And give the world the lie.
Say to the Court, it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the Church, it shows
What’s good and doth no good:
If Church and Court reply,
Then give them both the lie.
Tell men of high condition,
That manage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
Their practice only hate:
And if they once reply,
Then give them all the lie.
Tell zeal it wants devotion,
Tell love it is but lust,
Tell time it is but motion,
Tell flesh it is but dust:
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.
So when thou hast, as I
Commanded thee, done blabbing,
Although to give the lie
Deserves no less than stabbing,
Stab at thee he that will;
No stab the soul can kill.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH.
Ay, ay, good man, kind father, best of friends—
These are the words that grow, like grass and nettles,
Out of dead men, and speckled hatreds hide,
Like toads among them.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.
Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey;
But savage man alone does man betray.
Pressed by necessity, they kill for food;
Man undoes man to do himself no good.
With teeth and claws by nature armed, they hunt
Nature’s allowance, to supply their want;
But man with smiles, embraces, friendships, praise,
Unhumanly his fellow’s life betrays,
With voluntary pains works his distress,
Not through necessity, but wantonness.
For hunger or for love they bite or tear,
Whilst wretched man is still in arms for fear;
For fear he arms, and is of arms afraid,
From fear to fear successively betrayed.
Base fear, the source whence his best passion came,
His boasted honour and his dear-bought fame;
That lust of power, to which he’s such a slave,
And for the which alone he dares be brave;
To which his various projects are designed,
Which make him generous, affable and kind.
Look to the bottom of his vast design,
Wherein man’s wisdom, power and glory join,
The good he acts, the ill he does endure,
’Tis all for fear, to make himself secure.
Merely for safety after fame we thirst,
For all men would be cowards if they durst.
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER.
My life is measured by this glass, this glass
By all those little sands that thorough pass.
See how they press, see how they strive, which shall
With greatest speed and greatest quickness fall.
See how they raise a little mount, and then
With their own weight do level it again.
But when they have all got thorough, they give o’er
Their nimble sliding down and move no more.
Just such is man, whose hours still forward run,
Being almost finished ere they are begun;
So perfect nothings, such light blasts are we,
That ere we are aught at all, we cease to be.
Do what we will, our hasty minutes fly,
And while we sleep, what do we else but die?
How transient are our joys, how short their day!
They creep on towards us, but fly away.
How stinging are our sorrows! where they gain
But the least footing, there they will remain.
How groundless are our hopes, how they deceive
Our childish thoughts, and only sorrow leave!
How real are our fears! they blast us still,
Still rend us, still with gnawing passions fill.
How senseless are our wishes, yet how great!
With what toil we pursue them, with what sweat!
Yet most times for our hurts, so small we see,
Like children crying for some mercury. . . .
Poor man, what art? A tennis ball of error,
A ship of glass tossed in a sea of terror,
Issuing in blood and sorrow from the womb,
Crawling in tears and mourning to the tomb;
How slippery are thy paths, how sure thy fall,
How art thou nothing, when thou art most of all!
JOHN HALL.
Let him lean
Against his life, that glassy interval
’Twixt us and nothing; and, upon the ground
Of his own slippery breath, draw hueless dreams,
And gaze on frost-work hopes. Uncourteous Death
Knuckles the pane and . . .
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.
Comic Poetry
What poor astronomers are they
Take women’s eyes for stars!
And set their thoughts in battle ’ray
To fight such idle wars;
When in the end they shall approve
’Tis but a jest drawn out of love.
And love itself is but a jest
Devised by idle heads,
To catch young fancies in the nest
And lay them in fools’ beds;
That being hatched in beauty’s eyes,
They may be fledged ere they be wise.
But yet it is a sport to see
How wit will run on wheels;
While will cannot persuaded be
With that which Reason feels,
That women’s eyes and stars are odd
And love is but a feignèd god.
But such as will run mad with will
I cannot clear their sight,
But leave them to their study still
To look where is no light;
Till—time too late—we make them try,
They study false astronomy.
ANON.
Ha ha! ha ha! this world doth pass
Most merrily, I’ll be sworn;
For many an honest Indian ass
Goes for an Unicorn.
Farra diddle dino,
This is idle fino.
Ty hye! ty hye! O sweet delight!
He tickles this age that can
Call Tullia’s ape a marmosite
And Leda’s goose a swan.
Farra diddle dino,
This is idle fino.
So so! so so! fine English days!
When false play’s no reproach;
For he that doth the coachman praise
May safely use the coach.
Farra diddle dino,
This is idle fino.
ANON.
He that marries a merry lass,
He has most cause to be sad:
For let her go free in her merry tricks,
She’ll work his patience mad.
But he that marries a scold, a scold,
He hath most cause to be merry;
For when she’s in her fits
He may cherish his wits
With singing, hey down derry!
He that weds a roaring girl
That will both scratch and fight,
Though he study all day
To make her away,
Will be glad to please her at night.
And he that copes with a sullen wench,
That scarce will speak at all,
Her doggedness more
Than a scold or a whore
Will penetrate his gall.
But he that’s matched with a turtle dove
That hath no spleen about her
Shall waste so much life
In love of his wife,
He had better be without her.
ANON.
The Elizabethans had a secret, since irretrievably lost—the secret of being lyrically funny, of writing comic verses that are also beautiful. Here are three examples of this extinct loveliness. The first two are poetically the best. You could not ask for a prettier cadence than
He tickles this age that can
Call Tullia’s ape a marmosite
And Leda’s goose a swan;
or a livelier image than
To catch young fancies in the nest
And lay them in fool’s beds.
But the third is also admirable. Admirable for the richness of its verbal flavour. (What grand locutions we have stupidly allowed to die! “Roaring girl,” for example, is a million times better than any equivalent since devised.) Admirable also in its substance. The poem is an abridged text-book of marriage.
To be a whore despite of grace,
Good council and an ugly face,
And to distribute still the pox
To men of wit
Will seem a kind of paradox;
And yet
Thou art a whore, despite of grace,
Good council and an ugly face.
CHARLES COTTON.
When Orpheus went down to the regions below,
Which men are forbidden to see,
He tuned up his lyre, as old histories show,
To set his Eurydice free.
All hell was astonished a person so wise
Should rashly endanger his life
And venture so far—but how vast their surprise,
When they heard that he came for his wife!
To find out a punishment due to the fault
Old Pluto had puzzled his brain;
But hell had no torment sufficient, he thought—
So he gave him his wife back again.
But pity succeeding found place in his heart
And, pleased with his playing so well,
He took her again in reward of his art—
Such merit had music in hell.
SAMUEL LISLE.
Lot and his Daughters
Il but,
Il devint tendre;
Et puis il fut
Son gendre.
ANON.
Compared with the best Elizabethan specimens, the comic poetry of later times seems, even when actually wittier and more amusing, rather poor stuff. Poor in not being beautiful. A certain natural and easy eloquence distinguished the comic verse of the Elizabethans, just as it distinguished their serious verse. Their fun is in the grand manner. Whereas ours is, and for the last two centuries has been, in the flippant manner—flippantly low, or else flippantly too high, mock-heroic. We make a radical distinction between the comic and the serious style. Which is a profound mistake. The best comic works have been grand and beautiful. Witness Rabelais and Aristophanes; witness Daumier and our own magnificently and calligraphically grotesque Rowlandson. The Elizabethans used the same style (in their case a rich and musically flowing one) for both kinds of poetry. So did the Jacobeans and Carolines. These had two main styles for serious poetry—the “witty,” “metaphysical” style and the colloquial style of everyday cultured speech. Both were employed very effectively in their comic verses. I quote a specimen of the second kind by Charles Cotton.
The flippant style came towards the end of the seventeenth century, and has remained the accredited style of comic poetry ever since. Its invention coincides with that of a special “poetic diction” for serious verse—of an artificial language remote from that of ordinary speech. Eighteenth-century diction went out of fashion about 1800—only to be replaced by another poetical argot, that of the Romantics, which is but now ceasing to be the official language of all serious verse. When this has finally gone the way of the conscious swains and finny tribes of an earlier dispensation, comic verse will get the chance of rising from its present Gilbertian degradation, up to that heaven of pure poetic beauty where Tullia’s marmosite and Leda’s goose have their supernatural being.
Conceits
Opening lines of two poems on the death of Edward King
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. . . .
I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize
His artificial grief, who scans his eyes.
Mine weep down pious beads; but why should I
Confine them to the muses’ rosary?
I am no poet here; my pen’s the spout
Where the rain-water of mine eyes runs out
In pity of that name, whose fall we see
Thus copied out in grief’s
