THE EARTHY FLAME: 1:, Iii;535773312; A STUDY OF THE Pox-2mg} OWHGMWEW fiisses‘ca’zfien far the Degree :2? PM); MEQHfiGAN SMTE SNWERSITY'. KA‘EHLEEN "MARTIN. Q’DGWD' 1973 t Illllllllllllllllllullllfllll 3 1293 01001 6669 P . .. Umvemty L. «'rv-v - vv— ‘— This is to certify that the thesis entitled THE EARTHY FLAME: A STUDY OF THE POETRY OF THOMAS CAREN presented by Kathleen Martin O'Dowd has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for .Eh._D._ degree in _Engll_skL ”K A v {la-fly L V( X ,- 10h // Major professor Date / ., - f. 0-7 639 H0 3 d 5' [1800K BlNMRY INC. 'LIanAnv amozns ".II‘PDIT I'm“. ‘ b; 51ml kth 4...! w ,3. R"... ABSTRACT THE EARTHY FLAME: A STUDY OF THE POETRY OF THOMAS CAREW BY Kathleen Martin O'Dowd The poetry of Thomas Carew has received critical acclaim for its urbane elegance, its graceful form, its lyric beauty. Critics have found in Carew the perfect blend of Jonsonian neo-classical smoothness and Donnean wit. But while acknowledging his formal excellence, many critics have objected to Carew's subject matter as immoral, superficial, trivial, and unoriginal. And neither his popularity in his own time, nor the respect accorded his work today can be said to be based to any significant de- gree on a positive view of his ideas. It is too generally assumed that he is totally conventional, has nothing to say. However, a careful reading of his poetry reveals an intellectual complexity, a subtlety of thought and feel- ing, a depth of perception that make his treatment of 1 Kathleen Martin O'Dowd traditional subjects a highly individualistic accomplish- ment. It is primarily with these aspects of his work--with content rather than form, insofar as it is possible to sep- arate the two--that this study is concerned. Carew emerges, above all else, as the Poet of Plea- sure. He readily acknowledges himself to be a devotee of sensuous experience, mortal beauty, sensual love. Yet he plays the hedonist's role with a careless ease which pre- vents his seeming to take it too seriously, and with a sense of humor and irony that grants him a certain dis- tance and objectivity. Carew possesses, and nearly always indicates, an awareness of the disparity between his own. earthy concept of man's nature and the concept generally acknowledged as ideal. His acute awareness of the tragi- comic limitations inherent in the pursuit and the pursuer of pleasure, coupled with his extraordinary ability to convey sensuous experience, forms the core of Carew's best verse and gives it depth and relevance. . Nowhere are these qualities more evident than in Carew's erotic poem "A Rapture," his longest and most no- torious work. Its most noted quality has always been its 2 Kathleen Martin O'Dowd "licentiousness," a fact which illustrates the oversimpli- fication to which Carew's work has usually been subjected. For "A Rapture" does not move toward a single, unified ef- fect, but maintains a deliberate, somewhat disturbing ten- sion throughout. Carew uses his special descriptive power to convey vividly the two-sided nature of sensual pleasure, its ability to repel us even as we revel in it, its flaws as well as its attraction. For.all its licentiousness, it is possible to argue that "A Rapture" is a highly moral- istic poem. The same complexity of thought and feeling is evi- dent in most of Carew's amorous lyrics. He employs many of the poetic conventions inherited from.his more idealis- tic Elizabethan predecessors, but usually in a highly ori- ginal way. Frequently he introduces elements which have the effect of undermining the serious conventions which, on the surface, he appears to be embracing. It is as spokesman for a realistic, down-to-earth view of human love that Carewis consistently at his best. His poems reveal his urgent belief in experiencing the pleasures of life and love to the fullest. There is not 3 Kathleen Martin O'Dowd time, he insists, for stalling games, for dwelling in im- possible dreams of selfless devotion, for holding back out of pride, "honour" or fear. Carew's sensitivity to beauty and his acute consciousness of the transience of earthly joys lend vitality and poignance to his poetry. Carew wrote a good deal of occasional verse in addition to his love lyrics. This poetry is of a more formal nature, requiring him to deal with subjects to which his customary sensual imagery and materialistic viewpoint are not always suited. Consequently, his occa- sional poems, though they reveal the'same formal excel- lence as his lyrics,are less consistently pleasing. Only in the role of critic does Carew equal his accomplishments as a love poet. In the poems devoted to criticism of the literary works of his contemporaries, his perceptions are astute, his judgments sound. Though Carew's literary criticism lacks the earthy emphasis of his lyrics, it reveals the same sensitivity to and appreciation of beauty that characterizes his celebrations of love. THE EARTHY FLAME: A STUDY OF THE- POETRY OF THOMAS CAREW BY m -<'-~ KathleendMartin O'Dowd A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1973 Copyright by KATHLEEN. MARTIN o' DOWD 1973 For my Mother and Father ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my profound gratitude to Professor Lawrence Babb without whose enduring patience, encouragement, and guidance this study might never have been completed. My sincere thanks go as well to Professor George Price for his invaluable assistance. And to Pro- fessor Elwood Lawrence, who saw me through from beginning to end, though he had to come out of retirement to do it, a very special thank you. i I would also like to express my appreciation to Professor Joseph Summers, whose fine seminar in seven- teenth century poetry introduced me to Carew's work and initiated this study. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 1 Chapter I. THE CAVALIER ETHIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 II. THE EARTHY FLAME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 III. LOVE POEMS: CONVENTIONAL IDEALS . . . . . . 74 IV. LOVE POEMS: UNCONVENTIONAL REALITIES. . . . 114 V O OCCAS IONAL POEMS O O O O C O O O C O O O O O l 7 0 NOTES 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O 24 9 BIBLIOGMPHY O O O O O O O I O O O O O O O O O 0 O O 260 iv INTRODUCTION Though he is far from being regarded as a major poet, the poetry of Thomas Carew probably enjoys more crit- ical acclaim today than at any time since the seventeenth century. This will scarcely seem a startling statement; it is undoubtedly true of many other seventeenth-century writers. It might easily be explained by saying that Carew's verse, too light for the serious eighteenth cen- tury, too licentious for the moral nineteenth, is more acclimated to the potpourri of twentieth-century taste. Such a statement, however, implies that content or thought has been the major factor determining Carew's popularity; and while the history of Carew criticism may seem to bear out this implication, it does so largely in a negative sense. Eighteenth and nineteenth century critics objected to Carew's subject matter as trivial or immoral or extrav- agant; consequently his reputation during these years was at a low ebb.1 However, neither his popularity in his own time, nor the respect accorded him today can be said to be 1 based to any significant degree on a positive view of his ideas. His amatory verses were prized by his Caroline audience for their lyric elegance, their graceful form, delicate wit. Rhodes Dunlap notes that his smooth lines continued to be "imitated and plagiarized" by poets until the end of his century.2 His formal excellence was not enough, however, to enable him to survive in the Augustan period. Is it enough today? Apparently so. This century's renewed interest in all aspects of metaphysical poetry has enabled Carew to slide into our field of study on Donne's coattails, as it were, having just enough of the metaphys- ical in him to pique our interest. Critics concerned with tracing influences have found in Carew the perfect blending of Jonsonian neoclassical smoothness and Donnean wit, with the emphasis decidedly on the former--so much so that "An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls" is often the only reason for his inclusion in studies devoted to Donne's influence.3 He appears regularly, however, and usually with favorable commentary, in most general studies of meta- physical or cavalier or Renaissance love poetry. But with' only occasional exceptions, stylistic and formal niceties are still what critics focus on when they come to Carew (this includes most discussions of his "wit"). The excel- lence of thought and judgment which almost everyone agrees characterizes the Donne elegy is seemingly to be regarded as a fluke. Carew's primary subject, the conventions of courtship and love, is familiar enough; no one apparently sees any point in re-examining that old and worn terrain. Moreover, one finds that the bulk of critical attention and praise is directed toward the same four or five poems, with partial credit for their excellence often going to Donne or Jonson. With the exceptions of Rufus Blanchard and Edward Selig, scarcely anyone has bothered to treat his verse as being of serious interest in itself. There is little point in my reiterating what so many others have already demonstrated. That Carew can imi- tate Donne's style with the best of the metaphysicals, or Jonson's like a legitimate Son of Ben; that in his best verse he achieves the combination of "the intense feeling of Donne and the discipline in conscious art of Jonson" which George Williamson sees as the hallmark of success in those poets who studied in both schools;4 that he is master of rhetorical techniques of imagery and argument, of the smooth line and the sensuous image--all of this can be readily granted. And yet, when this is acknowledged, there is still, I think, more that needs to be said. For even during.his two centuries of disrepute, no one really seems to have quarreled with Carew's formal achievements. It was rather that, within all that prettiness, he seemed to have nothing to say--or at least nothing that intelligent and serious readers could regard except with contempt. It is with Carew's subject matter, the attitudes, ideas, philosophies explicitly or implicitly expressed that the trouble has always lain. And it is with these aspects of his verse, insofar as it is possible to separate content from form, that I will be concerned in this paper. Decadent, immoral, superficial, extravagant, are the critical pejoratives one runs across most frequently in connection with Carew's verse. Perhaps the most damning criticism of his subject matter is that made by W. J. Courthope who found him guilty of "emasculating taste" and all but dismissed him with these words: "An imagina- tion so shallow, so incapable of penetrating to the heart and movement of things beyond the trivial circle of Court amusements was of course unable to rise into the region of the noble and pathetic."5 Modern critics have been kinder. F. R. Leavis states that Carew "has claims to more distinction than he is commonly accorded" and "should be, for more readers than he is, more than an anthology poet . . ."; but he adds, almost in the same breath, this qualification: "To say this is not to stress any remarkable originality in his talent; his strength is representative . . . ."6 H. J. C. Grierson refers to Carew as "a careful artist with a deeper vein of thought and feeling in his temperament than a first reading suggests ."7 Grierson's opinion is echoed in R. G. Howarth's commentary: "Yet even in Carew . . . there is a strain of deeper feeling, the sense of hidden and eternal things which haunts other poets."8 Unfortunately, none of these scholars is specific or pervasive enough on the sub- ject to offset the negative effect of two centuries of faint praise, indifference, and outright contempt. With so many claiming that a few glittering nuggets is all Carew‘s work has to offer, few readers will take the time to go back and dig for the deeper vein Grierson assures us is there. Edward Selig, in The Flourishing Wreath (the only book-length study devoted to Carew's work), comments on the failure of the critics to resolve the "curious ambiguity" of Carew's reputation, which he sums up as follows: "Is Carew a witty, elegant, and creatively representative poet, or is he superficial and unoriginal?"9 Selig goes on to prove the former quite conclusively; fortunately, he does not confine himself to doing only this, for it seems to me a disappointingly irrelevant goal. Not even his harshest critics have ever denied Carew wit and elegance. The con- flict, as I see it, is rather between those who are satis- fied with these accomplishments and those who feel that to be taken seriously a poet must do more. If the school or society or age he is content to represent is characterized by superficiality, mindless extravagance, trivia, then no matter how creatively and wittily he represents this char— acter, his verse will do no more than entertain us briefly. Granted that there are many of Carew's poems that do just that and nothing more. This is scarcely surprising since the raison d'etre of the sort of vers d3 societé the court poets produced was entertainment. That they can still delight us today is no negligible accomplishment. But if this were all his verse undertook to do, I would be inclined to feel that Carew has probably received all the attention he deserves. I believe, however, that a careful examination of his work will show that Carew accomplishes much more than he has yet received credit for doing, that he has significant merits beyond being only "creatively representative" which have heretofore been pretty much ig- nored or overlooked. Outpourings of a deeply emotional or profoundly intellectual nature would hardly have been well received in his milieu. But the "deeper vein of thought and feeling" Grierson speaks of is there for those who will. look, as too few of even Carew's admirers apparently did, beneath the glitter of witty images and playful conventions. Contrary to Courthope's statement, Carew is, it seems to me, very much concerned with the "heart and movement" of life: life, not as the idealists conceived it but as he saw it, and lived it. Indeed, from a historical point of view, the accuracy with which his work reflects the interest and temper of the English aristocracy during this crucial era is fascinating. As any history of the period points out, the failure of the aristocracy to assume their traditional responsibilities was a key factor in bringing about the ' revolution which ensued soon after Carew's death. Leaving their country estates, they swarmed to the city, attracted by the glitter of the court. Everyone, from the King and Queen down to the lowest ranking hangers-on, was seemingly preoccupied with only one thing--enjoying himself, unbur- dened by dull or irksome duty, as if there were no tomorrow. Gaity, and wit, clever conversation, sophisticated flirta- tion, elegant entertainment; food, drink, love, and, of course, art; these were the order of the day, and all were apparently determined to seize it. This was the atmosphere in which Carew lived and worked, and which he sought to capture permanently in his poems. Perhaps the condemnation of such critics as Courthope, who do not so much blame him for what did concern him as for what did not, is testimony to how well he succeeded. Carew emerges, above all else, as the Poet of Plea- sure. He readily acknowledges himself to be a devotee of sensuous experience, mortal beauty, sensual love. Few will argue with Courthope's contention that nobility is lacking in such preoccupations. But in a world in which the in- alienable right to the pursuit of happiness has so often been equated with the pursuit of pleasure, the subject can hardly be realistically censured as trivial. Nor is it necessarily devoid of pathos when handled skillfully. And regardless of his own moral convictions, no critic can make a meaningful evaluation of Carew's achievement with- out exploring, with an open mind, his treatment of this major theme. As one of his more enlightened anthologizers notes: "Carew's intelligence, Carew's poise and strength, can scarcely be inspected in isolation from his own tautly imagined celebrations of pleasurable transiency, which common sense does not like to think about."10 The truth of this observation should be obvious; and yet, this iso- lation of Carew's content from discussions of his style has too often been imposed. It is for this reason that I propose in this study to stress Carew's thematic content, most notably the sensuous hedonism that permeates his work. To be sure, this deliberate preoccupation with sen- suous delights and the pleasures of the flesh is risky, for there is real danger in seeming to take it too seriously. . Any artist who, like Carew, makes it his primary subject must beware of becoming ridiculous, of crossing the line which separates the artist from the pornographer, libertine from lecher. Two elements in Carew's work prevent this 10 disaster. The first is the sense of humor and of irony with which he endows his persona, enabling him to play his role with a careless ease that prevents his seeming to take it seriously and grants him a certain distance and objectivity. Secondly, and more important, Carew pos- sesses, and nearly always indicates, an awareness of the disparity between his own concept of man's nature and capabilities and the concept generally recognized as ideal. Nowhere are these elements more apparent than in his treatment of love. Love was, of course, the conven- tional subject with which all gentlemen poets were expected to deal, and the majority of Carew's poems are devoted to it. But he deals with it, for the most part, in a delight- fully unconventional way, exploiting the time-worn, ideal- ized love traditions of preceding generations of poets to serve his own less romantic conceptions. Occasionally, he does attempt to seriously embody the familiar Petrarchan or Platonic ideals but without much success. For it is an "earthy flame" rather than a celestial one that burns in his breast. His muse is earthbound and deserts him when he attempts to rise to a higher plane. ll Fortunately, such attempts are comparatively few. Most often, as I hope to demonstrate, Carew employs the conventions of ideal love poetry in order to undermine them. He seldom attacks them outright as did many of the other Cavaliers in whose hands the anti-Petrarchan pose was largely just one more convention. Carew, for the most part, either uses language and tone to work subtly against the conventional ideals being exploited, or eschews them completely, writing love poems of a frankly sensual or erotic nature. Even when his subject is not love, his poems are colored with the imagery of sensuous experience, which infuses them with an immediacy and vitality, a real- ism that is lacking in more strictly conventional poetry. G. A. E. Parfitt notes that ". . . Carew can react to a wide range of experiential stimuli; and has something of that varied awareness of what is involved in being human which is one of the marks of major poetry."11 "Human" is a word one meets frequently in discussions of Carew's poems, for the basic human desire for satisfaction in this world-~and the impossibility of attaining it for long--is what is recorded throughout his verse. Many, like Courthope, will insist he looks for it in the wrong 12 place, by confining himself to the realm of the senses. Yet for Carew these tangible pleasures, although fleeting, represent the only real happiness this world has to offer. He remains the poet of sensual beauty and earthly plea- sures, though paradoxically, intelligently, humorously, and sometimes sadly aware of their limitations, their transience, their inability to provide lasting contentment or to satisfy man completely. This awareness of the tragi- comic limitations inherent in the pursuit and the pursuer of pleasure, coupled with his extraordinary ability to convey sensuous experience, forms the core of Carew's best verse, gives it depth and relevance, and a distinctly indi- vidual "Carevian" quality as well. I do not wish to make Carew out to be a deep phi- losopher or attempt to weight his poems with a greater intellectual burden than they were made to carry. He is almost never profound; but he is perceptive. If his work is narrowly circumscribed by the time and place in which he found himself, he has probed the area allotted to him more thoroughly and clear-sightedly than most of his critics have realized. 13 Of the Cavalier poets in general, Robin Skelton a», writes: "They treat life cavalierly indeed, and sometimes/// I I ‘. \' - -.. they treat poetic conventions cavalierly too. For them ‘ life is far too enjoyable for much of it to be spent sweat- ing over verses in a study . . . ."12 This is seldom true of Carew who took his poetry too seriously for some. John Suckling says of him in "A Sessions of the Poets": His Muse was hard-bound, and th'issue of's brain Was seldom brought forth but with trouble and pain. (11. 36-40)13 The pains taken are evident, of course, in the smooth per- fection of Carew's lyrics, which seem to have been written with ease, so naturally and gracefully do they flow; but so too are they evident in the careful presentation of ideas, situations, conventions, wit, which reflect the tastes and concerns of his milieu. What he excludes may be as signif- icant evidence of his assessment of Caroline existence as what he includes. It is, at any rate, an undeniable indi- cation of how he wished to portray himself. No idealist, though thoroughly familiar with all the ideals of love and life proclaimed by others,he sustains throughout his verse an image of himself as a frank hedonist with no illusions about the nature or permanence of the happiness he pursued. CHAPTER I THE CAVALIER ETHIC Carew's life was that of the professional courtier, a role which today is likely to suggest an aristocratic idler--in this case with some justification. But the pop- ular humanistic concept of the ideal courtier prevalent in Elizabethan England makes clear that the courtier's role had at least the potential for great service to King and country as well as for development of all aspects of the individual. Soldier, scholar, statesman, patron, and critic of the arts; a man physically, morally, intellec- tually sound; poet and servant of love in its most pure and exalted form; this ideal figure was for a time no mere illusory image but one which many strove to realize. But this was at the height of the English Renaissance, a time of comparative domestic tranquility and national power, unprecedented achievement in the arts, patriotic fervor--a time as nearly ideal as man could hope to experience. 14 15 No such circumstances prevailed when Carew came to court. In a nation being slowly undermined by religious and political dissension, serving a King whose Right even- tually proved more tenuous than Divine, in a court more interested in amours than armadas, the courtier's role must have seemed less confidently clear, the ideal an unlikely dream. If the life and writings of Sir Philip Sidney seem to epitomize the ideal Elizabethan courtier, Carew's life and attitudes, as set forth in his verse, seem to suggest deliberately the antithesis of that ideal. Although Carew held no official position at court until 1630 when he was given the post of Sewer in Ordinary to King Charles, he had been an accepted and apparently admired figure in court circles since the last years of King James' reign. Court entertainments during the latter were both lavish and raucous, characterized by extreme displays of drunkenness and lasciviousness, practical jokes and horseplay, for King James, though affectionate and generous toward his friends, seems to have been a man of shockingly crude tastes--tastes for which his unfortu- nate son, who did not share them, would eventually pay the toll. 16 Christopher Hibbert describes, as a "characteristic evening at King James's Court," a scene recorded by one of the court wits on the occasion of a visit by Queen Anne's brother, the King of Denmark. Ben Jonson himself created a short "entertainment" officially welcoming the two Kings on this occasion.1 One hopes his stately presentation, with its dignified Latin speeches, was executed with more finesse than characterized this performance later on in the evening: After dinner the ladies and gentlemen of the Court enacted for the royal guest the Queen of Sheba's coming to Solomon's Temple. The lady who took the part of the Queen of Sheba was, however, too drunk to keep her balance on the steps and fell over onto King Christian's lap covering him with "wine, cream, jelly, bever- ages, cakes, spices and other good matters" which she was carrying in her hands. The King, even more drunk than Sheba, struggled to his feet, took her round the waist and would have danced away with her had he not collapsed to the floor and been carried off to recover . . . . The performance continued, but the players stumbled and fell about to such an ex- tent that it was impossible to discover what they were endeavouring to represent. Three ladies, gorgeously dressed as Hope, Faith and Charity, made a brief appearance but then promptly withdrew. Hope returned, tried to speak, failed and staggered out of the room again. Faith was no more successful. Charity did manage to kneel down in front of King James at her second attempt and to mumble a few words before following her companions down into the lower hall where they were both being sick. Victory "after much lamentable utterance" was l . fl l' I .\.III ill... '. 1" ill! i‘iilus (I I'll ’lll II? IIIIII‘III 17 "led away like a silly captive . . . ." Peace, boisterous and argumentative, endeavoured to take her place and "most rudely made war with her olive branches" on those, less drunk than she was, who interfered with her progress.2 Other accounts of Stuart revels make clear that elaborate entertainment did not require the excuse of a visiting monarch. David Harris Willson writes: Festivities were numerous, extravagant and disorderly. Queen Anne delighted in masques; and these entertainments, with their costly floats, costumes and scenery, their songs and dances, became the fashion. The court, wrote Arthur Wilson, was "a continued masquerado, where the Queen and her ladies, like so many sea-nymphs, or Nereids, appeared often in various dresses to the ravishment of the be- holders, the King himself being not a little delighted with such fluent elegancies as made the night more glorious than the day." It is true that James enjoyed the atmosphere of revelry; he was more interested in the ladies than is often supposed and found their immod- esty attractive.3 Not everyone, however, was "ravished" by these per- formances. Sir Dudley Carleton, in a criticism which stemmed from a production of Jonson's Masque of Blackness, expressed shock at "The King and Queen and some of the noblest of their courtiers painting themselves black to play the part of Ethiopians, and by ladies whose dresses 0 O I O 4 were as inordinately expenSive as they were revealing." 18 And the Lady Anne Clifford wrote "that the ladies about the court had gotten ill names and the Queen herself had fallen from her former reputation."s Whatever extravagance or indecency the Queen may have fostered, King James apparently surpassed her on both counts. His gifts to courtiers who took his fancy were generous to an extreme; and, "although he rarely got drunk himself . . . he encouraged his young men to drink too much, just as he encouraged the young ladies of the Court to wear scanty clothes and to behave lasciviously."6 According to historian Lawrence Stone, "Incalculable harm was done to the prestige of the monarchy by the gold-rush atmosphere of gambling, sex and drink created by the lavish generosity and the genial tolerance of King James."7 Charles, in contrast, was a shy, reserved, fasti- dious man, to whom the excesses of his father's court must have been appalling. As Prince of Wales he took as little part in the proceedings so offensive to his sense of pro— priety as his position allowed; and when, in 1625, he suc- ceeded to the throne and made Henrietta Maria of France his queen, he saw to it that the court reflected his more rigid concept of what majesty should be. 19 . . . King Charles' Court was decorous, orderly, elegant and ceremonial. Foreign observers were astonished by its almost ritualistic formality. Not even the King of Spain was waited upon with such devoted subservience and minute regard to a drill-like and unchanging custom as was the King of England.8 It is not to be supposed that the immorality condoned by King James ceased entirely. But publicly, at least, the vulgar displays that had amused the former king went out of fashion, and "the nobility and courtiers who did not quite abandon their debaucheries, yet so reverenced the King as to retire into corners to practice them."9 Though unfailingly courteous and gracious, Charles lacked his father's warmth and humor and, though respected, was on affectionate terms with very few of his subjects. Had it not been for the Queen, the court to which Carew eventually attached himself might have been very dull in- deed. The charm and gaity of Henrietta Maria, however, more than made up for the King's reserve and, as Charles lavished on his wife all the love and affection he seemed unable to bestow elsewhere, all her frivolities and ex- travagances were indulged. She loved dancing and colourful clothes, and the company of dashing handsome and rather disreputable men like Henry Jermyn, her Master 20 of the Horse, and of nubile women as beautiful as Lady Mary Villiers; she loved to surround herself with fashionable young poets, to be gay with them and to show that she understood their wit, to act with them, even to go to the theatre with them, which was something no one could remember a Queen ever having done before.10 Carew, who had long since attained a reputation for elegant, witty, if somewhat licentious, verse, would surely have been one of the poets in whom the queen delighted. He was admirably qualified by virtue of his education and travels, his "excellent parts," his carefree temperament and elegant ease with the ladies, to fit into and contri- bute to this happy circle. We have little factual infor- mation on which to base an image of his role there. But from what we know of his life and character, we may easily surmise that, though officially one of the King's men, he was equally ready to be of service to the Queen and her companions. Dunlap records an anecdote related by another Gentleman of the Privy Chamber which, though not fully authenticated, presents a picture of Carew in action that seems thoroughly believable. "Queen Henrietta Maria.--Thomas Carew, Gentle- man of the Privy Chamber, going to light King Charles into her chamber, saw Jermyn Lord St. Albans with his arm round her neck;--he stumbled and put out the light;--Jermyn 21 escaped; Carew never told the King, and the King never knew it. The Queen heaped favours on Carew."ll Whether or not this particular service was actually rendered, there can be little doubt about Carew's poetic contributions to the Queen's pleasure. His poems include a variety of playful and entertaining verses which Dunlap ascribes to the years spent at court, as well as several poems dedicated spegifically to the King, Queen and other noted members of the court. We know that many of his songs, some of them written for plays produced at court entertain- ments, were put to music by Henry Lawes, the King's Musi- cian. But by far Carew's most significant contribution to the revels that characterized the court of Charles and Henrietta was his masque, Coelum Britannicum, a hyperbolic celebration of the virtues of the royal couple, on which he collaborated with Inigo Jones. Masques were a favorite form of entertainment of the Queen as they had been with her predecessor; gorgeous, lengthy productions, as costly as they were elaborate, these extravaganzas, more than any other activity, seem to epitomize the essence of life at court. For there are varying, almost paradoxical aspects of the masque. A 22 highly refined and formalized type of entertainment, it employed myth, fantasy and complex symbolism, contained humorous as well as serious, even poignant, material, com- bined the poetic talents of such poets as Ben Jonson, Aurelian Townshend, and Carew, and the genius for artistic design of Inigo Jones, often for the primary end of ex- travagantly praising the royal audience who, with grave, unselfconscious vanity, usually took part in the ritual of their own glorification. Fantastic stories and themes were portrayed through music, dances (both rigidly formal and wildly grotesque), spectacular settings, costumes and mechanical effects, and through verse, partially exquisite poetry, part abject flattery. In our prosaic times, the court masque may seem vain and outlandish. Indignation at the devotion of so much talent and expense to so frivolous an end may be mixed with an awe of so much splendour so casually consumed. But today's standards are scarcely applicable to 17th century royalty; for the times, the revels of the Caroline Court reflected the most cultured, refined, and elegant taste. What they did not reflect was any awareness of troublesome conditions outside the court. 23 The King was estranged from his subjects, though he/lacked the political insight or imagination to gauge the depth of animosity against his rule . . . . The Court's atmo- sphere emphasized its isolation. Its higher circles breathed an artificial air. Its theatricals with their precious, sentimental love themes were the amusement of a coterie. They induced a feeling of exclusiveness and aristocratic intimacy amongst the courtiers . . . . The literature responsive to the Court's sensibility expressed a spirit of make-believe . . . 12 1'. Outside, storms were brewing on several fronts. But within, all conspired to contribute to a continuous im- pression of gaity and ease, serenity and luxury; practi- cally nothing was suffered to penetrate the aura of adored, beneficent majesty which surrounded the complacent royal couple. Insulated from unpleasant realities, the patterns of their days, during the nine or ten years Carew spent at court, were not unlike the extravagant structure of his masque in which all elements were calculated to assure them of their immortal greatness. Few of Charles' advisors cared or dared to disturb this happy illusion. Having quarreled with Parliament on both political and religious issues, the King had put an end to dissonance by dismissing it in 1629. He was not to recall it until almost eleven years later, when the voices 24 of dissension would be too many and too loud to be silenced. But for a decade, coinciding with Carew's residence at court, there was quiet. Chiefly by levying fines and taxes of various sorts, "some of doubtful legality and none of them popular,"13 the King and his ministers managed to cover the ordinary costs of government without the aid of Parliament. With matters beyond this, the King did not wish to be troubled. He had neither taste nor talent for administra- tion, declining to apply himself to problems of government which could not be solved by refer- ence to his own fixed ideas, preferring the com- pany of men whose cheerful optimism encouraged his own delusive hOpe that the country was as well run as the Court . . . .14 The latter, at least, seems to have been exceed- ingly well-run, and as sumptuous as it was orderly. Every day the King's table--where he sat in state and in public, served by attendants on bended knee--was provided with twenty-eight dishes, brought in to a fanfare of trumpets that temporarily stilled the less strident notes of his private orchestra. The Queen's table had twenty-four dishes; the other eighty-four had over four hundred dishes be- tween them . . . . The staff necessary to maintain the huge and complicated organization at Whitehall-- more, in fact, a rambling village than a palace--was immense. The numbers of those employed in the various departments in the King's Household, the Queen's Household, the 25 Households of the Prince of Wales and of the other royal children was probably not less than 1,700. Almost half of all peacetime royal ex- penditure was devoted to this labyrinthine com- plex known vaguely as the Court.1 They were costly then, these years of borrowed peace, in more ways than one. As most members of the King's administrative council held other court appointments as well, and thus shared the blessings of this liberality, few protests against his extravagance reached the King's ears. The privy councillors advised the ruler in an individual capacity, not as a body endowed with a common voice. At the pinnacle of the Court, they were themselves rivals for the high offices and grants that would increase their wealth and multiply the suitors who crowded their doors. They formed factions that might be associated with differences of policy, but whose principal aim was to extend their influ- ence over the King and form an exclusive channel for the receipt and distribution of the ensuing rewards.l6 There were, naturally, men who saw the folly of this way of life, but who were helpless to remedy it. In his notes on Carew's masque, Dunlap quotes from a letter to the Earl of Strafford, one of the King's few competent and conscien- tious ministers, calling that harried gentleman's attention 26 to the lamentable situation of which he was already pain- fully aware. "There are two Masques in Hand, the first of the Inns of Court, which is to be presented on Candlemas-day; the other the King presents the Queen with on Shrove-Tuesday at Night: High Expenses, they speak of 20000.£that it will cost the Men of the Law. Oh that they would once give over these Things, or lay them aside for a Time, and bend all their Endeavours to make the King Rich! For it gives me no Satisfaction, who am but a locker on, to see a rich Commonwealth, a rich People, and the Crown poor. God direct them to remedy this quickly."1'7 No such heavenly instruction made itself felt, how- ever, and the King was not inclined to take direction from a lesser quarter. Until the Scottish rebellion in 1639 sounded the first major note of discord and revealed the Crown's poverty, the harmonious and lavish existence con- tinued unchecked. Hours, days even, that should have been spent facing the difficulties of government were passed playing bowls and tennis and golf, in swimming and riding and hunting, in theo- logical discussion, in conducting visitors, round the treasures of his palaces, in singing or playing the viol da gamba, or in supervis- ing the preparations for Court entertainments and Court masques.18 These were indeed "halcyon" days, to use Carew's term. And though later events proved what any 27 serious-thinking member of the Court must have known, that they should have been spent more profitably, if less plea- santly, no element of dissatisfaction or anxiety appears in Carew's lines. Given his temperament as well as his position, this is not surprising. His father, Sir Matthew Carew, had suffered severe financial reverses prior to his death, and Thomas, as the younger son and a hopelesspro- fligate in his father's eyes, had no private income to speak of. As a young man Carew had alienated his one bene- factor, Sir Dudley Carleton, by foolishly and inexplicably putting on paper disparaging impressions of the characters of Sir Dudley and Lady Carleton, an act which the couple, having discovered the document, felt to be an indication of base ingratitude.19 Their forgiveness could not be ob- tained and Sir Matthew had died dispairing of his son's ever being safely established in the world. That he was so es- tablished then, despite his lack of personal fortune and influential relatives willing to advance him, seems to have been due primarily to his own very appealing nature and wit. Without more tangible assets to fall back on, having once been established as a member of the royal household, Carew was scarcely in a position to criticize the hand 28 that fed him. Possibly his experience with Sir Dudley had taught him discretion. A more likely possibility is that the extravagant and carefree life at Court exactly suited his easy-going, pleasure-oriented nature. But as he never deceives himself or us about the less-than—ideal quality of his way of life (he seems rather to stress it at times), so it is unlikely that he was blind to the flaws in a Court existence which revolved around pleasures, however refined. Much of this is conjecture, of course.3 Though the occupations and activities of the Caroline Court are well documented, Carew's part in them, or any private judgments he made about them, are not. He apparently carried out his appointed court offices satisfactorily. But beyond this he seems to have felt no obligation or desire to go; no inclination to excel in physical feats, or to distinguish himself in war; no desire to involve himself in the polit- ical or religious issues which culminated in the revolution; no wish to establish himself as an arbiter of manners or morals or art. The few poems which touch on events of his day portray him as a rather disinterested observer, a paragon of non-involvement. When he does take note of events of his time, it is usually contemptuously; he refers 29 to his age as "froward," "churlish," "sullen." At other times he appears to be simply resigned to the unheroic character of his time, to find it comfortable, if unin- spiring. The most notable example of this stance is to be found in his epistolary poem, "In answer of an Elegiacall Letter upon the death of the King of Sweden from Aurelian Townshend, inviting me to write on that subject" (74-77). It is a puzzling poem for many readers, and one which W. J. Courthope found particularly despicable. Carew first dis- claims his ability and worthiness to deal with this high subject; but lest anyone take his disclaimer too seriously, he devotes twenty-four lines to eulogizing Gustavus Adolphus, demonstrating a more than adequate ability for the task before elaborating on his refusal to carry it out. The remainder of this odd poem, which runs to one hundred and four lines, is given over to urging Townshend to return to writing poetry more suited to the poets of a "secure" and "obdurate" land--namely masques and "Revels." Some thirty lines follow praising Townshend's masque Tempe Restord with the final fifteen lines of the poem suggesting 30 that such topics are more appropriate than the heroic one Townshend would have him take up. These harmelesse pastimes let my Townshend sing To rurall tunes; not that thy Muse wants wing To soare a loftier pitch, for she hath made A noble flight, and plac'd th'Heroique shade Above the reach of our faint flagging ryme; But these are subjects proper to our clyme. Tourneyes, Masques, Theaters, better become Our Halcyon dayes; what though the German Drum Bellow for freedome and revenge, the noyse Concernes not us, nor should divert our joyes; Nor ought the thunder of their carabins Drown the sweet Aires of our tuned violins; (11.89-100) Taken at face value, these are surely some of the most callous and ignoble lines in English poetry, and ap- pear even more so when one recalls the idealistic Sidney's death in a foreign war, or contrasts them with the lines of Carew's mentor, Ben Jonson, in "An Epistle to a Friend, to perswade him to the Warres“: Wake, friend from forth thy Lethargie: the Drum Beates brave, and loude in Europe, and bids come All that dare rowse: or are not loth to quit Their vitious ease, and be o'rewhelm'd with it.20 (11. 1-4) Courthope found in Carew's lines evidence to support the contemptuous opinion quoted earlier, and makes the state- ment that "Such lines are sufficient to explain the over- throw of the Cavaliers within twelve years at Marston 31 Moor."21 Carew does, on occasion, carry his lust for plea- sure and ease beyond the realm of good taste; it is pos- sible that this poem with its offensive last lines is another such instance. But I think such a reading is very far from accurate. Joseph Summers, in a much more recent commentary on this poem, also laments Carew's response to Townshend's in- vitation though not, like Courthope, because of its con—1 temptible moral stance, but because he feels Carew passed up a subject that at last was worthy of his considerable poetic skills.22 I cannot share Professor Summers' sense of a missed Opportunity for I feel Carew turned the occa- sion to a far more meaningful end. Judging from the thirty lines of the poem which Carew did devote to eulogizing Sweden's King, I rather think he is far more aesthetically satisfying when he turns his attention to matters at home. And certainly from a historical standpoint the remarkably candid rendering of the spirit of the Caroline Court which he produced instead is both more moving and more valuable than any of the surviving heroic celebrations of the for- eign warrior king. 32 Though primarily interested in Carew's poetic ac- complishments and failures in discussing the poem, Summers, like Courthope, cannot resist commenting on it in its his- torical context: One does not have to remember that England was to be torn apart by civil war within ten years to recognize that such a smugly insular assump- tion of prosperity and an eternal party, like dancing on a volcano, was a defiance of the gods and fate which would have given pause to most Greeks and Romans. Summers' analogy seems particularly apt. But Carew was not dancing by himself, nor, to use Summers' terminologY. is the voice he uses in this poem a private one. He is not merely expressing a personal preference but embodying the suicidal political "clime" of his milieu. Not all Romans had a proper sense of Nemesis and, in fact, their histOry provides the best possible precedent for the "eternal party" Carew describes. Reading the lines, "Nor ought the thunder of their carabins/Drown the sweet Aires of our tuned violins," may we not recall another court where the strains of 'fiddle' music overrode the thunderous roar outside? Charles, of course, was no Nero; but his blindly arrogant confidence in the security of his position, coupled with the multiple resentments smouldering in his 33 kingdom, might well seem ominous to one who had little faith in permanence. Are not "Halcyon dayes"--in early tradition, the tranquil, quiet days of the winter solstice-- by definition, short-lived? It will be objected that I am attributing to Carew far more insight or foresight than he possessed. The man was a self-declared hedonist, a notorious libertine. Then why not simply read this poem as expressing the true senti- ments of a man dedicated to ease and self-indulgence? The answer lies, I believe, in Carew's poems, the same poems, curiously enough, which have led others to dismiss him as frivolous. Summers prefaces a discussion of Marvell's much analyzed "The Garden" by saying: In general, I think it is a good idea to have read most of a writer's work before one starts writing about individual poems, and to keep as much of that work in mind as one possibly can in readiness for those occasions in which one passage may provide a helpful gloss upon an- other. Encouraged by such an authority, I am more than ever in- clined to assert that the smug assumption of "an eternal party" he sees in Carew's poem is not meant to be taken as the poet's own. "A man who so loves the surface beauties of this world almost inevitably comes to feel the poignant 34 brevity of such beauty and of this life.“25 This statement, which Summers makes about Herrick, is at least equally ap- plicable to Carew who, in all his celebrations of sensuous beauty and pleasure, is seldom if ever smug about them. He is all too aware of their transience. No beauty, no joy is, for him eternal. Rather, if we may believe his most moving lines on the subject, their enjoyment is always mingled with "terror and apprehension" of their inevitably approach- 26 Thus the assumption of permanence in the revels ing end. described here is most uncharacteristic. Nor have any of Carew's critics accused him of being dense or obtuse. Thus it is difficult to believe that he could be so stupidly insensitive as to fail to recognize the ignobility of the pose he adopts here. As the critics point out, the folly of his stance is obvious; what they refuse to see is that the contrast he sets up, ostensibly between his own commitments and Townshend's, is inescapably a contrast between England's concerns and those occupying the continental nations. If he comes out looking very bad so, obviously, does the milieu for which he speaks. Surely, in juxtaposing lines celebrating the heroic feats of Gustavus Adolphus with a nearly equal 35 number of lines outlining a masque, one of the "harmeless pastimes" that occupy the English court, he cannot be un- aware that the latter suffers by comparison. Not that there is indicated, even implicitly, a desire to rouse others or himself to the call of the drums. He prefers the "sweetly-flowing numbers" of his own environment. But in acknowledging that such verse is of a humbler sort than that required to celebrate the acts of Sweden's King, in asking Townshend to abandon the "loftier pitch" and "noble flight" he has undertaken and descend to a lower level, there.is surely implicit disparagement of the frivolousness of the climate at home in comparison with that into which Townshend has ventured. Yet Carew does not set himself apart from or above that climate. In part, of course, his adoption of the stated preferences as his own, along with any ignominy attached to them, would seem a diplomatic necessity in order to avoid any appearance of criticizing the makers of the feast. Still, there is little doubt that he found this climate most congenial to his tastes. If it is not of a superior nature, it is nevertheless geared to human nature which prefers "secure shades" to the intense heat of the battlefield. This is Carew's 36 defense of his stand, the only one he offers here or in any of his poems blatantly supporting the pleasure principle. At the close of his poem to Townshend, he says of the war- ring nations what seems no more than the simple, oft-proven human truth: Beleeve me friend, if their prevailing powers Gaine them a calme securitie like ours, They'le hang their Armes up on the Olive bough, And dance, and revell then, as we doe now. (11. 101-104) Courthope may have been partially correct in seeing reflected in Carew's stance here the cause for the regime's collapse. If so, it can only be because Carew represents realistically and accurately the prevalent insulated atmo- sphere of the court of the ill-fated Charles. He voices frankly the general, tacitly-implied, attitude at home and refuses to gloss it over with high-sounding phrases, to make empty gestures such as trumpeting the achievements of‘ a man in whose nature and deeds he sees no reflection of himself or his world. To censure him for refusing to pre- sent things other than as they were is absurd. Ideally perhaps he ought to have dissociated himself from the world of play, urged his fellows on to nobler pursuits. But Carew never portrays himself to us as an ideal 37 courtier; rather he seems an antithetical figure--a real- istic representative of his place and time, content to while away the waning hours of the "gloriousnight" as pleasantly, as luxuriously as possible. But there is nearly always an underlying awareness of something lacking in the role to which he has consigned himself. Though less introspective, he has something of J. Alfred Prufrockfis self-insight and might well explain, or excuse, his failure to break the pattern of his days and ways similarly: "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be." But there is nothing of that modern gentleman's self-pity and little of regret in Carew's lines. Lacking the greatness or the means to disturb his universe, he embraces wholeheartedly the compensations it offers. If mermaids will not sing to him, Celia will, and for Carew human voices, human plea- sures, imperfect though they may be, will suffice because they must. If in reading his poems we are inclined to feel, with his most indignant critics, that here is a gifted man spending his God-given talents and years on the mundane and the trivial, without thought of the reckoning to come, we can scarcely avoid glimpsing in his verse the pattern in which the entire fabric of the Caroline Court was woven. ECHAPTER II THE EARTHY FLAME In the following pages I shall discuss at length two poems which I hope will support and clarify the claims which I have made for Carew. These poems, "A Rapture" and "To my worthy friend Master Geo. Sands, on his translation of the Psalmes," would seem to represent the opposite ex- tremes of Carew's temperament and interest. Yet despite their differences, each poem illustrates the distinctive quality I spoke of earlier as the hallmark of Carew's best verse--a basic tension or ambiguity which may indicate a deeper debt to the metaphysical style than has been sus- pected. Each poem exhibits a simultaneous, paradoxical' pull in two directions, and each has been subject to mis- interpretations by readers who have failed to see that underlying character. 'There is probably no better place to start an examination of Carew's poetic achievement than with his most notorious poem, "A Rapture." Its most noted quality has always been what Dunlap calls its "obvious but 38 V 39 magnificant licentiousness"l and Courthope considered it gross obscenity. Even the Caroline audience was apparently somewhat shocked by it, and in an anonymous satire written a few years after Carew's death, he is permitted to apolo- gize posthumously for this "vain Rapture" as a product of "wisdom's nonage and unriper years."2 Such criticism seems to me totally to miss the complexity of this poem which, if it is the product of his youth (and Dunlap, in his commen- tary, makes a strong case for dating it prior to 1624),3 shows Carew to be remarkably precocious in more ways than one. Erotic, Ovidian poetry enjoyed a long, successful run during the English Renaissance. The 16th century pro- duced numerous long poems such as Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis"; the 17th seems to have leaned more toward shorter elegies in the tradition of the Amores or of Catullus. Nearly all the gentlemen poets tried their hand at this type of verse at one time or another. At first glance, Carew's "A Rapture" may appear to be just one more such experiment, but one that went too far, exceeding the bounds of "taste." At second glance we may be inclined to regard the poem as a 4O humorous parody of the erotic tradition; the sensual images and metaphoric descriptions are overabundant, redundant, ludicrous. Thus we might conclude that Carew is attempting to out-Ovid Ovid (who is much less "refined" than most of his imitators). This second judgment is certainly closer to the truth; but it is not the whole truth. In his study of the evolution of love lyrics, H. M. Richmond discusses in detail the problems involved in writ- ing verse of this nature in a culture dominated, as was Carew's, by precepts of Christianity. Frank invitations to sensual indulgence de- cline in popularity from the time of Petronius, despite the veiled delight in adultery which characterizes courtly love . . . . No major poet from the time of Dante can easily recon- cile sensual satisfaction with the beliefs of his more serious moments (witness Chaucer's "Retraction"). This is not to say that con- ventional pleas for extra-marital love do not survive at least until about 1660, but they have usually an archaic flavor of quaint pagan- ism, rather than the dynamic actuality which they clearly had for Catullus or Ovid. When the high Renaissance attempts literary seduc- tion it does so with tongue in cheek, rarely in the bitter earnest of sexual desire . . . . It is necessary to stress this fact in order to clarify the apparent failure in the sequence of serious arguments for sexual indul- gence, of the kind epitomized by Catullus' "Vivamus mea Lesbia," during the course of the seventeenth century. Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress" does nothing to qualify this 41 statement, for While the sentiments offered by Catullus about the definitiveness of death were his literal belief and that of his age, those of Marvell's lover can in no way be reconciled either with the beliefs of the age or with the author's own religious poems . . . . What re- mains to the Renaissance love lyricist who is planning to compose an apparently sincere invi- tation to dalliance, is frequently only an in- teresting series of evasions of reality.4 While I might be disposed to argue with Mr. Rich- mond about any lack of dynamic actuality in Marvell's poem, his basic thesis is obviously valid, and important in con- sidering the almost unique complexity of "A Rapture." Most of the well-known carpe diem, or persuasion-to-love, poems evade the inherent conflict between their arguments and the prevailing religious doctrine of chastity by simply ignor- ing the latter. Clearly, if these poetic arguments are non-objectionable in a Christian society, it is because they are tacitly recognized as mere conventions, or game- playing, not to be taken seriously. Thus the powerful plea by Marvell, the playful eroticism of Donne's "To His Mistris Going to Bed," and his irreverent argument in "The Flea," and even the cynical defense of adultery in Jonson's "Come my Celia"--all manage to be equally inoffensive, while Herrick's "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" evades any 42 conflict by advising the girls to "go marry." There is also available, of course, the nee-Platonic argument of Donne's "The Extasie" for the bodies' embrace as a means of bringing souls together. But this too represents a con- ventional evasion of the primary religious issue. So long as the poet remains within the conventional formulae there is no difficulty. But Carew, though he makes full use of conventional poses, arguments and imagery, exploits them for his own unconventional purposes. And, I suspect, it is this de- parture from the accepted formula, rather than the extreme eroticism of the imagery, which was responsible for the notoriety of the poem. For when the conventional mask is allowed to slip, one comes face to face with the human re- ality beneath the convention. And as has been indicated, though Carew's readers might tolerate and enjoy the conven- tion, the reality underlying it was, or should have been, morally abhorrent. The result is that "A Rapture" pos- sesses a complexity not possible in the strictly conven- tional poems ostensibly in the same tradition. Few critics have taken note of this distinction. In his essay "The Argument of Marvell's 'Garden,'" Frank Kermode discusses 43 the development of a genre of garden poetry rooted in the informal naturalism of the late Renaissance which found its most popular expression in the essays of Montaigne and the poetry of Tasso, most notably his Aminta. "A genre of poetry developed which assumed the right to de- scribe the sensuality of a natural Eden, and a special- ized kind concentrated on sexual gratifications as inno- cent, and the subject of unreasonable interference from Honour."5 Though sexual indulgence is asserted to be innocent in the "libertine" gardens of this genre, Kermode stresses that we are not dealing with the innocence of Tasso's golden age, where there is a perfect concord between appetite and reason, or with the garden of innocent love that Spenser sketches in Faerie Queene . . . . The liber- tines use the argument of the innocence of sense to exalt sensuality and to propose the abolition of the tyrant Honour, meaning merely female chastity.6 This, according to Kermode, is the situation of Carew's "A Rapture"--a statement with which I must take issue. Kermode is, of course, not here concerned with Carew's poem except as one of several examples of the genre extolling the libertine garden of innocent sexuality to which Marvell's garden of the solitary thinker is in 44 opposition. And certainly "A Rapture" does employ the major norms by which Kermode defines that genre. The tyrant Honour is explicitly denounced; the sexual grat- ifications to be enjoyed in Carew's "Elyzium" are af- firmed to be innocent, without offense; and this is ob- viously not a place where appetite and reason could be said to be in perfect concord. It is indeed a libertine paradise. However, as I hope to show, the effect of the poem is not to support or exalt the notion of innocent sexuality, but to demolish it. If Marvell's "The Garden" is, as Kermode effectively demonstrates, "poetry written in the language of, or using the 'norms' of, a genre in a formal refutation of the genre,"7 the same may be said of Carew's poem. "A Rapture," I would argue, is as clear and effective a rejection of libertine innocence as "The Garden." Carew does not, like Marvell, reject it out of hand for, unlike the latter, he has no substitute happi- ness to offer. Instead he gives the libertine argument a hearing so extensive that it finally defeats itself, disintegrating into a crude, petulant demand for female promiscuity. 45 The effect of Carew's poem is less happy than Marvell's for Carew admits into his poem conflicting elements that are never really reconciled. In his all- too-earthly garden the argument for sensual indulgence may be temporarily silenced but it cannot be annihilated. When "A Rapture" closes, the case for the innocence of sexual gratification is lost, but its appeal is still in evidence. As a consequence, the reader's reactions are likely to be ambivalent. One critic who has taken note of the quality of conflict in "A Rapture" is G. A. E. Parfitt. He writes: The normal Elizabethan tactic, when expressing overt eroticism, is to condemn what is being expressed or to use some kind of pre-Christian setting; the usual Cavalier device is to ignore the Christian code, to pretend that poet and mistress are somehow exempt from it, or to emit a smoke-screen of pseudo-argument. Carew, how- ever, not only acknowledges a conflict between Christianity and the erotic but suggests that such a clash is inevitable, while his embodiment of the erotic has such force and beauty that it makes the erotic-moral opposition a real factor in the poem, makes the poem a disturbing phenom- enon, puzzling and extending our experience as poetry should do.8 Carew not only makes no attempt to resolve this conflict which he would probably consider irresolvable; he empha- sizes it to the point where it must be considered the 46 primary focus of the poem. He uses his special descrip- tive power to convey vividly the two-sided nature of sensual pleasure, its ability to repel us even as we revel in it, its flaws as well as its attraction. In addition he makes his parody a means of focusing atten- tion on paradoxical and hypocritical qualities in the attitudes and values of his own society, which welcomed erotic verse but demanded that it wear proper dress. And finally, he uses the conflicting elements of his poem to illuminate conflicting elements inherent in the dual nature of man. Despite the length of the poem, it will be neces— sary to quote it in full because of the nature of my argument. I will enjoy thee now my Celia, come And flye with me to Loves Elizium: The Gyant, Honour, that keepes cowards out, Is but a Masquer, and the servile rout Of baser subjects onely, bend in vaine 5 To the vast Idoll, whilst the nobler traine Of valiant Lovers, daily sayle betweene The huge Collosses legs, and passe unseene Unto the blissfull shore; be bold, and wise, And we shall enter, the grim Swisse denies 10 Only tame fooles a passage, that not know He is but forme, and onely frights in show The duller eyes that looke from farre; draw neere, And thou shalt scorne, what we were wont to feare. We shall see how the stalking Pageant goes 15 47 'With borrowed legs, a heavie load to those That made, and beare him; not as we once thought The seed of Gods, but a weake modell wrought By greedy men, that seeke to enclose the common, And within private armes empale free woman. Come then, and mounted on the wings of love Wee'le cut the flitting ayre, and sore above The Monsters head, and in the noblest seates *Of those blest shades, quench, and renew our heates. There, shall the Queene of Love, and Innocence, Beautie and Nature, banish all offence From our close Ivy twines, there I'le behold Thy bared snow, and thy unbraded gold. There, my enfranchiz'd hand, on every side Shall o're thy naked polish'd Ivory slide. No curtaine there, though of transparant lawne, Shall be before thy virgin-treasure drawne; But the rich Mine, to the enquiring eye Expos'd, shall ready still for mintage lye, And we will coyne young Cupids. There, a bed Of Roses, and fresh Myrtles, shall be spread Under the cooler shade of Cypresse groves: Our pillowes, of the downe of Venus Doves, Whereon our panting lims wee'le gently lay- In the faint respites of our active play; That so our slumbers, may in dreames have leisure, To tell the nimble fancie our past pleasure; And so our soules that cannot be embrac'd, Shall the embraces of our bodyes taste. Meane while the bubbling streame shall court the shore, Th'enamoured chirping Wbod-quire shall adore In varied tunes the Deitie of Love: The gentle blasts of Westerne winds, shall move The trembling leaves, a through their close bows breath Still Musick, whilst we rest our selves beneath Their dancing shade; till a soft murmure, sent From soules entranc'd in amorous languishment Rowze us, and shoot into our veines fresh fire, Till we, in their sweet extasie expire. Then, as the empty Bee, that lately bore, Into the common treasure, all her store, 48 Flyes'bout the painted field with nimble wing, Deflowring the fresh virgins of the Spring; So will I rifle all the sweets, that dwell In my delicious Paradise, and swell My bagge with honey, drawne forth by the power Of fervent kisses, from each spicie flower. I'le seize the Rose-buds in their perfum'd bed, The Violet knots, like curious Mazes spread O're all the Garden, taste the ripned Cherry, The warme, firme Apple, tipt with corall berry: Then will I visit, with a wandring kisse, The vale of Lillies, and the Bower of blisse: And where the beauteous Region doth divide Into two milkie wayes, my lips shall slide Downe those smooth Allies, wearing as I goe A tract for lovers on the printed snow; Thence climbing o're the swelling Appenine, Retire into thy grove of Eglantine; Where I will all those ravisht sweets distill Through Loves Alimbique, and with Chimmique skill From the mixt masse, one soveraigne Balme derive, Then bring that great Elixar to thy hive. Now in more subtile wreathes I will entwine My sinowie thighes, my legs and armes with thine; Thou like a sea of milke shalt lye display'd, Whilst I the smooth, calme Ocean, invade With such a tempest, as when Jove of old Fell downe on Danae in a storms of gold; Yet my tall Pine, shall in the Cyprian straight Ride safe at Anchor, and unlade her fraight: My Rudder, with thy bold hand, like a tryde, And skilfull Pilot, thou shalt steere, and guide My Bark into Loves channell, where it shall Dance, as the bounding waves doe rise or fall: Then shall thy circling armes, embrace and clip My willing bodie, and thy balmie lip Bathe me in juyce of kisses, whose perfume Like a religious incense shall consume, And send up holy vapours, to those powres That blesse our loves, and crowne our sportfull houres, That with such Halcion calmenesse, fix our soules In steadfast peace, as no affright controules. 6O 65 70 75 80 85 9O 95 49 There, no rude sounds shake us with sudden starts, No jealous eares, when we unrip our hearts 100 Sucke our discourse in, no observing spies This blush, that glance traduce; no envious eyes Watch our close meetings, nor are we betrayd To Rivals, by the bribed chamber-maid. No wedlock bonds unwreathe our twisted loves; 105 We seeke no midnight Arbor, no darke groves To hide our kisses, there, the hated name Of husband, wife, lust, modest, chaste, or shame, Are vaine and empty words, whose very sound Was never heard in the Elizian ground. 110 All things are lawfull there, that may delight Nature, or unrestrained Appetite; Like, and enjoy, to will, and act, is one, We only sinne when Loves rites are not done. The Roman Lucrece there, reades the divine 115 Lectures of Loves great master, Aretine, And knowes as well as Lais, how to move Her plyant body in the act of love. To quench the burning Ravisher, she hurles Her limbs into a thousand winding curles, 120 And studies artfull postures, such as be Carv'd on the barke of every neighbouring tree By learned hands, that so adorn'd the rinde Of those faire Plants, which as they lay entwinde, Have fann'd their glowing fires. The Grecian Dame, 125 That in her endlesse webb, toyl'd for a name As fruitlesse as her worke, doth there display Her selfe before the Youth of Ithaca, And th'amorous sport of gamesome nights prefer, Before dull dreames of the lost Traveller. 130 Daphne hath broke her barke, and that swift foot, Which th'angry Gods had fastned with a root To the fixt earth, doth now unfetter'd run, To meet th'embraces of the youthfull Sun: She hangs upon him, like his Delphique Lyre, 135 Her kisses blow the old, and breath new fire: Full of her God, she sings inspired Layes, Sweet Odes of love, such as deserve the Bayes, Which she her selfe was. Next her, Laura lyes In Petrarchs learned armes, drying those eyes 140 50 That did in such sweet smooth-pac'd numbers flow, As made the world enamour'd of his woe. These, and ten thousand Beauties more, that dy'de Slave to the Tyrant, now enlarg'd, deride His cancell'd lawes, and for their.time mispent, 145 Pay into Loves Exchequer double rent. Come then my Celia, wee'le no more forbeare To taste our joyes, struck with a Pannique feare, But will depose from his imperious sway This proud Usurper and walke free, as they 150 With necks unyoak'd; nor is it just that Hee Should fetter your soft sex with Chastitie, Which Nature made unapt for abstinence; When yet this false Impostor can dispence With humane Justice, and with sacred right, 155 And maugre both their lawes command me fight With Rivals, or with emulous Loves, that dare Equall with thine, their Mistresse eyes, or haire: If thou complaine of wrong, and call my sword To carve out thy revenge, upon that word 160 He bids me fight and kill, or else he brands With markes of infamie my coward hands, And yet religion bids from blood-shed flye, And damns me for that Act. Then tell me why This Goblin Honour which the world adores, 165 Should make men Atheists, and not women Whores. (49-53) "A Rapture" does not move toward a single, unified effect, but maintains a deliberate and somewhat disturbing tension throughout. We are always pulled in at least two directions simultaneously. The opening is certainly con- ventional enough, having in it something of the Elizabethan tactic of a pre-Christian setting, and the Cavalier claim of exemption from the prevailing code. However, in re- jecting the tyranny of "Honour," the poet is here 51 explicitly defying not a moral, Christian code but the conventional, man-made code of idealized courtly love with its artificial standards (including, of course, female chastity) for the conduct of lovers—~standards which, he argues later, are themselves inconsistent with religious precepts. This Honour is derided as a false idol, an empty show, a papier mache giant weighing heav- ily upon those fools who uphold him. It is not an en- tirely original sentiment,9 and coupled with the woman's liberation arguments of lines 18-20, seems but a pleasant sophistry. Along with Celia, we are invited to put aside false standards, unnatural inhibitions, and abandon our- selves to the sensual paradise Carew throws open to us. We are ushered into a lush, idyllic Garden of Love, the "heavenly" reward of the bold, the valiant, the wise. In accepting his invitation, we seem, sqrfar, only to be defying empty forms, rather than valid religious re- strictions. We have actually left a corrupt, unnatural world for a nobler, as well as more pleasurable one. A bed of roses, the cool shade of cypress groves, a bubbling stream, soft winds blowing--and lovers, naturally enjoying one another. Freed from the constricting bonds imposed 52 by artificial standards of society, "enfranchised" hands slide freely over "naked polish'd ivory." All of nature is involved in amorous play: streams, birds, winds, and bees that fly around "Deflowering the fresh virgins of the Spring." The lover is moved to emulate these. What could be more innocent? If somewhere in the reader an insistent voice answers "Almost anything," he is effectively caught in Carew's trap and can hardly escape facing some of the implications of his position. For we have been told that Love and Innocence reign here. Supposedly, having rejected the unnatural and confining standards of society, we are in a veritable Eden, a pre-lapsarian state of innocence; all offence has been banished.i Yet despite the poet's assurance that this is not an invitation to sin, but to a sinless state, the scene remains guiltily erotic. And it is difficult to say at first, whether the vision itself is at fault or if the evil is in us. Are we so corrupt that we cannot even momentarily conceive of sexual love as both pleasant and innocent as the Naturalists claimed, or as Religion assures us it was before the Fall? Must we, like Milton's 53 disgruntled Satan upon viewing Paradise, conclude "Myself am Hell"? But "A Rapture" is not Paradise Lost and any confusion or discomfiture the reader might feel is quickly dispelled as the verse becomes more frankly salacious and we know exactly where we are. Despite the contemporary note struck in the opening lines urging rebellion against prevailing restrictions, Carew has used the Elizabethan tactic of whisking his reader back to a Pagan Paradise, the garden of Venus, in which we need not be concerned with moral issues from which we are temporarily playing truant. Our orientation complete, we can enter blame- lessly into the playful spirit of the poem. We are, after all, reading for amusement, for simple pleasure which is unashamedly not of a very elevated sort. For the success of such verse depends, to a great extent, on a good-humored recognition on the part of the reader of his own "lower" instincts; it enables him to indulge them, and at the same time smile patronizingly at himself for his indulgence. Such intellectual slumming is fine sport precisely because the reader is enabled to let him- self go (within certain pre-established limits), and yet 54 retain the smug assurance that he is not permanently re- signed to this sphere. Carew's metaphoric descriptions of sexual love are ideally calculated to create such an atmosphere. Heaped one upon the other, they become more and more ludicrous, yet their absurdity does not cancel out their titillating effect. It is great fun, and the laughter makes it seem totally unnecessary to restrain our sensual enjoyment. Had the poem ended at line 114, the effect would have been completely happy. But Carew does not stop there, and herein, per- haps, lies the true source of complaints about the poem. The remainder of it, though it ostensibly continues in the same vein, is in reality all downhill, and quite un- pleasant. At first this seems to be simply an extension of the Venusion paradise, an erotic catalogue of famous lovers indulging themselves in love's rites. But gradu- ally we become uncomfortably aware that something is wrong, that these virtuous people are out of place here. They too, it seems have been freed from the bonds of the giant Honour. The chaste Lucrece, so cruelly raped, to the horror (and secret delight?) of Shakespeare's readers, is turned lascivious 'courtesan, the faithful Penelope 55 a shameless exhibitionist. But because,for them, Honor was something more than just a convention, Carew's attri- buting to them a share of the seemingly insatiable lust (now seen clearly for what it is) exhibited by the speaker, Celia, and, to some extent, the reader who has stayed with them, is shocking. Once again we are made to stop and look carefully at our surroundings, at where we good people have chosen to wander; and we find, as in a nightmare, that we are not in Heaven but in a kind of Dantean Hell. Here those who, on earth, sinned through chastity against Love's precepts, burn for "Their time mis-spent." At this hideous, perverted picture of ideal figures writhing in lust, the whole gay illusion is bru- tally smashed. Carew has given us our tour through the slums; but he has neglected to see us safely back, un- touched, to our own environment. He has left us there to find our own way back, and in the cold light of dawn, we may be somewhat ashamed of having sought such surround- ings. Admittedly, Carew has not played the fame fairly. Having assured us our defiance of Honour was merely a gambit, an exchange of one set of arbitrary poetic 56 conventions for another, he has_introduced a group of revered figures from another tradition whichcannot be reconciled with this one. The effect is like suddenly confronting one's mother at an orgy. The reader, having been caught with his guard down and his bad side showing, can either slink away red-faced or make the best of it and take Carew's little joke good-naturedly. If he does the latter, he will find that Carew is not quite through exposing his inconsistencies. The question of whether that Honour governing the behavior of lovers is only a word or'a meaningful ideal, neatly avoided at the begin- ning of the poem, is now aggressively reopened as the poem changes direction once again. The distasteful nature of the scenes in lines 115 to 146 has the effect of an implicit argument against de- viating from the chaste code of love. Now Carew again argues £g£_defiance of it. This Honour that enforces chastity is consistent neither with Nature, "humane" jus- tice, nor religion. Sexual abstinence is an unnatural restriction to put on the "soft sex" and surely an in- human punishment. The demands Honour makes on men are no less cruel; they must fight and kill to prove their 57 devotion, risking damnation for this breach of religion. Obviously, Honour's rule is unreasonable and ought to be ignored. It is doubtful that Celia will be persuaded by the false analogy between her "unjust" victimization and his, or that she will reach the "logical" conclusion that, be- cause Honour (the conventional tyrant) is inhumane, un- just and opposed to religious doctrine, her honor (chas- tity) is worthless and ought to be abandoned. In any case, the last sentence destroys any force his logic may have had. For his real quarrel with Honour is reduced to the petulant, ungallant, self-interested complaint that it demands sacrifices of men, puts them in conflict with religion, yet inflicts no Such split loyalty or infamy on women. For it does not, where they are concerned, con— flict with true honor based on moral doctrine. His final line's callous restatement of what he is asking of Celia counteracts and dispels the sensuous appeal of his earlier plea, and again seems to advise chastity, if only as the better of two bad alternatives; for the alternative to being a slave to the tyrant Honour is, for Celia, to be a whore. The puzzled reader, having been shoved from one 58 side of the argument to the other throughout the poem, might well be outraged by Carew's inconsistency as much as by his crassness. If Carew had not inserted the previous passage (lines 115-145) placing the faithful lovers in Hell, this final passage, with its unappealing frankness would probably have been sufficiently unpalatable to leave the courtly reader with an unpleasant aftertaste. And yet, if he was not offended by the poet's initial sugges- tion that Celia defy Honour and give way to lust, why should this final statement offend him? It is simply a blunt restatement of what the speaker has been suggesting all along, despite claims of innocence which have fooled no one. But up to now, Carew's persuasions have seemed to be working within familiar, acceptable traditions (albeit his use of them is somewhat gauche); at the end, he drops conventional phrasing and states plainly what he's asking. The reader who has not objected to the more euphemistic, though equally clear, argument, ought really not to complain here of bad taste. The hypocrisy and absurdity of such a reaction is blatantly clear. And the formal excellence Carew exhibits in his use of the pentameter couplet, his mastery of sensuous imagery, his wit and humor, make it 59 impossible to place the blame on artistic incompetence. The objector is thus placed in the position of protesting a breach of etiquette, having ignored a defiance of reli- gion, and reveals his major concern as manners rather than morals. It is thus impossible to condemn the poet without condemning oneself. Too few readers, shocked by the harsh sentiment of the poem's last lines, have stopped to consider that Carew, careful artist that he was, undoubtedly knew what he was doing. He could not have been unaware of their negative effect any more than he could have missed the ignoble con- notations of his final lines to Townshend. One can only conclude that he is deliberately working to crush any illusions he might have created as to the perfect happiness to be found in the Elysium previously described. If lines 115 to 146 have not served to turn the dream to nightmare, these final lines are calculated, like a dash of cold water, to awaken any remaining dreamers to reality. The nature of the poem then, is complex. It is sensual and funny, pleasant and unpleasant, and several other things besides. It seems unjust to simply classify it as "licentious." To do so is to fail to understand the 60 extent of Carew's achievement. “A Rapture," like Donne's "To His Mistresse Going to Bed," parodies the erotic genre, and through what is essentially a reductio ad absurdam, illustrates the fact that the argument for sensual indul- ' ma gence, carried too far becomes ridiculous. But Carew's poem is much more complex than Donne's, goes more deeply’ into the nature of sensual pleasure and man's ambivalent attitude toward it. For all its licentiousness, it is possible to argue that "A Rapture" is a highly moralistic poem. Carew posits a sensual paradise so pleasant that the reader may be strongly inclined to accept it as a reasonable facsimile of what man's life would have been like had Adam not fallen. It is ironic perhaps that our vision of unfallen happiness should take the form of un- restrained indulgence of those instincts considered "cor- rupt" as a result of the fall. But it is really not so paradoxical if one recognizes honestly Carew's habitual thesis that the pleasures of the senses are very much a part of man's happiness here on earth; why should we not long for a world where the frank enjoyment of them is un- tainted by any sense of guilt or shame? And it is 61 scarcely assuming much psychological insight to suggest that, just as the poorest men are the least likely to be completely convinced that money cannot buy happiness, so those who have attempted to conform most rigidly to so- cial and religious restrictions on the indulgence of the lower instincts, are most likely to imagine that the abo- lition of all such restrictions may constitute happiness. From what we know of Carew's life, it seems safe to exclude him from the ranks of the most unyielding moral conformers. Even in a society which is regarded today as having been extremely lax and indulgent, he was considered a libertine, and biographical facts suggest that he was not much given to denying himself pleasure. Whatever his actual experience, his poetry, and particu- larly "A Rapture," reveals him to have had few naive illusions about the joy to be derived from total grati- fication of the senses. And it must be recognized that "A Rapture" works to dispel any illusions a less exper- ienced reader might have. The first effect of such grat- ification, as in the first twenty-four lines of the poem, may indeed be ”sweet ecstasy." But after the initial exposure, as the novelty wears off, exhilaration wanes 62 and must be deliberately, artificially, refurbished. Thus the descriptions of the lovers' activity become more and more elaborately metaphorical, less natural, more strained, further and further removed from the naturalness and innocence claimed for it; finally they are downright ugly and oppressive. Carew demonstrates thereby, more effectively than any moral treatise could do, more completely than explicit poems on the subject (Shakespeare's "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame" and Jonson's "Doing a filthy pleasure is" come most immediately to mind), that there is something in: trinsically degrading and self-defeating about total immersion in the sensual self. Yet if the last part of the poem leads us to such an awareness, the first part stands to remind us why men continue to fall prey to temptation. It is a concrete portrayal of the human dilemma Shakespeare summed up in his Sonnet 129: All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. Carew's poem is thus, not a condemnation of man's weakness and foolishness so much as a sensitive, artistic portrayal of the pathetic, frustrating, ludicrous limitations of the human condition. 63 It seems to me that Carew does this time and time again, though rarely so thoroughly as in "A Rapture." He is continually showing us man falling short of, or rebel- ling against, the established philosophical, social, or religious ideals. Often humorously, sometimes less plea- ""3 santly, he portrays situations where the disparity be- tween the ideal attitude or mode of behavior and what actually occurs is clearly, though implicitly, obvious, and awareness of the disparity is essential to a full appreciation of the poem. If "A Rapture" has been oversimplified by two centuries of readers into irrefutable proof that its creator was a shallow-minded voluptuary, the response to his commendatory verse to George Sandys has been al- most as simplistic. Written in 1638, within two years of Carew's death,10 the poem seems as far away in sentiment as in time from the earlier poem; so much so that many critics can only conclude that the Carew of the later poem is a new, reformed man. Such a conclusion is sup- portable only if one reads "A Rapture" as a straight- forward, untroubled celebration of sensual pleasure and the poem to Sandys as a devout penitent's sincere 64 recanting of his former earthy ways. The latter reading, I feel, is no more justified than the former. Shorter, tighter, more unified in its tone and argument than "A Rapture," "To my worthy friend Master Geo. Sands, on his translation of the Psalmes"(93),enmn1apart from the worthi- ness of its sentiment, is an admirable poem. Here, as in "A Rapture," and indeed nearly all of his serious poems, Carew employs the pentameter couplet, rather than the tetrameter form he preferred for his lighter verse. And style here is perhaps as important an element in creation of the intended compliment as language. Louis Martz's comments on the stylistic accomplishment in this poem suggest this is the case. "These couplets are completely end-stopped, each couplet standing as a perfect unit, somewhat anticipating the Augustan manner in caesura, balance, and antithesis. Carew is presenting here a superb imitation of the couplet style that George Sandys had achieved in his famous translation of Ovid's Metamor- phoses . . . ."11 This aspect of Carew's artistry has probably gone unnoticed by most readers of the poem; what has caught their attention is the apparently heartfelt tribute to Sandys' pious work and the unusually 65 introspective and regretful tone with which Carew assesses his own poetic accomplishments. I presse not to the Quire, nor dare I greet The holy place with my unhallowed feet; My unwasht Muse, polutes not things Divine, Nor mingles her prophaner notes with thine; Here, humbly at the porch she listning stayes, And with glad eares sucks in thy sacred layes. So, devout penitents of Old were wont, Some without dore, and some beneath the Font, To stand and heare the Churches Liturgies, Yet not assist the solemne exercise: Sufficeth her, that she a lay-place gaine, To trim thy Vestments, or but beare thy traine; Though nor in tune, nor wing, she reach thy Larke Her Lyrick feet may dance before the Arke. Who knowes, but that her wandring eyes that run, Now hunting Glow-wormes, may adore the Sun, A pure flame may, shot by Almighty power Into her brest, the earthy flame devoure. My eyes, in penitentiall dew may steepe That brine, which they for sensuall love did weepe. 80 (though 'gainst Natures course) fire may be quencht With fire, and water he with water drencht. Perhaps my restlesse soule, tyr'de with persuit Of mortall beauty, seeking without fruit Contentment there, which hath not, when enjoy'd Quencht all her thirst, nor satisfi'd, though cloy'd;. Weary of her vaine search below, Above In the first Faire may find th'immortall Love. Prompted by thy example then, no more In moulds of clay will I my God adore; But teare those Idols from my heart, and write What his blest Sprit, not fond Love shall indite; Then, I no more shall court the verdant Bay, But the dry leaveless Trunke on Golgotha; And rather strive to gaine from thence one Thorne, Then all the flourishing wreathes by Laureats worne. 10 15 20 30 66 The self-deprecating references to his own verse, used primarily, I believe, as a complimentary technique to exalt the accomplishment of Sandys, have a sincere ring to them certainly. But to read into this "a sincere public avowal of changed endeavor and belief," a "remark- able alteration" in a man formerly capable of "savage cynicism," in short, a "moral revolution" as R. G. Howarth does,12 is to ignore not only the grappling with the con- flict between the ideal and the human which is implicit in so many of Carew's poems including "A Rapture"; it also fails to take note of biographical facts, later composi- tions, and contradictory evidence in the poem to Sandys itself. For to read Carew's poems carefully is to recog- nize that there is nothing revolutionary about his admis- sion here of the imperfect and unexalted nature of the "mortall beauty" he has pursued throughout his life and his verse. He has never pretended it was otherwise. Nor need we be surprised at the apparently genuine reverence for Sandys' "sacred layes," his recognition of the super— iority of a "pure" to an "earthy" flame or Muse. Had he not earlier, in the much acclaimed elegy on Donne,impli- citly noted this same hierarchy of devotion, praising 67 first Donne's work as the "true Gods Priest," and only secondly his secular verse? And while Carew's admiration for Donne's work was undoubtedly genuine, he did not, for all that, abandon classical myths and models to follow in his footsteps. I find little basis for George Williamson's re- mark, in his commentary on the Donne elegy, that "This is where Carew began the pursuit of beauty which ended, like Donne's, by being translated into higher terms and by con- tributing power to his fine lines to Sandys."13 Surely, in view of Carew's work thereafter, the comparison between his "conversion" and Donne's is inapt. The undue emphasis put on the pious sentiments expressed in the poem to Sandys seems to me untenable. It is true that it comes near the end of his life and critics who read moral reform into it are fond of refer- ring (as does Mr. Williamson) to the Earl of Clarendon's lines on Carew: "But his Glory was that after fifty years of his Life, spent with less Severity or Exactness than it ought to have been, He died with the greatest Remorse for that Licence, and with the greatest Manifes- tation of Christianity, that his best Friends could 68 desire."14 There is, however, conflicting evidence about the remorseful end. Dunlap relays an account from the notes of Izaak Walton which seems far more consistent with the inconsistent Carew, to the effect that the latter, having fallen ill, did indeed repent and receive absolu- tion; however, upon recovering he returned to his old habits to the extent that, when a relapse occurred, he was refused a second absolution.15 More pertinent perhaps to my rejection of the idea of a new Carew are his poems composed after the poem to Sandys, particularly "To my friend G. N. from Wrest" (written in 1640), in which we find him once again writing with relish of sensuous, if not sexual, delights. The only other poems which accord- ing to Dunlap, may be dependably dated after the one to Sandys (two on D'Avenant's Madagascar, one on Lord Cary's Malvezzi, and the song on the marriage of Lord Lovelace) are equally mundane. The point I wish to emphasize is that this seeming inconsistency on Carew's part need not disturb us. A careful study of the amorous poems through which he is best-known will not support the simplified and generally accepted impression of him as a gross libertine against 69 which the Carew of the Sandys poem stands out in start- ling relief. For while he has never seriously embraced higher ideals, he reveals himself as keenly aware of them and his devotion to the sensuous pleasures delineated in "A Rapture" has never been total or blind. Indeed it is often qualified, or proclaimed with a good deal of irony. Thus the apologetic note he sounds in the Sandys poem need hardly strike us as an about-face. Above all, it is im- portant to note that while he disparages his Muse, he does not forsake her. The last eight lines taken alone may seem to be a firm pledge to follow in Sandys footsteps, to abjure his idolatrous worship of women in favor of adoration.bf "the first Faire." However, this resolution is qualified, dependent as it is upon the conversion of his Muse, stated only as a possibility in the preceding fourteen lines. If his Muse is enflamed with love of God, perhaps his restless soul will cease its fruitless search for contentment in earthly love. This, it seems to me, is a "maybe" so big that only the most naive gambler would lay odds on it. It is true that the poem's tone of regret and humility rings true. Most poignant, per- haps, is the sense of weary dissatisfaction with the 70 earthy course he has chosen which comes through in lines 23-28. Yet despite these elements, angels or critics who, on this basis, rejoice at the sheep's return will find their celebrating premature and scarcely defensible. For one thing, the dissatisfaction with the imperfect happiness to be found in sensual love and mortal beauty has been expressed before, not only implicitly as in "A Rapture" but explicitly, and even more poignantly than here, in Carew's masque, Coelum Britannicum, written sev- eral years earlier. There the poet's ambivalent attitude toward Pleasure is explicit in the lines addressed to Hedone, who personifies it: but still the terror And apprehension of thy hasty end, Mingles with Gall thy most refined sweets, Yet thy Cyrcaean charmes transforme the world. (175) Although the "faire cup" Hedone offers is known to contain poison, the poet is still unable to refrain from tasting. But he is clearly without illusion about the contentment and satisfaction to be attained. Thus this expression of dissatisfaction with hedonism in the Sandys poem cannot justify a reader's jumping to conclusions about a moral revolution. _ .....—;.‘u. a 71 There is, moreover, implicit evidence in the poem itself suggesting that, however firmly Carew might be- lieve, intellectually, in the superiority of psalms to love songs, he is not really attracted to such writing. He manages to convey, through the images he employs, the utter lack of emotional and imaginative appeal Sandys' colorless muse holds for him. Following his own sensual muse, "unwasht" and profane though she may be, he equates with courting "the verdant Bay," striving for "flourishing wreathes"; the images suggest lush, thriving life, rich rewards. How harsh and bleak by comparison are the images he uses to describe the pursuit of Sandys' Divine Muse for whom he contemplates exchanging his own. To do so is to court "the dry leaveless Trunke on Golgotha" in hopes of gaining a thorn. Such sterile images work counter to the expressed preference for Sandys' muse in the poem's argu- ment. Donne, in "La Corona" had used the same images of bays and thorns to symbolize the rewards of poetic and pious works respectively. But Donne's truly devout spirit enabled him to make the thorns seem truly preferable. But doe not, with a vile crowne of fraile bayes, Reward my muses white sincerity, But what thy thorny crowne gain'd, that give mee, A crowne of Glory, which doth flower alwayes; 72 For "the true God's Priest," as Carew had called him, the thorn suggests a crown which will flower eternally. For Carew, whose lukewarm piety will never advance him beyond the church porch, a thorn is just a thorn, and seems to imply the rejection of all he truly cherishes. It is impossible to believe that Carew really desires the quenching of his earthy flame though he recog- nizes intellectually (as does anyone contemplating reform of a pleasurable vice) that he should desire it. There is, consequently, a tension created here, similar to that operating in "A Rapture"; the explicit, idealistic state- ment of the poem is balanced against, undermined by, the more realistic natural tendencies revealed implicitly through the imagery. It is as though, underlying the debate over whether he will renounce profane for sacred verse, we can see in operation, though on a minor scale, the basic conflict in human nature between flesh and spirit. The ambivalence of Carew's attitude in no way diminishes the compliment to Sandys, who may be regarded as being above the struggle, having chosen the higher course. If anything, Carew's expressed difficulty in 73 emulating his friend makes Sandys' accomplishment seem the greater. As for the outcome of Carew's conflict, few readers familiar with his thought and temperament will seriously expect him to trade in the bay for the thorn. And, for those who know his more characteristic work, the possibility that he may forsake his Muse seems as undesirable as it does remote. We are quite content that her "Lyrick feet" should "dance before the Arke." For in this happy phrase, meant to acknowledge the limitations of his poetry, Carew also manages to suggest its strength and appeal as well. Ideals may be necessary and impor- tant; but they can also be wearying. To acknowledge this is to recognize the essence of Carew's earthy charm. When the sun seems HHinding, the stars unreachable, one could do worse than be a hunter of glow-worms. CHAPTER III LOVE POEMS: CONVENTIONAL IDEALS * As Carew could not enthusiastically worship where his senses as well as his soul were not engaged and fed, one might assume that in writing amatory poems he would have little interest in the legacy of idealized love con- ventibns, either Petrarchan or neo-Platonic, which he and his contemporaries inherited from preceding genera- tions of Renaissance poets. But while it is true that the view of love which emerges from Carew's love poems as a whole has a strong physical focus, he could scarcely avoid making use of the wealth of ready-made materials handed down to him. Indeed it would have taken an inno- vative genius to do so and Carew was not of this breed. Considering the thoroughness with which the sub- ject of love had been explored by their predecessors, and the number of poets at work at the time (Howarth reckons that about "a hundred and twenty poets were writing 74 75 between 1616 and 1660, and all of them at some moment capable of becoming fine poets"),l the Caroline Poets whose originality was not totally buried under the weight of set forms and prescribed attitudes, not to mention the common store of ideas and metaphors, accomplished no mean feat. Carew, I believe, managed it much more success- fully than most. Meet critics have noted his extensive employment of conventional Petrarchan forms. That he is using them in a highly original manner has too often been overlooked. Thus it is possible for Francis Schoff to conclude, on the basis of frequent Petrarchisms in Carew's verse, that he is more kin to Spenser than to Jonson. . . . there is an obviously deep-seated delight in the entire Petrarchan pattern of expression; in its elaborately built arguments, its rhetor- ical devices, its praise of the lady and at- tacks on her cruelty, and above all its enthus- iastically extreme conceits and hyperboles. Carew's world had wearied of all this, or thought it had outgrown it; ours mistrusts hyperbole almost by definition; but Spenser did not, nor his Elizabethan compeers; and Carew did not either.2 Such a conclusion, it seems to me, can only be supported by reading Carew's verse piecemeal, by ignoring the con- sistent subtle trend of thought running throughout, and 76 focusing instead on sheer numerical incidence of familiar forms. More to the point is an article by Bruce King who sees Carew's employment of conventions as rhetorical and ”‘4 psychological strategy. "It is in the shaping of a liter- ary strategy that a poet reveals his personality and the values he holds in relation, or opposition, to society."3 King's point is extremely important, I think. Schoff, along with a majority of Carew's readers, assumes too easily that the frequent employment of Petrarchan conven- tions indicates Carew's desire to uphold them. King goes on to say that "Carew works within poetic conventions so. that he may seem to speak with detachment and high self- control. The purpose is to avoid injury by keeping per- sonal emotion at a distance. Carew uses poetic conven- tions to organize personal emotions for social warfare." This is precisely what Carew seems to me to be doing. It is not all-out war by any means--merely a little gentle shelling calculated to shake his contem- poraries out of their pretenses and illusions, to make them see their life for what it was, not with any view to reforming it but because he found idealistic pretense 77 absurd. Contrary to Schoff's statement, there is evi- dence that Carew's world had neither wearied of nor out- grown the overblown love conventions of the preceding century. M. B. Pickel discusses at length the Platonic love cult that flourished in Charles' court under the guidance of Queen Henrietta Maria, though she notes: ”This courtly Platonic movement should be distinguished from the mystical Platonism to be found in the work of Drummond and Donne earlier in the century, and of Spenser in the preceding century."5 The wishes of the Queen and her ladies for idealized love poems could not be so easily turned aside as Townshend's request for a eulogistic poem on Sweden's King. Carew, of course, complied though without the fervor of a wyatt or Sidney, and often with tongue in cheek. Robin Skelton, in a passage that seems to flatly contradict Schoff's "son of Spenser" thesis, takes note of this lack of enthusiasm. One might say, indeed, that Carew is the poet of normalcy. He suspects the over-elaborate and the exaggerated expression of emotion as being no more than a game on the part of the speaker. Admittedly, he himself could play the game, and play it well, but hardly ever without an ironic half-smile, a quiet glee.6 78 Readers familiar only with the heavily sensual verses most typical of Carew might possibly be inclined to imagine him with a perpetual leer rather than Skelton's ironic half-smile. But the latter is a far more accurate image, conveying something of the attitude with which he approaches even the most serious subjects, particularly human love. Before turning to discussion of Carew's more frankly sensual, and more realistic, treatment of love, I should like to examine some of his experiments with conventional forms and themes from the idealized love traditions, to explore the devices he employs to avoid being merely imitative and to adapt the conventions to his own purposes. Theoretically, the numerous established patterns for treating all aspects of a potential love relationship might not seem to offer real problems to a truly creative mind. There are, after all, different possible stylistic modes of expression, variations in language, tone, inten- sity, rhetorical and metrical patterns, imagery, associa- tions--all tools the poet can employ to imbue the con- ventional situations with freshness and vitality. So 79 many resources for originality ought surely to offset the difficulties inherent in dealing with themes worn thin from repetition. However, a perusal of collections of Renaissance love lyrics is enough to convince most readers that these difficulties were too often insurmountable. H. M. Richmond in The School of Love, in which he traces the evolution of the love lyric from classical times through the seventeenth century, comments on the diffi— culties involved in eluding the pull of conventional forces: While the situations on which love lyrics are based seem commonly to be conventional, even if given impetus by some personal exper- ience of the author, it might be assumed that the choice of his mode of communication would be entirely within the poet's own creative pdwer. However, once the poet has committed himself to some well-defined traditional pattern this does not prove to be the case. The inescapable logic of that situation at once constrains the author to adopt certain methods of communicating the relationship. He finds certain methods carefully adapted to the theme by traditional practice and ex- periment, be it in the use of description, narrative, dialogue, or soliloquy. Thus in the two poems of Marvell and Catullus ("To his Coy Mistress," "Vivamus mea Lesbia"] in which the poets are seeking the release of sexual desire, despite the millennia separat- ing them both poets adopt the posture of a lover speaking directly to his mistress. But once past this major decision of format each . 80 poet finds that more detailed prescriptions begin to operate. Both use the imperative form of verb in an emphatic manner; each heaps up verb forms, usually words of great energy and drama. The relentless logic of the situation leads the two poets to the same images and preoccupations--death, the sun, secrecy. Other well-known poems in the persuasion-to-love category will readily occur to the reader and most can only serve to support Richmond's contention. The situa- tion does indeed confine the poet's choices. If we look at conventional situations in the idealized love tradi- tions, we will find the case to be the same with them, though at times to a lesser extent. A lady has only so many parts that can be catalogued and praised, a lover only a limited number of approaches. The number of pos- sible images, of course, is all but inexhaustible. But not all are equally appropriate or satisfying and a poet who is determined to be original must sometimes be con- tent with images inferior in logic or beauty to those which custom has staled. The violations of sense and sensibility to which some poets were driven in their attempts to avoid or to improve upon what had become hackneyed are well-known to all who are familiar with 81 Renaissance poetry.” And yet, despite such inherent dif- ficulties, exquisite, memorable poems continued to be produced within the framework of the conventions. At times, these are the result of formal or stylistic innovations; periodically a poet might come up with a syntactical or rhetorical formula which would unleash new potentialities in old themes. Carew's best- known lyric "Aske me no more" (pp. 102-3), a poem in the tradition of those seeking to define the attraction of the mistress, provides such an instance. Other poets in this species of compliment had apostrophized, anal- yzed, sentimentalized, puzzled over, the qualities of the force that possessed them. Carew speaks with the author- itative voice of one who has pondered metaphysical ques- tions raised by his mistress and reached conclusive answers. Aske me no more where £933 bestowes, When Ippg is past, the fading rose: For in your beauties orient deepe, These flowers as in their causes, sleepe. Aske me no more whether doth stray, The golden Atomes of the day: For in pure love heaven did prepare Those powders to inrich your haire. 82 Aske me no more whether doth hast, The Nightingale when May is past: For in your sweet dividing throat, She winters and keepes warme her note. Aske me no more where those starres light, That downewards fall in dead of night: For in your eyes they sit, and there, Fixed become as in their sphere. Aske me no more if East or West, The Phenix builds her spicy nest: For unto you at last shee flies, And in your fragrant bosome dyes. Richmond notes that "the poem was perhaps, the most imitated one of the century, and this in an age whose poets copied each other freely."8 What is most immediately striking about this poem is its rhetorical pattern and it is this element, almost exclusively, which lent itself to imitation.9 After all, lovely as they are, the images of the lady as a repository of the beauty of roses, sunbeams, nightingales' song, and fallen stars were old when Carew was born. However, careful reading reveals that, here too, Carew is working changes on the old formulas. The resulting freshness is not really satisfactorily explained by pointing out the metaphysical influence which is discernible in the poem. It is true that the worn Elizabethan images take on a new depth of 83 meaning as a result of the metaphysical note struck in the last two lines of the first stanza which suggest the lady is not merely a final resting place for nature's beauties, but the formal cause from whence they spring, their raison d'etre. There is implicit an assurance that in residing in her these beauties are not only not lost, but that they will be reborn, an assurance reinforced by the use of such words as "orient," "sleepe," "keepes warme," and the familiar image of the Phoenix. Yet I cannot agree with George Williamson's statement that the poem "employs the Metaphysical mode of wit within the song convention that Jonson passed on to the Caroline poets."lo Despite the admitted "learnedness" of the phrase "as in their causes" (Dunlap notes at length that it is to be understood in relation to the four causes distinguished by Aristotle, Carew's reference being to the concept of formal cause),11 and the enrichment which the traditional compliment derives from it, the poem re- mains in essence the conventional Elizabethan tribute to beauty. Unless one learned reference is sufficient indi- cation of the metaphysical mode of wit, there is nothing in the poem to suggest the school of Donne. There is no 84 real ambiguity here, no concentration of image or argument. The structure is cumulative rather than logical. The "causes" conceit, if a simple analogy may be so desig- nated, is not developed. As it has no logical basis, to attempt to expand it logically would destroy its effec- tiveness. Carew wisely slips it in casually, almost im- perceptibly, with no desire to startle, to shift the argu- ment to an intellectual plane. Helen Gardner's discussion of the distinction between Elizabethan and metaphysical conceits leaves little doubt about the nature of Carew's. Elizabethan poetry, dramatic and lyric, abounds in conceits. They are used both as ornaments and as the basis of songs and son- nets. What differentiates the conceits of the metaphysicals is not the fact that they frequently employ curious learning in their comparisons. Many of the poets whom we call metaphysical, Herbert for instance, do not. It is the use which they make of the conceit and the rigorous nature of their conceits, springing from the use to which they are put, which is more important than their frequently learned content. A metaphysical conceit . . . is not indulged in for its own sake. It is used . . . to persuade, or it is used to de- fine, or to prove a point . . . . It can only do this if it is used with an appearance of logical rigour, the analogy being shown to hold by a process not unlike Euclid's superim- position of triangles.12 Surely none of these metaphysical traits apply to Carew's use of the phrase "as in their causes"; and just as surely 85 this is the only image that suggests the metaphysical. Though the poet pretends to be resolving metaphysical questions, the poem's argument remains traditionally Elizabethan. What truly distinguishes it from its hun- dreds of predecessors employing the same imagery is that Carew manages a rather striking reversal of the pgppg diem formula in which the nature images are commonly used to stress the transience of the lady's beauty. His im- plication that her beauty is more permanent than the fleeting beauties of nature magnifies the compliment many times over, yet so subtly that there is no sense of ex- cessive hyperbole. This serene assurance of her almost immortal beauty, coupled with the certitude suggested by the negative imperative with which he begins each verse, gives the speaker an air of confident authority and his essentially hackneyed "discoveries" a forceful emphasis that makes them appear singular. There are other equally striking instances where revitalization has been achieved through syntactical de- vices. But the possibilities are obviously limited and all new fortuitous formulas were immediately assimilated 86 into the common store to be used and reused until the form became as routinely familiar as the theme. Ultimately, although fresh imagery, form and syntax might aid a poet in making a conventional love situation less blandly predictable, most successful love lyrics--successful in the sense that they allow us to feel that the situations posited and sentiments expressed are something more than a mere literary exercise of the author's skill--depend on the writer's ability to bring new insights, introduce new possibilities of action or feeling, to the situation itself. I would not go so far as to suggest, as Samuel Johnson does in his Lives of the Ppgpg, that it is folly to write of imagined situations and that "he that professes love ought to feel its power."13 But as no true lover ever feels his love to be precisely like any other, though love be as old as Eden, so no poet who is willing to adopt the exact re- sponses of hundreds of others in addressing his mistress can create the impression of a potentially actual situa- tion. An intelligent awareness of the psychology of the situation posited, and of human nature in general, can go far to atone for any lack of true emotion in breathing 87 life into conventions. Anyone who doubts this need only read Donne's early poems. According to Richmond, "What each lyricist accomplishes in a successful love poem is . . . not simply to individualize or dramatize a conven- tional topic but to express more fully the necessary facts and logical outcome of that kind of situation."14 The facts and outcome, insofar as there is room for variation, will of course depend largely on the pro- jected personalities of the individuals involved. Too often these figures are purely formulaic, as flatly pre- dictable as their situations, and can call forth no imag- inative involvement on the part of the reader. In such cases smoothness of line and excellence of image must suffice to engage our interest. These are by no means negligible accomplishments. But in an age where so many wrote so well on such limited material, something more is required for a poem to attract more than passing at- tention. Carew's lyrics manage to do so with satisfying frequency, chiefly because his lovers are usually dis- tinguishable as believable human beings expressing real emotions. Parfitt writes that Carew uses language "pre- cisely to re-enliven the human situation which lies behind 88 all conventions but which repetition so easily deadens."15 "Human.situation" are key words here; for it is precisely the human situation that most ideal, Petrarchan poetry seems to want to ignore. The continued popularity of ideal love conventions made it almost inevitable that Carew should try to incorporate them into verses written a i , for a courtly audience, even though he found the rarified atmosphere of such love unsuited to the earthy elements of his own nature. But though he makes use of Neo-Platonic and Petrarchan themes, he frequently gives his own distinc- tive variations to the patterns, causing us to look at them from a slightly different perspective from which the old, worn motifs seem less predominant. He does not always do so. It might be well to look at some instances where he makes no attempt to adapt the conventional expression of ideal, eternal leve to his own more realistic, if somewhat grosser, understanding of that emotion. His "servile imitation" (to use his own phrase) of the emotions of others results in verse which, apart from its formal merits, is not only uninspiring but imaginative, in contrast to his more successful love poems where the love expressed is not so unalloyed. His 89 song "Eternitie of love protested" (23-4) is a case in point. How ill doth he deserve a lovers name, Whose pale weake flame, Cannot retaine His heate in spight of absence or disdaine; But doth at once, like paper set on fire, Burne, and expire! True love can never change his seat, Nor did he ever love, that could retreat. That noble flame, which my brest keepes alive, Shall still survive, When my soule's fled; Nor shall my love dye, when my bodye's dead, And never fade: My very ashes in their urne, Shall like a hallowed Lamp, for ever burne. The marriage of true minds which Shakespeare and Donne conveyed so beautifully is, in Carew's hands, merely a formula and unconvincing. Imagery is nearly always Carew's forte. But the image here of ashes burning for- ever in their urn is unlikely to attract or move us. Carew is never at a loss for appealing images to commun- icate the beauties of sensual love. But he cannot ex- press attractively ideals which are neither real nor attractive to him. He lacks the vision that can conceive of souls or minds meeting with an impact equal to or greater than the impact of bodies; and, it seems, he 90 lacks the imagination to write as if he could. These un- memorable lines were set to music by Henry Lawes, which no doubt helped to give them an appeal they lack when merely read. "To Celia, upon Love's Ubiquity" (123) is a still less satisfying poem which has not even music to recommend it. Carew borrows from Petrarchan love the pose of the long-suffering lover whose devotion to his mistress is unaffected by her unchanging coldness; from the neo- Platonic writers he takes the concept of love's ubiquity, its indifference to physical absence. From both tradi- tions he takes the most familiar images and lumps them together indiscriminately. The result is a poem as dis- unified as it is unoriginal, as improbable as it is un- distinguished. Though definitely mediocre, it is not unequal to much of the poetry being produced at the time; but had Carew often written so, he would not rank among those comparative few who deserve to be remembered today. Fortunately his talents were seldom so misemployed as in the following lines. As one that strives, being sick, and sick to death By changing places, to preserve a breath, 91 A tedious restlesse breath, removes and tryes A thousand roomes, a thousand policyes, To cozen payne, when he thinks to find ease, At last he finds all change, but his disease, So (like a Ball with fire and powder fild) I restless am, yet live, each minute kild, And with that moving torture must retain (With change of all things else) a constant payn. Say I stay with you, presence is to me Nought but a light, to shew my miserie, And partings are as Rackes, to plague love on, The further stretchd, the more affliction. Goe I to Holland, France, or furthest Inde, I change but onely Countreys not my mind:I6 And though I passe through ayr and water free, Despair and hopelesse fate still follow me. Whilest in the bosome of the waves I reel My heart I'le liken to the tottering keel, The sea to my own troubled fate, the wind To your disdayn, sent from a soul unkind: But when I lift my sad lookes to the skyes, Then shall I think I see my Celia's eyes, And when a Cloud or storm appeares between, I shall remember what her frownes have been. Thus, whatsoever course my fates allow, All things but make me mind my business, you. The good things that I meet I think streames be From you the fountain, but what bad I see, How vile and cursed is that thing thinks I, That to such goodnes is so contrary? My whole life is bout you, the.Center starre, But a perpetuall Motion Circular: I am the dyalls hand, still walking round, You are the Compasse, and I never sound Beyond your Circle, neyther can I shew Ought, but what first expressed is in you: That wheresoever my teares doe cause me move My fate still keepes me bounded with your love; Which ere it dye, or be extinct in me, Time shall stand still, and moist waves flaming be. Yet, being gon, think not on me, I am 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 92 A thing too wretched for thy thoughts to name; ' But when I dye, and wish all comforts given, 45 Ile think on you, and by you think on heaven. The complex syntax, phrasing, and imagery are sug- gestive of Donne, if only superficially; but where the latter developed metric and stanzaic forms to complement his rhetoric and point up logical stresses, Carew uses pentameter couplets, a form which often works against the sense. Though Donne used this form for his elegies, the couplets there set off logical breaks or pauses in his argument. Here the rhymes are often intrusive and are allowed to control sentence structure to the detriment of any attempt to emulate the rhythms of real speech. Lines 27 through 32 provide the most awkward demonstration of this. And at times, as in line three, an image or thought must be dragged out to fit the metric line. The poem's content is no less unremarkable than its form. The compass image of lines 35 through 38 is obviously plundered from Donne's "A Valediction: Forbid- ding Mourning." Less obviously, the opening image of men "sick to death" is suggestive of the virtuous men dying to whom the parting lovers are compared in Donne's poem. Even the phrasing of the first line seems to echo Donne's 93 opening: "As virtuous men passe mildly away." Likewise, in lines 19 through 26, there are echoes of these lines from Donne's "Elegie XII. His Parting From Her": I will not look upon the quickning Sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure; Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure. Time shall not lose our passages; the Spring How fresh our love was in the beginning; (11. 73-78) The essential process is the same; the lover in each poem predicts that he will see his absent mistress in the ele- ments of nature which surround him. And yet their condi- tions are not really similar. Both of Donne's poems af- firm the oneness of the lovers and the inability of Fate to divide them through physical separation. But, while Carew too affirms this Platonic concept of love as a matter of the mind, a union unaffected by physical dis- tance, the beauty as well as the logic of the concept is destroyed by the fact that his is an unrequited love. In his case, it is misery that remains constant despite separation, which is more a matter for lament than con- solation. And lament he does, with all the tear-floods and sigh-tempests eschewed by Donne's lovers, but typical of the Petrarchan sonneteers. Like any ideal lover of 94 that school, Carew's remains humbly faithful despite the lady's disdain. The final lines, in which one may catch faint echoes of Shakespeare's sonnets, round off the ab- surdity. Though all his thoughts are to be absorbed in her, she is not to think of so wretched a thing as he is; and though she be the source of all his wretchedness, he can still say that to think of her will be to think of heaven. The irrationality of these final lines will scarcely be noticed by anyone who has picked his way through this grab-bag of borrowed posturings and images. So little resemblance is there between this and Carew's other love poems that one cannot help but wonder if he did not deliberately set out to construct this mindless imitation to mimic the poetic parasites who continuously copied what they could not create. Such speculation, of course, is futile. The poem stands as an indicator of what Carew might have been had he been content to transfer unquestioningly into verse, unaltered by his own experience, the attitudes toward love and the fixed formulas for its expression developed by poets before him. 95 In another attempt at Platonic love poetry, "To my Mistresse in absence" (24), an earthy element creeps in despite the convention. Here the "boundless spirits" of two Donnelike lovers meet and souls kiss; but the hours lag and the souls' chief joy in their "bitter ab- sence" comes from contemplating their bodies languishing with desire to join with one another--a consummation wished for no less fervently by their watching souls whose own meeting seems decidedly less than satisfactory. Carew learned much from Donne but he could not learn to convey convincingly a love independent of the senses. No more could he imagine himself as eternally idolizing an untouchable goddess whose unnatural coldness condemned him to a life of abject suffering. Fortunately he does not often try. Usually when he imagines himself in a conventional situation, he imagines his own natural re- sponses and writes accordingly. Believable as well as lovely verses result. "The Spring" (3) is such a poem. Although its theme is highly conventional, the situation involved admits large scope for Carew's descriptive talents and may cause his reader to wish he had more often devoted 96 himself to the celebration of natural, rather than femi- nine, beauty. Here his use of the pentameter couplet is sure. There is no attempt at the irregular and unwieldy syntax of "Upon Love's Ubiquity." Instead his sentences flow naturally as he moves from one point of observation to another. He regulates the tempo through masterful use of the caesura, and the patterns and cadences of natural speech are maintained. Now that the winter's gone, the earth hath lost Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost Candies the grasse, or castes an ycie creame Upon the silver Lake, or Chrystall streame: But the warme Sunne thawes the benummed Earth, 5 And makes it tender, gives a sacred birth To the dead Swallow; wakes in hollow tree The drowzie Cuckow, and the Humble-Bee. Now doe a quire of chirping Minstrels bring In tryumph to the world, the youthfull Spring. 10 The Vallies, hills, and woods, in rich araye, Welcome the comming of the long'd for May. Now all things smile; onely my Love doth lowre: Nor hath the scalding Noon-day-Sunne the power, To melt that marble yce, which still doth hold 15 Her heart congeald, and makes her pittie cold. The Oxe which lately did for shelter flie Into the stall, doth now securely lie In open fields; and love no more is made By the fire side; but in the cooler shade 20 Amyntas now doth with his Cloris sleepe Under a Sycamoure, and all things keepe Time with the season, only shee doth carry Iune in her eyes, in her heart Ianuary. The imagery, though predictable, is lovely, the sounds melodious. But perhaps the outstanding element in 97 the poem is Carew's use of objective tone. Dunlap notes that "the paradox of burgeoning earth and unhappy lover" was developed by Petrarch and used widely by his imita- tops.l7 Traditionally the joys of Spring are recorded primarily to point up the contrasting misery of the out- of-tune lover. Carew gives his lover a slightly different voice and viewpoint, altering the traditional emphasis. His poem is rather more impersonal than its English pre- decessors. There is no overt expression of emotion, no reference to his suffering. The understated simplicity with which the central contrast is first stated, in line thirteen, gives it added impact. The complaint is slipped in delicately and naturally. But the punctuation--nowhere else do we get two end-stopped phrases in a single line-- gives it the emphasis it requires. Carew will not adopt the usual role of abject lover. It is not pg who is out of tune with Nature, but the lady. The fact that she alone, of all things in Nature, does not respond to the charm of Spring proclaims her unnatural indeed. And when not even the "scalding" heat of the noon day-sun can melt her heart, a lover as clear-sighted as this one will not be long in concluding that the warmth of his love will 98 never do it. There is a note of regret perhaps in the contrasts drawn in lines 17-24. But the speaker himself seems very much attuned to the season and not at all likely to waste it weeping useless tears among the wil- lows. No speculation about the future of his love is made, of course, and there is no hint of faithlessness. But the conventional figure takes on firmer dimensions than usual by being made to seem less the helpless victim of an overpowering emotion than the adequate master of it. A stronger, more effective poem results. The plight of the unrequited lover is taken up again in "A cruell Mistris." (8). In this complaint, Carew employs conventional precepts of the religion of love. Too many ladies before this had been elevated to the status of goddess or saint at whose shrine the lover; worshipped for the poem's situation to need any explana- tion. Indeed, Carew does not even bother to state the conceit explicitly before launching his complaint. But though the imagery is standard, his argument reveals that he is not quite reconciled to the role of humble suppliant in whichthe poet-lover who thus idealizes his mistress is normally cast. 99 Wee read of Kings and Gods that kindly tooke A pitcher fil'd with water from the brooke; But I have dayly tendred without.thankes Rivers of teares that overflow their bankes. A slaughter'd bull will appease angry IoVe, 5 A horse the Sun, a Lambe the God of love, But shee disdaines the spotlesse sacrifice Of a pure heart that at her altar lyes. Vesta is not displeas'd if her chast vrne Doe with repayred fuell ever burne; 10 But my Saint frownes though to her honour'd name I consecrate a never dying flame. Th' Assyrian King did none i'th' furnace throw, But those that to his Image did not bow; With bended knees I daily worship her, 15 Yet she consumes her owne Idolater. Of such a Goddesse no times leave record, That burnt the temple where she was ador'd. Rufus Blanshard says of Carew that "He re-informs the old conceits with new meanings, creates ironic con- texts for the expression of traditional attitudes, and argues or pleads with a combination of grace and ingenuity that disguises platitude."18 This statement seems an apt description of Carew's accomplishment here. The flood of hyperbole to which this tradition usually lends itself is kept under control in this poem as a result of the ironic tone and logical development. The speaker does not ad- dress the lady directly. He might be pleading his case before some divine court of appeals, so reasonably does he argue. He progresses, in lines one through twelve, by 100 citing facts and precedents which prove the unreasonable- ness of his lady's continued disdain, showing that Kings and Gods have been pleased with lesser sacrifices than those he has offered. Thus, without inpugning her god- hood, he substantiates his claim to some show of kindness from her. In the final six lines, however, the argument strikes a more formidable note. The voice is as calmly reasonable as ever, but the irony is more prominent. With the analogy introduced in line thirteen the poet verges on heresy, letting slip the pretense of the mis- tress' divinity. The term "Idolater" is a lovely touch, for it lends added implications to the nature of the poet's love, or more accurately, to his realistic percep- tion of that love. An idolater is, literally, one who warships a false god, and the preceding reference to the Assyrian King who, despite the inaccuracy in nationality, is undoubtedly Nebuchadnezzar, emphasizes this meaning. The latter threw into the furnace those worshipers of the true God who refused to pay homage to the image he had erected. Unlike them, the poet has not refused to worship the idol. And in pointing out the injustice of 101 his being consigned to the flames anyway, he is inciden- tally reminding her that she is just that--a false idol, not a legitimate goddess. It is ungallant of him perhaps; but it has the effect of bringing the static conventional situation to life, making the relationship seem more plausible. An ideal lover might suffer his mistress' incessant scorn without diminishing his devotion. A real,human lover in such a situation must grow bitter, impatient with one who took his devotion so much for granted, and might well remind her that she has feet of clay as Carew does here. The final couplet carries this message still further. It may seem at first glance to say only that such an implacable goddess as this has been heretofore unknown. As such it could be taken as a com- pliment, an expression of the awe in which she is held. But when we recall another essential element in the tra- ,dition of Petrarchan love poetry, that the poet-lover may render his lady immortal through his lines, the couplet seems to contain a veiled threat. If her divin- ity rests solely on her ability to command his adoration, her immortality depends on his willingness to eternize her in verse. If she destroys him, or his love, no such 102 poetic evidence of her powers and virtues will survive. It is an elegantly subtle warning to a vain young lady that she cannot continue to deny this supplicant for- ever--unless, of course, she is prepared to be one of those goddesses of whom "no times leave record." Carew's reworking of conventional formulas is not always as subtle and serious as in the two poems discussed above. If he is a little less selfless in paying court to his lady than his idealistic predeces- sors, he is surely more entertaining. The sense of humor, and of irony, which frequently mark his verse could not help but find an outlet in his experiments with conventions which posed such a challenge to the writer's originality and in which he found so much that was absurd. One of the most popular conventions of Petrar- chan love poetry was the writing of verse compliments idealizing the beauty of the lady. Usually such verses took the form of a catalogue of the separate elements of her physical beauty, described in hyperbolic terms, ending with praise of her inner beauty (mind, virtue, soul) which, in accordance with the ideal love 103 relationship, was her chief attraction. This form re- mained popular with the cavalier poets, but in their hands became something less reverent and romantic, more playful and urbanely gallant. This applies to most of the verse compliments of Carew; however, because he often gives his compliments a structure or tone strongly remi- niscent of the earlier Petrarchan verses, the reader's attention is apt to be drawn to the disparity between his humorous or earthy expressions of love and those of his more idealistic predecessors. I would like to ex- amine two such typically Carevian compliments. "The Comparison" (p. 98) adopts a quietly rever- ent tone so completely reminiscent of the 16th century sonneteers that it is possible to be lulled by it into reading the poem as a simple throwback to their conven- tional idealizations. But the simplicity, like the tone, is deceiving. For if one ignores the tone and attends only to what is said in the opening lines, the poem appears to be instead an almost equally conven- tional gppiePetrarchan statement. It seems his inten- tion is to mock the hackneyed hyperboles as Shakespeare 104 does in his Sonnet 130, "My Mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." Carew's poem begins: Dearest thy tresses are not threads of gold, Thy eyes of Diamonds, nor doe I hold * Thy lips for Rubies: Thy faire cheekes to be Fresh Roses; or thy teeth of Ivorie: Thy skin that doth thy daintie bodie sheath Not Alablaster is, nor dost thou breath Arabian odours . . . So mahy poets had disclaimed such metaphors that another such disclaimer, which Carew seems to be writing, would hardly strike the reader as original. What is striking is his reversal of the direction in which the poem seems to be going. It turns out he is not attacking these metaphors for their extravagance, as others had done. The trouble with them is that they are not extravagant enough to describe his mistress. The poem continues:- those the earth brings forth Compar'd with which would but impaire they worth. Such may be others Mistresses, but mine Holds nothing earthly, but is all divine. 10 Thy tresses are those rayes that doe arise Not from one Sunne, but two; Such are thy eyes: Thy lips congealed Nectars are, and such As but a Deitie, there's none dare touch. The perfect crimson that thy cheeke doth cloath 15 (But onely that it farre exceeds them both) Aurora's blush resembles, or that redd That Iris struts in when her mantl's spred. Thy teeth in white doe Leda's swan exceede, Thy skin's a heavenly and immortall weede, 20 And when thou breath'st, the winds are readie strait 105 To filch it from thee, and doe therefore wait Close at thy lips, and snatching it from thence Beare it to Heaven, where 'tis Joves frankin- cense. Faire Goddesse, since thy feature makes thee one, 25 .Yet be not such for these respects alone; But as you are divine in outward view So be within as faire, as good, as true. This second catalogue, if anything, exceeds in its hyper- bole the excesses of the Petrarchan poets to which Carew was implicitly alluding in the first seven lines. Its tone remains serious and reverent, and the poem closes with an expression of the conventional concept of ideal beauty as being very much a matter of the inner nature. We might conclude that Carew is, after all, writing a serious traditional compliment. But the shift from an apparently anti-Petrarchan to a Petrarchan attitude in mid-stream, as it were, suggests that Carew is having a little fun with the convention itself. Having renounced the usual metaphors as too gross to describe his mis- tress, he sets out to clothe her in suitably divine images. It would seem his is a truly uplifted, spiri- tual love untainted by earthy elements. Yet, though the images he finally uses are, as he says, of a divine nature, the references are to pagan divinities and sug- gest the gods' more erotic moments: Aurora blushing as 106 she slips from her lover's bed, Jove venting his lust on Leda in the form of a swan, Iris strutting in her scarlet dress. The psychological implications are such that, though he earnestly professes to worship an ethe- real beauty, his love is revealed to be of a somewhat mere corporeal nature. As in the verse letter to Sandys, the choice of images deliberately belies the profession of ideals incompatible with the sensual side of man's nature which, as Carew demonstrates in this not so simple compliment, cannot be totally denied. Equally delightful, though it works in quite another way, is Carew's poem, "The Complement" (99). Selig calls this poem "an exercise in the tradition of informing a young lady that she is not loved for any single feature, but for all of them combined."19 This is certainly what the poem does, but I would suggest that the tradition from which this lyric, and others like it, is an offshoot, is the one discussed in my treatment of the preceding poem, that of informing a lady that she is loved not so much for any feature of her physical beauty, as for her inner beauty, which surpasses them all. For the reader thoroughly familiar with this tradition, such 107 a statement would be the logical culmination of Carew's catalogue, and his refusal to supply it gives the con- clusion of the poem a humorous impact. As, stanza by stanza, the poet takes up and then gently rejects each of the lady's separate beauties as the cause of his love, he would seem to be moving toward an ultimate citing of one as superior to all of the others. And logically, as well as ideally, that chief beauty must be her mind or soul, which are, as everyone knows, always to be re- garded as eminently superior to physical beauties. How- ever, in this poem too, the conventional ideal is under- mined. The light tone and the obvious relish the speaker takes in sensuously describing her physical features do not at all suggest an ideal lover likely to appreciate her finer, abstract qualities. Yet he is prevented from seeming merely a leering, callous sensualist by the humor which accompanies his sensuous dallying. His love does ppp go beyond the purely physical, but he is as good- humoredly aware of its (and his) limitations, its devia- tion from the ideal, as is the reader. 108 The poem is too long to quote in full, but the stanzas describing the lady's neck and breasts will serve very well to illustrate. I doe not love thee (O my fairest) .For that richest, for that rarest Silver pillar which stands under Thy round head, that globe of wonder; Though that necke be whiter farre, Than towers of pollisht Ivory are. I doe not love thee for those mountaines Hill'd with snow, whence milkey fountaines, (Suger'd sweete, as sirropt berries) Must one day run through pipes of cherries; 0 how much those breasts doe move me, Yet for them I doe not love thee: (11. 25—36) The excessive hyperbole of globes, pillars, mountains, fountains and pipes of cherries is deliberately absurd as, the speaker knows, is a love based solely on such features. Yet while we see the absurdity of an overem- phasis on physical beauty we are not allowed to forget that it is nevertheless highly appealing to man's sen- sual nature. The descriptions grow more deliberately licentious as the poet moves down the lady's body. He is obviously enjoying his imaginative journey, and at each stop it is harder to believe his protest that it is not for this item that he loves her. His playful 109 audacity reaches new "heights" in this stanza celebrating her thighs: I doe not love thee for those thighes, Whose Alablaster rocks doe rise So high and even that they stand Like Sea-markes to some happy land. Happy are those eyes have seene them, More happy they that saile betweene them. (11. 43-48) Had the poem ended with the conventional tribute to her inner beauty, it would have been most unconvincing after such a catalogue. Instead, Carew closes with an admission of what the reader has known all along. It ig these physical attributes that he loves her for, though not for any particular one: “But wouldst thou know (deere sweet) for all." His failure to praise any higher quality in the lady is no letdown. And his initial play- ful fear that his mistress will be grieved to hear that it is not her physical charms he loves her for suggests that she too would neither expect nor desire a compliment ‘in line with the ideal. The effect of "The Complement" is thus a very delightful one all around; though it may be in conflict with the more serious tradition of com- pliments that its structure recalls, it is totally at peace with itself. 110 As I have tried to indicate in this discussion, it is not unawareness of the ideals postulated for men,_ particularly as they apply to human love, that is re— sponsible for Carew's consistenly down-to-earth poetry, but rather an awareness and acceptance of the fact that such ideals are too often either unattainable for man, or undesirable, at odds with his humanity. Poets who sang of ideal love strove to idealize the objects of their affection, placing them-on pedestals so high that they exceeded the grasp of mortal men. The absurdity of such a process, in view of man's real nature and needs, is illustrated often in Carew's verse. In "A ' divine Mistresse" (6), a truly exquisite poem in which irony is a major device, he posits a mistress endowed with all the perfections the Petrarchan poets attempted to assign to theirs. Yet the tone is not boastful or elated but wistful. For the lady is out of reach for the lover, as perfection is beyond the reach of human- ity. She possesses "every beauteous line," yet the speaker, whose ideal is realized in her, cannot be called happy. 111 In natures peeces still I see 7 Some errour, that might mended bee; Something my wish could still remove, Alter or adde; but my faire love Was fram'd by hands farre more divine; 5 For she hath every beauteous line: Yet I had beene farre happier, Had Nature that made me, made her; Then likenes, might (that love creates) Have made her love what now she hates: 10 Yet I confesse I cannot spare From her iust shape the smallest haire; Nor need I beg from all the store Of heaven, for her one beautie more: Shee hath too much divinity for mee, 15 You Gods teach her some more humanitie. The speaker's situation is no different from that of thousands of sonneteers before him; only his ironic in— sight differentiates him. The poem reveals that perfec- tion is unnatural, incompatible with imperfect humanity; he who strives to attain it must meet, inevitably, with frustration. How nonsensical then, seems all the ideal- ists' striving to make a woman the epitome of a perfec— tion which can only alienate her from them. As the close of Carew's poem reveals, man cannot hope to em- brace his ideal without in some way diminishing the perfection which attracted him in the first place. The prayer of the last line is, in effect, a contradiction of the lines which precede it, and it underlines the 112 pathetic, paradoxical position of man. Perfection is not really perfection if any desirable quality is lacking. This "divine" lady lacks the humanity that would place her within the lover's reach, which is certainly desir- able. The speaker is thus reduced to saying she would be more perfect if less perfect which is paradoxical non- sense. But if that is true, what are we to say of all the poetry which seems bent on presenting this inhumanly perfect, unreachable woman as ideal? G. A. E. Parfitt, in his article on Carew, in- cludes an excellent commentary on this poem. The stress on the earth-bound limitations of the poet’s nature is in part the conven- tional pose of the poet's inferiority, and as such a compliment to the mistress, but Carew also reminds us that the attitude his persona adopts has validity, hyperbole is being held in check by a kind of realism. So "humanitie" does more than make the ob- vious contrast with "divinity"; it also re— minds us that idealization of the mistress can dehumanize a situation.20 It is precisely this dehumanization of love that Carew finds so unappealing and works to eliminate in his exper- iments with ideal love conventions. Of course, going to the opposite extreme and treating love as a purely phys- ical process can be dehumanizing also. Carew is 113 completely aware of this, and though some of his lovers are this gross, their defects are always made apparent. A realist, at least where love is concerned, is what Carew finally, essentially, is. The folly, the pain, the imperfections of love, as well as its joys, find expression in his verse. Love for him is seldom serious, spiritual, Godlike; like man himself, love has its humorous, its earthy, even beastly, sides and all apsects receive recognition. Perhaps the thing about Carew which best explains the direction taken in his verse, and even his life, is the fact that he is so frankly unashamed of being human. He accepts the bad with the good, the bitter with the sweet, the pleasure and the pain. His reader must do so too. CHAPTER IV LOVE POEMS: UNCONVENTIONAL REALITIES As is already evident from the preceding chap- ters, it is as spokesman for a realistic, down-to-earth view of human love that Carew is consistently at his best. Despite a certain amount of inevitable repetition such a discussion must entail, I should like to turn now to analysis of some of his finer love poems in order to justify the claims I have made for him and, hOpefully, to permanently dispel any lingering notion that, in ab— juring the romantic ideals of love as a predominantly aesthetic and spiritual experience, he reduces it to a gross, animalistic process. For Carew, though no ideal- ist, is a serious, often eloquent champion of love as a deeply meaningful human experience in which coy decep- tions and daydreams have no place. His precepts are simple, sane, consistent. A satisfactory love relationship, he asserts again and again, must nurture the senses as well as the soul of 114 115 man; and it must be a mutual attraction between equals, involving reciprocal affection and giving. His most memorable lovers disdain the mistress-servant relation- ship of the courtly love code, refuse to pretend satis- faction with neo-Platonic embraces of souls or minds only. They neither worship women nor denigrate them in the anti-Petrarchan fashion; they only ask that they be Epip. Other lovers may waste themselves and time in de- votion to a hopeless cause; Carew's lovers, when they go a-courting, expect to win their suits. They enjoy the game of courtship and they play it with a flair. But they are not likely to regard a smile from the lady or permission to be near her as a satisfactory resolution of it all. Generally, Carew's verse implies that love is not love unless it finds reciprocation. It does not endure repeated rebuffs or long separation. He writes in his song "Separation of Lovers" (61-62): Yet though absence for a space Sharpen the keene Appetite, Long continuance, doth quite All love's characters efface. For the sense not fed, denies Nourishment unto the minde, 116 Which with expectation pinde, Love of a consumption dyes. (11. 17-24) The poet does not deny that love has its seat in the mind but points out reasonably that the mind depends on the body for nourishment. The healthy-love-in-a-healthy-mind- in—a-healthy-body argument is not really sound logic, of course; and by making love's growth, or alternatively its dying, analogous to the physical process, it seriously undermines the suggestion that the mind is the paramount factor in love. Yet despite the speciousness of the logic, his thesis that physical sustenance is vital to love is too often true to be lightly dismissed. Though "Separation of Lovers" is not one of Carew's better poems, the logical structure and rational tone it employs are typical of the group of fine poems, emphasizing the sensual aspects of love, that will be the focus of this chapter. The syllogistic structure often serves to offset the poet's sensual emphasis, to make His insistence on physical involvement seem reason- able-:as indeed it is if one accepts his argument that man, as a mixture of soul and sense, cannot be fulfilled by a love that denies one half of his nature. Thus in 117 "To his mistresse retiring in affection" (129-30), a poem in the Petrarchan tradition of the faithful, though un- requited, lover, Carew asserts that reason is Opposed to such supposedly ideal devotion: But if my constant love shall fail to move thee, Then know my reason hates thee, though I love thee. (11. 11-12) Edward Selig states that "The main difference between Carew and his predecessors in the Petrarchan tradition is thatCarew is disposed to reason with the ladies, not just to appear before them on bended knee."l It is an important point, I think, though somewhat understated. With reason, or at least the appearance of logic, on their side, Carew's liberated lovers are quite disposed to argue or even to threaten. Unencumbered by idealistic notions of women's divinity, they are apt to insist on favors from their ladies rather more substantial than ribbons or bracelets of hair. They are not above bar- gaining, using the poet's power to immortalize as a weapon, though they wield it gently as a rule. "To a Lady that desired I would love her." (81) and "Ingratefull beauty threatned." (17) are two of Carew‘s most superb poems in this vein. Predictably 118 enough, Donne's influence can be seen more clearly here than in any of Carew's poems with the exception of his Donne elegy. According to Rufus Blanshard, what Carew learned from Donne ”was to probe, explore, question, ring changes on the old conceits."2 This aspect of Donne's style can be seen in these poems, but perhaps more striking, though less tangible, are familiar echoes in tone, voice, attitude. And yet these are no servile imitations. Carew is never as strenuously analytical as Donne nor are his images as astonishing. His irony is softened by gallantry, his meter, even when irregular, is musical. If his images do not strike us as original, his use of them often does. Because he does not try to startle, preferring to be subtle in his effect, nothing impedes the flow of his lines, the harmonious meshing of image and idea. Thus it is that, as Joseph Summers notes, Carew "often surpasses Donne in the evocation of sensuous and sensual (rather than dramatic) immediacy."3 In tone and style, "To a Lady that desired I would love her" is strongly reminiscent of Donne's "Womans Constancy." Its theme, however, is completely different. Donne's poem, in which the speaker anticipates with scorn 119 the various ruses his lady might use to justify her sub- sequent faithlessness, is a single seventeen line unit with irregular meter. The first five lines are suffi- cient to show the similarities. Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day, Tomorrow when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons, which we were? Carew's poem, which is twice the length of this one, is devoted to gentle persuasion, and as the poem progresses, stanza after smooth stanza, the sensuous music of his alliterative lines gradually drowns out the echoes of Donne . 1. Now you have freely given me leave to love, What will you doe? Shall I your mirth, or passion move When I begin to wooe; Will you torment, or scorne, or love me too? 5 2. Each pettie beautie can disdaine, and I Spight of your hate Without ydur leave can see, and dye; Dispence a nobler Fate, 'Tis easie to destroy, you may create. 10 3. Then give me leave to love, and love me too, Not with designe To rayse, as Loves curst Rebells doe, When puling Poets whine, Fame to their beautie, from their blubbr'd eyne. 15 120 . 4. Griefe is a puddle, and reflects not cleare Your beauties rayes, Joyes are pure streames, your eyes appeare Sullen in sadder layes, In chearfull numbers they shine bright with prayse; 20 5. Which shall not mention to expresse you fayre Wounds, flames, and darts, Stormes in your brow, nets in your haire, Suborning all your parts, Or to betray, or torture captive hearts. 25 6. I'le make your eyes like morning Suns appeare, As milde, and faire; Your brow as Crystall smooth, and cleare, . And your dishevell'd hayre Shall flow like a calme Region of the Ayre. 30 7. Rich Natures store, (which is the Poets Treasure) I'le spend, to dresse Your beauties, if your mine of Pleasure In equall thankfulnesse You but unlocke, so we each other blesse. 35 This prospective lover, rational and cautious, is seemingly unwilling to proceed with the relationship until he knows exactly what he is getting into. Yet his hesitance is only a ruse, though a very urbane one. Al- though apparently concerned about how his advances will be received, he is already launching his attack in the second stanza with a confidant and well-prepared argument which, though it seems carefully based on reason, is largely an appeal to her vanity. At the same time, he 121 is subtly laying out the rules by which he will play the game. He makes it clear that the lady's "leave to love" (one suspects this will be the last time she will have the upper hand) must imply more than the right to weep at her disdain and, in his grief, write poems celebrating her beauty. Such conquests are "easie," within the power of any "pettie beautie" and therefore, he implies, beneath her. In any case, such a one-sided arrangement would be in no way desirable, for it could satisfy neither of them, as he makes clear in the witty argument of stanzas four through six. His unhappiness at being unable to possess her would make it impossible for him to do her beauty full justice in his verse. In a fine reversal of traditional usage, all the Petrarchan images of wounds, flames, darts, stormes, nets, commonly used to compliment a mistress, are here treated as unflattering and demeaning. Such stuff is produced only for "Loves curst Rebells" by “puling Poets" whose blubbered eyes cannot clearly appraise beauty. With these disparagements, he neatly forestalls the possibility that she might wish to play the role of scornful lady to his abject servant. She is almost bound to show herself above 122 such puerile games--and to prove herself equal to his expectations by meeting them. Her only alternative to adopting the mild aspect he praises so highly in stanza seven (and if she does, can the key to her "mine of Pleasure" be long withheld?) is to withdraw her leave to love altogether. In either case, the poet has the satisfaction of an immediate answer to his initial ques- tion. It may not be a very uplifting proposition, but the reason and elegance with which it is presented, and the pleasant picture which the final stanza presents of a balanced relationship in which each bestows his richest gifts upon the other, prevent it from being unpalatable. Considering the earthy nature of the love described, this is no small accomplishment in itself. "Ingratefull beauty threatned" echoes this in- sistence upon mutual rights in love, though much less delicately and pleasantly. Yet the no-nonsense approach of this poem gives it an immediacy which is extremely effective. The tone and situation are reminiscent of Donne's Elegie VII (to which Helen Gardner has given the title "Tutelage"), though Donne's ringing rebuke of the 123 ungrateful lady ("Natures lay Ideot, I taught thee to love")5 is not matched in Carew's calmer opening--perhaps because his lover is not as frustratedly helpless as Donne's. Know Celia, (since thou art so proud,) 'Twas I that gave thee thy renowne: Thou hadst, in the forgotten crowd Of common beauties, liv'd unknowne, Had not my verse exhal'd thy name, 5 And with it, ympt the wings of fame. That killing power is none of thine, I gave it to thy voyce, and eyes: Thy sweets, thy graces, all are mine; ThOu art my starre, shin'st in my skies; 10 Then dart not from thy borrowed sphere Lightning on him, that fixt thee there. Tempt me with such affrights no more, Lest what I made, I uncreate; Let fooles thy mystique formes adore, 15 I'le know thee in thy mortall state: Wise Poets that wrap't Truth in tales, Knew her themselves, through all her vailes. As Rufus Blanshard points out in comparing this with Donne's poem, "Carew's movement is less nervous, his imagery less audacious."6 The greater control shown by Carew's speaker is justified, I think, by the fact that he ig more in control of the situation. For, unlike Donne (or any poet before him according to H. M. Richmond who traces the theme of the lover rebuking a faithless or ungrateful mistress from classical poets through the 124 Stuart lyricists), Carew recognizes and uses, as a weapon to keep his lady true, the poet-lover's subjective view of her nature. For she is a goddess, a queen, an angel, only as long as he continues to portray her as such. It was left to Carew in "Ingrateful Beauty Threatened" to bring the warning of a fickle woman to its full maturity as an immediately effective psychological weapon, rather than a wistful hope for her future ruin. Carew's poem is another of the peaks of Renaissance creativity and deserves the most careful at- tention . . . . It is important to stress that what is involved is not simply a poet's pride in his craft, it is the sense of the power of a lover's affection to confer a dis- tinction on its source far superior to that source's intrinsic virtues. The poem turns as much on a point of applied psychology as upon a poet's vanity. The loss of a lover subtly diminishes the attractions of a beaut- iful woman--this is the assertion that is made by Carew . . . .7 Whether or not a reader catches the subtle psy- chology that has impressed Richmond, he can scarcely help being moved by the naturalness of the poet's feeling or, more simply, believing in it. For it seems to me that .much of the poem's appeal stems from the fact that its angry tone and frankly self-interested argument are so convincing, so realistically, typically, eternally human. The lover in this poem has made the mistake of giving the lady what she wants in advance, on credit as it were; 125 and she has not only taken his gifts as her due, with apparently no thought of payment, but is now using them against him. Only an idealist or a fool would suffer such a situation meekly. This lover is neither. He is more like a businessman who will no longer be put off with promises nor intimidated by arrogance. In short, he will possess or repossess. Carew's use of imagery in this poem seems to me particularly fine. Many a poet has claimed the credit for making his mistress' beauty famous or immortalizing her in verse. But I cannot recall another instance in which the poet has claimed to have created her beauty, as if out of nothing, like a God. Not only is this power stated explicitly in line fourteen, but it is implied in line five through the use of "exhal'd" with its suggestion of the poet's having, like God, breathed life into common clay. The image of his having "ympt" or grafted her name to the wings of fame, as if it were some gigantic, soaring bird, is also striking. But by far the most impressive image--it might justifiably be called a conceit--is that in lines fifteen through eighteen. Not only poets, but theologians and philOSOphers as well, have traditionally 126 "cast Poetical vails over the face of their mysteries,"8 created myths, parables, symbols, in an effort to make the sublime comprehensible. The poet, at first glance, seems only to be ranking himself among the select few who are capable of looking on Truth (in this case, the lady's real dazzling self) unveiled. As such, the image is a compli— ment to her as well as to himself, implying that she is as mystic, as generally unknowable, as Truth. In reality though, he has wrapped this very mortal lady in tales in order to make her appear Eggs-dazzling, more divine than she really is. But he makes it clear that the "mystique formes" in which he has presented her are only for fools to believe in; and he does not intend her to count himself among them. There is clearly nothing philosophical about the superior knowledge of her he intends to attain. This aggressive, unchivalric assertion of the poet's rights over his "creatiOn" may seem offensive; but as Richmond points out, it "is surely a proper reaction to the lady's earlier insolence to her lover."9 The jus- tice and wit of the argument are undoubtedly primarily responsible for the popularity of the poem, which is one of the most frequently reprinted of Carew's works. 127 F. R. Leavis calls it "a distinguished achievement," and comments: It is not a mere charming trifle; it has in its light grace a remarkable strength. How fine and delicate is the poise it maintains may be brought out by looking through Carew's Restor- ation successors for a poem to compare with it. In its sophisticated gallantry there is noth- ing rakish or raffish--nothing of the Wild Gal- lant; its urbane assurance has in it nothing of the Restoration insolence . . . it represents a Court culture (if the expression may be per- mitted as a convenience) that preserved, in its sOphisticated way, an element of the tradition of chivalry and that had turned the studious or naively enthusiastic Renaissance classicizing and poetizing of an earlier period into some- thing intimately bound up with contemporary life and manners--something consciously both mature and, while contemporary, traditional. Lovers, alas, no longer rely on the power of poetry to woo or retain a lady's affection. But though the moves in Courtship have been modified, it is still the same game, involving the same emotions and rules of fair play. Thus the lover's angry resentment at a fickle woman's abuse of his love, the feeling which gives the poem its force, remains timeless. The faithlessness of lovers is a theme dealt with frequently in Carew's realistic love poems. He was keenly aware that love, like all other joys of human 128 life, was likely to be imperfect and, therefore, imperma- nent. But if he was without the faith in the endurance of love which characterized the verse of his Renaissance predecessors, he could not be as blasé about it as his Cavalier contemporaries. The inconstancy of lovers, male or female, is not something he can joke about in the fashion of Donne or Suckling. Eleven of his poems treat situations in which love has been,scorned or betrayed and in all of them we are made aware of the‘pain inflicted. DeSpite his reputation as a libertine, Carew, at least in his poetry, seems always to take the failure of a love affair seriously. Though he may not himself have be- lieved in the permanence of love, his lovers never seem quite able to banish all hope of finding it. And when that hope dies, they are bitter or angry or hurt. They do not vow to continue loving, as Petrarchan lovers might, deSpite their wounds; but neither do they bounce back lightly to another love as if they had expected no different from women (or men) and couldn't care less. For always, often in spite of knowing better, they HES expected more. In their disillusionment they may blame themselves for their naiveté as much as their lover for 129 exploiting it. Thus the abandoned mistress in "In the person of a Lady to her inconstant servant" (40) refuses to complain to the god of love about her lover's abuse of her kindness, knowing she should not have believed the vows and tears which won her favors: If I implore the Gods, they'le find Thee too ingrateful, me too kind. (11. 20-21) The plight of a lady rejected by a lover after he has enjoyed her physically is so common in literature that it is difficult to portray without boredom or bathos. The poem just mentioned is saved from either fate by Carew's allowing the lady to recognize and state the inevitable 'judgment her complaint would draw from the Gods, as well as from men. In "A deposition from Love" (16), however, the traditional situation undergoes a refreshing reversal. Here a lady who has given herself to her lover proves the traitor, leaving the man to mourn what has been lost. Its _formal beauty and exquisite portrayal of the feelings in- volved make this one of Carew's finer poems. I was foretold, your rebell sex, Nor love, nor pitty knew; And with what scorne, you use to vex Poore hearts, that humbly sue; Yet I believ'd, to crowne our paine, 5 Could we the fortresse win, 130 The happy lover sure should gaine A Paradise within: I thought loves plagues, like Dragons sate, Only to fright us at the gate. 10 But I did enter, and enjoy, What happy lovers prove; For I could kisse, and sport, and toy, And tast those sweets of love; Which had they but a lasting state,» 15 Or if in Celia's brest, The force of love might not abate, Jove were too meane a guest. But now her breach of faith, far more Afflicts, then did her scorne before. 20 Hard fate! to have been once possest As victor, of a heart, Atchiev'd with labour, and unrest, And then forc'd to depart. If the stout Foe will not resigne, 25 When I besiege a Towne, I lose, but what was never mine; But he that is cast downe From enjoy'd beautie, feeles a woe, Onely deposed Kings can know. 30 Despite the second stanza's celebration of the sensual pleasures of love, something one comes finally to expect from Carew, the speaker is clearly lamenting the loss of something more than just a body. There is, in Carew's philos0phy, more to love than sensual delights or a businesslike exchange of favors. In his discussion of the Renaissance poets' refinement of the classical treat- ment of heterosexual love as a purely physical attraction, 131 H. M. Richmond comments: "If onerecognizes that love is not simply the gratification of sensual desire, the fail- ure of the mistress to live up to expectation is not to be handled adequately by a blistering curse, any more than the possession of her body would of itself be wholly satisfying."ll Though Richmond is talking specifically about such poets as Wyatt, Spenser, and Donne, in whom this refined sensibility is not surprising, this poem proves that it was shared by Carew. His lover, though forewarned of the obstacles in the path to a lady's heart, had nevertheless believed that once he surmounted them and achieved his goal, his happiness would be assured. Clearly, it was not merely sexual enjoyment of her that he sought or he would have nothing to complain of. He had hoped for a lasting relationship and had made the complacent male assumption, which Carew here suggests is not always justified, that possession of her body assured him of her heart and loyalty as well. Thus when she abandons him, he is not as easily reconciled to his fate as the lady in the poem mentioned above. For though their situations are identical, there is plenty of pre- cedent for her being betrayed; but all the conventional 132 beliefs about the behavior of women in love argue against his own betrayal. Donne, in "Loves Alchymie," presents a disgruntled lover whose outraged tone reveals that he too had enter- tained hopes for a relationship that went beyond the phys- ical and was disappointed. Donne's lover, in his disil- lusionment, is embittered and turns his wrath on all women: Hope not for minde in women; at their best Sweetnesse and wit, they'are but Mpmmy, possest. (11. 23-24) The emotional effect of Donne's poem derives from the dramatic immediacy of the speaker's tone which metaphor- ically collars his listener and holds him spellbound throughout the harangue. Carew's is a much quieter and smoother poem as befits the voice of his lover, who is not bitter or outraged, but hurt. Unlike the disen- chanted man in Donne's poem, this man had found the happiness he sought, or thought he had. In the woeful tone sustained throughout the poem, the frustration and sorrow man feels when his fragile dreams collapse is magnificently expressed. In the ignored warnings, the hopes now recognized as naive, the remembered happiness 133 and, above all, the sense of loss, the tragi-comic story of imperfect humanity's imperfect love is captured, time- less, though wrapped in the language and traditions of Carew's own age. The paradise created by love, in which man may momentarily feel level with the gods, is contin- ually being lost, reminding him that, after all, he is more kin to Adam than to Jove. Hard fate indeed, and yet man, forewarned, continues to pursue it, unwilling to accept the inevitability of the fall, feeling, perhaps, that it's better to be a king deposed than never to have reigned at all. It is impossible to help wondering whe- ther Charles would have agreed. At any rate, the final image must have had added poignance for the Caroline au- dience in the decade that followed its publication in 1640. In insisting on a depth of genuine feeling in this poem, I am at odds with Edward Selig who finds it ”sprightly" rather than melancholic, and "as carefree a performance as Suckling's "Tis now, since I sate down be- fore/That foolish fort, a heart."'12 Aside from the seige imagery which is common to both poems, I can see no real similarity. Indeed Suckling's clever but completely 134 playful lyric, written in ballad meter, contrasts with and points up the seriousness of Carew's. Suckling sus- tains the single image of the unsuccessful siege through- out his ten stanzas, closing with a joke about women's Honor, apparently the main point of his poem, which oc- cupies the last three stanzas: I sent to know from whence and where These hopes and this relief; A spy inform'd, Honor was there, And did command in chief. March, march, quoth I, the word straight give, Let's lose no time, but leave her; That giant upon air will live, And hold it out for ever. To such a place our camp remove, As will no siege abide; I hate a fool that starves her love, Only to feed her pride. (11. 28-40)13 Unlike Carew's lover, the suitor in this poem has lost nothing but time, and his playful cynicism is com- pletely appropriate. The carefree argument is suited to the simplicity of the form. Each stanza is a complete unit of thought, and the light rhythm is almost never hampered or slowed by internal punctuation. Carew uses the same basic 4-3-4-3 meter, but by careful use of punc- tuation, continuation of a syntactical statement through 135 six or eight lines, and the addition of a tetrameter couplet after each eight lines, he creates a smooth but sophisticated stanza ideally suited to his more somber .tone. This stanza also serves to emphasize the division of his love affair into its three separate stages of seige, triumph, and fall from grace. Selig apparently cannot conceive of Carewis being capable of even imagining a lover's disappointment in such a situation. He argues: "Surely, the poet has not been deceived. Even at the height of his folly, he was far too sophisticated to put much faith in the rules of conventional courtship . . . . In short, since he was forewarned about women, he has no present grounds for complaint."14 The conventional warnings about women's cruelty, it should be noted, were usually confined to her behavior during courtship, and this the lover was quite prepared for. But her abandonment of him after she had given herself is most unconventional and not the kind of thing the sonneteers were wont to record. So Carew's lover may be allowed to complain and yet be acquitted of the charge of naive faith in the conventions of love. It is true that the careful artistry of the complaint 136 prevents this from seeming an intensely personal expres- sion of emotion. But despite the aesthetic distance the poet achieves, the tone is still decidedly melancholy. Selig was perhaps identifying the poem's persona too closely with Carew himself, for if the latter was ever prey to the folly described in "A deposition," it is not recorded. His voice is far more often that of a somewhat cynical expert in affairs of the heart, who knows better than to put faith in love's promises. In several poems he offers the benefit of this experience to prospective lovers in the form of advice, usually very negative. No defender of his own sex, he cautions young ladies against succumbing to the tearful pleas of their admirers. "Good counsell to a young Maid" (25) suggests that, behind his seeming adoration of his mistress, the lover has really only one thing on his mind. When you the Sun-burnt Pilgrim see Fainting with thirst, hast to the springs, Marke how at first with bended knee He courts the crystall Nimphe, and flings His body to the earth, where He Prostrate adores the flowing Deitie. But when his sweaty face is drencht In her coole waves, when from her sweet Bosome, his burning thirst is quencht; Then marke how with disdainfull feet 137 He kicks her banks, and from the place That thus refresht him, moves with sullen pace. So shalt thou be despis'd, faire Maid, When by the sated lover tasted; What first he did with teares invade, Shall afterwards with scorne be wasted; When all thy Virgin-springs grow dry, When no streames shall be left, but in thine eye. The analogy of the Pilgrim kneeling at the spring seems to me very fine. In one stroke Carew has recalled the conventional Petrarchan imagery of the religion of love in which the lover worships at his lady's shrine, and has reduced this idealized love to a simple physical need. Sexual passion is what inflames the lover, as the sun the pilgrim, and the former's passion is as quickly sated as the latter's thirst. The water image of the first two stanzas is smoothly carried into the third in the form of virgin-springs and tears, and serves to em- phasize that the young maid is far more vulnerable than the water nymph disdained by the pilgrim. For while the latter's springs are not noticeably diminished, the virgin-springs or vital juices of the human lady could, according to Renaissance belief, be exhausted. The only streams remaining to her will be her tears--the price she will pay for drying his. 138 Carew's dismal outlook might be depressing to a young maid, especially one nurtured on the chivalric love tradition, but it is pragmatic advice such as Ann Landers might dispense, adding no doubt that the girl should hold out for marriage--a qualification which Carew wisely does not make, for a view of love as something which lasts only until passion is sated is obviously inconsistent with illusions of wedded bliss. In another ”Good counsel to a young Maid" (13), this one a song, Carew again cautions the fair sex against a lover's wiles. Here he warns that a mirror is a much more reliable reflector of a lady's beauty, and a safer one, than lovers' tears. Poetry, the poet reveals, is likewise a deceitful device, whose purpose is not to honor but to trap. Netts, of passion's finest thred, Snaring Poems, will be spred, All, to catch thy maiden-head. (11. 10-12) In this poem, it is his fever rather than his tears that the lover transfers to the lady, with possibly more ser- ious effects. Then beware, for those that cure Love's disease, themselves endure For reward, a Calenture. 139 Rather let the Lover pine, Then his pale cheeke, should assigne A perpetuall blush to thine. (11. 13-18) In his cynical ascription of ulterior motives to poets' compliments and his treatment of love as a communicable disease, Carew is delightfully iconoclastic. Yet, with the closing references to lever's pale cheek and maiden's blush, those familiar Petrarchan images, he might be thought to have been expressing all along the most con- ventional of sentiments. It is an amusing performance with a humorous yet pointed moral for the maid: 'tis better to be cold than to burn. It is not only the ladies who receive the benefit of Carew's counsels. If he seems to show a dispropor- tionate concern for their welfare, perhaps this is because the Petrarchan poets, assuming the lady to have the upper hand, concentrated almost exclusively on the hardships wrought by love on the long suffering male. In his "SONG. Conquest by flight." (15), Carew dispenses some rather more conventional advice to both sexes. Ladyes, flye from Love's smooth tale, Oathes steep'd in teares doe oft prevaile; Griefe is infectious, and the ayre Enflam'd with sighes, will blast the fayre: Then step your eares, when lovers cry, 5 140 Lest your selfe weepe, when no soft eye Shall with a sorrowing teare repay That pittie which you cast away. Young men fly, when beautie darts Amorous glances at your hearts: 10 The fixt marke gives the shooter ayme; And Ladyes lookes have power to mayme; Now 'twixt their lips, now in their eyes, Wrapt in a smile, or kisse, Love lyes; Then fly betimes,.for only they ' 15 Conquer love that run away. There is nothing particularly original about the poem's sentiments or imagery. The blasting sighs Of lovers, amorous glances darted by ladies, are all tOO familiar fare. Still, Carew manages to serve it up with a flair. The careful balance Of the argument with its pleasing juxtaposition Of ladies and lovers, ears and eyes, focuses attention on the weapons Of each sex rather than on the worn images. Ladies must close their ears, for men attack with words and sighs, while men must shield their eyes from the penetrating power Of the lady's beauty, particularly her eyes which are her most formidable weapon. The advice to fly, stressed in the imperative Openings Of the poem's two sections, receives its logical justification in the closing couplet with its neat para- dox Of conquest by flight--the only possible victory in 141 the conflict Of love. SO cleverly and subtly is the ima- gery Of weapons and warfare woven through the poem that the reader may not be aware until these final lines that the poet has been describing a battle. According to Rufus Blanshard, Carew consistently excels his contemporaries "in the careful working out of single metaphors, in the logical persuasiveness of argu- ment, and in the combined variety and smoothness Of rhythm."15 This poem, though not an exceptional example Of Carew's verse, admirably demonstrates all three Of these characteristics. The extended battle metaphor, the witty paradox through which he points up his argu- ment, his masterly control of the tetrameter couplet,; prevent the poem's seeming merely one more bland repe- tition Of an Old theme. The style might be called mildly "metaphysical,” the form and subject semi-classical, and in the smooth blend of the two there is evidence not only Of Carew's debt tO both Donne and Jonson but of his own special talent as well. Blanshard's three distinguishing characteristics are again apparent in "Boldness in love" (42). Returning here tO the warmly sensuous imagery that is his forte, 142 Carew dispenses advice on how to succeed in love, advice more in keeping with his usual image as a kind Of Caroline Hugh Hefner than with Ann Landers. The theme is ancient but still serviceable, and the poet's skills revive it beautifully. Marke how the bashfull morne, in vaine Courts the amorous Marigold, With sighing blasts, and weeping raine; Yet she refuses to unfold. But when the Planet Of the day, 5 Approacheth with his powerfull ray, Then she spreads, then she receives His warmer beames into her virgin leaves. SO shalt thou thrive in love, fond Boy; If thy teares, and sighes discover 10 Thy griefe, thou never shalt enjoy The just reward of a bold lover: But when with moving accents, thou Shalt constant faith, and service vow, Thy Celia shall receive those charmes 15 With Open eares, and with unfolded armes. It is difficult to say enough about this little lyric without seeming to blow its accomplishment out Of all proportion. It is surely a minor masterpiece Of its type, its strengths being largely formal. The single, carefully developed conceit Of the woman as a flower to be unfolded is made to carry the argument, and to give it its sexual undertones. The feminine feints Of the Petrarchan lovers are implicitly disparaged through the 143 imagery. Carew's woman is not a blushing rose or a pale lily but an "amorous” marigold, a richly suggestive choice since it is thought to be named for the virgin, {yet is a flower that traditionally Opens itself to the warmly penetrating rays Of the sun.. Thus Carew advises ‘young men tO abjure the bashful techniques Of sighs and tears in favor Of a bolder, more masculine approach. It is an appealing, persuasive argument, if not a particularly startling one. [What is startling is the artistry with which Carew adapts his form to his content, letting the sound and rhythm of his lines reinforce his» ideas. The poem divides into two eight-line stanzas. In the first four lines Of each he describes, respec- tively, the courtship Of the bashful morn and the bashful lover. These lines, with their repeated 'm' and 's' sounds, their internal punctuation, and abab rhyme scheme, are relatively slow-moving, softly feminine. But with the description Of the bold lovers in the fifth and sixth lines Of each section, Carew shifts to rhymed couplets, and to harder consonant sounds, achieving a faster moving, more "masculine" line. In addition, the last line Of each section (lines eight and sixteen) are extended an extra 144 foot, emphasizing the successful culmination Of the bold lovers' efforts--the unfolding of the flower, the deflow- ering Of the lady. Carew, Of course, never puts it so callously, but the sensual imagery he uses, particularly in lines seven and eight, makes it impossible to mistake his meaning. And since he stresses frequently in his amorous verse that the pleasures of love are shared by women as well as men, he would be unlikely to apologize for his counsel here, no doubt feeling that the amorous Celia should no more resent the successful lover than the marigold the sun. Carew's attitude here may seem in direct conflict with his advice to young maids in the poems discussed previously. This would not be disturbing if it were so, since the poet is under no Obligation to maintain a con- sistent viewpoint from poem tO poem. But there ip.actu- ally a certain consistency in Carew's expressed attitudes. What he warns the ladies against is becoming victims of sensual passion disguised as pain or as meek adoration. Submission out Of pity for a lover's tears is what leads tO betrayal and regret. Similarly, in poem after poem, Carew reveals his contempt for the Petrarchan lover whO' 145 hides his natural desires under a mask Of pure devotion, and he advises young men to eschew such tactics, wooing with manly warmth instead Of with tears. Not only will heat serve better tO melt a cold heart, but presumably a lady who responds tO it will share the lover's desire and has pleasure. Then should their love prove unendur- ing, as in Carew's experience it so Often does, neither will have cause to complain. If from this initial under- standing love grows into something finer and more endur- ing, well and good; but in Carew's earthy philOSOphy, recognition and acceptance Of the physical nature Of the attraction must come first. When Carew turns his hand to persuasions to love, he follows his own advice, preferring to inflame a lady's senses rather than her soul. "A Rapture" provides the ultimate example Of this, and nowhere else does he attempt seduction on such a scale, or with such a barrage Of sen- sual images. But persuasion is a fine art, and the poet demonstrates his mastery Of it in several other instances. _Obviously, the coldly chaste beauty Of the Petrarchan sonneteers is not Carew's ideal. His Celia is usually conceived Of as a warm-blooded woman who need not be 146 convinced Of her own sensuality, though she seems to have a healthy self-interest that prevents her from being a pushover. With such a mistress, persuasion to love is primarily a matter Of convincing her that it is to her advantage. Carew's usual strategy is to lodge his appeal for sensual indulgence in the form Of logical argument which has the lady's best interests at heart. His "SONG. Perswasions to enjoy" (16) is a delightful example. If the quick spirits in your eye Now languish, and anon must dye; If every sweet, and every grace, Must fly from that forsaken face: Then (Celia) let us reape our joyes, E're time such goodly fruit destroyes. Or, if that golden fleece must grow For ever, free from aged snow; If those bright Suns must know no shade, Nor your fresh beauties ever fade: Then feare not (Celia) to bestow, What still being gather'd, still must grow. Thus, either Time his Sickle brings In vaine, or else in vaine his wings. Despite the rich images, the sensuous immediacy Carew Often achieves is lacking in this lyric due tO the formality Of its structure. ‘The focus is on logic rather than feeling, but the facility Of the argument more than atones for its lack Of intensity. It is as if the poet felt his appeal tO be so eminently reasonable that no 147 other pressure, psychological or emotional, could pos- sibly be required. It is assumed that Celia needs no convincing about the pleasures tO be found in love; nor is there any suggestion Of moral reservations. The issue is thus neatly reduced to a question Of 222$ she should reap love's harvest--not whether she should do so. Should she seize the day--or try to preserve her "fruit" for a later date (and possibly a better Offer)? The very real dilemma facing an actual young lady in such a situ- ation is ignored. An actual woman who permitted her fruits tO be sampled might well find the market value of the rest of her crOp seriously diminished. The poem evades this unpleasant reality by treating beauty as a kind Of passport to Pleasure which only Time can revoke. Given this hypothesis, the poet's solution is completely logical. The basic argument is not original with Carew. Dunlap notes that it had been presented more succinctly by Ronsard in Sonnets pour Helene, II, xxxii.16 Ronsard's original may be more succinct, but it lacks the artful facility and logical poise of Carew's version. Though he makes the same point, Ronsard plays down its logical 148 ingenuity, while Carew capitalizes on it. Richmond quotes the lines in question and supplies a quite literal trans- lation which, In! its very flatness, serves to illustrate the extent Of Carew's achievement, though it all but oh- literates Ronsard's. Si la beauté se perd, fais-en part de bonne heure, Tandis qu'en son printemps tu la vois fleuronner. Si elle ne se perd, ne crain point de donner A tes amis 1e bien qui tousjours te demeure... (If beauty fades, use it soon while you see it flower in its springtime: if it does not fade, do not fear to give to your friends the gOOd which will always remain with you . . .)17 Granted that almost everything but the sense is lost in the translation, it is nevertheless clear that Ronsard throws away the argument which Carew converts into a real tour de force. In the English poem, Ronsard's two simple "ifs“ are gracefully extended until all their im- plications are explored, and the two possibilities are held in a delicate balance until they are brought to- gether in the final dazzling couplet with its conclusion that compliance with his request will assure beauty's victory over her ancient enemy Time. This splendid sum- mary Of the poem's argument surely points the way for Marvell's concluding couplet in "To His Coy Mistress": 149 Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. Rhythm and syntax are identical, the ideas expressed nearly so. The only real difference is that Marvell's conclusion, like his argument, is more firmly grounded in reality than Carew's. For Marvell's plan for outwit- ting Time is at least theoretically possible, while Carew's is not. In view Of the poet's avowed intent, the fact that the hypothesis entertained in the second half of Carew's poem is untenable scarcely detracts from the effectiveness Of the argument. It is far more gallant than the tradi- tional carpe diem with its unpleasant, though necessary, insistence on the time limit imposed on beauty. His will- ingness to entertain the possibility that Celia might be exempt from the fate Of ordinary mortals is a flattering concession that costs the lover nothing and may well win him his suit. Though he has ostensibly addressed himself to her reason, the poet has all along been indirectly appealing to the lady's vanity--a powerful ally in any argument, as Carew is demonstrably aware. Yet despite this realistic touch, the song remains more an aesthetic 150 achievement than a psychologically or dramatically con- vincing appeal to a real woman. The reverse is true of "To A. L. Perswasions to love" (4). In this much longer poem the speaker argues persuasively in a frank, down-to—earth manner, but at such length that his relentless logic threatens to become oppressive. Though the identity Of the lady is not known, one is quite ready to believe in both A. L.'s reality and the poet's ardor. But both the lady and the reader might wish that some of the graceful urbanity with which he addressed the mythical Celia had been reserved for his appeal to the real woman. What begins as an eloquent argument against chastity threatens to become a filibuster as the speaker warms to his subject. Thinke not cause men flatt'ring say, Y'are fresh as Aprill, sweet as May, Bright as is the morning starre, That you are so, or though you are Be not therefore proud, and deeme 5 All men unworthy your esteeme. For being so, you loose the pleasure Of being faire, since that rich treasure Of rare beauty, and sweet feature . Was bestow'd on you by nature 10 To be enjoy'd, and 'twere a sinne, There to be scarce, where shee hath bin SO prodigall Of her best graces; Thus common beauties, and meane faces Shall have more pastime, and enjoy 15 151 The Sport you loose by being coy. Did the thing for which I sue Onely concern my selfe not you, Were men so fram'd as they alone Reap'd all the pleasure, women none, Then had you reason to be scant; But 'twere a madnesse not to grant That which affords (if you consent) TO you the giver, more content Then me the beggar; Oh then bee Kinde to your selfe, if not to me. Starve not your selfe, because you may Thereby make me pine away; Nor let brittle beautie make You your wiser thoughts forsake: For that lovely face will faile, Beautie's sweet, but beautie's fraile; 'Tis sooner past, 'tis sooner done Then Summers raine, or winters Sun: Most fleeting when it is most deare, 'Tis gone while wee but say 'tis here. These curious locks so aptly twind, Whose every haire a soule doth bind, Will change their abroun hue, and grow White, and cold as winters snow. That eye which now is Cupids nest Will proue his grave, and all the rest Will follow; in the cheeke, chin, nose Nor lilly shall be found nor rose. And what will then become of all Those, whom now you servants call? Like swallowes when your summers done, They'le flye and seeke some warmer Sun. Then wisely chuse one tO your friend, Whose love may, when your beauties end, Remaine still firme: be provident And thinke before the summers spent Of following winter; like the Ant In plenty hoord for time Of scant. Cull out amongst the multitude Of lovers, that seeke to intrude IntO your favour, one that may Love for an age, not for a day; 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 152 One that will quench your youthfull fires, And feed in age your hot desires. 60 For when the stormes Of time have mou'd Waves on that cheeke which was belou'd, When a faire Ladies face is pin'd And yellow spred, where red once shin'd, When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her, 65 Love may returne, but lover never: And Old folkes say there are no paynes Like itch of love in aged vaines. Oh love me then, and now begin it, Let us not loose this present minute: 70 For time and age will worke that wrack Which time or age shall ne're call backe. The snake each yeare fresh skin resumes, And Eagles change their aged plumes; The faded Rose each spring, receives 75 A fresh red tincture on her leaves: But if your beauties once decay, You never know a second May. Oh, then be wise, and whilst your season Afford you dayes for sport, doe reason; 80 Spend not in vaine your lives short houre, But crop in time your beauties flower: Which will away, and doth together Both bud, and fade, both blow and wither. Dunlap notes that the poem's original title, "An Admonition to coy acquaintance," "points for the modern reader the anticipation Of Marvell's To His Coy Mis- tress."18 However, even under its present title the simi- larities are readily apparent. Both poems employ the tetrameter couplet, logical structure, extended syntax, and both stress the carpe diem argument. However, the argument 153 is made more palatable in Marvell's poem by the lover's gallant and flattering apology for his haste, and by his representation of himself as an equal victim in Time's chase. Carew chooses to focus on Old age, rather than death, as the prospect to be feared and his descriptions Of the lady's future condition range from the unpleasant tO the downright repugnant. Not content with his ruthless projection Of her as a lustful Old crone, her hair whitened, skin wrinkled, complexion yellowed, he rubs it in with his reminder that in this fate she is less fortunate than the snake, the eagle, and the rose. Such lines are not likely to inspire a lady's affection;19 rather, the speaker seems to be trying to terrify her into compliance. There is no trace in this poem Of the graceful irony with which Mar- vell softens his references to the grave and gently mocks both his lady's coyness and his own passion. Carew's lover seems to get carried away, either by his own skill- ful rhetoric or his lust, until he becomes almost over- bearing. And yet individual passages are not without beauty. According tO Dunlap, the first twenty-six lines appear in manuscript as a separate piece, as do lines 154 thirty-seven through forty-eight, the latter segment hav- ing been put to music by Henry Lawes.20 Reading either passage singly one is more aware Of Carew's formal artis- try, his control Of syntax, rhythm, sound and tone, and the argument is not at all obtrusive. The artist's aesthetic sensibility holds the lover's urgency in check. But this balance is upset slightly when one reads the poem as a whole. The cumulative weight Of all its argu- ments suggests that the speaker is primarily a lover, not an artist, moved by passion rather than aesthetic consi- derations, his goal the lady's acquiescence, rather than a poem. Consequently the persuasion continues beyond aesthetically-dictated stopping points, ending only when all the arguments have been raised. Nature, pleasure, time, even prudence, are enlisted in his passion's cause; he even manages to imply, in lines fifty-four through fifty-seven, that this is a life-long love he Offers, without ever actually making such a promise. It is a believable if not endearing performance, passionate so- phistry such as a young man schooled in rhetoric and classical poetry might conceivably dish out. And it is impossible to believe the effect is accidental. The poem 155 is partially original, partially a free translation Of Marinor.and Dunlap notes that "the manuscripts exhibit numerous variants, suggesting that the piece as a whole received long and careful polishing."21 Like "A Rapture," this poem manages tO convey the fact that tOO much empha- sis On the purely physical aspects Of love, and Of human nathre, is cloying, self-defeating. Here the same incite- ments to pleasure which have proved attractive or enticing when administered lightly are shown to diminish in effec- tiveness when the dosage is greatly increased. It is interesting to note, particularly in view Of Henry Lawes' connection with both works, that the first part of the poem's argument (lines 6-16) anticipates in part the argument Of Milton's Comus, another intemperate champion Of the senses. Milton's seducer, like Carew's, is seemingly anxious lest the lady Offend Nature by being "scarce" where the latter has been "prodigall." Comus argues: List Lady, be not coy, and be not cozened With that same vaunted name Virginity; _ Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded, But must be current, and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partaken bliss, Unsavory in the enjoyment Of itself. 156 If you let slip time, like a neglected rose It withers on the stalk with languished head. Beauty is Nature's brag, and must be shown In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities Where most may wonder at the workmanship; It is for homely features to keep home . . . (11. 737-48)22 Milton, Of course, provides his lady with a re- buttal to Comus' argument. Her charge, Thou hast nor Ear nor Soul to apprehend The sublime notion and high mystery That must be utter'd to unfold the sage And serious doctrine Of Virginity, (11. 784-87)23 might perhaps be as justly levelled at Carew. It is un- likely that he would disagree, for he makes no pretense Of understanding the sublime. He seems never to have come up with an answer to arm his ladies with, knowing no genu- inely satisfactory substitute for the sensual pleasures Offered by his lovers. Yet he ig aware Of the dehumanizing 'nature Of an exclusively physical conception Of happiness, and frequently, as in the poem to A. L., demonstrates imr plicitly that beyond a certain point the sensual approach loses its luster. For a critic to read these poems, note the igno- bility of the ideas expressed, perceive the less than pleasant effect produced, and refuse to allow the poet 157 the same perceptiveness and sensibility they claim for themselves, seems rather supercilious. One might with equal justice indict Chaucer for his Pardoner's cupidity. Had Carew voiced more "respectable" doctrine elsewhere, his most contemptuOus critics might have been inclined to grant his celebrations Of pleasure, as well as his explor- ations Of its limitations, the serious attention they de- serve. But though Carew Often portrays the frustration and debasement that beset those who live by the pleasure principle, he never entirely repudiates it. He Offers no retraction or apology, undergoes no conversion. Conse- quently, his themes are met with contempt or good-humored tolerance, but almost never considered seriously, despite the fact that, like all gOOd literature, they serve to heighten our awareness and understanding of human experi- ence. Perhaps the failure Of many critics to acknowledge this is explained by the fact that these poems Often spot- light a part of human nature we prefer not tO recognize, at least not in ourselves. The weakness of the flesh, and the power it exerts over our beings despite that weakness, seen close up is distasteful, sordid, sad. And Carew will 158 not let us ignore it, nor always laugh it Off lightly. It is easier to denounce than to forgive him. "A Rapture" is supposedly Carew's most outrageous work, the one which earned him notoriety and a reputation as an incorrigible libertine which he never seems to have shaken. Yet, though its brevity may have made it a less noteworthy example, "The second Rapture" (103) surpasses the first by far in the portrayal of lust and the frank dedication to sexual pleasure. "A Rapture" at least has humor tO recommend it and manages to be engagingly erotic for at least one hundred Of its lines. There is nothing engaging about the salaciousness portrayed in "The second Rapture." The "itch Of love in aged vaines" about which A. L. was warned in the preceding poem is materialized here in the person Of an elderly man--a "dirty Old manf in today's terminology. I suppose the poem might be regarded as an exercise in Obscenity, demonstrative Of Carew's lack Of taste, by some readers and as a joke by others. I must confess I find it strangely moving. For no readily defin- able reason, the "protagonist" reminds me of Jonson's VOlpone; though sex rather than gold is his Obsession, he is as much a victim Of his lust as is VOlpone Of greed, 159 as unwittingly comic in his single-minded animality, and as irrevocably imprisoned. NO worldling, no, tis not thy gold, ':Which thou dost use but to behold; Nor fortune, honour, nor long life, Children, or friends, nor a good wife, That makes thee happy; these things be 5