England's Antiphon

To look at the change a little more closely: we find in the earliest time, feeling working on historic fact and on what was received as such, and the result simple aspiration after goodness. The next stage is good doctrine—I use the word, as St. Paul uses it, for instruction in righteousness—chiefly by means of allegory, all attempts at analysis being made through personification of qualities. Here the general form is frequently more poetic than the matter. After this we have a period principally of imitation, sometimes good, sometimes indifferent. Next, with the Reformation and the revival of literature together, come more of art and more of philosophy, to the detriment of the lyrical expression. People cannot think and sing: they can only feel and sing. But the philosophy goes farther in this direction, even to the putting in abeyance of that from which song takes its rise,—namely, feeling itself. As to the former, amongst the verse of the period I have given, there is hardly anything to be called song but Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, and for them we are more indebted to King David than to Sir Philip. As to the latter, even in the case of that most mournful poem of the Countess of Pembroke, it is, to quite an unhealthy degree, occupied with the attempt to work upon her own feelings by the contemplation of them, instead of with the utterance of those aroused by the contemplation of truth. In her case the metaphysics have begun to prey upon and consume the emotions. Besides, that age was essentially a dramatic age, as even its command of language, especially as shown in the pranks it plays with it, would almost indicate; and the dramatic impulse is less favourable, though not at all opposed, to lyrical utterance. In the cases of Sir Fulk Grevill and Sir John Davies, the feeling is assuredly profound; but in form and expression the philosophy has quite the upper hand.

We must not therefore suppose, however, that the cause of religious poetry has been a losing one. The last wave must sink that the next may rise, and the whole tide flow shorewards. The man must awake through all his soul, all his strength, all his mind, that he may worship God in unity, in the one harmonious utterance of his being: his heart must be united to fear his name. And for this final perfection of the individual the race must awake. At this season and that season, this power or that power must be chiefly developed in her elect; and for its sake the growth of others must for a season be delayed. But the next generation will inherit all that has gone before; and its elect, if they be themselves pure in heart, and individual, that is original, in mind, will, more or less thoroughly, embody the result, in subservience to some new development, essential in its turn to further progress. Even the fallow times, which we are so ready to call barren, must have their share in working the one needful work. They may be to the nation that which sickness so often is to the man—a time of refreshing from the Lord. A nation's life does not lie in its utterance any more than in the things which it possesses: it lies in its action. The utterance is a result, and therefore a sign, of life; but there may be life without any such sign. To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God, is the highest life of a nation as of an individual; and when the time for speech comes, it will be such life alone that causes the speech to be strong at once and harmonious. When at last there are not ten righteous men in Sodom, Sodom can neither think, act, nor say, and her destruction is at hand.

While the wave of the dramatic was sinking, the wave of the lyric was growing in force and rising in height. Especially as regards religious poetry we are as yet only approaching the lyrical jubilee. Fact and faith, self-consciousness and metaphysics, all are needful to the lyric of love. Modesty and art find their grandest, simplest labour in rightly subordinating each of those to the others. How could we have a George Herbert without metaphysics? In those poems I have just given, the way of metaphysics was prepared for him. That which overcolours one age to the injury of its harmony, will, in the next or the next, fall into its own place in the seven-chorded rainbow of truth.

CHAPTER VII

DR. DONNE.

We now come to Dr. John Donne, a man of justly great respect and authority, who, born in the year 1573, the fifteenth of Queen Elizabeth, died Dean of St. Paul's in the year 1636. But, although even Ben Jonson addresses him as "the delight of Phoebus and each Muse," we are too far beyond the power of his social presence and the influence of his public utterances to feel that admiration of his poems which was so largely expressed during his lifetime. Of many of those that were written in his youth, Izaak Walton says Dr. Donne "wished that his own eyes had witnessed their funerals." Faulty as they are, however, they are not the less the work of a great and earnest man.

Bred to the law, but never having practised it, he lost his secretaryship to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere through the revenge of Sir George More, whose daughter Donne had married in secret because of her father's opposition. Dependent thereafter for years on the generous kindness of unrelated friends, he yet for conscience' sake refused to take orders when a good living was offered him; and it was only after prolonged thought that he yielded to the importunity of King James, who was so convinced of his surpassing fitness for the church that he would speed him towards no other goal. When at length he dared hope that God might have called him to the high office, never man gave himself to its duties with more of whole-heartedness and devotion, and none have proved themselves more clean of the sacrilege of serving at the altar for the sake of the things offered thereon.

He is represented by Dr. Johnson as one of the chief examples of that school of poets called by himself the metaphysical, an epithet which, as a definition, is almost false. True it is that Donne and his followers were always ready to deal with metaphysical subjects, but it was from their mode, and not their subjects, that Dr. Johnson classed them. What this mode was we shall see presently, for I shall be justified in setting forth its strangeness, even absurdity, by the fact that Dr. Donne was the dear friend of George Herbert, and had much to do with the formation of his poetic habits. Just twenty years older than Herbert, and the valued and intimate friend of his mother, Donne was in precisely that relation of age and circumstance to influence the other in the highest degree.

The central thought of Dr. Donne is nearly sure to be just: the subordinate thoughts by means of which he unfolds it are often grotesque, and so wildly associated as to remind one of the lawlessness of a dream, wherein mere suggestion without choice or fitness rules the sequence. As some of the writers of whom I have last spoken would play with words, Dr. Donne would sport with ideas, and with the visual images or embodiments of them. Certainly in his case much knowledge reveals itself in the association of his ideas, and great facility in the management and utterance of them. True likewise, he says nothing unrelated to the main idea of the poem; but not the less certainly does the whole resemble the speech of a child of active imagination, to whom judgment as to the character of his suggestions is impossible, his taste being equally gratified with a lovely image and a brilliant absurdity: a butterfly and a shining potsherd are to him similarly desirable. Whatever wild thing starts from the thicket of thought, all is worthy game to the hunting intellect of Dr. Donne, and is followed without question of tone, keeping, or harmony. In his play with words, Sir Philip Sidney kept good heed that even that should serve the end in view; in his play with ideas, Dr. John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse. He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of metric movement and associated sounds. This is clearly the result of indifference; an indifference, however, which grows very strange to us when we find that he can write a lovely verse and even an exquisite stanza.

Greatly for its own sake, partly for the sake of illustration, I quote a poem containing at once his best and his worst, the result being such an incongruity that we wonder whether it might not be called his best and his worst, because we cannot determine which. He calls it Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness. The first stanza is worthy of George Herbert in his best mood.

  Since I am coming to that holy room,    Where with the choir of saints for evermore  I shall be made thy music, as I come    I tune the instrument here at the door,    And what I must do then, think here before.

To recognize its beauty, leaving aside the depth and truth of the phrase, "Where I shall be made thy music," we must recall the custom of those days to send out for "a noise of musicians." Hence he imagines that he has been summoned as one of a band already gone in to play before the king of "The High Countries:" he is now at the door, where he is listening to catch the tone, that he may have his instrument tuned and ready before he enters. But with what a jar the next stanza breaks on heart, mind, and ear!

  Whilst my physicians by their love are grown    Cosmographers, and I72 their map, who lie  Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown    That this is my south-west discovery,    Per fretum febris—by these straits to die;—

Here, in the midst of comparing himself to a map, and his physicians to cosmographers consulting the map, he changes without warning into a navigator whom they are trying to follow upon the map as he passes through certain straits—namely, those of the fever—towards his south-west discovery, Death. Grotesque as this is, the absurdity deepens in the end of the next stanza by a return to the former idea. He is alternately a map and a man sailing on the map of himself. But the first half of the stanza is lovely: my reader must remember that the region of the West was at that time the Land of Promise to England.

  I joy that in these straits I see my West;    For though those currents yield return to none,  What shall my West hurt me? As west and east    In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,    So death doth touch the resurrection.

It is hardly worth while, except for the strangeness of the phenomenon, to spend any time in elucidating this. Once more a map, he is that of the two hemispheres, in which the east of the one touches the west of the other. Could anything be much more unmusical than the line, "In all flat maps (and I am one) are one"? But the next stanza is worse.

  Is the Pacific sea my home? Or are    The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?  Anvan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar?    All straits, and none but straits are ways to them,    Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Sem.

The meaning of the stanza is this: there is no earthly home: all these places are only straits that lead home, just as they themselves cannot be reached but through straits.

Let my reader now forget all but the first stanza, and take it along with the following, the last two:

  We think that Paradise and Calvary,    Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place:  Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;    As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,    May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.  So, in his purple wrapped, receive me, Lord;    By these his thorns give me his other crown;  And as to others' souls I preached thy word,    Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:    Therefore, that he may raise, the Lord throws down.

Surely these are very fine, especially the middle verse of the former and the first verse of the latter stanza. The three stanzas together make us lovingly regret that Dr. Donne should have ridden his Pegasus over quarry and housetop, instead of teaching him his paces.

The next I quote is artistic throughout. Perhaps the fact, of which we are informed by Izaak Walton, "that he caused it to be set to a grave and solemn tune, and to be often sung to the organ by the choristers of St. Paul's church in his own hearing, especially at the evening service," may have something to do with its degree of perfection. There is no sign of his usual haste about it. It is even elaborately rhymed after Norman fashion, the rhymes in each stanza being consonant with the rhymes in every stanza.

A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER

  Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,    Which was my sin, though it were done before?73  Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,74    And do run still, though still I do deplore?—      When thou hast done, thou hast not done;        For I have more.  Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won    Others to sin, and made my sins their door?75  Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun    A year or two, but wallowed in a score?—      When thou hast done, thou hast not done;        For I have more.  I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;  But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son    Shall shine, as he shines now and heretofore;      And having done that, thou hast done:        I fear no more.

In those days even a pun might be a serious thing: witness the play in the last stanza on the words son and sun—not a mere pun, for the Son of the Father is the Sun of Righteousness: he is Life and Light.

What the Doctor himself says concerning the hymn, appears to me not only interesting but of practical value. He "did occasionally say to a friend, 'The words of this hymn have restored to me the same thoughts of joy that possessed my soul in my sickness, when I composed it.'" What a help it would be to many, if in their more gloomy times they would but recall the visions of truth they had, and were assured of, in better moments!

Here is a somewhat strange hymn, which yet possesses, rightly understood, a real grandeur:

A HYMN TO CHRIST

At the Author's last going into Germany.76

  In what torn ship soever I embark,  That ship shall be my emblem of thy ark;  What sea soever swallow me, that flood  Shall be to me an emblem of thy blood.  Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise  Thy face, yet through that mask I know those eyes,    Which, though they turn away sometimes—      They never will despise.  I sacrifice this island unto thee,  And all whom I love here and who love me:  When I have put this flood 'twixt them and me,  Put thou thy blood betwixt my sins and thee.  As the tree's sap doth seek the root below  In winter, in my winter77 now I go    Where none but thee, the eternal root      Of true love, I may know.  Nor thou, nor thy religion, dost control  The amorousness of an harmonious soul;  But thou wouldst have that love thyself: as thou  Art jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now.  Thou lov'st not, till from loving more thou free  My soul: who ever gives, takes liberty:    Oh, if thou car'st not whom I love,      Alas, thou lov'st not me!  Seal then this bill of my divorce to all  On whom those fainter beams of love did fall;  Marry those loves, which in youth scattered be  On face, wit, hopes, (false mistresses), to thee.  Churches are best for prayer that have least light:  To see God only, I go out of sight;    And, to 'scape stormy days, I choose      An everlasting night

To do justice to this poem, the reader must take some trouble to enter into the poet's mood.

It is in a measure distressing that, while I grant with all my heart the claim of his "Muse's white sincerity," the taste in—I do not say of—some of his best poems should be such that I will not present them.

Out of twenty-three Holy Sonnets, every one of which, I should almost say, possesses something remarkable, I choose three. Rhymed after the true Petrarchian fashion, their rhythm is often as bad as it can be to be called rhythm at all. Yet these are very fine.

  Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?    Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;    I run to death, and death meets me as fast,  And all my pleasures are like yesterday.  I dare not move my dim eyes any way,    Despair behind, and death before doth cast    Such terror; and my feeble flesh doth waste  By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.  Only them art above, and when towards thee    By thy leave I can look, I rise again;  But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,    That not one hour myself I can sustain:  Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,  And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.  If faithful souls be alike glorified    As angels, then my father's soul doth see,    And adds this even to full felicity,  That valiantly I hell's wide mouth o'erstride:  But if our minds to these souls be descried    By circumstances and by signs that be    Apparent in us—not immediately78—  How shall my mind's white truth by them be tried?    They see idolatrous lovers weep and mourn,  And, style blasphemous, conjurors to call  On Jesu's name, and pharisaical    Dissemblers feign devotiön. Then turn,  O pensive soul, to God; for he knows best  Thy grief, for he put it into my breast.  Death, be not proud, though some have calléd thee    Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;    For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,  Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.  From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,    Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;    And soonest79 our best men with thee do go,  Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery!    Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,    And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st80 thou then?  One short sleep past, we wake eternally,  And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.

In a poem called The Cross, full of fantastic conceits, we find the following remarkable lines, embodying the profoundest truth.

  As perchance carvers do not faces make,  But that away, which hid them there, do take:  Let crosses so take what hid Christ in thee,  And be his image, or not his, but he.

One more, and we shall take our leave of Dr. Donne. It is called a fragment; but it seems to me complete. It will serve as a specimen of his best and at the same time of his most characteristic mode of presenting fine thoughts grotesquely attired.

RESURRECTION

  Sleep, sleep, old sun; thou canst not have re-past81  As yet the wound thou took'st on Friday last.  Sleep then, and rest: the world may bear thy stay;  A better sun rose before thee to-day;  Who, not content to enlighten all that dwell  On the earth's face as thou, enlightened hell,  And made the dark fires languish in that vale,  As at thy presence here our fires grow pale;  Whose body, having walked on earth and now  Hastening to heaven, would, that he might allow  Himself unto all stations and fill all,  For these three days become a mineral.  He was all gold when he lay down, but rose  All tincture; and doth not alone dispose  Leaden and iron wills to good, but is  Of power to make even sinful flesh like his.  Had one of those, whose credulous piety  Thought that a soul one might discern and see  Go from a body, at this sepulchre been,  And issuing from the sheet this body seen,  He would have justly thought this body a soul,  If not of any man, yet of the whole.

What a strange mode of saying that he is our head, the captain of our salvation, the perfect humanity in which our life is hid! Yet it has its dignity. When one has got over the oddity of these last six lines, the figure contained in them shows itself almost grand.

As an individual specimen of the grotesque form holding a fine sense, regard for a moment the words,

  He was all gold when he lay down, but rose  All tincture;

which means, that, entirely good when he died, he was something yet greater when he rose, for he had gained the power of making others good: the tincture intended here was a substance whose touch would turn the basest metal into gold.

Through his poems are scattered many fine passages; but not even his large influence on the better poets who followed is sufficient to justify our listening to him longer now.

CHAPTER VIII

BISHOP HALL AND GEORGE SANDYS.

Joseph Hall, born in 1574, a year after Dr. Donne, bishop, first of Exeter, next of Norwich, is best known by his satires. It is not for such that I can mention him: the most honest satire can claim no place amongst religious poems. It is doubtful if satire ever did any good. Its very language is that of the half-brute from which it is well named.

Here are three poems, however, which the bishop wrote for his choir.

ANTHEM FOR THE CATHEDRAL OF EXETER

  Lord, what am I? A worm, dust, vapour, nothing!    What is my life? A dream, a daily dying!  What is my flesh? My soul's uneasy clothing!    What is my time? A minute ever flying:      My time, my flesh, my life, and I,      What are we, Lord, but vanity?  Where am I, Lord? Down in a vale of death.    What is my trade? Sin, my dear God offending;  My sport sin too, my stay a puff of breath.    What end of sin? Hell's horror never ending:      My way, my trade, sport, stay, and place,      Help to make up my doleful case.  Lord, what art thou? Pure life, power, beauty, bliss.    Where dwell'st thou? Up above in perfect light.  What is thy time? Eternity it is.    What state? Attendance of each glorious sprite:      Thyself, thy place, thy days, thy state      Pass all the thoughts of powers create.  How shall I reach thee, Lord? Oh, soar above,    Ambitious soul. But which way should I fly?  Thou, Lord, art way and end. What wings have I?    Aspiring thoughts—of faith, of hope, of love:      Oh, let these wings, that way alone      Present me to thy blissful throne.

FOR CHRISTMAS-DAY

  Immortal babe, who this dear day  Didst change thine heaven for our clay,  And didst with flesh thy Godhead veil,  Eternal Son of God, all hail!  Shine, happy star! Ye angels, sing  Glory on high to heaven's king!  Run, shepherds, leave your nightly watch!  See heaven come down to Bethlehem's cratch! manger.  Worship, ye sages of the east,  The king of gods in meanness drest!  O blessed maid, smile, and adore  The God thy womb and arms have bore!  Star, angels, shepherds, and wise sages!  Thou virgin-glory of all ages!  Restored frame of heaven and earth!  Joy in your dear Redeemer's birth.* * * * *  Leave, O my soul, this baser world below;  O leave this doleful dungeön of woe;  And soar aloft to that supernal rest  That maketh all the saints and angels blest:    Lo, there the Godhead's radiant throne,    Like to ten thousand suns in one!  Lo, there thy Saviour dear, in glory dight, dressed.  Adored of all the powers of heavens bright!  Lo, where that head that bled with thorny wound,  Shines ever with celestíal honour crowned!    That hand that held the scornful reed    Makes all the fiends infernal dread.  That back and side that ran with bloody streams  Daunt angels' eyes with their majestic beams;  Those feet, once fastened to the cursed tree,  Trample on Death and Hell, in glorious glee.    Those lips, once drenched with gall, do make    With their dread doom the world to quake.  Behold those joys thou never canst behold;  Those precious gates of pearl, those streets of gold,  Those streams of life, those trees of Paradise  That never can be seen by mortal eyes!    And when thou seest this state divine,    Think that it is or shall be thine.  See there the happy troops of purest sprites  That live above in endless true delights!  And see where once thyself shalt rangéd be,  And look and long for immortality!    And now beforehand help to sing    Hallelujahs to heaven's king.

Polished as these are in comparison to those of Dr. Donne, and fine, too, as they are intrinsically, there are single phrases in his that are worth them all—except, indeed, that one splendid line, Trample on Death and Hell in glorious glee.

George Sandys, the son of an archbishop of York, and born in 1577, is better known by his travels in the east than by his poetry. But his version of the Psalms is in good and various verse, not unfrequently graceful, sometimes fine. The following is not only in a popular rhythm, but is neat and melodious as well.