Sixteen psalms are
composed
of trochaic heptasyllabic couplets,
and five of couplets of lines of six syllables.
and five of couplets of lines of six syllables.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v07
Even the opening poems on the
thoughts of childhood, beautiful as they are, have nothing so
striking as the corresponding prose passage, which begins : The
corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from ever-
lasting to everlasting. Again, the poems on Thoughts, as being
every man’s ‘substantial treasures,' are less flowing and musical
than such lines as these :
I can visit Noah in his ark, and swim upon the waters of the deluge. I can
see Moses with his rod, and the children of Israel passing through the sea. . . .
I can visit Solomon in his glory, and go into his temple, and view the sitting
of his servants, and admire the magnificence and glory of his kingdom. No
ereature but one like unto the Holy Angels can see into all ages. . . . It is not
by going with the feet, but by journeys of the Soul, that we travel thither.
Such writing as this has some of the magical quality and personal
note of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici.
As a poet, Traherne has not mastered his technique. His
poems are often diffuse and full of repetitions. He is obsessed
with the rime, 'treasures' and 'pleasures,' using it on page after
page; and, even for an age that was not careful of such things,
the proportion of defective rimes is high. The categorical habit,
also, has had disastrous effects, in unbroken strings of fifteen
nouns in one poem, thirteen adjectives in another, fourteen par-
ticiples in a third. In other poems, the didactic purpose gets the
upper hand, and we hear the preacher's voice: This, my dear
friends, this was my blessed case. ' In spite of such poems as
Wonder, News, Silence and The Ways of Wisdom, he wrote
nothing in verse that is so arresting as his rhetorical prose:
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and per-
ceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because
men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.
The success of Herbert's Temple inevitably produced a crop
of imitations, ranging from Christopher Harvey's Synagogue,
which, by being bound up with The Temple in many editions
from 1640 onwards, achieved a reputation beyond its deserts,
1
1
1
## p. 45 (#61) ##############################################
William Habington
45
down to the doggerel and wholesale plagiarism of Samuel
Speed's Prison Pietie (1677). Vaughan rightly complained of
these facile imitators that they cared more for verse than
perfection. ' Those of Herbert's contemporaries who attempted
sacred verse without falling under his influence deserve more
consideration. To right and to left of Herbert stand William
Habington and Francis Quarles. Both belong by birth to the
country gentry; but the former found readers only among his
own class, while the latter was more successful than any writer of
his time in gauging the protestant religious feeling of English-
men at large. Habington's associations from birth onwards were
with the Roman Catholic minority. He was born at Hindlip hall
near Worcester, a house famous for its concealment of priests,
on the very day on which the Gunpowder plot was discovered
in consequence (so tradition has said) of his mother's letter to
lord Monteagle. His father was an antiquary, whose History of
Edward IV the son completed and published in 1640. William
Habington, after being educated at St Omer and Paris with a
view to his becoming a priest, returned to England and, probably
in the early months of 1633, married Lucy Herbert, youngest
daughter of the first baron Powis. Her praises he celebrated
in Castara, which he published anonymously in 1634. The two
parts of which it then consisted contain poems of courtship and
of marriage. A new edition of Castara, a year later, revealed the
author's name, and added to the second part a set of eight elegies
on his friend, George Talbot, which would more properly have
constituted a third part, and three characters of a mistress, a
wife and a friend, introducing the three sections. In 1640, a
third edition included an entirely new third part, consisting of
a character of 'A Holy Man,' and a collection of sacred poems.
The author recognises that he may be thought ‘a Precisian' for
his unfashionable praise of chastity, but he would not win even
'the spreadingst laurell’by writing wanton or profane. ' In the
third part, he leaves the theme of earthly love to the soft silken
youths at Court,' and is full of self-accusation that he should
ever have handled the theme, however purely. There is a
sombre and monotonous strain running through this third part.
Advancing death, empty fame and decay of the tomb itself are its
constant subjects. Unlike Traherne, he hardly finds life worth
enjoying, with death awaiting him:
And should I farme the proudest state,
I'me Tennant to uncertaine fate.
There is grim humour in the description of his deathbed, where
## p. 46 (#62) ##############################################
46
The Sacred Poets
6
he seems to be a mourner at his own obsequies. He can put
no trust in the predictions of astrologer or doctor :
They onely practise how to make
A mistery of each mistake.
In most of the poems there are occasional fine lines, as in the
welcome to death as a safe retreat,
Where the leane slave, who th' Oare doth plye,
Soft as his Admirall may lye.
More sustained excellence is found in the poems Nox nocti
indicat Scientiam, Et exultavit Humiles and Cupio dissolvi.
But, in many of these meditative and frigid poems, the thought
is commonplace and uncommended by graceful expression, or
accent of sincerity. Defects of workmanship rather than of taste
mar his work; he judged himself rightly, when he admitted in
his preface that he needed to spend ‘more sweate and oyle,' if he
would aspire to the name of poet. Greater pains might have
eliminated his excessive use of the expletive 'do,' many weak
rime-endings, clumsy syntax and harsh elisions (e. g. 'th' An’chrits
prayer,' ''mid th' horrors,' 'sh' admires,' 'so 'bhors'). In the
same year as the complete Castara, appeared The Queene of
Arragon. A Tragi-Comedie. The author died in 1654 and was
buried where my forefathers ashes sleepe. ' His own modest
estimate of his verses will not be challenged, that they are not
so high, as to be wondred at, nor so low as to be contemned. '
Quarles was as little affected as was Habington by the school of
Donne. His chief literary idol was Phineas Fletcher, 'the Spenser
of this age. He was born in 1592 at his father's manor house
.
of Stewards, near Romford in Essex. After studying at Cam-
bridge and Lincoln's inn, he went abroad, like his contemporary
Ferrar, in the train of the princess Elizabeth, on her marriage
with the elector palatine. After his return to England, he seems
to have lived partly in Essex, and partly in Ireland as secretary to
Ussher. In 1639, he became chronologer to the city of London. His
advocacy of the king's cause in a series of pamphlets led to his pro-
perty being sequestrated, his manuscripts burnt and his character
traduced in a petition to parliament. This last misfortune, ac-
cording to his widow, worried him into his grave (1644). His
literary career began in 1620 with A Feast for Wormes, a para-
phrase of the book of Jonah. He gauged popular taste accurately
in employing a facile, straightforward style, much familiar wisdom
and pious allegory, an abundance of metaphors and similes from
common life, but no difficult conceits of the fashionable kind.
Divine Fancies (1632) gave a better taste of his quality, and
6
## p. 47 (#63) ##############################################
Francis Quarles
47
anticipated, in The World's a Theater, some of the success which
attended Emblemes (1635), the most famous English example of
a class of writing which began with the Milanese doctor, Alciati,
a century earlier. Visible poetry. . . catching the eye and fancy
at one draught' had a fascination for most religious writers.
When Herbert moralised on the speckled church-floor, he was near
falling under this influence. Crashaw designed his own emblems
for his last volume; while Silex Scintillans took its name from the
frontispiece of a flinty heart struck with a thunderbolt, and began
with a poem, Authoris de se Emblema. It is fortunate that these
writers, who could do better things, escaped lightly from this
misleading fashion. It is as fortunate that Quarles found in it
the means of doing his best work. Most of the woodcut illus-
trations, and much of the moralising, he took straight from the
Jesuit Herman Hugo's Pia Desideria (1624). But Quarles had
something better to give than 'wit at the second hand. ' If his
ingenuity and his morality are commonly better than his poetry,
at times he rises above his mere task-work to original and forcible
writing, as in False World, thou ly'st, or in the picturesque
comparison of the weary soul with the haggard, cloister'd in
her mew. Sometimes, he reveals an unexpectedly musical quality,
as in the skilful use which he makes of the refrain, 'Sweet
Phosphor, bring the day, and his least attractive pages are
brightened by some daring epithet or felicitous turn of expression.
His liveliness and good sense, his free use of homely words and
notions and his rough humour are enough to account for, and to
justify, his popularity.
Of all these writers it may be said that their sacred themes did
not lead them to avoid the literary fashions of their day: they
and the secular poets trod the same paths. They enjoyed the
same delight in ingenuity, the same fearless use of hyberbole,
the same passion for finding likenesses and unlikenesses in all
manner of unrelated things; and they escaped the commoner
faults of religious poetry, its obviousness, its reliance upon stock
phrases, its tameness. Nor, with all their artificiality, is their
sincerity open to suspicion. They were sacred poets, not from
fashion or interest, but from choice and conviction. 'The very
outgoings of the soule' are to be found alike in Herbert's searching
of heart, in Crashaw's ecstasy and in Vaughan's mystical rapture.
## p. 48 (#64) ##############################################
CHAPTER III
WRITERS OF THE COUPLET
No dogma of Dryden and the critics who were his contem-
poraries is more familiar than that which gave Edmund Waller
the credit of bringing about a revolution in English verse. Dryden
wrote, in 1664 :
the excellence and dignity of it [i. e. rime) were never fully known till
Mr Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to
conclude the sense, most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those
before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of
breath to overtake it 1.
8
:
The author of the preface to the second part of Waller's poems
(1690) indulged in eulogy without qualification :
The reader needs be told no more in commendation of these Poems, than
that they are Mr Waller's; a name that carries everything in it that is either
great or graceful in poetry. He was, indeed, the parent of English verse, and
the first that showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it. . . . The
tongue came into his hands like a rough diamond: he polished it first, and to
that degree, that all artists since him have admired the workmanship, without
pretending to mend it.
These words represent the general conviction of an age in
which smoothness of rhythm and terseness of language were in-
dispensable conditions of poetry. The self-contained couplet
became the universal medium to which these tests were applied ;
and in Waller's couplets the age found the earliest form of verse
which answered them satisfactorily. Waller, during the last thirty
years of his life, must have been thoroughly familiar with the
reputation which he enjoyed as the improver of our numbers ;
but it would be difficult to discover any set purpose or novel
poetical theory underlying the form of the poems which made
him famous. The decasyllabic couplet had been employed very
generally, among other forms, by Elizabethan writers; and, in
1 Dedication of The Rival Ladies (Works, ed. Scott (Saintsbury's ed. ), vol. I,
p. 187). See, also, preface to Fables, 1700 (ibid. vol. II, pp. 209, 210).
## p. 49 (#65) ##############################################
Sir John Beaumont
49
Englands Heroicall Epistles, written before the end of the six-
teenth century, Drayton had given an example of couplet-writing
in which there is as little overlapping of the sense from couplet
to couplet as in any of Waller's most admired poems. But
the general tendency of those poets of the former age' who
used the couplet was to overstep the limits which Drayton
instinctively felt that it imposed. Its bounds were too narrow
for the richness of imagination which distinguished the followers
of Marlowe or of Spenser, and for the elaboration of thought
with which younger poets followed the example of Donne. Those
bounds were better suited to Jonson; but, although much of
his work in this form anticipates the practice of a later age,
his
abrupt vigour of language and his natural fluency were against
consistency in his handling of the couplet. In many cases, where
one couplet was allowed to pass into the next without any break
of sense or construction, and where this continued for many lines
together, the demands of melody prevented the poet from in-
dulging in weak rimes, or ending one couplet with a conjunction
or preposition which bound it to its successor ; but, among the
lesser poets of the Stewart epoch, such tricks became increasingly
common, until, in poems like Chamberlayne's Pharonnida,
sentences were carried on without a break through couplet after
couplet. The casual beauties of such passages are hidden by
a pedantic neglect of form, which amounts to a point of honour
with the writer. Sir John Beaumont, in a set of couplets addressed
to James I, lamented the prevailing formlessness of English poetry,
demanding, in place of ‘balting feet' and defective accents, ragged
rime,' 'fetter'd staves' and obscure language, a type of verse
the requirements of which are most nearly met by the closed
couplet.
The lines To His Late Majesty, concerning the True Forme of
English Poetry, not published till 1629, were, probably, written
soon after the publication of the works of James I in 1616. Sir
John Beaumont was a friend of Drayton, and may have had the
characteristics of Englands Heroicall Epistles before his mind
as he wrote. Drayton, also, was the friend, and, in no small
degree, the master, of George Sandys, who has some importance
in the history of the couplet. Sandys, born on 2 March 1577/8,
was the youngest son of Edwin Sandys, archbishop of York. He
entered St Mary hall, Oxford, in 1589; but nothing further is
known of him until, in 1610, he began his travels in the east, the
relation of which he published, with a dedication to the prince
4
E. L. VII.
CH. III.
## p. 50 (#66) ##############################################
50
Writers of the Couplet
of Wales, in 1615. In August 1621, he went to America, as
treasurer of the English company for the colony of Virginia, with
the governor of the colony, his brother-in-law, Sir Francis Wyatt.
There can be no doubt that, before he went, the first five books of
his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses had appeared in print.
No copy of this publication has been traced ; and Sandys, in
his preface to the whole translation, published in 1626, implies
that the work was done during his residence in Virginia. How-
ever, there is an elegy by Drayton addressed to Sandys, which
was written very soon after Sandys's departure, and contains
historical allusions to events in the Thirty Years' war which shew
that it was composed in the winter of 1621–2. Drayton praises
the first five books of the Metamorphoses already translated,
and begs his correspondent to let's see what lines Virginia
will produce. ' Aided by such encouragement, Sandys persevered,
dedicating the day, as he tells Charles I, 'to the service of your
Great Father, and your Selfe,' and 'that unperfect light, which
was snatcht from the houres of night and repose' to the com-
pletion of his translation, and, probably, the polishing of its
earlier books.
The influence of the study of Ovid upon a more concise and
pointed type of couplet had been already a remarkable feature of
Drayton's poetry. Sandys endeavoured to translate as literally as
possible. In the end, his translation exceeded the original by
only some eleven hundred lines. He is sometimes excessively
literal. When auxiliary brasse resounds in vaine’ is an almost
too exact rendering of Cum frustra resonent aera auxiliaria'
'I see the better, I approve it too; The worse I follow' is faithful
to its original, without reproducing its real force? Wilful em-
broidery on the text is sometimes admitted, where a few additional
words give a picturesque or dramatic touch to the context. Thus,
in these lines from the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe,
M
与
!
6
1
When Pyramus, who came not forth so soone,
Perceived by the glimpses of the Moone
The footing of wild Beasts 3;
and, in this couplet from the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphro-
ditus,
Her sisters oft would say; Fie, Salmacis,
Fie lazie sister, what a sloth is this 4 !
1
2
IV, 372 (Ovid, iv, 333).
iv, 115, 116 (IV, 105, 106).
VII, 25, 26 (v11, 20, 21).
IV, 339 (iv, 305, 306).
3
## p. 51 (#67) ##############################################
George Sandys
51
6
the italicised words are not even implied by Ovid. More often,
probably, Sandys aimed at condensing the sense of the Latin in
his English, where an effect was possible. As a rule, however,
he renders Ovid's sense with extraordinary faithfulness, and in
verse which is strong and melodious. Nowhere are his ability
and ingenuity so apparent as in passages containing long lists of
names of persons or places. The relish which, as a traveller, he
must have found in Ovid's enumeration of the mountains and
rivers affected by Phaëthon's experiment with his father's horses
is clearly apparent? A love of outdoor sport, which elsewhere
suggests casual words and phrases, led him to find appropriate
English equivalents for the names which Ovid gives to Actaeon's
hounds? : his account of the tragedy gains strength thereby.
In almost every part of the poem we may find passages of
vigour and picturesqueness, sustained for many lines together.
Such are the descriptions of the cave of Envy8; of the plague*;
of Pythagoras and his vegetarian counsels"; and the comparison
of the ages of man to the seasons. In his rendering of the
good-natured story of Baucis and Philemon,' Sandys works with
that simplicity of language which the homely subject demands? .
He was not habitually superior to what he would have called
the 'ambages' of his contemporaries. Richard Hooper, the
editor of his poems, has indicated the obligation under which,
in the matter of phrase, he lay to Chapman, not the best model of
a perspicuous style. But, on the whole, his style was consistently
direct and intelligible; it is even, at times, colloquial. Every one
of Ovid's heroes, gods, or monsters assumes, with Sandys, a
tendency to 'skip' or 'caper'; while
Furious Medea, with her haire unbound,
About the flagrant Altar trots a Round 8.
However, his directness does not lead to baldness of language, or
to avoidance of a sounding word or phrase where it will serve its
turn. Similarly, his versification is guided by its opportunities
rather than by fixed prejudices in favour of certain rules.
A number of couplets, each complete in itself, may quite easily
be followed by a series of overlapping couplets. In either case,
each couplet will be solid and weighty in texture and content:
Sandys was not afraid of double consonants or strong monosyllabic
1
2
3
11, 235 ff. (Ovid, n, 216 ff. ).
11, 835 ft. (11, 760 ff. ).
xv, 69 ff. (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.
thoughts of childhood, beautiful as they are, have nothing so
striking as the corresponding prose passage, which begins : The
corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from ever-
lasting to everlasting. Again, the poems on Thoughts, as being
every man’s ‘substantial treasures,' are less flowing and musical
than such lines as these :
I can visit Noah in his ark, and swim upon the waters of the deluge. I can
see Moses with his rod, and the children of Israel passing through the sea. . . .
I can visit Solomon in his glory, and go into his temple, and view the sitting
of his servants, and admire the magnificence and glory of his kingdom. No
ereature but one like unto the Holy Angels can see into all ages. . . . It is not
by going with the feet, but by journeys of the Soul, that we travel thither.
Such writing as this has some of the magical quality and personal
note of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici.
As a poet, Traherne has not mastered his technique. His
poems are often diffuse and full of repetitions. He is obsessed
with the rime, 'treasures' and 'pleasures,' using it on page after
page; and, even for an age that was not careful of such things,
the proportion of defective rimes is high. The categorical habit,
also, has had disastrous effects, in unbroken strings of fifteen
nouns in one poem, thirteen adjectives in another, fourteen par-
ticiples in a third. In other poems, the didactic purpose gets the
upper hand, and we hear the preacher's voice: This, my dear
friends, this was my blessed case. ' In spite of such poems as
Wonder, News, Silence and The Ways of Wisdom, he wrote
nothing in verse that is so arresting as his rhetorical prose:
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and per-
ceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because
men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.
The success of Herbert's Temple inevitably produced a crop
of imitations, ranging from Christopher Harvey's Synagogue,
which, by being bound up with The Temple in many editions
from 1640 onwards, achieved a reputation beyond its deserts,
1
1
1
## p. 45 (#61) ##############################################
William Habington
45
down to the doggerel and wholesale plagiarism of Samuel
Speed's Prison Pietie (1677). Vaughan rightly complained of
these facile imitators that they cared more for verse than
perfection. ' Those of Herbert's contemporaries who attempted
sacred verse without falling under his influence deserve more
consideration. To right and to left of Herbert stand William
Habington and Francis Quarles. Both belong by birth to the
country gentry; but the former found readers only among his
own class, while the latter was more successful than any writer of
his time in gauging the protestant religious feeling of English-
men at large. Habington's associations from birth onwards were
with the Roman Catholic minority. He was born at Hindlip hall
near Worcester, a house famous for its concealment of priests,
on the very day on which the Gunpowder plot was discovered
in consequence (so tradition has said) of his mother's letter to
lord Monteagle. His father was an antiquary, whose History of
Edward IV the son completed and published in 1640. William
Habington, after being educated at St Omer and Paris with a
view to his becoming a priest, returned to England and, probably
in the early months of 1633, married Lucy Herbert, youngest
daughter of the first baron Powis. Her praises he celebrated
in Castara, which he published anonymously in 1634. The two
parts of which it then consisted contain poems of courtship and
of marriage. A new edition of Castara, a year later, revealed the
author's name, and added to the second part a set of eight elegies
on his friend, George Talbot, which would more properly have
constituted a third part, and three characters of a mistress, a
wife and a friend, introducing the three sections. In 1640, a
third edition included an entirely new third part, consisting of
a character of 'A Holy Man,' and a collection of sacred poems.
The author recognises that he may be thought ‘a Precisian' for
his unfashionable praise of chastity, but he would not win even
'the spreadingst laurell’by writing wanton or profane. ' In the
third part, he leaves the theme of earthly love to the soft silken
youths at Court,' and is full of self-accusation that he should
ever have handled the theme, however purely. There is a
sombre and monotonous strain running through this third part.
Advancing death, empty fame and decay of the tomb itself are its
constant subjects. Unlike Traherne, he hardly finds life worth
enjoying, with death awaiting him:
And should I farme the proudest state,
I'me Tennant to uncertaine fate.
There is grim humour in the description of his deathbed, where
## p. 46 (#62) ##############################################
46
The Sacred Poets
6
he seems to be a mourner at his own obsequies. He can put
no trust in the predictions of astrologer or doctor :
They onely practise how to make
A mistery of each mistake.
In most of the poems there are occasional fine lines, as in the
welcome to death as a safe retreat,
Where the leane slave, who th' Oare doth plye,
Soft as his Admirall may lye.
More sustained excellence is found in the poems Nox nocti
indicat Scientiam, Et exultavit Humiles and Cupio dissolvi.
But, in many of these meditative and frigid poems, the thought
is commonplace and uncommended by graceful expression, or
accent of sincerity. Defects of workmanship rather than of taste
mar his work; he judged himself rightly, when he admitted in
his preface that he needed to spend ‘more sweate and oyle,' if he
would aspire to the name of poet. Greater pains might have
eliminated his excessive use of the expletive 'do,' many weak
rime-endings, clumsy syntax and harsh elisions (e. g. 'th' An’chrits
prayer,' ''mid th' horrors,' 'sh' admires,' 'so 'bhors'). In the
same year as the complete Castara, appeared The Queene of
Arragon. A Tragi-Comedie. The author died in 1654 and was
buried where my forefathers ashes sleepe. ' His own modest
estimate of his verses will not be challenged, that they are not
so high, as to be wondred at, nor so low as to be contemned. '
Quarles was as little affected as was Habington by the school of
Donne. His chief literary idol was Phineas Fletcher, 'the Spenser
of this age. He was born in 1592 at his father's manor house
.
of Stewards, near Romford in Essex. After studying at Cam-
bridge and Lincoln's inn, he went abroad, like his contemporary
Ferrar, in the train of the princess Elizabeth, on her marriage
with the elector palatine. After his return to England, he seems
to have lived partly in Essex, and partly in Ireland as secretary to
Ussher. In 1639, he became chronologer to the city of London. His
advocacy of the king's cause in a series of pamphlets led to his pro-
perty being sequestrated, his manuscripts burnt and his character
traduced in a petition to parliament. This last misfortune, ac-
cording to his widow, worried him into his grave (1644). His
literary career began in 1620 with A Feast for Wormes, a para-
phrase of the book of Jonah. He gauged popular taste accurately
in employing a facile, straightforward style, much familiar wisdom
and pious allegory, an abundance of metaphors and similes from
common life, but no difficult conceits of the fashionable kind.
Divine Fancies (1632) gave a better taste of his quality, and
6
## p. 47 (#63) ##############################################
Francis Quarles
47
anticipated, in The World's a Theater, some of the success which
attended Emblemes (1635), the most famous English example of
a class of writing which began with the Milanese doctor, Alciati,
a century earlier. Visible poetry. . . catching the eye and fancy
at one draught' had a fascination for most religious writers.
When Herbert moralised on the speckled church-floor, he was near
falling under this influence. Crashaw designed his own emblems
for his last volume; while Silex Scintillans took its name from the
frontispiece of a flinty heart struck with a thunderbolt, and began
with a poem, Authoris de se Emblema. It is fortunate that these
writers, who could do better things, escaped lightly from this
misleading fashion. It is as fortunate that Quarles found in it
the means of doing his best work. Most of the woodcut illus-
trations, and much of the moralising, he took straight from the
Jesuit Herman Hugo's Pia Desideria (1624). But Quarles had
something better to give than 'wit at the second hand. ' If his
ingenuity and his morality are commonly better than his poetry,
at times he rises above his mere task-work to original and forcible
writing, as in False World, thou ly'st, or in the picturesque
comparison of the weary soul with the haggard, cloister'd in
her mew. Sometimes, he reveals an unexpectedly musical quality,
as in the skilful use which he makes of the refrain, 'Sweet
Phosphor, bring the day, and his least attractive pages are
brightened by some daring epithet or felicitous turn of expression.
His liveliness and good sense, his free use of homely words and
notions and his rough humour are enough to account for, and to
justify, his popularity.
Of all these writers it may be said that their sacred themes did
not lead them to avoid the literary fashions of their day: they
and the secular poets trod the same paths. They enjoyed the
same delight in ingenuity, the same fearless use of hyberbole,
the same passion for finding likenesses and unlikenesses in all
manner of unrelated things; and they escaped the commoner
faults of religious poetry, its obviousness, its reliance upon stock
phrases, its tameness. Nor, with all their artificiality, is their
sincerity open to suspicion. They were sacred poets, not from
fashion or interest, but from choice and conviction. 'The very
outgoings of the soule' are to be found alike in Herbert's searching
of heart, in Crashaw's ecstasy and in Vaughan's mystical rapture.
## p. 48 (#64) ##############################################
CHAPTER III
WRITERS OF THE COUPLET
No dogma of Dryden and the critics who were his contem-
poraries is more familiar than that which gave Edmund Waller
the credit of bringing about a revolution in English verse. Dryden
wrote, in 1664 :
the excellence and dignity of it [i. e. rime) were never fully known till
Mr Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to
conclude the sense, most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those
before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of
breath to overtake it 1.
8
:
The author of the preface to the second part of Waller's poems
(1690) indulged in eulogy without qualification :
The reader needs be told no more in commendation of these Poems, than
that they are Mr Waller's; a name that carries everything in it that is either
great or graceful in poetry. He was, indeed, the parent of English verse, and
the first that showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it. . . . The
tongue came into his hands like a rough diamond: he polished it first, and to
that degree, that all artists since him have admired the workmanship, without
pretending to mend it.
These words represent the general conviction of an age in
which smoothness of rhythm and terseness of language were in-
dispensable conditions of poetry. The self-contained couplet
became the universal medium to which these tests were applied ;
and in Waller's couplets the age found the earliest form of verse
which answered them satisfactorily. Waller, during the last thirty
years of his life, must have been thoroughly familiar with the
reputation which he enjoyed as the improver of our numbers ;
but it would be difficult to discover any set purpose or novel
poetical theory underlying the form of the poems which made
him famous. The decasyllabic couplet had been employed very
generally, among other forms, by Elizabethan writers; and, in
1 Dedication of The Rival Ladies (Works, ed. Scott (Saintsbury's ed. ), vol. I,
p. 187). See, also, preface to Fables, 1700 (ibid. vol. II, pp. 209, 210).
## p. 49 (#65) ##############################################
Sir John Beaumont
49
Englands Heroicall Epistles, written before the end of the six-
teenth century, Drayton had given an example of couplet-writing
in which there is as little overlapping of the sense from couplet
to couplet as in any of Waller's most admired poems. But
the general tendency of those poets of the former age' who
used the couplet was to overstep the limits which Drayton
instinctively felt that it imposed. Its bounds were too narrow
for the richness of imagination which distinguished the followers
of Marlowe or of Spenser, and for the elaboration of thought
with which younger poets followed the example of Donne. Those
bounds were better suited to Jonson; but, although much of
his work in this form anticipates the practice of a later age,
his
abrupt vigour of language and his natural fluency were against
consistency in his handling of the couplet. In many cases, where
one couplet was allowed to pass into the next without any break
of sense or construction, and where this continued for many lines
together, the demands of melody prevented the poet from in-
dulging in weak rimes, or ending one couplet with a conjunction
or preposition which bound it to its successor ; but, among the
lesser poets of the Stewart epoch, such tricks became increasingly
common, until, in poems like Chamberlayne's Pharonnida,
sentences were carried on without a break through couplet after
couplet. The casual beauties of such passages are hidden by
a pedantic neglect of form, which amounts to a point of honour
with the writer. Sir John Beaumont, in a set of couplets addressed
to James I, lamented the prevailing formlessness of English poetry,
demanding, in place of ‘balting feet' and defective accents, ragged
rime,' 'fetter'd staves' and obscure language, a type of verse
the requirements of which are most nearly met by the closed
couplet.
The lines To His Late Majesty, concerning the True Forme of
English Poetry, not published till 1629, were, probably, written
soon after the publication of the works of James I in 1616. Sir
John Beaumont was a friend of Drayton, and may have had the
characteristics of Englands Heroicall Epistles before his mind
as he wrote. Drayton, also, was the friend, and, in no small
degree, the master, of George Sandys, who has some importance
in the history of the couplet. Sandys, born on 2 March 1577/8,
was the youngest son of Edwin Sandys, archbishop of York. He
entered St Mary hall, Oxford, in 1589; but nothing further is
known of him until, in 1610, he began his travels in the east, the
relation of which he published, with a dedication to the prince
4
E. L. VII.
CH. III.
## p. 50 (#66) ##############################################
50
Writers of the Couplet
of Wales, in 1615. In August 1621, he went to America, as
treasurer of the English company for the colony of Virginia, with
the governor of the colony, his brother-in-law, Sir Francis Wyatt.
There can be no doubt that, before he went, the first five books of
his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses had appeared in print.
No copy of this publication has been traced ; and Sandys, in
his preface to the whole translation, published in 1626, implies
that the work was done during his residence in Virginia. How-
ever, there is an elegy by Drayton addressed to Sandys, which
was written very soon after Sandys's departure, and contains
historical allusions to events in the Thirty Years' war which shew
that it was composed in the winter of 1621–2. Drayton praises
the first five books of the Metamorphoses already translated,
and begs his correspondent to let's see what lines Virginia
will produce. ' Aided by such encouragement, Sandys persevered,
dedicating the day, as he tells Charles I, 'to the service of your
Great Father, and your Selfe,' and 'that unperfect light, which
was snatcht from the houres of night and repose' to the com-
pletion of his translation, and, probably, the polishing of its
earlier books.
The influence of the study of Ovid upon a more concise and
pointed type of couplet had been already a remarkable feature of
Drayton's poetry. Sandys endeavoured to translate as literally as
possible. In the end, his translation exceeded the original by
only some eleven hundred lines. He is sometimes excessively
literal. When auxiliary brasse resounds in vaine’ is an almost
too exact rendering of Cum frustra resonent aera auxiliaria'
'I see the better, I approve it too; The worse I follow' is faithful
to its original, without reproducing its real force? Wilful em-
broidery on the text is sometimes admitted, where a few additional
words give a picturesque or dramatic touch to the context. Thus,
in these lines from the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe,
M
与
!
6
1
When Pyramus, who came not forth so soone,
Perceived by the glimpses of the Moone
The footing of wild Beasts 3;
and, in this couplet from the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphro-
ditus,
Her sisters oft would say; Fie, Salmacis,
Fie lazie sister, what a sloth is this 4 !
1
2
IV, 372 (Ovid, iv, 333).
iv, 115, 116 (IV, 105, 106).
VII, 25, 26 (v11, 20, 21).
IV, 339 (iv, 305, 306).
3
## p. 51 (#67) ##############################################
George Sandys
51
6
the italicised words are not even implied by Ovid. More often,
probably, Sandys aimed at condensing the sense of the Latin in
his English, where an effect was possible. As a rule, however,
he renders Ovid's sense with extraordinary faithfulness, and in
verse which is strong and melodious. Nowhere are his ability
and ingenuity so apparent as in passages containing long lists of
names of persons or places. The relish which, as a traveller, he
must have found in Ovid's enumeration of the mountains and
rivers affected by Phaëthon's experiment with his father's horses
is clearly apparent? A love of outdoor sport, which elsewhere
suggests casual words and phrases, led him to find appropriate
English equivalents for the names which Ovid gives to Actaeon's
hounds? : his account of the tragedy gains strength thereby.
In almost every part of the poem we may find passages of
vigour and picturesqueness, sustained for many lines together.
Such are the descriptions of the cave of Envy8; of the plague*;
of Pythagoras and his vegetarian counsels"; and the comparison
of the ages of man to the seasons. In his rendering of the
good-natured story of Baucis and Philemon,' Sandys works with
that simplicity of language which the homely subject demands? .
He was not habitually superior to what he would have called
the 'ambages' of his contemporaries. Richard Hooper, the
editor of his poems, has indicated the obligation under which,
in the matter of phrase, he lay to Chapman, not the best model of
a perspicuous style. But, on the whole, his style was consistently
direct and intelligible; it is even, at times, colloquial. Every one
of Ovid's heroes, gods, or monsters assumes, with Sandys, a
tendency to 'skip' or 'caper'; while
Furious Medea, with her haire unbound,
About the flagrant Altar trots a Round 8.
However, his directness does not lead to baldness of language, or
to avoidance of a sounding word or phrase where it will serve its
turn. Similarly, his versification is guided by its opportunities
rather than by fixed prejudices in favour of certain rules.
A number of couplets, each complete in itself, may quite easily
be followed by a series of overlapping couplets. In either case,
each couplet will be solid and weighty in texture and content:
Sandys was not afraid of double consonants or strong monosyllabic
1
2
3
11, 235 ff. (Ovid, n, 216 ff. ).
11, 835 ft. (11, 760 ff. ).
xv, 69 ff. (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.
