At the time of its publication, Cleveland’s ode on the death of Edward King was, I suspect, greatly preferred in advanced literary circles to Milton’s; it must have seemed so much more modern and on the spot. For an intelligent undergraduate of the later sixteen-thirties, phrases like “grief’s hydrography” held, no doubt, that quality of intense contemporariness which his successor now finds, and feels to be so satisfactory, in almost any of the imitations of “Anna Livia Plurabelle.”
“Lycidas” is one of the most staggering performances in any literature; having said which, I may admit that I have a sneaking fondness for Cleveland. I like him even when he is at his worst, as in this poem on Edward King; I like him for his very defects—for being so extraordinarily silly in his cleverness, for the really monstrous badness of his bad taste. I like him, also, for his merits. For he has merits. When he is good, he is very good. Thus, to a young lady, who had promised to be his mistress, but was dilatory in keeping her word, he could write:—
Why does my she-advowson fly
Incumbency?
Which is a stroke of genius, a piece of the purest and most concentrated poetical utterance. Meaning is here under pressure, so to speak. There are only seven words; but they carry the significance of seventy times seven. “Advowson” suggests, by its sound, that Chaucerian offence of avouterie, so much resented by storks; by its sense, the clergy—no better, the context implies, than they should be. The association clergy-adultery is always amusing and in the best poetical tradition. (“There is none other incubus but he.”) As for “incumbency”—it is a treasure of etymological ambiguity. On the surface of the word we catch a glimpse of beneficed parsons settling down to porridge and sausages after morning prayers; beneath, in the dimly-remembered, boyhood world of Latin grammar, flutter the literal meanings of in and cubo, with accompanying visions almost Pompeian in their unequivocalness.
A phrase of poetry drops into the mind like a stone into a pool. The waves go out and out in expanding circles. How soon will they break on a confining shore? It depends on the native abilities and the acquired culture of each individual mind. A dull, uneducated spirit is a mere well, narrow between walls; but in a lively and cultivated mind the waves can run on for the imaginative equivalent of miles and hours.
A good “metaphysical” conceit like this of Cleveland’s is a poetical phrase of a peculiar and special kind. The waves it sets going are oddly shaped and have an eccentric motion. Instead of moving in regular circles across the mind, these waves will leave whole expanses of the pool unruffled, to come splashing up with a surprising and fantastic vehemence at one or two remote and unrelated points. The metaphysical poets always aimed at astonishing their readers, at compelling their attention by the association of the most unlikely ideas. The spectacle of strange bed-fellows arbitrarily coupled is always absurd; and so, in all such metaphysical conceits, there is a certain element of absurdity. When the poet knows his business, this is no defect; the absurdity of a thing of beauty may actually heighten our pleasure in its beauty. When the poet does not know his business, the absurdity ruins everything. The association by Cleveland of grief with gutters is merely disastrous. The stone is dropped in the neighbourhood of death; like a waterspout, the wave splashes up at the plumber’s. It won’t do. Whether another and a better poet might have made it do, I cannot guess. Probably not. Plumbing is, I suspect, too intrinsically Freudian and unspiritual ever to be satisfactorily associated with the nobler emotions.
One more paragraph by way of appendix. Shortly after writing this note on plumbing, I saw at Pommersfelden, in Franconia, a fifteenth-century painting, in which Cleveland’s conceit is pictorially realized with all its implications. Christ is shown bleeding, and an angel collects the precious drops as they fall. But instead of collecting the blood directly from the wound, as angels always do in the paintings of the Italian primitives, this German angel collects it only when, in a positive torrent, it has run through an elaborate system of gutters and drain pipes, which discharge it, several feet below the platform on which the Saviour stands, through a large gilt spout. The picture illustrates only too well that disastrous tendency to over-emphasize and protest too much, which is the bane of all German art, from the Middle Ages to the present day. It also confirms all I have said about the incompatibility of plumbing with the higher feelings.
Inscription on the tomb of Lady Mary Wentworth
And here the precious dust is laid,
Whose purely tempered clay was made
So fine, that it the guest betrayed.
Else, the soul grew so fast within,
It broke the outward shell of sin,
And so was hatched a Cherubin.
In height it soared to God above,
In depth it did to knowledge move,
And spread in breadth to general love.
Good to the poor, to kindred dear,
To servants kind, to friendship clear,
To nothing but herself severe.
So, though a virgin, yet a bride
To every grace, she justified
A chaste polygamy, and died.
Learn from hence, reader, what small trust
We owe the world, where virtue must,
Frail as our flesh, crumble to dust.
THOMAS CAREW.
Death and plumbing cannot be coupled poetically. But death and polygamy can be. Carew has proved it.
So, though a virgin, yet a bride
To every grace, she justified
A chaste polygamy, and died.
It is absurd; one is forced to smile. But at the same time one is touched, one does not forget the sadness of early death, one even believes in the lady’s virtues. Smiling, one is yet charmed by the beauty of the verse, one admires the refined and delicate art with which the phrasing is managed. The absurdity of the metaphysical conceit does not take away from our aesthetic pleasure or neutralize our serious emotions; it only changes their quality, gives them a new and peculiar flavour.
Evening
The shadows now so long do grow
That brambles like tall cedars show;
Molehills seem mountains, and the ant
Appears a monstrous elephant.
A very little, little flock
Shades thrice the ground that it would stock,
Whilst the small stripling following them
Appears a mighty Polypheme.
CHARLES COTTON.
The Grasshopper: to Charles Cotton
O thou that swing’st upon the waving hair
Of some well-filled oaten beard,
Drunk every night with a delicious tear
Dropt thee from heaven, where thou wert reared!
The joys of earth and air are thine entire,
That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly;
And when thy poppy works, thou dost retire
To thy carved acorn-bed to lie.
Up with the day, the Sun thou welcomest then,
Sport’st in the gilt plaits of his beams,
And all these merry days mak’st merry men,
Thyself, and melancholy streams.
But, ah, the sickle! golden ears are cropped;
Ceres and Bacchus bid good night;
Sharp frosty fingers all your flowers have topped,
And what scythes spared, winds shave off quite.
Poor verdant fool, and now green ice! thy joys,
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass,
Bid us lay in ’gainst winter rain, and poise
Their floods with an o’erflowing glass.
Thou best of men and friends! we will create
A genuine summer in each other’s breast,
And spite of this cold time and frozen fate,
Thaw us a warm seat to our rest.
RICHARD LOVELACE.
But now the salmon fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist
And, like antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads with their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but not so slow,
These rational amphibii go!
Let’s in; for the dark hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.
ANDREW MARVELL.
Why should, of all things, man unruled
Such unproportioned dwellings build?
The beasts are by their dens expressed,
And birds contrive an equal nest;
The low-roofed tortoises do dwell
In cases fit of tortoise-shell:
No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.
But he, superfluously spread,
Demands more room alive than dead
And in his hollow palace goes,
Where winds, as he, themselves may lose.
What need of all this marble crust
T’ impark the wanton mote of dust?
ANDREW MARVELL.
Dear Marvell’s tortoises! So absurd again—for the tortoise is an intrinsically ridiculous animal; but so right where they are, so beautifully adapted, the one to make us see the fishermen under their coracles and night, hooded with its astronomical tent of shadow; the other to bring home the vanity of royal or plutocratic magnificence. Absurd, I repeat; but for that very reason all the more poetical.
Hope, whose weak being ruined is,
Alike if it succeed and if it miss;
Whom good or ill does equally confound,
And both the horns of Fate’s dilemma wound.
Vain shadow, which does vanish quite
Both at full moon and perfect night!
The stars have not a possibility
Of blessing thee;
If things then from their end we happy call,
’Tis hope is the most hopeless thing of all.
Hope, thou bold taster of delight,
Who, whilst thou shouldst but taste, devour’st it quite!
Thou bring’st us an estate, yet leav’st us poor
By clogging it with legacies before.
The joys which we entire should wed
Come deflowered virgins to our bed;
Good fortunes without gain imported be,
Such mighty custom’s paid to thee.
For joy, like wine, kept close does better taste;
If it take air before, its spirits waste.
Hope, fortune’s cheating lottery,
Where for one prize a hundred blanks there be!
Fond archer, Hope, who tak’st thy aim so far,
That still or short or wide thine arrows are!
Thin, empty cloud, which the eye deceives
With shapes that our own fancy gives!
A cloud which gilt and painted now appears,
But must drop presently in tears!
When thy false beams o’er reason’s light prevail,
By ignes fatui for North Stars we sail.
Brother of fear, more gaily clad!
The merrier fool o’ the two, yet quite as mad!
Sire of repentance, child of fond desire,
That blow’st the Chymic’s and the Lover’s fire!
Leading them still insensibly on
By the
