The
translation of Vergil which Aubrey says that he made here may
have been a fragment of the fourth book, The Passion of Dido
for Aeneas; but Aubrey, possibly, was thinking merely of The
Destruction of Troy, which was published in 16568.
translation of Vergil which Aubrey says that he made here may
have been a fragment of the fourth book, The Passion of Dido
for Aeneas; but Aubrey, possibly, was thinking merely of The
Destruction of Troy, which was published in 16568.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v07
(xv, 60 ff.
).
1 VIII, 722 ff. (VIII, 639 ff. ).
6
III, 223 ff. (III, 206 ff. ).
vii, 573 ff. (v11, 523 ff. ).
XV, 237 ff. (xv, 199 ff. ).
VII, 281, 282 (VII, 257, 258).
8
3
4-2
## p. 52 (#68) ##############################################
52
Writers of the Couplet
6
rimes. He frequently allowed himself, and always with good
effect, to rime two weak endings. In this freedom and variety
of use, Drayton was his master; and it is impossible to say that
Sandys did more than continue Drayton's form of couplet versi-
fication with great skill and success, and on a larger scale than his
master had employed.
Sandys returned from Virginia about 1626, when the first
complete edition of his Ovid was published. He was appointed a
gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles I, and was able to
spend the remainder of his life in long intervals of leisure, living
at the country houses of his relations and consorting with the poets
and wits whom Falkland attracted round him. To a new edition
of his Ovid, published at Oxford in 1632, Sandys gave
what perfection [his) Pen could bestow; by polishing, altering, or restoring,
the harsh, improper, or mistaken, with a nicer exactnesse than perhaps is
required in so long a labour.
He added to this edition a translation in couplets of the first book
of the Aeneid. His mind, however, as he confessed, was 'diverted
from these studies'; and he forsook 'Peneian groves and Cirrha's
caves' for Holy Scripture. His Paraphrase upon the Psalms of
David was published in 1636. Early in 1638, it appeared in a folio
a
edition, with tunes by Henry Lawes, and in company with para-
phrases of Job, Ecclesiastes, the Lamentations of Jeremiah and
the various songs of the Old and New Testament. The decasyllabic
couplet was employed in the versions of Job, Ecclesiastes and
Lamentations, in nineteen of the Psalms and in two of the mis-
cellaneous songs. Twenty-eight psalms, and three of the miscel-
laneous songs, are written in octosyllabic couplets. Thirty-six
psalms are arrangements of octosyllabic lines, with various rimes,
in stanza form. Among these should be noticed five examples of
the stanza familiar to us as that of Tennyson's In Memoriam.
Sixteen psalms are composed of trochaic heptasyllabic couplets,
and five of couplets of lines of six syllables. The remaining psalms
consist, with nine exceptions, of stanzas in which lines of eight are
mingled with lines of six or four syllables, or both. In seven of the
exceptions, the stanza is formed by a quatrain of six-syllabled lines
with alternate rimes, followed by a quatrain of four-syllabled lines,
the rimes in which are formed by the two extreme and two middle
lines respectively. The two remaining exceptions are composed of
a series of quatrains of decasyllabic lines. The paraphrase of The
Song of Solomon, published in 1641, is in octosyllabic couplets; the
tragedy entitled Christ's Passion, an imitation of Grotius's tragedy
1
.
## p. 53 (#69) ##############################################
Edmund Waller
53
on the same theme, is in decasyllabic couplets, with occasional
incursions into the eight-syllabled measure. In these later works,
Sandys's versification, if it does not achieve perfect smoothness, is re-
markably regular. The habitual parallelism of sense in single verses
of Hebrew poetry supplied natural bounds to the couplet; and only
here and there, as in the seventy-eighth psalm, does Sandys show a
tendency to run his couplets into one another. He also has aban-
doned his earlier habit of riming weak endings; and, as a general
rule, his rimes are less emphatic and consonantal than in his
Ovid.
The entry of Sandys's burial (7 March 1643/4), in the parish
register of Boxley, describes him as poetarum Anglorum sui
saeculi facile princeps; and Dryden's opinion of the ingenious
and learned Sandys' as 'the best versifier of the former age",
gives a certain colour, with a necessary qualification, to the
perhaps prejudiced encomium of the Kentish vicar. There cannot
be any question that, to the younger generation, Sandys's verse
represented a praiseworthy contrast to the straggling licence of
the couplet-writers of his day. But, to them, the new age began,
not with Sandys, but with Waller; and Waller claimed his own
poetical descent from another source. Edmund Waller was born
at Coleshill, near Amersham, on 3 March 1605/6. His earliest
known attempt in verse appears to be the poem Of the Danger His
Majesty [Being Prince] Escaped in the Road at St Andere. The
danger in question was incurred by prince Charles at Santander
in September 1623, as he was returning from his attempt to secure
a Spanish bride ; but the compliment which the poem contains to
Henrietta Maria is so essential to it, that it was probably written
retrospectively after the betrothal of Charles to the French
princess. In this early essay, Waller certainly did not attain the
complete mastery of the self-contained couplet. In one place,
four couplets occur together, each of which needs its neighbour to
complete its sense? In another, seven couplets run on in close
connection, before an appreciable pause is reached; and, even
then, an eighth is needed to bring the included comparison to an
effective close
The quantity of Waller's published verse is small in comparison
with its fame. He went from a school at High Wycombe to
Eton, and from Eton he entered King's college, Cambridge, as
a fellow commoner, in March 1619/20. His parliamentary career
seems to have begun about a year later, when, probably, he was
i Pref. to Fables (1700).
* LI. 61-68.
* LI. 89-104.
## p. 54 (#70) ##############################################
54
Writers of the Couplet
returned as member for Amersham. He sat for Ilchester in the
last parliament of James I, for Chipping Wycombe in the first
parliament of Charles I, for Amersham in the third parliament of
Charles I and the Short parliament and for St Ives in the Long
parliament. He was a prominent and famous speaker in the house
of Commons: when the troubles first broke out, he was on the
side of the popular leaders, and took part in the opposition to
ship-money. But, by 1642, he was gradually drawn closer to
the party of the via media ; and his parliamentary career was
closed, for the time, in 1643, by the discovery of his complicity in
the royalist conspiracy which became known as Waller’s plot.
He was arrested, and, after a trying interval, in which he cer-
tainly attempted to save himself by compromising others, was
fined and banished. He spent his exile in France, associating
with Hobbes and Evelyn. Pardoned at the end of 1651, he re-
turned to England. Cromwell appointed him a commissioner of
trade in 1655; and, after the restoration, he once more entered
parliament as member for Hastings. He sat for this con-
stituency till his death in 1687, playing the part of Nestor of
the house with no little self-consciousness, and using his voice
on behalf of that constitutional liberalism which embodied his
convictions.
During this long period, he wrote but little. He married twice,
and was already a widower when he first met lady Dorothy Sidney,
daughter of Robert, earl of Leicester. The lady became the
theme of several addresses celebrating her beauty and her
cruelty with charming ease and with no more than conventional
warmth. In lines written at Penshurst, amid the accompani-
ments of listening deer, beeches bowing their heads and gods
weeping rain in sympathy with the poet, the love of Astrophel
for Stella is invoked to rebuke a colder scion of the house
of Sidney. As all nature is compassionate to the sighing swain,
80 is it obsequious to the obdurate nymph. Her presence
harmonises and gives order to the park: the trees form a shady
arbour for her when she sits, an avenue when she walks. When
she comes to London, the delights of the spring are there of set
purpose to welcome her. Waller's enthusiasm goes so far as to
turn verses nominally addressed to others into compliments to
lady Dorothy. Her friend, lady Rich, dies: Waller's elegy is con-
verted into the celebration of the friendship of its subject for
Sacharissa. Her father goes abroad: the trees of Penshurst
lament his absence, and its deer, grudging to be slain by any
## p. 55 (#71) ##############################################
Waller's Sacharissa
55
hand but his, repine. Not these, nor the regrets of his friends,
demand his return so much as the havoc which his daughter is
working in the hearts of English youth. It is her portrait which
is the occasion of an address to Van Dyck; and the stanzas
To a Very Young Lady would not have been written had there
not been an elder sister to give them their real point. Such
indirect approaches may argue a more sincere passion than we
are at liberty to discover in the lines Of the Misreport of her
being Painted, and their companions. But, whether Waller was
in love with Sacharissa, or whether she was merely a theme for
poetical flattery, her influence over his heart or his verse, or both,
was transient. His professed fidelity to Sacharissa did not hinder
him from joining the train of poets who celebrated the attractions
of Lucy, countess of Carlisle. If he is ready to carve his passion on
the beeches of Penshurst for one whose every movement those trees
obey, the woods of England are equally admirers of lady Carlisle,
and 'every tree that's worthy of the wound' bears her name on its
bark. Lady Isabella Thynne, and an unidentified Mrs Arden,
received tributes from him, which might be made the foundation,
with equal justice, of a tradition of passionate love. Sentimentality
may please itself with reading the name of Sacharissa between
the lines of Behold the brand of beauty tossed, or Go, lovely
Rose! ; but Celia, Flavia, Chloris, or Amoret (who, indeed, is
once used as a foil to Sacharissa) may quite as justly claim
insertion. Love, indeed, with Waller, as with most of his contem-
poraries, was the ever fertile theme of verse, on which his art
demanded that ceaseless variations should be played. He had
much of the old skill in execution, but never reached the
climax at which art took on itself the very semblance of genuine
passion.
When his poems were first printed, in 1645, Waller himself was
an exile, and Sacharissa a widow. She had married Henry, lord
Spencer of Wormleighton, in 1639 : her husband, created earl of
Sunderland, fell at Newbury. The editions of 1645, for which Waller
was in no way responsible, contained his love-poems, with a number
of occasional verses, and the miniature epic called The Battle of
the Summer Islands. These poems embrace a number of experi-
ments in lyric metres as well as in the couplet. Very few gallant
addresses, and even fewer variations from the couplet form, are
to be found in the verses written by Waller after his exile. These,
in the main, are complimentary and of historical interest, with
the exception of Divine Poems, which were published in the year
## p. 56 (#72) ##############################################
56
Writers of the Couplet
7
before his death. Waller's most enduring work belongs to this
later period: the Panegyric to my Lord Protector, the verses
Upon a Late Storm, and of the Death of His Highness ensuing
in the same, the Instructions to a Painter, commemorating the
battle of Sole bay, and the lines of the Last Verses in the
Book, which contain the famous passage 'the soul's dark cottage,
battered and decayed,' are more sustained examples of Waller's
poetical gift than any of the pieces published in 1645. Yet,
it was upon the earlier pieces that his celebrity as the in-
augurator of a new age was founded. Of their contents, some-
thing has been said. It is probable that the political misfortunes
of the poet, and the early widowhood of Sacharissa, helped to
give the poems their vogue. The fame of Waller, however,
rested on something less ephemeral. It can hardly be said it was
won by exclusive devotion to the work of keeping the couplet
within fixed bounds. At no time was he especially careful to
limit the construction of his sentences to two lines. The lines
On the Statue of King Charles I at Charing Cross, written in or
after 1674, consist of six couplets: the first three are inseparable,
and the next two, joined without a break, contain an antithesis
without which the former three could not stand alone. This, how-
ever, is an extreme instance; and the habit of expanding a
symmetrical sentence over two couplets was Waller's more natural
practice. Instances of it may be found, among the earlier poems,
in The Battle of the Summer Islands; and, among his maturer
work, the Panegyric to Cromwell is written in compact stanzas
of two couplets each.
This method of grouping couplets, with the habit of concen-
trating the force of a passage in a succinct concluding distich,
afforded a noticeable contrast to the paragraphic manner in which
the minor Jacobean and Caroline poets handled this form of verse.
But felicitous examples of grouping and of single pointed couplets
may be found in Drayton and Sandys; and Waller's reputation
cannot have been due to these devices alone. Aubrey, re-
ferring to Waller as 'one of the first refiners of our English
language and poetrey,' tells the story of him that, 'when he was
a brisque young sparke, and first studyed poetry, "Methought,
said he, “I never sawe a good copie of English verses; they want
smoothness; then I began to essay? ”. The lines of Sir John
Beaumont already mentioned demand for English poetry simplicity
of rime and simplicity of language. The avoidance of 'fetter'd staves'
· Aubrey, Brief Lives, vol. II, p. 275.
1
## p. 57 (#73) ##############################################
Waller's Style
57
6
is a consequence, rather than a necessary accompaniment, of these
requirements. Towards these ends, Waller's conscious efforts, pro-
bably, were directed from the beginning: the simplification of the
couplet could hardly fail to be a result of their successful attainment.
He said, in Dryden's hearing, that he took Fairfax as his model'.
Fairfax, in his Godfrey of Bulloigne, invariably concluded his eight-
lined stanza with a couplet, which, by no means always isolated from
the rest of the stanza, led, at any rate, to a full stop. This, of itself,
might not bave much effect on couplets pure and simple; but it is
certain that Fairfax's comparative plainness and perspicuity of
language affected Waller’s style, and helped to give it the purity
desiderated by Beaumont. But, to account fully for Waller's
smoothness of rhythm and simplicity of diction, we must recognise
that the spirit of reaction from 'ragged rime' and involved
language was very general. It is to be found, for example, in
Suckling and Carew. In neither was it fully developed, for
both were still under the spell of the fantastic verse of their
day, and Suckling, in particular, was too much the amateur
to effect a revolution in English poetry. Waller, on the other
hand, stood apart from the characteristic fashions of his time.
He had no taste for elaborate and fantastic metaphors. His
invention was small. Not many of the images of nature were
present to him; but he was able to make creditable use of those
of which he was conscious. He chose highly conventional subjects
for his verse, old artificial themes which allowed scope for graceful
classical allusions. Aiming at a pointed fluency of style, he
avoided rough rimes, and lines loaded with sounding words. And
80, without setting an unalterable limit to the couplet, he played
a noticeable part in lightening its contents, and bringing it one
step further in the direction of systematic coherence and concise-
There is in Sandys's translations abundance of proof of the
value of antithesis in restraining the couplet within due bounds.
Waller, in his constant endeavour after smoothness, did not take
full advantage of the force which antithesis may give to a line.
His work in English versification was to make his contemporaries
familiar with a rimed couplet in which each line was marked by
regular beats and by an observance of caesura; in which heavy
;
stress on the first syllable of a foot, all redundant syllables and
elisions were the rarest exceptions ; in which, finally, the flow of
the verse from couplet to couplet was unbroken by the intrusion
of spondaic words or striking, but unmusical, rimes.
Dryden, Pref, to Fables, u. s.
ness.
## p. 58 (#74) ##############################################
58
Writers of the Couplet
To a generation accustomed to a poetical style whose brightness
was often concealed by the smoke which enveloped it, the con-
sistent clearness and brightness of Waller's verse must have
compensated for its want of that splendour which was frequent,
but intermittent, in the writers of the fantastic school. If his
polished simplicity was not employed consciously in making the
sense and contents of a couplet conterminous, it was bound to
exercise an influence in that direction. On his own confession, he
did not compose easily'; and he seems to have followed up his
rare moments of inspiration by a sedulous application of the file
to their results. His verse is often, if not always, polished into
a state of monotonous elegance. Apart from a phrase here and
there, as in the lines on 'the soul's dark cottage,' there is little
which, out of the evenness of his execution, stands forth as a triumph
of poetic imagination. The sentiment of the famous lyric Go,
lovely Rose! fortunate in its opening line, is not above the
meritoriously commonplace. His experiments outside the couplet,
in many cases, miss that even melody which he usually achieved.
There are lines in Puerperium, the poem written, probably, to
celebrate the birth of Henry, duke of Gloucester, in 1640, and in
Behold the brand of Beauty, which it needs some discernment to
scan correctly; and, in the opening quatrain of To Amoret,
Amoret! the Milky Way
Framed of many nameless stars!
The smooth stream where none can say
He this drop to that prefers!
the third line is an example of a halting accentuation of which,
in his couplets, Waller was careful not to be guilty. It was by
avoiding the characteristic faults of contemporary English verse, its
force which sometimes degenerated into clumsiness, its eloquence
which could sink at a moment's notice into garrulity, that Waller
achieved his fame, and not by any original experiment of his
own. In the imagination and the language of men like Sandys,
there was still much of the former age. ' The generation which
hailed Waller as an innovator and inventor failed to find in Sandys
or Drayton the sense of relief which Waller
gave.
The simplicity of style which Waller achieved was reached,
with the use of somewhat different means, by Sir John Denham.
He was born at Dublin in 1615, while his father, Sir John
Denham of Little Horkesley in Essex, was lord chief justice of
the king's bench in Ireland. He was entered at Trinity college, ,
1 Aubrey, 1. 8.
## p. 59 (#75) ##############################################
Sir John Denham
59
Oxford, in 1631, and afterwards became a student of Lincoln's
inn. His first written effort seems to have been The Destruction
of Troy, a translation of part of the second book of the Aeneid
into decasyllabic couplets, made in 1636. This work is hardly a
translation so much as a paraphrase, in which Denham succeeded
in rendering 558 lines of Vergil by 544 of his own. His desire to
reproduce the effect of his original was genuine, and went to the
length of his using unfinished lines in places where Vergil had
done the same. However, such brevity, in dealing with an author
whose style notoriously defies reproduction, implies no very close
attention to fine shades of meaning; and the version is somewhat
commonplace. Denham's reputation was made by his tragedy
The Sophy, acted at Blackfriars in 1641, and published in 1642.
This prepared the way for the fame of Cooper's Hill, the first
edition of which bears date 1642. Aubrey describes the delight
which Denham took in the neighbourhood of the house at Egham,
which had come to him by the death of the elder Sir John, its
builder, in 16391 This neighbourhood, as seen from Cooper's hill,
was the subject of a poem which, combining description with moral
reflection in an unfamiliar manner, was, as an example of that
combination, the first of a long series.
The habit of mind which produced these united elements of
description and sentiment was natural to Denham, and was ex-
pressed by him without difficulty. After the preliminary argument,
addressed to the hill on which he stands, that it is the poet who
makes Parnassus, not Parnassus which makes the poet, he refers to
the distant view of London and old St Paul's. He prophesies the
eternal security of the cathedral, restored by the bounty of Charles I,
and celebrated by the lines in which Waller hailed its restoration,
and contrasts the tumult of the city with the innocent happiness of
private life. The nearer towers of Windsor move him to the praise
of the royal line, culminating in Charles I. A contrast is provoked
by the memory of a chapel, apparently belonging to Chertsey abbey,
which stood on a neighbouring hill: this calls forth reflections on
Henry VIII, and on the religious controversies of his own day.
The Thames next receives his praise in lines containing the
passage which begins 'O could I flow like thee'—a passage, how-
ever, which is not to be found in the first edition of the poem.
The fertile valley, with its wooded banks, suggests old stories of
fauns, nymphs and satyrs, and a long description of a stag-hunt,
in which the quarry falls at length a victim to the king's shaft.
· Aubrey, op. cit. vol. I, p. 218.
## p. 60 (#76) ##############################################
60 Writers of the Couplet
1
4
:
Here, on Runnymede, says Denham, continuing the hunt in
metaphor, Liberty, hunted by Power, once stood at bay, and Power
laid down arbitrary tyranny. The poem concludes with a com-
ment, appropriate to the times, upon the encroachments of
subjects on kingly generosity, and with a warning against pro-
voking the fury of a river, which may be guarded against by
embankments, but cannot be confined in time of flood within a
narrower channel.
The feature of the style of Cooper's Hill is a forcible concise-
ness, aiming at constant antithesis and occasional epigram. The
reflections on the spoliation of the monasteries consist of a string
of shrewd observations. Denham knew the value of alliteration
in driving a point home :
May no such storm [he prays]
Fall on our times, where ruin must reform 1;
and, a few lines lower down:
Thus he the church at once protects, and spoils :
But princes' swords are sharper than their styles 2.
Repetition of a telling word or phrase is another of his artifices:
But god-like his unweary'd bounty flows;
First loves to do, then loves the good he does 3;
and he is alive to the virtues of an oxymoron:
Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants,
Cities in deserts, woods in cities plants 4.
In spite of this studied brevity, he makes no consistent use of the
stopped couplet; and, in Cooper's Hill, there is ample proof that
its occurrence in the poetry of this age is the result, not of a
fixed metrical design, but of an effort to be direct and intelligible
in expression. As descriptive poetry, Cooper's Hill has that
tendency to generalise scenery which was already inherent in
English verse. Local details are subordinated to subjective
musings. But for the mention by name of Windsor and the
Thames, the woods, the flood and the boldly designated 'airy
mountain' might belong to any part of England or even of
Europe. Denham did not invent the habit of looking on scenery
as composed of certain fixed elements, with conventional equi-
valents in poetic diction; but Cooper's Hill certainly increased the
vogue of this fashion.
Between 1642 and 1648, Denham wrote occasional verses; and
"
1
6
1
1 Ll. 115, 116.
· Ll. 131, 132.
3 LI. 177, 178.
* LI. 185, 186.
## p. 61 (#77) ##############################################
Denham's Later Years
61
6
the poem Of Old Age, a paraphrase in verse of Cicero De Senectute,
is said to have been published in 1648Denham himself tells us
that, on behalf of queen Henrietta Maria, he gained admittance to
Charles I in captivity, and that Charles, after referring kindly to
his lines on Sir Richard Fanshawe's translation of Il Pastor Fido,
advised him to write no more, as verses were well enough for idle
young men, but stood in their way when they were thought fit
for more serious employments? ' Denham took the advice, and
devoted himself to the task of transmitting the ciphered corre-
spondence between Charles and his adherents. On its discovery,
he escaped into France, and was employed on various missions by
Charles II and Henrietta Maria. Returning to England in 1652,
he stayed for some time with lord Pembroke at Wilton.
The
translation of Vergil which Aubrey says that he made here may
have been a fragment of the fourth book, The Passion of Dido
for Aeneas; but Aubrey, possibly, was thinking merely of The
Destruction of Troy, which was published in 16568. In 1658,
Denham obtained leave to live at Bury St Edmunds. At the
restoration, he came into the office, the reversion of which had been
promised him by Charles I, of surveyor-general of the royal works,
and was made a knight of the Bath at the coronation. His second
marriage was unhappy; and to his wife's faithlessness was attributed
a strange fit of madness which overtook him on a journey, under-
taken in the performance of his duties as supervisor of the king's
buildings, to the Portland stone-quarries. He recovered before his
death: the poems Of Prudence and Of Justice, translated from the
Italian of Mancini, and the octosyllabic couplets On Mr Abraham
Cowley's Death, belong to his latest years. In 1667—8, he pub-
lished bis poems and The Sophy, with a dedication to Charles II.
His version of De Senectute was published by itself in 1669. His
last work was A Version of the Psalms of David. Denham also
wrote a number of verses on current topics in irregular and halting
metres, which may have amused his friends, but have little merit
in them today. Of his shorter couplet pieces, the Elegy on the
Death of Henry Lord Hastings, written in 1650, treats a subject
to which Dryden devoted some of his earliest verse.
Abraham Cowley, whose genius Denham declared to be twin
to that of Vergil, occupies a place somewhat outside the main
channel of the poetry of his day. He was born in Fleet street
in 1618. His essay Of My Self tells us what we know of his
i Johnson, Life of Denham.
? Dedication to Poems, 1667–8.
: Aubrey, op. cit. vol. I, p. 218.
a
## p. 62 (#78) ##############################################
62 Writers of the Couplet
學
earliest years, and how the early reading of a copy of Spenser,
which lay in his mother's parlour, 'filled' his head first with such
Chimes of Verse, as have never since left ringing there. ' He was
sent to Westminster school, and, in 1633, when only in his fifteenth
year, published a small volume entitled Poeticall Blossomes,
dedicated to bishop Williams, then dean of Westminster. In 1636
appeared Sylva, a collection of occasional verses and odes; and
the composition of the pastoral comedy called Love's Riddle also
belongs to his Westminster days. His two earliest pieces to
which a date can be assigned are the narratives, Pyramus and
Thisbe and Constantia and Philetus, written, on his own showing,
in 1628 and 1630. These are in stanzas of six decasyllabic lines: the
stanza of Pyramus and Thisbe has two rimes, the third and fourth
lines forming a couplet riming with the first line, and the con-
cluding couplet riming with the second line; while that of Con-
stantia and Philetus consists of a quatrain with alternate rimes,
and a final couplet. Spenser's successors, rather than Spenser
himself, appear to have been Cowley's model. The two songs in
Constantia and Philetus, and the epitaph at the end of Pyramus
and Thisbe, in which the metre is varied by changes from iambic
to trochaic lines, and vice versa, show that his ear was naturally
sensitive to prosody. His delight in Latin poetry, and particularly
in Horace, appears in the odes contained in Sylva. Of the last
three verses of The Vote, written when he was thirteen, he was
justly not ashamed at a more mature time of life; and, indeed, he did
not often excel their heart-felt, if not wholly original, prayer for a
moderate estate and a life of quiet study. The opening verses, with
their keen and even humorous observation of typical characters, are
evidence that, if he sat at the feet of Spenser and the Latin poets,
he also bad caught the tricks of Donne; and the 'two or three
sharpe curses' which he flings, in A Poeticall Revenge, at the 'semi-
gentleman of th’ Innes of Court' who struck him in Westminster
hall are a direct reminiscence of Donne in his satiric mood.
In 1637, Cowley entered Trinity college, Cambridge, as a
scholar. He obtained his fellowship in 1640 : ejected in 1644,
he sought refuge at St John's college, Oxford. In his first year
at Cambridge, he wrote a Latin comedy, Naufragium Joculare ;
and, on 12 March 1640/1, his English comedy, The Guardian,
which he brought out in an entirely new form after the restoration
as Cutter of Coleman-Street, was acted at Trinity before prince
Charles. Amid the troubles of the civil war, he acted as secretary
in France to the queen and court in their correspondence with
a
## p. 63 (#79) ##############################################
Abraham Cowley
63
Charles I. The discovery of his cipher led to the flight of Denham,
already recounted. Cowley's fervent loyalty brought him into
a way of life which was little to his taste. For a time, in 1656,
he acted as a royalist spy in England. After detection and a
narrow escape, he sheltered himself under the profession of a
physician, but returned to France before the restoration.
Although his detractors cast doubt on his loyalty to his old
cause, his Discourse by way of Vision concerning the Government
of Oliver Cromwell was the work of one who was heartily relieved
to see the end of the protectorate. After the restoration, he was
refused the mastership of the Savoy, and Cutter of Coleman-Street
was a failure on the stage. He found patrons in the earl of
St Albans and the duke of Buckingham, and retired on a fair
income to Chertsey, where he died in 1667.
The Mistress first appeared in 1647, and was reprinted in 1656 as
part of a four-fold collection of poems. His preface to the collected
edition represents him as about to quit the exercise of poetry,
and desirous to preserve all his writings which were worth pre-
serving. He excluded his juvenile pieces, and all verses written
by him with direct reference to the civil war. Part of a poem on
the war in three books, 'reaching as far as the first Battle of
Newbury,' was printed in 1679. The rest he divided into four
parts, Miscellanies, The Mistress, Pindarique Odes and Davideis,
of each of which he gave some explanation in his preface.
The Miscellanies and The Mistress are composed of lyrics
written in a variety of irregular metres. Of the Miscellanies,
Cowley thought little ; yet among these are most of the poems
indispensable in any representative selection of his work. In his
Anacreontiques, he used couplets in which the iambic line of eight,
and trochaic line of seven, syllables mingle tunefully and naturally.
The Chronicle, a great contrast to the tortuous fancies of his
love-poems, is one of the best examples of English vers de société
in any age. The stanzas On the Death of Mr William Hervey,
though disfigured by at least one frigid hyperbole, contain ad-
mirable lines, and were prompted by genuine affection. The same
may be said of the couplets On the Death of Mr Crashaw.
Sincere feeling pervades Cowley's excuse to his own church for
celebrating a pervert from her doctrines; and, while the conceit
in which Crashaw's muse is likened to Mary is expressed taste-
lessly, nothing could be happier than the wording of the companion
conceit. Angels are said to have carried the house of the Virgin
to Loreto:
## p. 64 (#80) ##############################################
64
Writers of the Couplet
'Tis surer much they brought thee there, and They,
And Thou, their charge, went singing all the way.
In The Mistress, Cowley was writing set verses on conventional
topics, and proved himself capable of endless fluency and ingenuity
of fancy. Donne's superficial influence is obvious in the subject of
such verses as the stanzas Written in Juice of Lemmon, or in
The Prophet, where the man who proposes to teach the poet to
love is given a list of arts and bidden teach them to their chief
professors. From Donne are taken the trick of beginning a poem
impatiently and abruptly, as though in exasperation, and an extra-
vagant outburst like
Love thou'rt a Devil; if I may call thee One,
For sure in Me thy name is Legioni,
Equally characteristic of Donne is Cowley's free use of far-fetched
and unexpected simile. Love exercises an unbounded tyranny
over him, and he calls in the other passions to drive this one out:
so do the Indians seek to free themselves from the Spaniard by
calling in the states of Holland? His love is so violent that,
though his life may be short, he may become “the great Methu-
salem of Love3. ' On parting from his mistress, he recalls the
sorrow with which men in Greenland see the sun sink for half
a year under the horizon". But, amid these vagaries, he does not
give any sign of the capacity for phrases and thoughts of astonishing
brilliance which underlies Donne’s extravagances. His aim is
always to astonish his readers with some new invention of a learned
and elaborate fancy. No genuine follower of Donne ever misused
his cleverness so woefully as Cowley, when, in presenting his book
to the Bodleian library, he called the store of God's wonders 'the
Beatifick Bodley of the Deity. ' True discipleship does not consist
in the imitation of mannerisms; and, in the few poems of The
Mistress in which Cowley chose to be natural, his manner was far
more nearly allied to the level suavity of Waller than to the
rugged and cloudy magnificence of Donne. Such are the stanzas
called The Spring, and the beautiful lines in The Change, which
begin, 'Love in her Sunny Eyes does basking play. '
The Pindarique Odes, prefaced by paraphrases of Pindar's
second Olympian and first Nemean odes, were introduced by
Cowley with a little diffidence. He is afraid that even experienced
readers will not understand them. Their voluble licence of metre
may give the mistaken impression that they are easy to compose.
1 The Inconstant, st. 1.
2 The Passions, st. 4.
3 Love and Life, st. 1.
* The Parting, st. 1.
## p. 65 (#81) ##############################################
Cowley's Pindarique Odes
65
>
6
>
The 'sweetness and numerosity' of the irregular lines may be
overlooked by a disregard of the necessary cadences in pronuncia-
tion. He had little or no insight into Pindar's metrical schemes :
his imitations of the 'stile and manner' of his author follow no
fixed system of prosody. The quality which he sought to
reproduce was the 'Enthusiastical manner' of Pindar, with its
digressions and bold figures, clothed in that kind of Stile
which Dion. Halicarnasseus calls Meryanopvès kaì Ý dù uera
SELVÓTITOs, and which he attributes to Alcacus. ' Cowley describes
the ‘Pindarique Pegasus' on which he is mounted :
'Tis an unruly, and a hard-mouth'd Horse,
Fierce, and unbroken yet,
Impatient of the Spur or Bit,
Now praunces stately, and anon flies oʻre the place,
Disdains the servile Law of any settled pace,
Conscious and proud of his own natural force.
'Twill no unskilful Touch endure,
But flings Writer and Reader too that sits not surel,
Thus he fortifies himself against charges of unskilful horseman-
ship. It is possible that he himself remained firm in the saddle
when he wrote the lines :
Thy task was harder much then his,
For thy learn'd America is
Not onely found out first by Thee2;
but the reader endures a fall before he makes the discovery that
the last syllable of 'America' has to be elided. Again, the line,
Which Father-Sun, Mother-Earth below' may be made into eight
syllables by eliding the last syllable of 'Mother'; but the reader
may be excused another stumble. Cowley's critical notes on the
odes serve unconsciously to set his own faults in relief. For the
metaphor at the beginning of The Muse, he cites the second strophe
of Pindar's sixth Olympian. But Pindar uses the metaphor merely
to introduce what follows, nor does he wear it threadbare. Cowley,
on the other hand, harnesses to the muse's chariot six abstract
qualities and the suggestion of more; Nature becomes its postillion,
Art its coachman, Figures, Conceits and other qualities its running
footmen; and the whole four stanzas, in lines varying from two
to twelve syllables, describe its progress with a prodigal use of
fancies, which are astonishing merely in their extravagance and want
of grace. Amid these things, lines occur in which Cowley's natural
melancholy speaks with a note of music—for example ‘And Life,
?
3
• To Mr Hobs, st. 4.
1 The Resurrection, st. 4.
* To Dr Scarborough, st. 4.
E L. VII. CH. III.
5
## p. 66 (#82) ##############################################
66
Writers of the Couplet
alas, allows but one ill winters Day. But these moments are
few and far between. The poet is bent on being clever at the
expense of all else besides. Conceits in which the years to
come are conceived as eggs within their shell", in which Elijah
becomes
The second Man, who leapt the Ditch where all
The rest of Mankind fall,
And went not downwards to the skies,
are faults of ambition from which Cowley's humour was not
capable of saving him.
The fourth part of the volume was occupied by the four
books of Davideis, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David,
in decasyllabic couplets. Cowley's deep conviction of religion,
though tinged with decided fatalism, prompted him to compose
a sacred epic; and David, as the ancestor of Jesus, and as a
hero who attained success through sufferings of an epic cast,
suggested a possibly fertile subject. Vergil was the model of the
poem, which, designed to be in twelve books, like the Aeneid, was
to conclude with the lament of David over Saul and Jonathan.
Whether the subject was suited for epic treatment on this scale
is a purely aesthetic question, which Cowley, at any rate, answered
a
in the affirmative. His handling of it was hampered by a passion
a
for digression, and the determination to crowd all his biblical
learning into the poem. The first book, after the preliminary
invocation, and a description of the opposed councils of hell and
heaven, proceeds with the history of Saul's anger, the preservation
,
of David by Michal, his flight to Ramah and the appearance of
Saul among the prophets. The charm of David's music suggests
a disquisition, containing some staggering analogies on the har-
mony designed by God in creation. David's visit to Ramah calls
for a minute description of the prophets' college, and a less
interesting résumé of their course of instruction. Balaam's pro-
phecy is applied, happily, to Saul's change of heart. In the second
book, a rhapsody on the nature of love introduces us to Jonathan.
The celebration of the feast of the new moon brings us to the
hall of Saul's palace, where we read the story of Abraham por-
trayed in the tapestry hangings. David, absent from the feast, is
regaled by a vision selected by an angel from the miscellaneous
treasury of fancy, and sees the history of his royal house unfolded
before him until, to his waking ears, Gabriel, an elegant figure
clothed in a blue silk mantle cut from the skies, with a scarf
1 The Muse, st. 3.
2 The Extasie, st. 7.
>
## p. 67 (#83) ##############################################
Cowley's Davideis
67
formed of the choicest piece of an undimmed rainbow, prophesies
the birth of the Messiah. The third book brings us into a labyrinth
of retrospect. David escapes to Nob and Gath : his heroes join
him at Adullam, and accompany him to Moab. The king of Moab,
full of epic curiosity to hear a story of adventure, hears from Joab
the tale of David and Goliath and the marriage of David and
Michal. With the next morning, the fourth book begins. The
last three leagues of the way to 'gameful Nebo’ are beguiled
by David with a sketch of the constitution of Israel under the
judges, and a review of the early part of the reign of Saul.
Much still remains to be told after the end of the Philistine
war; but, with the arrival of the hunters at Nebo, the poem
closes.
That Cowley had some narrative art must be admitted : the
poem is not dull, and his consistent cleverness stimulates the
reader's curiosity, if it does not provoke his admiration. In
notes, full of learning, he discusses and defends his embroideries
on the sacred story, and explains what may seem to be the
novelties of his versification. His couplet has in it more of the
weight of Sandys and the older couplet-writers than of the some-
what emasculated melody of Waller or the pointed brevity of
Denham. He occasionally allows himself a triplet. Sandys, how-
ever, in his Ovid, had used triplets, though on a very few occasions,
and had written several of his Psalms in octosyllabic triplets ;
and, at least once, a triplet is to be found in Waller. Twelve-
syllabled lines occur from time to time in Davideis, and, in the
fourth book, the oracle at Shiloh speaks in this measure. In
Davideis, such variations are used to express the sense of the
passage more thoroughly by the sound. The overflowing of a
river, the infinitude of the glory of heaven, the incessant halleluia
of the angels 'Halleluia' was a word which led Cowley into
strange metrical gymnastics—the hugeness of the appearance of
Goliath, the height of Saul, all give occasion to the serviceable
alexandrine; and Cowley feels himself bound to call the reader's
possibly neglectful attention to this. He indeed refined too
greatly on the effect produced by wedding sound to sense. Of
the two examples to which he directs us in the second book, one,
the line describing the meteor worn instead of hair by Gabriel',
is too subtle to make its intended point clear ; while the other,
describing the doom of the Edomites at the hands of Amaziah? ,
defies all scansion in its effort to be graphic. The fact that
1 Book 11, 1. 802.
2 Book 11, 1. 611.
5_2
## p. 68 (#84) ##############################################
68 Writers of the Couplet
Cowley always kept his meaning before him, and sought, with
high ideals, for the most effective way of expressing it, is the
leading virtue of this, his most ambitious work. Valuing every
artifice which may give vivacity to the expression of emotion, he
condemns the 'putid officiousness' of the grammarians who
finished Vergil's incomplete lines? ; and, where words or de-
scription fail him, he himself suppresses the end of his line and
the conclusion of his couplet.
Cowley's work, in the development of the couplet form, was
neither to smooth its roughnesses nor to disencumber it of super-
fluous content. He strove to make it an adequate vehicle for
narrative verse, and to make its movement responsive to the
demands of its subject. His weakness in performance lay in his self-
conscious ambitiousness, and the mannerisms in which his thought
habitually found expression. Without his example, however, the
couplet could hardly have attained that force which, in combina-
tion with flexibility and ease, it acquired in Dryden's hands. In
many respects, the ease and majesty of Dryden's couplets seem
more closely allied to the masculine style of the earlier couplet-
writers than to the artifices and not infrequent tameness of Cowley
and Waller. Yet it is the case that the intermediary work of
each, in its own way, made those qualities in Dryden possible,
and that their efforts helped to give his couplets that polish
and balance and good sense which, in his case, became a second
nature.
After 1656, the poetical work of Cowley was small in volume.
In 1643, he had written a bitter, but able, satire in couplets
on puritanism, called The Puritan and the Papist. His first
published work after the restoration was the attack, already
alluded to, on the memory of Cromwell, which, although in prose,
contains verses, and ends in a set of couplets. The Verses on
Several Occasions, including the long Ode upon His Majesties
Restoration and Return and the lively Ode Sitting and Drinking
in the Chair, made out of the Reliques of Sir Francis Drake's
Ship, appeared in 1663. Another ode in the same collection, To
the Royal Society, recalls the publication, in 1661, of Cowley's
brief prose Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental
Philosophy. The folio edition of his works published in 1668 con-
tained, in addition to the poems of 1656 and 1663, the Discourse
on Cromwell, and the Several Discourses by way of Essays, in
Verse and Prose. These later verses include odes and stanzas
1 Book I, note 14.
>
## p. 69 (#85) ##############################################
Cowley's Influence
69
appropriate to the subjects of the essays, and a number of trans-
lations and imitations, chiefly of Horace. The prose Essays
take their place more fittingly in a discussion of the development
of English prose? : their value in connection with the poetry of
Cowley is that they give us, in language of great refinement
and beauty, the key to his scholarly and sensitive nature. While
thoroughly conscious of his own art, he obtruded himself but
little into the text of his poems. Once, in his later years,
disappointed of his hopes of court favour, he blamed himself,
'the melancholy Cowley,' through the lips of his muse, for his
' unlearn'd Apostacy' from poetry, and the devotion to affairs
which had left him 'gaping . . . upon the naked Beach, upon the
Barren Sand,' while his fellow-voyagers pressed inland to their
reward. He consoled himself by rebuking his mentor, and repre-
senting the favour of the king as still possible? This, however, is
his one strictly autobiographical poem. The true ambition and
devotion of his life was centred in literature. In his own day, his
reputation was very high. The influence of Donne, lord of the
universal monarchy of Wit,' was still powerful: its finer qualities
were hidden by the passion for flights of artificial fancy which it
had provoked, and one who surpassed Donne in outlandish variety
of conceits might well be hailed as his legitimate successor and
even superior. If the reputation of Cowley declined with sur-
prising rapidity, while that of Waller and Denham remained
undiminished”, it was because, instead of pursuing, with them, the
natural direction of poetry, he chose to limit his taste within the
compass of fashions that were outworn, and to exhaust the last
resources with which those fashions could supply their followers.
Yet his influence on the verse of the younger generation of poets
must not be judged entirely by the eclipse which overtook his
fame within half a century of his death. That influence was
summed up by Johnson at the end of the searching criticism of the
fantastic school of poetry, and of Cowley as 'the last of that race,
and undoubtedly the best,' with which he concluded his Life of
Cowley :
It may be afirmed, without any encomiastic fervour, that he brought to
his poetic labours a mind replete with learning, and that his pages are
embellished with all the ornaments which books could supply; that he was
the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode,
and the gaiety of the less; that he was equally qualified for spritely sallies,
1 See volume vm of the present work.
2 The Complaint, stt. 3, 8.
3 Contrast, e. g. Pope, Essay on Criticism, Il. 360, 361, with Imitations of Horace,
cp. 1 1. 75–79.
epil
p. I, %!
## p. 70 (#86) ##############################################
70
Writers of the Couplet
17
and for lofty flights; that he was among those who freed translation from
servility, and, instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side;
and that, if he left versification yet improveable, he left likewise from time to
time such specimens of excellence, as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.
The general inclination to restrain poetic fluency within definite
bounds, which led to the adoption of the self-contained couplet
as the standard form of verse after the restoration, prompted
Sir William D'Avenant to write his epic poem, Gondibert, in a
series of quatrains with alternate rimes. The first two books of
Gondibert were written at Paris, where D'Avenant was the guest
of lord Jermyn in his rooms at the Louvre. The whole poem was
intended to consist of five books, corresponding to the five acts of
a play, each divided into a number of cantos. D'Avenant, according
to Aubrey, was much in love with his design; and his pre-
occupation with it excited the ridicule of Denham and other
courtiers then at Paris. In 1650, the two finished books were
published, prefaced by a long letter from the author to Hobbes,
who had read the work as it advanced, and by a complimentary
answer from Hobbes himself. Gondibert was never completed.
Early in 1650, Sir William left Paris for Virginia : his voyage was
intercepted by a parliamentary ship, which took him prisoner.
He wrote six cantos of the third book during his imprisonment in
Cowes castle, but, finding that the sorrows of his condition begat
in him 'such a gravity, as diverts the musick of verse,' he aban-
doned the poem, and, during the remaining eighteen years of his
life, added to it but one fragment, which was printed in the
collected edition of his works in 1673. The unfinished poem, with
a postscript dated from Cowes castle, 22 October 1650, was pub-
lished in 1651.
1 VIII, 722 ff. (VIII, 639 ff. ).
6
III, 223 ff. (III, 206 ff. ).
vii, 573 ff. (v11, 523 ff. ).
XV, 237 ff. (xv, 199 ff. ).
VII, 281, 282 (VII, 257, 258).
8
3
4-2
## p. 52 (#68) ##############################################
52
Writers of the Couplet
6
rimes. He frequently allowed himself, and always with good
effect, to rime two weak endings. In this freedom and variety
of use, Drayton was his master; and it is impossible to say that
Sandys did more than continue Drayton's form of couplet versi-
fication with great skill and success, and on a larger scale than his
master had employed.
Sandys returned from Virginia about 1626, when the first
complete edition of his Ovid was published. He was appointed a
gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles I, and was able to
spend the remainder of his life in long intervals of leisure, living
at the country houses of his relations and consorting with the poets
and wits whom Falkland attracted round him. To a new edition
of his Ovid, published at Oxford in 1632, Sandys gave
what perfection [his) Pen could bestow; by polishing, altering, or restoring,
the harsh, improper, or mistaken, with a nicer exactnesse than perhaps is
required in so long a labour.
He added to this edition a translation in couplets of the first book
of the Aeneid. His mind, however, as he confessed, was 'diverted
from these studies'; and he forsook 'Peneian groves and Cirrha's
caves' for Holy Scripture. His Paraphrase upon the Psalms of
David was published in 1636. Early in 1638, it appeared in a folio
a
edition, with tunes by Henry Lawes, and in company with para-
phrases of Job, Ecclesiastes, the Lamentations of Jeremiah and
the various songs of the Old and New Testament. The decasyllabic
couplet was employed in the versions of Job, Ecclesiastes and
Lamentations, in nineteen of the Psalms and in two of the mis-
cellaneous songs. Twenty-eight psalms, and three of the miscel-
laneous songs, are written in octosyllabic couplets. Thirty-six
psalms are arrangements of octosyllabic lines, with various rimes,
in stanza form. Among these should be noticed five examples of
the stanza familiar to us as that of Tennyson's In Memoriam.
Sixteen psalms are composed of trochaic heptasyllabic couplets,
and five of couplets of lines of six syllables. The remaining psalms
consist, with nine exceptions, of stanzas in which lines of eight are
mingled with lines of six or four syllables, or both. In seven of the
exceptions, the stanza is formed by a quatrain of six-syllabled lines
with alternate rimes, followed by a quatrain of four-syllabled lines,
the rimes in which are formed by the two extreme and two middle
lines respectively. The two remaining exceptions are composed of
a series of quatrains of decasyllabic lines. The paraphrase of The
Song of Solomon, published in 1641, is in octosyllabic couplets; the
tragedy entitled Christ's Passion, an imitation of Grotius's tragedy
1
.
## p. 53 (#69) ##############################################
Edmund Waller
53
on the same theme, is in decasyllabic couplets, with occasional
incursions into the eight-syllabled measure. In these later works,
Sandys's versification, if it does not achieve perfect smoothness, is re-
markably regular. The habitual parallelism of sense in single verses
of Hebrew poetry supplied natural bounds to the couplet; and only
here and there, as in the seventy-eighth psalm, does Sandys show a
tendency to run his couplets into one another. He also has aban-
doned his earlier habit of riming weak endings; and, as a general
rule, his rimes are less emphatic and consonantal than in his
Ovid.
The entry of Sandys's burial (7 March 1643/4), in the parish
register of Boxley, describes him as poetarum Anglorum sui
saeculi facile princeps; and Dryden's opinion of the ingenious
and learned Sandys' as 'the best versifier of the former age",
gives a certain colour, with a necessary qualification, to the
perhaps prejudiced encomium of the Kentish vicar. There cannot
be any question that, to the younger generation, Sandys's verse
represented a praiseworthy contrast to the straggling licence of
the couplet-writers of his day. But, to them, the new age began,
not with Sandys, but with Waller; and Waller claimed his own
poetical descent from another source. Edmund Waller was born
at Coleshill, near Amersham, on 3 March 1605/6. His earliest
known attempt in verse appears to be the poem Of the Danger His
Majesty [Being Prince] Escaped in the Road at St Andere. The
danger in question was incurred by prince Charles at Santander
in September 1623, as he was returning from his attempt to secure
a Spanish bride ; but the compliment which the poem contains to
Henrietta Maria is so essential to it, that it was probably written
retrospectively after the betrothal of Charles to the French
princess. In this early essay, Waller certainly did not attain the
complete mastery of the self-contained couplet. In one place,
four couplets occur together, each of which needs its neighbour to
complete its sense? In another, seven couplets run on in close
connection, before an appreciable pause is reached; and, even
then, an eighth is needed to bring the included comparison to an
effective close
The quantity of Waller's published verse is small in comparison
with its fame. He went from a school at High Wycombe to
Eton, and from Eton he entered King's college, Cambridge, as
a fellow commoner, in March 1619/20. His parliamentary career
seems to have begun about a year later, when, probably, he was
i Pref. to Fables (1700).
* LI. 61-68.
* LI. 89-104.
## p. 54 (#70) ##############################################
54
Writers of the Couplet
returned as member for Amersham. He sat for Ilchester in the
last parliament of James I, for Chipping Wycombe in the first
parliament of Charles I, for Amersham in the third parliament of
Charles I and the Short parliament and for St Ives in the Long
parliament. He was a prominent and famous speaker in the house
of Commons: when the troubles first broke out, he was on the
side of the popular leaders, and took part in the opposition to
ship-money. But, by 1642, he was gradually drawn closer to
the party of the via media ; and his parliamentary career was
closed, for the time, in 1643, by the discovery of his complicity in
the royalist conspiracy which became known as Waller’s plot.
He was arrested, and, after a trying interval, in which he cer-
tainly attempted to save himself by compromising others, was
fined and banished. He spent his exile in France, associating
with Hobbes and Evelyn. Pardoned at the end of 1651, he re-
turned to England. Cromwell appointed him a commissioner of
trade in 1655; and, after the restoration, he once more entered
parliament as member for Hastings. He sat for this con-
stituency till his death in 1687, playing the part of Nestor of
the house with no little self-consciousness, and using his voice
on behalf of that constitutional liberalism which embodied his
convictions.
During this long period, he wrote but little. He married twice,
and was already a widower when he first met lady Dorothy Sidney,
daughter of Robert, earl of Leicester. The lady became the
theme of several addresses celebrating her beauty and her
cruelty with charming ease and with no more than conventional
warmth. In lines written at Penshurst, amid the accompani-
ments of listening deer, beeches bowing their heads and gods
weeping rain in sympathy with the poet, the love of Astrophel
for Stella is invoked to rebuke a colder scion of the house
of Sidney. As all nature is compassionate to the sighing swain,
80 is it obsequious to the obdurate nymph. Her presence
harmonises and gives order to the park: the trees form a shady
arbour for her when she sits, an avenue when she walks. When
she comes to London, the delights of the spring are there of set
purpose to welcome her. Waller's enthusiasm goes so far as to
turn verses nominally addressed to others into compliments to
lady Dorothy. Her friend, lady Rich, dies: Waller's elegy is con-
verted into the celebration of the friendship of its subject for
Sacharissa. Her father goes abroad: the trees of Penshurst
lament his absence, and its deer, grudging to be slain by any
## p. 55 (#71) ##############################################
Waller's Sacharissa
55
hand but his, repine. Not these, nor the regrets of his friends,
demand his return so much as the havoc which his daughter is
working in the hearts of English youth. It is her portrait which
is the occasion of an address to Van Dyck; and the stanzas
To a Very Young Lady would not have been written had there
not been an elder sister to give them their real point. Such
indirect approaches may argue a more sincere passion than we
are at liberty to discover in the lines Of the Misreport of her
being Painted, and their companions. But, whether Waller was
in love with Sacharissa, or whether she was merely a theme for
poetical flattery, her influence over his heart or his verse, or both,
was transient. His professed fidelity to Sacharissa did not hinder
him from joining the train of poets who celebrated the attractions
of Lucy, countess of Carlisle. If he is ready to carve his passion on
the beeches of Penshurst for one whose every movement those trees
obey, the woods of England are equally admirers of lady Carlisle,
and 'every tree that's worthy of the wound' bears her name on its
bark. Lady Isabella Thynne, and an unidentified Mrs Arden,
received tributes from him, which might be made the foundation,
with equal justice, of a tradition of passionate love. Sentimentality
may please itself with reading the name of Sacharissa between
the lines of Behold the brand of beauty tossed, or Go, lovely
Rose! ; but Celia, Flavia, Chloris, or Amoret (who, indeed, is
once used as a foil to Sacharissa) may quite as justly claim
insertion. Love, indeed, with Waller, as with most of his contem-
poraries, was the ever fertile theme of verse, on which his art
demanded that ceaseless variations should be played. He had
much of the old skill in execution, but never reached the
climax at which art took on itself the very semblance of genuine
passion.
When his poems were first printed, in 1645, Waller himself was
an exile, and Sacharissa a widow. She had married Henry, lord
Spencer of Wormleighton, in 1639 : her husband, created earl of
Sunderland, fell at Newbury. The editions of 1645, for which Waller
was in no way responsible, contained his love-poems, with a number
of occasional verses, and the miniature epic called The Battle of
the Summer Islands. These poems embrace a number of experi-
ments in lyric metres as well as in the couplet. Very few gallant
addresses, and even fewer variations from the couplet form, are
to be found in the verses written by Waller after his exile. These,
in the main, are complimentary and of historical interest, with
the exception of Divine Poems, which were published in the year
## p. 56 (#72) ##############################################
56
Writers of the Couplet
7
before his death. Waller's most enduring work belongs to this
later period: the Panegyric to my Lord Protector, the verses
Upon a Late Storm, and of the Death of His Highness ensuing
in the same, the Instructions to a Painter, commemorating the
battle of Sole bay, and the lines of the Last Verses in the
Book, which contain the famous passage 'the soul's dark cottage,
battered and decayed,' are more sustained examples of Waller's
poetical gift than any of the pieces published in 1645. Yet,
it was upon the earlier pieces that his celebrity as the in-
augurator of a new age was founded. Of their contents, some-
thing has been said. It is probable that the political misfortunes
of the poet, and the early widowhood of Sacharissa, helped to
give the poems their vogue. The fame of Waller, however,
rested on something less ephemeral. It can hardly be said it was
won by exclusive devotion to the work of keeping the couplet
within fixed bounds. At no time was he especially careful to
limit the construction of his sentences to two lines. The lines
On the Statue of King Charles I at Charing Cross, written in or
after 1674, consist of six couplets: the first three are inseparable,
and the next two, joined without a break, contain an antithesis
without which the former three could not stand alone. This, how-
ever, is an extreme instance; and the habit of expanding a
symmetrical sentence over two couplets was Waller's more natural
practice. Instances of it may be found, among the earlier poems,
in The Battle of the Summer Islands; and, among his maturer
work, the Panegyric to Cromwell is written in compact stanzas
of two couplets each.
This method of grouping couplets, with the habit of concen-
trating the force of a passage in a succinct concluding distich,
afforded a noticeable contrast to the paragraphic manner in which
the minor Jacobean and Caroline poets handled this form of verse.
But felicitous examples of grouping and of single pointed couplets
may be found in Drayton and Sandys; and Waller's reputation
cannot have been due to these devices alone. Aubrey, re-
ferring to Waller as 'one of the first refiners of our English
language and poetrey,' tells the story of him that, 'when he was
a brisque young sparke, and first studyed poetry, "Methought,
said he, “I never sawe a good copie of English verses; they want
smoothness; then I began to essay? ”. The lines of Sir John
Beaumont already mentioned demand for English poetry simplicity
of rime and simplicity of language. The avoidance of 'fetter'd staves'
· Aubrey, Brief Lives, vol. II, p. 275.
1
## p. 57 (#73) ##############################################
Waller's Style
57
6
is a consequence, rather than a necessary accompaniment, of these
requirements. Towards these ends, Waller's conscious efforts, pro-
bably, were directed from the beginning: the simplification of the
couplet could hardly fail to be a result of their successful attainment.
He said, in Dryden's hearing, that he took Fairfax as his model'.
Fairfax, in his Godfrey of Bulloigne, invariably concluded his eight-
lined stanza with a couplet, which, by no means always isolated from
the rest of the stanza, led, at any rate, to a full stop. This, of itself,
might not bave much effect on couplets pure and simple; but it is
certain that Fairfax's comparative plainness and perspicuity of
language affected Waller’s style, and helped to give it the purity
desiderated by Beaumont. But, to account fully for Waller's
smoothness of rhythm and simplicity of diction, we must recognise
that the spirit of reaction from 'ragged rime' and involved
language was very general. It is to be found, for example, in
Suckling and Carew. In neither was it fully developed, for
both were still under the spell of the fantastic verse of their
day, and Suckling, in particular, was too much the amateur
to effect a revolution in English poetry. Waller, on the other
hand, stood apart from the characteristic fashions of his time.
He had no taste for elaborate and fantastic metaphors. His
invention was small. Not many of the images of nature were
present to him; but he was able to make creditable use of those
of which he was conscious. He chose highly conventional subjects
for his verse, old artificial themes which allowed scope for graceful
classical allusions. Aiming at a pointed fluency of style, he
avoided rough rimes, and lines loaded with sounding words. And
80, without setting an unalterable limit to the couplet, he played
a noticeable part in lightening its contents, and bringing it one
step further in the direction of systematic coherence and concise-
There is in Sandys's translations abundance of proof of the
value of antithesis in restraining the couplet within due bounds.
Waller, in his constant endeavour after smoothness, did not take
full advantage of the force which antithesis may give to a line.
His work in English versification was to make his contemporaries
familiar with a rimed couplet in which each line was marked by
regular beats and by an observance of caesura; in which heavy
;
stress on the first syllable of a foot, all redundant syllables and
elisions were the rarest exceptions ; in which, finally, the flow of
the verse from couplet to couplet was unbroken by the intrusion
of spondaic words or striking, but unmusical, rimes.
Dryden, Pref, to Fables, u. s.
ness.
## p. 58 (#74) ##############################################
58
Writers of the Couplet
To a generation accustomed to a poetical style whose brightness
was often concealed by the smoke which enveloped it, the con-
sistent clearness and brightness of Waller's verse must have
compensated for its want of that splendour which was frequent,
but intermittent, in the writers of the fantastic school. If his
polished simplicity was not employed consciously in making the
sense and contents of a couplet conterminous, it was bound to
exercise an influence in that direction. On his own confession, he
did not compose easily'; and he seems to have followed up his
rare moments of inspiration by a sedulous application of the file
to their results. His verse is often, if not always, polished into
a state of monotonous elegance. Apart from a phrase here and
there, as in the lines on 'the soul's dark cottage,' there is little
which, out of the evenness of his execution, stands forth as a triumph
of poetic imagination. The sentiment of the famous lyric Go,
lovely Rose! fortunate in its opening line, is not above the
meritoriously commonplace. His experiments outside the couplet,
in many cases, miss that even melody which he usually achieved.
There are lines in Puerperium, the poem written, probably, to
celebrate the birth of Henry, duke of Gloucester, in 1640, and in
Behold the brand of Beauty, which it needs some discernment to
scan correctly; and, in the opening quatrain of To Amoret,
Amoret! the Milky Way
Framed of many nameless stars!
The smooth stream where none can say
He this drop to that prefers!
the third line is an example of a halting accentuation of which,
in his couplets, Waller was careful not to be guilty. It was by
avoiding the characteristic faults of contemporary English verse, its
force which sometimes degenerated into clumsiness, its eloquence
which could sink at a moment's notice into garrulity, that Waller
achieved his fame, and not by any original experiment of his
own. In the imagination and the language of men like Sandys,
there was still much of the former age. ' The generation which
hailed Waller as an innovator and inventor failed to find in Sandys
or Drayton the sense of relief which Waller
gave.
The simplicity of style which Waller achieved was reached,
with the use of somewhat different means, by Sir John Denham.
He was born at Dublin in 1615, while his father, Sir John
Denham of Little Horkesley in Essex, was lord chief justice of
the king's bench in Ireland. He was entered at Trinity college, ,
1 Aubrey, 1. 8.
## p. 59 (#75) ##############################################
Sir John Denham
59
Oxford, in 1631, and afterwards became a student of Lincoln's
inn. His first written effort seems to have been The Destruction
of Troy, a translation of part of the second book of the Aeneid
into decasyllabic couplets, made in 1636. This work is hardly a
translation so much as a paraphrase, in which Denham succeeded
in rendering 558 lines of Vergil by 544 of his own. His desire to
reproduce the effect of his original was genuine, and went to the
length of his using unfinished lines in places where Vergil had
done the same. However, such brevity, in dealing with an author
whose style notoriously defies reproduction, implies no very close
attention to fine shades of meaning; and the version is somewhat
commonplace. Denham's reputation was made by his tragedy
The Sophy, acted at Blackfriars in 1641, and published in 1642.
This prepared the way for the fame of Cooper's Hill, the first
edition of which bears date 1642. Aubrey describes the delight
which Denham took in the neighbourhood of the house at Egham,
which had come to him by the death of the elder Sir John, its
builder, in 16391 This neighbourhood, as seen from Cooper's hill,
was the subject of a poem which, combining description with moral
reflection in an unfamiliar manner, was, as an example of that
combination, the first of a long series.
The habit of mind which produced these united elements of
description and sentiment was natural to Denham, and was ex-
pressed by him without difficulty. After the preliminary argument,
addressed to the hill on which he stands, that it is the poet who
makes Parnassus, not Parnassus which makes the poet, he refers to
the distant view of London and old St Paul's. He prophesies the
eternal security of the cathedral, restored by the bounty of Charles I,
and celebrated by the lines in which Waller hailed its restoration,
and contrasts the tumult of the city with the innocent happiness of
private life. The nearer towers of Windsor move him to the praise
of the royal line, culminating in Charles I. A contrast is provoked
by the memory of a chapel, apparently belonging to Chertsey abbey,
which stood on a neighbouring hill: this calls forth reflections on
Henry VIII, and on the religious controversies of his own day.
The Thames next receives his praise in lines containing the
passage which begins 'O could I flow like thee'—a passage, how-
ever, which is not to be found in the first edition of the poem.
The fertile valley, with its wooded banks, suggests old stories of
fauns, nymphs and satyrs, and a long description of a stag-hunt,
in which the quarry falls at length a victim to the king's shaft.
· Aubrey, op. cit. vol. I, p. 218.
## p. 60 (#76) ##############################################
60 Writers of the Couplet
1
4
:
Here, on Runnymede, says Denham, continuing the hunt in
metaphor, Liberty, hunted by Power, once stood at bay, and Power
laid down arbitrary tyranny. The poem concludes with a com-
ment, appropriate to the times, upon the encroachments of
subjects on kingly generosity, and with a warning against pro-
voking the fury of a river, which may be guarded against by
embankments, but cannot be confined in time of flood within a
narrower channel.
The feature of the style of Cooper's Hill is a forcible concise-
ness, aiming at constant antithesis and occasional epigram. The
reflections on the spoliation of the monasteries consist of a string
of shrewd observations. Denham knew the value of alliteration
in driving a point home :
May no such storm [he prays]
Fall on our times, where ruin must reform 1;
and, a few lines lower down:
Thus he the church at once protects, and spoils :
But princes' swords are sharper than their styles 2.
Repetition of a telling word or phrase is another of his artifices:
But god-like his unweary'd bounty flows;
First loves to do, then loves the good he does 3;
and he is alive to the virtues of an oxymoron:
Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants,
Cities in deserts, woods in cities plants 4.
In spite of this studied brevity, he makes no consistent use of the
stopped couplet; and, in Cooper's Hill, there is ample proof that
its occurrence in the poetry of this age is the result, not of a
fixed metrical design, but of an effort to be direct and intelligible
in expression. As descriptive poetry, Cooper's Hill has that
tendency to generalise scenery which was already inherent in
English verse. Local details are subordinated to subjective
musings. But for the mention by name of Windsor and the
Thames, the woods, the flood and the boldly designated 'airy
mountain' might belong to any part of England or even of
Europe. Denham did not invent the habit of looking on scenery
as composed of certain fixed elements, with conventional equi-
valents in poetic diction; but Cooper's Hill certainly increased the
vogue of this fashion.
Between 1642 and 1648, Denham wrote occasional verses; and
"
1
6
1
1 Ll. 115, 116.
· Ll. 131, 132.
3 LI. 177, 178.
* LI. 185, 186.
## p. 61 (#77) ##############################################
Denham's Later Years
61
6
the poem Of Old Age, a paraphrase in verse of Cicero De Senectute,
is said to have been published in 1648Denham himself tells us
that, on behalf of queen Henrietta Maria, he gained admittance to
Charles I in captivity, and that Charles, after referring kindly to
his lines on Sir Richard Fanshawe's translation of Il Pastor Fido,
advised him to write no more, as verses were well enough for idle
young men, but stood in their way when they were thought fit
for more serious employments? ' Denham took the advice, and
devoted himself to the task of transmitting the ciphered corre-
spondence between Charles and his adherents. On its discovery,
he escaped into France, and was employed on various missions by
Charles II and Henrietta Maria. Returning to England in 1652,
he stayed for some time with lord Pembroke at Wilton.
The
translation of Vergil which Aubrey says that he made here may
have been a fragment of the fourth book, The Passion of Dido
for Aeneas; but Aubrey, possibly, was thinking merely of The
Destruction of Troy, which was published in 16568. In 1658,
Denham obtained leave to live at Bury St Edmunds. At the
restoration, he came into the office, the reversion of which had been
promised him by Charles I, of surveyor-general of the royal works,
and was made a knight of the Bath at the coronation. His second
marriage was unhappy; and to his wife's faithlessness was attributed
a strange fit of madness which overtook him on a journey, under-
taken in the performance of his duties as supervisor of the king's
buildings, to the Portland stone-quarries. He recovered before his
death: the poems Of Prudence and Of Justice, translated from the
Italian of Mancini, and the octosyllabic couplets On Mr Abraham
Cowley's Death, belong to his latest years. In 1667—8, he pub-
lished bis poems and The Sophy, with a dedication to Charles II.
His version of De Senectute was published by itself in 1669. His
last work was A Version of the Psalms of David. Denham also
wrote a number of verses on current topics in irregular and halting
metres, which may have amused his friends, but have little merit
in them today. Of his shorter couplet pieces, the Elegy on the
Death of Henry Lord Hastings, written in 1650, treats a subject
to which Dryden devoted some of his earliest verse.
Abraham Cowley, whose genius Denham declared to be twin
to that of Vergil, occupies a place somewhat outside the main
channel of the poetry of his day. He was born in Fleet street
in 1618. His essay Of My Self tells us what we know of his
i Johnson, Life of Denham.
? Dedication to Poems, 1667–8.
: Aubrey, op. cit. vol. I, p. 218.
a
## p. 62 (#78) ##############################################
62 Writers of the Couplet
學
earliest years, and how the early reading of a copy of Spenser,
which lay in his mother's parlour, 'filled' his head first with such
Chimes of Verse, as have never since left ringing there. ' He was
sent to Westminster school, and, in 1633, when only in his fifteenth
year, published a small volume entitled Poeticall Blossomes,
dedicated to bishop Williams, then dean of Westminster. In 1636
appeared Sylva, a collection of occasional verses and odes; and
the composition of the pastoral comedy called Love's Riddle also
belongs to his Westminster days. His two earliest pieces to
which a date can be assigned are the narratives, Pyramus and
Thisbe and Constantia and Philetus, written, on his own showing,
in 1628 and 1630. These are in stanzas of six decasyllabic lines: the
stanza of Pyramus and Thisbe has two rimes, the third and fourth
lines forming a couplet riming with the first line, and the con-
cluding couplet riming with the second line; while that of Con-
stantia and Philetus consists of a quatrain with alternate rimes,
and a final couplet. Spenser's successors, rather than Spenser
himself, appear to have been Cowley's model. The two songs in
Constantia and Philetus, and the epitaph at the end of Pyramus
and Thisbe, in which the metre is varied by changes from iambic
to trochaic lines, and vice versa, show that his ear was naturally
sensitive to prosody. His delight in Latin poetry, and particularly
in Horace, appears in the odes contained in Sylva. Of the last
three verses of The Vote, written when he was thirteen, he was
justly not ashamed at a more mature time of life; and, indeed, he did
not often excel their heart-felt, if not wholly original, prayer for a
moderate estate and a life of quiet study. The opening verses, with
their keen and even humorous observation of typical characters, are
evidence that, if he sat at the feet of Spenser and the Latin poets,
he also bad caught the tricks of Donne; and the 'two or three
sharpe curses' which he flings, in A Poeticall Revenge, at the 'semi-
gentleman of th’ Innes of Court' who struck him in Westminster
hall are a direct reminiscence of Donne in his satiric mood.
In 1637, Cowley entered Trinity college, Cambridge, as a
scholar. He obtained his fellowship in 1640 : ejected in 1644,
he sought refuge at St John's college, Oxford. In his first year
at Cambridge, he wrote a Latin comedy, Naufragium Joculare ;
and, on 12 March 1640/1, his English comedy, The Guardian,
which he brought out in an entirely new form after the restoration
as Cutter of Coleman-Street, was acted at Trinity before prince
Charles. Amid the troubles of the civil war, he acted as secretary
in France to the queen and court in their correspondence with
a
## p. 63 (#79) ##############################################
Abraham Cowley
63
Charles I. The discovery of his cipher led to the flight of Denham,
already recounted. Cowley's fervent loyalty brought him into
a way of life which was little to his taste. For a time, in 1656,
he acted as a royalist spy in England. After detection and a
narrow escape, he sheltered himself under the profession of a
physician, but returned to France before the restoration.
Although his detractors cast doubt on his loyalty to his old
cause, his Discourse by way of Vision concerning the Government
of Oliver Cromwell was the work of one who was heartily relieved
to see the end of the protectorate. After the restoration, he was
refused the mastership of the Savoy, and Cutter of Coleman-Street
was a failure on the stage. He found patrons in the earl of
St Albans and the duke of Buckingham, and retired on a fair
income to Chertsey, where he died in 1667.
The Mistress first appeared in 1647, and was reprinted in 1656 as
part of a four-fold collection of poems. His preface to the collected
edition represents him as about to quit the exercise of poetry,
and desirous to preserve all his writings which were worth pre-
serving. He excluded his juvenile pieces, and all verses written
by him with direct reference to the civil war. Part of a poem on
the war in three books, 'reaching as far as the first Battle of
Newbury,' was printed in 1679. The rest he divided into four
parts, Miscellanies, The Mistress, Pindarique Odes and Davideis,
of each of which he gave some explanation in his preface.
The Miscellanies and The Mistress are composed of lyrics
written in a variety of irregular metres. Of the Miscellanies,
Cowley thought little ; yet among these are most of the poems
indispensable in any representative selection of his work. In his
Anacreontiques, he used couplets in which the iambic line of eight,
and trochaic line of seven, syllables mingle tunefully and naturally.
The Chronicle, a great contrast to the tortuous fancies of his
love-poems, is one of the best examples of English vers de société
in any age. The stanzas On the Death of Mr William Hervey,
though disfigured by at least one frigid hyperbole, contain ad-
mirable lines, and were prompted by genuine affection. The same
may be said of the couplets On the Death of Mr Crashaw.
Sincere feeling pervades Cowley's excuse to his own church for
celebrating a pervert from her doctrines; and, while the conceit
in which Crashaw's muse is likened to Mary is expressed taste-
lessly, nothing could be happier than the wording of the companion
conceit. Angels are said to have carried the house of the Virgin
to Loreto:
## p. 64 (#80) ##############################################
64
Writers of the Couplet
'Tis surer much they brought thee there, and They,
And Thou, their charge, went singing all the way.
In The Mistress, Cowley was writing set verses on conventional
topics, and proved himself capable of endless fluency and ingenuity
of fancy. Donne's superficial influence is obvious in the subject of
such verses as the stanzas Written in Juice of Lemmon, or in
The Prophet, where the man who proposes to teach the poet to
love is given a list of arts and bidden teach them to their chief
professors. From Donne are taken the trick of beginning a poem
impatiently and abruptly, as though in exasperation, and an extra-
vagant outburst like
Love thou'rt a Devil; if I may call thee One,
For sure in Me thy name is Legioni,
Equally characteristic of Donne is Cowley's free use of far-fetched
and unexpected simile. Love exercises an unbounded tyranny
over him, and he calls in the other passions to drive this one out:
so do the Indians seek to free themselves from the Spaniard by
calling in the states of Holland? His love is so violent that,
though his life may be short, he may become “the great Methu-
salem of Love3. ' On parting from his mistress, he recalls the
sorrow with which men in Greenland see the sun sink for half
a year under the horizon". But, amid these vagaries, he does not
give any sign of the capacity for phrases and thoughts of astonishing
brilliance which underlies Donne’s extravagances. His aim is
always to astonish his readers with some new invention of a learned
and elaborate fancy. No genuine follower of Donne ever misused
his cleverness so woefully as Cowley, when, in presenting his book
to the Bodleian library, he called the store of God's wonders 'the
Beatifick Bodley of the Deity. ' True discipleship does not consist
in the imitation of mannerisms; and, in the few poems of The
Mistress in which Cowley chose to be natural, his manner was far
more nearly allied to the level suavity of Waller than to the
rugged and cloudy magnificence of Donne. Such are the stanzas
called The Spring, and the beautiful lines in The Change, which
begin, 'Love in her Sunny Eyes does basking play. '
The Pindarique Odes, prefaced by paraphrases of Pindar's
second Olympian and first Nemean odes, were introduced by
Cowley with a little diffidence. He is afraid that even experienced
readers will not understand them. Their voluble licence of metre
may give the mistaken impression that they are easy to compose.
1 The Inconstant, st. 1.
2 The Passions, st. 4.
3 Love and Life, st. 1.
* The Parting, st. 1.
## p. 65 (#81) ##############################################
Cowley's Pindarique Odes
65
>
6
>
The 'sweetness and numerosity' of the irregular lines may be
overlooked by a disregard of the necessary cadences in pronuncia-
tion. He had little or no insight into Pindar's metrical schemes :
his imitations of the 'stile and manner' of his author follow no
fixed system of prosody. The quality which he sought to
reproduce was the 'Enthusiastical manner' of Pindar, with its
digressions and bold figures, clothed in that kind of Stile
which Dion. Halicarnasseus calls Meryanopvès kaì Ý dù uera
SELVÓTITOs, and which he attributes to Alcacus. ' Cowley describes
the ‘Pindarique Pegasus' on which he is mounted :
'Tis an unruly, and a hard-mouth'd Horse,
Fierce, and unbroken yet,
Impatient of the Spur or Bit,
Now praunces stately, and anon flies oʻre the place,
Disdains the servile Law of any settled pace,
Conscious and proud of his own natural force.
'Twill no unskilful Touch endure,
But flings Writer and Reader too that sits not surel,
Thus he fortifies himself against charges of unskilful horseman-
ship. It is possible that he himself remained firm in the saddle
when he wrote the lines :
Thy task was harder much then his,
For thy learn'd America is
Not onely found out first by Thee2;
but the reader endures a fall before he makes the discovery that
the last syllable of 'America' has to be elided. Again, the line,
Which Father-Sun, Mother-Earth below' may be made into eight
syllables by eliding the last syllable of 'Mother'; but the reader
may be excused another stumble. Cowley's critical notes on the
odes serve unconsciously to set his own faults in relief. For the
metaphor at the beginning of The Muse, he cites the second strophe
of Pindar's sixth Olympian. But Pindar uses the metaphor merely
to introduce what follows, nor does he wear it threadbare. Cowley,
on the other hand, harnesses to the muse's chariot six abstract
qualities and the suggestion of more; Nature becomes its postillion,
Art its coachman, Figures, Conceits and other qualities its running
footmen; and the whole four stanzas, in lines varying from two
to twelve syllables, describe its progress with a prodigal use of
fancies, which are astonishing merely in their extravagance and want
of grace. Amid these things, lines occur in which Cowley's natural
melancholy speaks with a note of music—for example ‘And Life,
?
3
• To Mr Hobs, st. 4.
1 The Resurrection, st. 4.
* To Dr Scarborough, st. 4.
E L. VII. CH. III.
5
## p. 66 (#82) ##############################################
66
Writers of the Couplet
alas, allows but one ill winters Day. But these moments are
few and far between. The poet is bent on being clever at the
expense of all else besides. Conceits in which the years to
come are conceived as eggs within their shell", in which Elijah
becomes
The second Man, who leapt the Ditch where all
The rest of Mankind fall,
And went not downwards to the skies,
are faults of ambition from which Cowley's humour was not
capable of saving him.
The fourth part of the volume was occupied by the four
books of Davideis, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David,
in decasyllabic couplets. Cowley's deep conviction of religion,
though tinged with decided fatalism, prompted him to compose
a sacred epic; and David, as the ancestor of Jesus, and as a
hero who attained success through sufferings of an epic cast,
suggested a possibly fertile subject. Vergil was the model of the
poem, which, designed to be in twelve books, like the Aeneid, was
to conclude with the lament of David over Saul and Jonathan.
Whether the subject was suited for epic treatment on this scale
is a purely aesthetic question, which Cowley, at any rate, answered
a
in the affirmative. His handling of it was hampered by a passion
a
for digression, and the determination to crowd all his biblical
learning into the poem. The first book, after the preliminary
invocation, and a description of the opposed councils of hell and
heaven, proceeds with the history of Saul's anger, the preservation
,
of David by Michal, his flight to Ramah and the appearance of
Saul among the prophets. The charm of David's music suggests
a disquisition, containing some staggering analogies on the har-
mony designed by God in creation. David's visit to Ramah calls
for a minute description of the prophets' college, and a less
interesting résumé of their course of instruction. Balaam's pro-
phecy is applied, happily, to Saul's change of heart. In the second
book, a rhapsody on the nature of love introduces us to Jonathan.
The celebration of the feast of the new moon brings us to the
hall of Saul's palace, where we read the story of Abraham por-
trayed in the tapestry hangings. David, absent from the feast, is
regaled by a vision selected by an angel from the miscellaneous
treasury of fancy, and sees the history of his royal house unfolded
before him until, to his waking ears, Gabriel, an elegant figure
clothed in a blue silk mantle cut from the skies, with a scarf
1 The Muse, st. 3.
2 The Extasie, st. 7.
>
## p. 67 (#83) ##############################################
Cowley's Davideis
67
formed of the choicest piece of an undimmed rainbow, prophesies
the birth of the Messiah. The third book brings us into a labyrinth
of retrospect. David escapes to Nob and Gath : his heroes join
him at Adullam, and accompany him to Moab. The king of Moab,
full of epic curiosity to hear a story of adventure, hears from Joab
the tale of David and Goliath and the marriage of David and
Michal. With the next morning, the fourth book begins. The
last three leagues of the way to 'gameful Nebo’ are beguiled
by David with a sketch of the constitution of Israel under the
judges, and a review of the early part of the reign of Saul.
Much still remains to be told after the end of the Philistine
war; but, with the arrival of the hunters at Nebo, the poem
closes.
That Cowley had some narrative art must be admitted : the
poem is not dull, and his consistent cleverness stimulates the
reader's curiosity, if it does not provoke his admiration. In
notes, full of learning, he discusses and defends his embroideries
on the sacred story, and explains what may seem to be the
novelties of his versification. His couplet has in it more of the
weight of Sandys and the older couplet-writers than of the some-
what emasculated melody of Waller or the pointed brevity of
Denham. He occasionally allows himself a triplet. Sandys, how-
ever, in his Ovid, had used triplets, though on a very few occasions,
and had written several of his Psalms in octosyllabic triplets ;
and, at least once, a triplet is to be found in Waller. Twelve-
syllabled lines occur from time to time in Davideis, and, in the
fourth book, the oracle at Shiloh speaks in this measure. In
Davideis, such variations are used to express the sense of the
passage more thoroughly by the sound. The overflowing of a
river, the infinitude of the glory of heaven, the incessant halleluia
of the angels 'Halleluia' was a word which led Cowley into
strange metrical gymnastics—the hugeness of the appearance of
Goliath, the height of Saul, all give occasion to the serviceable
alexandrine; and Cowley feels himself bound to call the reader's
possibly neglectful attention to this. He indeed refined too
greatly on the effect produced by wedding sound to sense. Of
the two examples to which he directs us in the second book, one,
the line describing the meteor worn instead of hair by Gabriel',
is too subtle to make its intended point clear ; while the other,
describing the doom of the Edomites at the hands of Amaziah? ,
defies all scansion in its effort to be graphic. The fact that
1 Book 11, 1. 802.
2 Book 11, 1. 611.
5_2
## p. 68 (#84) ##############################################
68 Writers of the Couplet
Cowley always kept his meaning before him, and sought, with
high ideals, for the most effective way of expressing it, is the
leading virtue of this, his most ambitious work. Valuing every
artifice which may give vivacity to the expression of emotion, he
condemns the 'putid officiousness' of the grammarians who
finished Vergil's incomplete lines? ; and, where words or de-
scription fail him, he himself suppresses the end of his line and
the conclusion of his couplet.
Cowley's work, in the development of the couplet form, was
neither to smooth its roughnesses nor to disencumber it of super-
fluous content. He strove to make it an adequate vehicle for
narrative verse, and to make its movement responsive to the
demands of its subject. His weakness in performance lay in his self-
conscious ambitiousness, and the mannerisms in which his thought
habitually found expression. Without his example, however, the
couplet could hardly have attained that force which, in combina-
tion with flexibility and ease, it acquired in Dryden's hands. In
many respects, the ease and majesty of Dryden's couplets seem
more closely allied to the masculine style of the earlier couplet-
writers than to the artifices and not infrequent tameness of Cowley
and Waller. Yet it is the case that the intermediary work of
each, in its own way, made those qualities in Dryden possible,
and that their efforts helped to give his couplets that polish
and balance and good sense which, in his case, became a second
nature.
After 1656, the poetical work of Cowley was small in volume.
In 1643, he had written a bitter, but able, satire in couplets
on puritanism, called The Puritan and the Papist. His first
published work after the restoration was the attack, already
alluded to, on the memory of Cromwell, which, although in prose,
contains verses, and ends in a set of couplets. The Verses on
Several Occasions, including the long Ode upon His Majesties
Restoration and Return and the lively Ode Sitting and Drinking
in the Chair, made out of the Reliques of Sir Francis Drake's
Ship, appeared in 1663. Another ode in the same collection, To
the Royal Society, recalls the publication, in 1661, of Cowley's
brief prose Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental
Philosophy. The folio edition of his works published in 1668 con-
tained, in addition to the poems of 1656 and 1663, the Discourse
on Cromwell, and the Several Discourses by way of Essays, in
Verse and Prose. These later verses include odes and stanzas
1 Book I, note 14.
>
## p. 69 (#85) ##############################################
Cowley's Influence
69
appropriate to the subjects of the essays, and a number of trans-
lations and imitations, chiefly of Horace. The prose Essays
take their place more fittingly in a discussion of the development
of English prose? : their value in connection with the poetry of
Cowley is that they give us, in language of great refinement
and beauty, the key to his scholarly and sensitive nature. While
thoroughly conscious of his own art, he obtruded himself but
little into the text of his poems. Once, in his later years,
disappointed of his hopes of court favour, he blamed himself,
'the melancholy Cowley,' through the lips of his muse, for his
' unlearn'd Apostacy' from poetry, and the devotion to affairs
which had left him 'gaping . . . upon the naked Beach, upon the
Barren Sand,' while his fellow-voyagers pressed inland to their
reward. He consoled himself by rebuking his mentor, and repre-
senting the favour of the king as still possible? This, however, is
his one strictly autobiographical poem. The true ambition and
devotion of his life was centred in literature. In his own day, his
reputation was very high. The influence of Donne, lord of the
universal monarchy of Wit,' was still powerful: its finer qualities
were hidden by the passion for flights of artificial fancy which it
had provoked, and one who surpassed Donne in outlandish variety
of conceits might well be hailed as his legitimate successor and
even superior. If the reputation of Cowley declined with sur-
prising rapidity, while that of Waller and Denham remained
undiminished”, it was because, instead of pursuing, with them, the
natural direction of poetry, he chose to limit his taste within the
compass of fashions that were outworn, and to exhaust the last
resources with which those fashions could supply their followers.
Yet his influence on the verse of the younger generation of poets
must not be judged entirely by the eclipse which overtook his
fame within half a century of his death. That influence was
summed up by Johnson at the end of the searching criticism of the
fantastic school of poetry, and of Cowley as 'the last of that race,
and undoubtedly the best,' with which he concluded his Life of
Cowley :
It may be afirmed, without any encomiastic fervour, that he brought to
his poetic labours a mind replete with learning, and that his pages are
embellished with all the ornaments which books could supply; that he was
the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode,
and the gaiety of the less; that he was equally qualified for spritely sallies,
1 See volume vm of the present work.
2 The Complaint, stt. 3, 8.
3 Contrast, e. g. Pope, Essay on Criticism, Il. 360, 361, with Imitations of Horace,
cp. 1 1. 75–79.
epil
p. I, %!
## p. 70 (#86) ##############################################
70
Writers of the Couplet
17
and for lofty flights; that he was among those who freed translation from
servility, and, instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side;
and that, if he left versification yet improveable, he left likewise from time to
time such specimens of excellence, as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.
The general inclination to restrain poetic fluency within definite
bounds, which led to the adoption of the self-contained couplet
as the standard form of verse after the restoration, prompted
Sir William D'Avenant to write his epic poem, Gondibert, in a
series of quatrains with alternate rimes. The first two books of
Gondibert were written at Paris, where D'Avenant was the guest
of lord Jermyn in his rooms at the Louvre. The whole poem was
intended to consist of five books, corresponding to the five acts of
a play, each divided into a number of cantos. D'Avenant, according
to Aubrey, was much in love with his design; and his pre-
occupation with it excited the ridicule of Denham and other
courtiers then at Paris. In 1650, the two finished books were
published, prefaced by a long letter from the author to Hobbes,
who had read the work as it advanced, and by a complimentary
answer from Hobbes himself. Gondibert was never completed.
Early in 1650, Sir William left Paris for Virginia : his voyage was
intercepted by a parliamentary ship, which took him prisoner.
He wrote six cantos of the third book during his imprisonment in
Cowes castle, but, finding that the sorrows of his condition begat
in him 'such a gravity, as diverts the musick of verse,' he aban-
doned the poem, and, during the remaining eighteen years of his
life, added to it but one fragment, which was printed in the
collected edition of his works in 1673. The unfinished poem, with
a postscript dated from Cowes castle, 22 October 1650, was pub-
lished in 1651.
