Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley

At the same time were produced, from the same university, the two great poets, Cowley and Milton, of dissimilar genius, of opposite principles, but concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry; in which the English, till their works and May’s poem appeared, seemed unable to contest the palm with any other of the lettered nations.

If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be compared (for May I hold to be superior to both), the advantage seems to lie on the side of Cowley.  Milton is generally content to express the thoughts of the ancients in their language; Cowley, without much loss of purity or elegance, accommodates the diction of Rome to his own conceptions.

At the Restoration, after all the diligence of his long service, and with consciousness, not only of the merit of fidelity, but of the dignity of great abilities, he naturally expected ample preferments; and, that he might not be forgotten by his own fault, wrote a song of triumph.  But this was a time of such general hope, that great numbers were inevitably disappointed; and Cowley found his reward very tediously delayed.  He had been promised, by both Charles the First and Second, the mastership of the Savoy; “but he lost it,” says Wood, “by certain persons, enemies to the Muses.”

The neglect of the court was not his only mortification; having by such alteration as he thought proper, fitted his old comedy of “The Guardian” for the stage, he produced it under the title of “The Cutter of Coleman Street.”  It was treated on the stage with great severity, and was afterwards censured as a satire on the king’s party.

Mr. Dryden, who went with Mr. Sprat to the first exhibition, related to Mr. Dennis, “that, when they told Cowley how little favour had been shown him, he received the news of his ill success, not with so much firmness as might have been expected from so great a man.”

What firmness they expected, or what weakness Cowley discovered, cannot be known.  He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man perhaps has a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame, by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence.

For the rejection of this play it is difficult now to find the reason: it certainly has, in a very great degree, the power of fixing attention and exciting merriment.  From the charge of disaffection he exculpates himself in his preface, by observing how unlikely it is, that, having followed the royal family through all their distresses, “he should choose the time of their restoration to begin a quarrel with them.”  It appears, however, from the theatrical register of Downes the prompter, to have been popularly considered as a satire on the royalists.

That he might shorten this tedious suspense, he published his pretensions and his discontent in an ode called “The Complaint;” in which he styles himself the melancholy Cowley.  This met with the usual fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than pity.

These unlucky incidents are brought, maliciously enough, together in some stanzas, written about that time on the choice of a laureate; a mode of satire, by which, since it was first introduced by Suckling, perhaps every generation of poets has been teased.

Savoy-missing Cowley came into the court,   Making apologies for his bad play;Every one gave him so good a report,   That Apollo gave heed to all he could say:Nor would he have had, ’tis thought, a rebuke,   Unless he had done some notable folly;Writ verses unjustly in praise of Sam Tuke,   Or printed his pitiful Melancholy.

His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him.  “Not finding,” says the morose Wood, “that preferment conferred upon him which he expected, while others for their money carried away most places, he retired discontented into Surrey.”

“He was now,” says the courtly Sprat, “weary of the vexations and formalities of an active condition.  He had been perplexed with a long compliance to foreign manners.  He was satiated with the arts of a court; which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet.  Those were the reasons that moved him to follow the violent inclination of his own mind, which, in the greatest throng of his former business, had still called upon him, and represented to him the true delights of solitary studies, of temperate pleasures, and a moderate revenue below the malice and flatteries of fortune.”

So differently are things seen! and so differently are they shown!  But actions are visible, though motives are secret.  Cowley certainly retired; first to Barn Elms, and afterwards to Chertsey, in Surrey.  He seems, however, to have lost part of his dread of the hum of men.  He thought himself now safe enough from intrusion, without the defence of mountains and oceans; and, instead of seeking shelter in America, wisely went only so far from the bustle of life as that he might easily find his way back when solitude should grow tedious.  His retreat was at first but slenderly accommodated; yet he soon obtained, by the interest of the Earl of St. Alban’s, and the Duke of Buckingham, such lease of the queen’s lands as afforded him an ample income.

By the lovers of virtue and of wit it will be solicitously asked, if he now was happy.  Let them peruse one of his letters accidentally preserved by Peck, which I recommend to the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for solitude.

“To Dr. Thomas Sprat,“Chertsey, May 21, 1665.

“The first night that I came hither I caught so great a cold, with a defluxion of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days.  And, two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in my bed.  This is my personal fortune here to begin with.  And, besides, I can get no money from my tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbours.  What this signifies, or may come to in time, God knows; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging.  Another misfortune has been, and stranger than all the rest, that you have broke your word with me and failed to come, even though you told Mr. Bois that you would.  This is what they call monstri simile.  I do hope to recover my late hurt so far within five or six days (though it be uncertain yet whether I shall ever recover it) as to walk about again.  And then, methinks, you and I and the dean might be very merry upon St. Ann’s Hill.  You might very conveniently come hither the way of Hampton Town, lying there one night.  I write this in pain, and can say no more: verbum sapienti.”

He did not long enjoy the pleasure or suffer the uneasiness of solitude; for he died at the Porch-house in Chertsey, in 1667 [28th July], in the forty-ninth year of his age.

He was buried with great pomp near Chaucer and Spenser; and King Charles pronounced, “That Mr. Cowley had not left behind him a better man in England.”  He is represented by Dr. Sprat as the most amiable of mankind; and this posthumous praise may safely be credited, as it has never been contradicted by envy or by faction.

Such are the remarks and memorials which I have been able to add to the narrative of Dr. Sprat; who, writing when the feuds of civil war were yet recent, and the minds of either party were easily irritated, was obliged to pass over many transactions in general expressions, and to leave curiosity often unsatisfied.  What he did not tell cannot, however, now be known; I must therefore recommend the perusal of his work, to which my narration can be considered only as a slender supplement.

Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and, instead of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the minds of men, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another.

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms.  About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets; of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not improper to give some account.

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

If the father of criticism had rightly denominated poetry τéχνη μιμητικὴ, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.

Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits.  Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne in wit; but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.

If wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction.  But Pope’s account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous; he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.

If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.  Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.

But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.  Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough.  The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

From this account of their compositions it will be readily inferred that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections.  As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion.  Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow.  Their wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before.

Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration.  Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion.  Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness.  It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles, is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction.  Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.  Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments; and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and laboured particularities, the prospects of nature, or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon.

What they wanted, however, of the sublime they endeavoured to supply by hyperbole; their amplifications had no limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations of confused magnificence, that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined.

Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far fetched, they were often worth the carriage.  To write on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think.  No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery, and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme, and volubility of syllables.

In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry; something already learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined.  If their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment.

This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from Marino and his followers, had been recommended by the example of Donne, a man of very extensive and various knowledge, and by Jonson, whose manner resembled that of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his sentiments.

When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators than time has left behind.  Their immediate successors, of whom any remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Clieveland, and Milton.  Denham and Waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony of our members.  Milton tried the metaphysic style only in his lines upon Hobson the carrier.  Cowley adopted it, and excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment and more music.  Suckling neither improved versification nor abounded in conceits.  The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley; Suckling could not reach it, and Milton disdained it.

Critical remarks are not easily understood without examples; and I have therefore collected instances of the modes of writing by which this species of poets (for poets they were called by themselves and their admirers) was eminently distinguished.

As the authors of this race were perhaps more desirous of being admired than understood, they sometimes drew their conceits from recesses of learning not very much frequented by common readers of poetry.  Thus, Cowley on Knowledge:

The sacred tree ’midst the fair orchard grew;   The phœnix truth did on it rest,   And built his perfumed nest,That right Porphyrian tree which did true logic show.   Each leaf did learned notions give,   And the apples were demonstrative;So clear their colour and divine,The very shads they cast did other lights outshine.

On Anacreon continuing a lover in his old age:

Love was with thy life entwined,Close as heat with fire is join’d;A powerful brand prescribed the dateOf thine, like Meleager’s fate.Th’ antiperistasis of ageMore enflam’d thy amorous rage.

In the following verses we have an allusion to a rabbinical opinion concerning manna:

Variety I ask not: give me oneTo live perpetually upon.The person Love does to us fit,Like manna, has the taste of all in it.

Thus Donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomiastic verses:

   In everything there naturally growsA balsamum to keep it fresh and new,   If ’twere not injured by extrinsic blows:Your youth and beauty are this balm in you.   But you, of learning and religion,And virtue and such ingredients, have made   A mithridate, whose operationKeeps off, or cures what can be done or said.

Though the following lines of Donne, on the last night of the year, have something in them too scholastic, they are not inelegant:

This twilight of two years, not past nor next,   Some emblem is of me, or I of this,Who, meteor-like, of stuff and form perplext,   Whose what and where in disputation is,   If I should call me anything, should miss.I sum the years and me, and find me not   Debtor to th’ old, nor creditor to th’ new.That cannot say, my thanks I have forget,   Nor trust I this with hopes; and yet scarce true   This bravery is, since these times show’d me you.—Donne.

Yet more abstruse and profound is Donne’s reflection upon man as a microcosm:

If men be worlds, there is in every oneSomething to answer in some proportion;All the world’s riches; and in good men, thisVirtue, our form’s form, and our soul’s soul, is

Of thoughts so far-fetched, as to be not only unexpected, but unnatural, all their books are full.

To a lady, who wrote posies for rings:

They, who above do various circles find,Say, like a ring, th’ equator Heaven does bindWhen Heaven shall be adorned by thee,(Which then more Heaven than ’tis will be)’Tis thou must write the poesy there,   For it wanteth one as yet,Then the sun pass through’t twice a year,   The sun, which is esteem’d the god of wit.—Cowley.

The difficulties which have been raised about identity in philosophy are by Cowley, with still more perplexity applied to love:

Five years ago (says story) I loved you,For which you call me most inconstant now;Pardon me, madam, you mistake the man;For I am not the same that I was then:No flesh is now the same ’twas then in me,And that my mind is changed yourself may see.The same thoughts to retain still, and intentsWere more inconstant far; for accidentsMust of all things most strangely inconstant prove,If from one subject they t’ another move;My members then the father members were,From whence these take their birth, which now are hereIf then this body love what th’ other did,’Twere incest, which by nature is forbid.

The love of different women is, in geographical poetry, compared to travels through different countries:

Hast thou not found each woman’s breast   (The land where thou hast travelled)Either by savages possest,   Or wild, and uninhabited?What joy could’st take, or what repose,In countries so uncivilis’d as those?Lust, the scorching dog-star, here   Rages with immoderate heat;Whilst Pride, the ragged northern bear,   In others makes the cold too great.And where these are temperate known,The soil’s all barren sand, or rocky stone.—Cowley.

A lover, burnt up by his affection, is compared to Egypt:

The fate of Egypt I sustain,And never feel the dew of rain,From clouds which in the head appear;But all my too-much moisture eweTo overflowings of the heart below.—Cowley.

The lover supposes his lady acquainted with the ancient laws of augury and rites of sacrifice:

And yet this death of mine, I fear,Will ominous to her appear:   When, sound in every other part,Her sacrifice is found without an heart.   For the last tempest of my deathShall sigh out that too, with my breath.

That the chaos was harmonised, has been recited of old; but whence the different sounds arose remained for a modern to discover:

Th’ ungovern’d parts no correspondence knew;An artless war from thwarting motions grew;Till they to number and fixed rules were brought.Water and air he for the tenor chose,Earth made the base; the treble flame arose.—Cowley.

The tears of lovers are always of great poetical account; but Donne has extended them into worlds.  If the lines are not easily understood, they may be read again:

         On a round ball   A workman, that hath copies by, can lay   An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,And quickly make that which was nothing, all.      So doth each tear,      Which thee doth wear,A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflowThis world, by waters sent from thee my heaven dissolved so.

On reading the following lines, the reader may perhaps cry out “Confusion worse confounded.”

Hers lies a she sun, and a he moon here,   She gives the best light to his sphere,   Or each is both, and all, and so,They unto one another nothing owe.—Donne.

Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?

Though God be our true glass through which we seeAll, since the being of all things is He,Yet are the trunks, which do to us deriveThings in proportion fit, by perspectiveDeeds of good men; for by their living here,Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.

Who would imagine it possible that in a very few lines so many remote ideas could be brought together?

Since ’tis my doom, love’s undershrieve,      Why this reprieve?Why doth my she advowson fly      Incumbency?To sell thyself dust thou intend      By candles end,And hold the contract thus in doubt,      Life’s taper out?Think but how soon the market fails,Your sex lives faster than the males;And if to measure age’s span,The sober Julian were th’ account of man,Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian.—Cleveland.

Of enormous and disgusting hyperboles, these may be examples:

By every wind that comes this way,   Send me at least a sigh or two,Such and so many I’ll repay   As shall themselves make winds to get to you.—Cowley.In tears I’ll waste these eyes,By love so vainly fed:So lust of old the deluge punished.—Cowley.All arm’d in brass, the richest dress of war,(A dismal glorious sight!) he shone afar.The sun himself started with sudden fright,To see his beams return so dismal bright.—Cowley.

A universal consternation:

His bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp pawsTear up the ground; then runs he wild about,Lashing his angry tail and roaring out.Beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there;Trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear;Silence and horror fill the place around;Echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound.—Cowley.

Their fictions were often violent and unnatural.

Of his mistress bathing:

The fish around her crowded, as they doTo the false light that treacherous fishers show,And all with as much ease might taken be,   As she at first took me;   For ne’er did light so clear   Among the waves appear,Though every night the sun himself set there.—Cowley.

The poetical effect of a lover’s name upon glass:

   My name engraved hereinBoth contribute my firmness to this glass:   Which, ever since that charm, hath beenAs hard as that which graved it was.—Donne.

Their conceits were sometimes slight and trifling.  On an inconstant woman:

He enjoys the calmy sunshine now,   And no breath stirring hears,In the clear heaven of thy brow   No smallest cloud appears.He sees thee gentle, fair and gay,   And trusts the faithless April of thy May.—Cowley.

Upon a paper written with the juice of lemon, and read by the fire:

   Nothing yet in thee is seen,   But when a genial heat warms thee within,   A new-born wood of various lines there grows;   Hers buds an L, and there a B,   Here sprouts a V, and there a T,And all the flourishing letters stand in rows.—Cowley.

As they sought only for novelty, they did not much inquire whether their allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross; whether they compared the little to the great, or the great to the little.

Physic and chirurgery for a lover:

   Gently, ah gently, madam, touchThe wound, which you yourself have made;   That pain must needs be very muchWhich makes me of your hand afraid.   Cordials of pity give me now,For I too weak of purgings grow.—Cowley.

The world and a clock

Mahol th’ inferior world’s fantastic faceThrough all the turns of matter’s maze did trace;Great Nature’s well-set clock in pieces took;On all the springs and smallest wheels did lookOf life and motion, and with equal artMade up the whole again of every part.—Cowley.

A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not want its due honour, Cleveland has paralleled it with the sun: