (40) detects some sinister motive in M.’s inaccuracy, but M. is true to his (then respectable) source, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who reports that Isocrates starved himself after Chaeronea so as not to outlive the good of Athens (Isocrates 1).
9. later born, than to born too late to. The Earl was about sixty when M. and Margaret were born.
Arcades
This ‘entertainment’ (also called ‘a masque’ in TMS) was performed at an unknown date early in the 1630s for Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby, then aged about seventy. She had long been associated with poets. Spenser had dedicated poems to her, Marston had composed a masque in her honour (1607), and she had participated in Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) and Masque of Beauty (1607). Her first husband (to whom she owed her title) was Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby (d. 1594). In 1600 she married Sir Thomas Egerton (d. 1617), and her daughter married his son, Sir John. John Egerton became Earl of Bridgewater in 1617, and M.’s A Masque (Comus) was performed in his honour (1634). The ‘noble persons’ of the Countess’s family in Arcades may have included some of the Earl’s children who acted in A Masque. M.’s friend Henry Lawes, who composed the music for A Masque, had been music tutor to the Earl’s children since 1626, and so probably managed both performances.
The ‘Arcades’ of the title are inhabitants of Arcadia, a mountainous area in Greece associated with pastoral poetry in Virgil’s Eclogues and Renaissance pastoral fictions. [stage direction] seat of state the chair in which the Countess sat as principal spectator.
5. (and 17). This this is she Cp. J
onson, Entertainment at Althorp (1616) 113–14 (‘This is she / This is she’) and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) 308: ‘She, she it is’.
8. raise *laud, extol (OED 18d).
9. erst formerly (referring to previous poetic tributes to the Countess, such as those of Spenser and Marston).
12. Less than half Cp. I Kings 10. 7 (the Queen of Sheba’s words to Solomon): ‘I believed not the words, until I came… and behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard’.
14. state canopy over a throne (OED 20b).
20. Latona mother of Apollo and Diana.
21. Cybele a Phrygian goddess, identified with Rhea (Jove’s mother). Virgil (Aen. vi 784–7) refers to her turreted crown (hence towered) and describes her as holding a hundred of her grandchildren.
23. give her odds compete with her on equal terms.
24. this clime See PL ix 44–5n for the theory that northern climates were unfavourable to creative genius.
[stage direction] Genius protective local deity. Cp. II Penseroso 154 and Lycidas 183.
26. gentle swains well-born servants (an oxymoron).
28. Arcady Arcadia.
30. secret sluice hidden channel (translating occultas… vias, Virgil, Aen. iii 695).
31. Arethuse one of Diana’s nymphs. She excited the passion of the Arcadian river-god Alpheus when she bathed naked in his waters. He pursued her, but Diana turned her into a river and cleft the ground beneath her feet. Still pursued by Alpheus, Arethusa flowed under the earth and rose as a fountain on the isle of Ortygia, just off Sicily (Ovid, Met. v 574–61, Virgil, Aen. iii 694–6).
32. breathing roses both ‘roses emitting fragrance’ and ‘human roses’.
33. silver-buskined wearing high silver boots.
34. free noble, generous (OED 4a).
37. reverence bow (OED 2).
39. solemnity festival, occasion of ceremony (OED 2).
41. shallow-searching looking superficially. Fame rumour.
42. shades trees.
44. lot divinely appointed destiny.
pow’r deity.
47. ringlets *curled locks (OED 3). M. likens the leaves to intricate (quaint) and sportive (wanton) human hair. Cp. Eve’s ‘wanton ringlets’ (PL iv 306). The echo of ‘quaint mazes in the wanton green’ (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream II i 99) also suggests ‘fairy ring’ (OED ‘ringlet’ 2).
49. noisome injurious.
blasting withering.
50. evil dew mildew. Cp. Shakespeare, The Tempest I ii 321: ‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed’.
51. thwarting thunder blue lightning cutting across the sky. Cp. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I iii 50: ‘the cross blue lightning’. Blue fire was associated with ghosts and devils (OED 1c).
52. cross adverse, thwarting.
planet Saturn, the planet of malign astrological aspect (hence dire-looking).
53. cankered *venomous (OED 4).
worm the cankerworm (a caterpillar that destroys buds and leaves). Cp. Lycidas 45.
54. fetch my round walk my circuit.
57. tasselled horn hunting horn. Cp. L’Allegro 53–6.
59. Number my ranks count my rows (of trees), like an officer inspecting the ranks. Cp. PL i 567–71.
60. puissant… murmurs magic charms. Cp. A Masque 526.
63. celestial Sirens’ harmony the Music of the Spheres. The allusion is not to Homer’s Sirens, but to those in Plato’s myth of Er (Republic x 616–17). Plato depicts the universe as eight concentric whorls threaded on a spindle of adamant. Necessity holds the spindle on her knees, while her daughters (the Fates Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos) rotate the whorls. On the rim of each whorl stands a Siren, who sings a single note as she is borne around. Together, the eight Sirens produce a harmony. M. has nine Sirens to accord with the nine Ptolemaic spheres. Cp. Solemn Music 1–2, Nativity 131.
64. enfolded concentric.
65. those that hold… shears the Fates. Strictly speaking, Atropos alone held the shears that cut the thread of life.
vital fatal to life (OED 6).
71. measured *having a marked rhythm (OED 3b).
72–3. none… unpurgèd ear Pythagorean doctrine held that our physical nature made it impossible for us to hear the Music of the Spheres. See Nativity 125n and cp. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice V i 64–5: ‘But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it’.
73. mould earth as the material of the human body (OED 4).
74. blaze proclaim as with a trumpet (OED v2 2), with a hint of ‘shine, be conspicuous’ (OED v1 6); notice lustre (76).
77. hit imitate exactly (OED 14).
81. state chair of state (OED 20). The Countess would have been sitting opposite the stage. The masquers now move towards her, as was customary at the conclusion of a masque.
82. stem stock, descent.
84. enamelled beautified with various colours (OED 3), thus ‘full of flowers’. Cp. Lycidas 139.
89. star-proof proof against malignant astral influences (see line 52).
94. Queen The Countess was a Queen (of the Isle of Man), but here the title might be hyperbole (cp. deity). I owe this point to Jeremy Maule.
97. Ladon a river in Arcadia. Ovid speaks of its sandy banks (Met. i 702).
98–102. Lyncaeus… Cyllene… Erymanth… Maenalus Arcadian mountains associated with Pan.
98. hoar ancient and white with snow. Cp. L‘Allegro 55.
99. Trip dance.
ranks rows (of trees and dancers).
106. Syrinx an Arcadian nymph pursued by Pan. She was changed into reeds when she reached the river Ladon (Ovid, Met. i 689–712).
Lycidas
On 10 August 1637 Edward King, a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and a former classmate of M.’s, drowned in the Irish Sea. His body was not recovered. Lycidas is dated November 1637 in TMS. It was first published as the last English poem in a commemorative volume, Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638), a collection of Latin, Greek, and English poems by King’s Cambridge contemporaries. The present text follows 1645, but freely draws on the punctuation of 1638 in places where it is clearly superior.
M.’s poem is a pastoral elegy, a form established in the third century BC when Theocritus composed his lament for Daphnis (Idylll). Other classical poems in the genre include Bion’s Lament for Adonis, Moschus’s Lament for Bion, and Virgil’s Eclogue X. M.’s poem includes many traditional features, such as the procession of mourners and the lament of nature, but he omits the refrain, which was prominent in ancient examples of the form. In pastoral elegy the poet and his subject are described as shepherds. Christian poets of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were therefore able to combine classical decorum with allusions to the bad shepherds of Ezekiel 34, John 10 and other scriptural passages. Thus the pastoral elegy became a vehicle for anti-ecclesiastical satire. Examples include the Eclogues of Petrarch (VI and VII) and Mantuan (IX). M.’s poem stands firmly in this tradition – most obviously in St Peter’s ‘digression’ (108–31), though political references may be found throughout the poem. The Laudian censorship was still strong in 1637, so M. had to word his criticisms carefully. On 30 June 1637 Bastwick, Burton and Prynne had had their ears cropped and been sentenced to life imprisonment for publishing anti-prelatical pamphlets. Burton and Prynne were in prison-ships on the Irish Sea when M. wrote Lycidas. M. signed the poem ‘J.M.’ in 1638.
Headnote. M. added the headnote in 1645 when the Anglican censorship had fallen. 1638 has no headnote. TMS has only the first sentence.
monody a mournful ode, often a funeral song, sung by a single voice.
1. Yet once more Cp. Heb. 12. 26–7: ‘Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain’.
laurels an emblem of poetry, sacred to Apollo.
ivy an emblem of frenzy, immortality, poetry, or learning, sacred to Bacchus. Horace calls ivy ‘the reward of poets’ brows’ (Odes I i 29). Petrarch was crowned with laurel, myrtle and ivy in 1341.
never sere never withered (i.e. evergreen).
3. crude unripe (OED 4). Cp. Sonnet VII 7: ‘inward ripeness doth much less appear’.
4. rude unskilled.
5. Shatter both ‘scatter’ (OED 1) and ‘destroy’. *mellowing OED’s earliest participial instance.
6. dear heartfelt (OED a1 7a) and dire (OED a2 2).
8. ere his prime Edward King drowned at the age of twenty-five.
8–9. Lycidas… Young Lycidas The repetition of a name for pathetic effect is common in pastoral. Cp. Virgil, Ecl. v 50–53, Castiglione, Alcon
24–6, Spenser, Astrophel 7–8, Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island ix 3, and M.’s Fair Infant 25–6.
10. Who would not sing for Lycidas? Cp. Virgil, Ecl. x 3: neget quis carmina Gallo? (‘Who would not sing for Gallus?’).
10–11. he knew… Himself ‘he himself knew how’. Cp. also the Delphic maxim ‘know thyself’ (Plato, Protagoras 343B).
11. to… rhyme King had written encomiastic Latin verses.
13. welter of a dead body: to be tossed on the waves (OED 3b). parching drying (impossible in water).
14. meed recompense.
tear elegy. A common metonymy, as in Spenser’s The Teares of the Muses.
15. Begin then Cp. the refrains urging the Muses to ‘begin’ in Theocritus i, Moschus, Lament for Bion, and Virgil, Eel. viii.
well the Muses’ fountain (either Aganippe on Mount Helicon or the Pierian spring at the foot of Mount Olympus).
17. somewhat loudly Cp. Virgil, Ecl. iv 1: ‘Sicilian Muses, let us sing a somewhat loftier strain’ (paulo maiora canamus).
18. coy shyly reserved (OED 2).
19. Muse poet under the guidance of a Muse (OED 2c).