The New Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse!

Our book today is Alastair Fowler's 1991 New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, and it's as volatile and tremendous a tribute to National Poetry Month as could be imagined. Opinion among those I've quizzed is decidedly mixed as to the merit of even having a National Poetry Month (one poet of my acquaintance summed things up by saying "it can't possibly have any widespread effect other than to further marginalize the most marginalized literature in America"), but that's surely a debate about browbeating the public, not about the worth of poetry itself. And no other period of human history can rival the 'long' 17th century for verse, that glorious epoch from roughly the final years of Queen Elizabeth I to the advent of the Glorious Revolution. As Fowler here reckons that time, it stretches from George Chapman all the way to Alexander Pope, with stops along the way for Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, and Dryden.

There are lots and lots of other names in this updated version of the Oxford classic, including quite a few names that don't deserve to be here. Fowler is typically British in his diffidence:

A representative selection has meant more Drayton; more Cowley and Marvell; more Oldham and Strode; and many more female poets. It has meant including marginal figures such as the waterman Taylor, the alcoholic Brathwait, and the lunatic Carkesse. It has meant, in fact, including some 'subliterary' verse, and some very minor poets. If literature is the nation's memory, forgotten verse may contain things we need to know.

Or it may not. It's hard to imagine what even mercifully brief extracts from the life-outpourings of Emilia Lanier, John Chalkhill, or John Digby, the Earl of Bristol could teach us about much of anything, but if they and their ilk are the price of admission to the rest of this mighty host, you won't hear me complaining.

There's our old friend Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, writing about the cruelties of mankind and meaning, as she so often does, men, in this excerpt from 1653's "The Hunting of the Hare":

As if that God made creatures for man's meat,

And gave them life and sense, for man to eat;

Or else for sport, or recreation's sake,

Destroy those lives that God saw good to make;

Making their stomachs graves, which full they fill

With murthered bodies that in sport they kill.

Yet man doth think himself so gentle, mild,

When of all creatures he's most cruel wild;

And is so proud, thinks only he shall live,

That God a godlike nature did him give,

And that all creatures for his sake alone

Was made for him to tyrannize upon.

And there's Will Davenant, that weak-willed wit and wannabe wastrel who got his start in literary London while serving in the household of our old friend Fulke Greville and who, amidst stacks and stacks of intensely conventional writing, could occasionally produce something puckish and original, like this from 1673:

O Thou that sleepest like pig in straw,

Thou lady dear, arise:

Open, to keep the sun in awe,

Thy pretty pinking eyes;

And having stretched each leg and arm,

Put on your clean white smock,

And then, I pray, to keep you warm,

A petticoat on dock.

Arise, arise! Why should you sleep,

When you have slept enough?

Long since French boys cried 'Chimney-sweep',

And damsels 'Kitchen-stuff'.

The shops were opened long before,

And youngest prentice goes

To lay at his mistress' chamber door

His master's shining shoes.

Arise, arise; your breakfast stays:

Good water gruel warm,

Or sugar sops, which Galen says

With mace will do no harm.

Arise, arise; when you are up,

You'll find more to your cost,

For morning's draught in caudle cup,

Good nutbrown ale and toast.

And what of William Drummond of Hawthornden, the able poet and late-life friend of Ben Jonson? Drummond let a long and very active literary life, but in less inclusive anthologies than this one he might nevertheless get crowded right off the stage - either in favor of demographically advisable nonentities or to make room for more Shakespeare. Not so here, where we can read bittersweet little ditties like this bit fro Madrigal II.i, written in the first decade of the new century:

This life which seems so fair

Is like a bubble blown up in the air

By sporting children's breath,

Who chase it everywhere,

And strive who can most motion it bequeath:

And though it sometime seem of its own might,

Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,

And firm to hover in that empty height,

That only is because it is so light.

But in that pomp it doth not long appear;

For even when most admired, it in a thought,

A swelled from nothing, doth dissolve in nought.

I've praised these wonderful Oxford Books here before, but when it comes to anthologies this wide-ranging and thought-provoking, I don't mind repeating myself. And when I'm delighting in the acuity of Fowler's choices, I don't even mind all the makeweight names he was forced to mix in amongst them.

credo

There are words we live by, words that become the creeds by which we live our lives. Those of us with any heart at all assemble them gradually, over a lifetime. They form our most intimate book, the essential text of our heart. The Phoenicians believed there was a specially designated being – neither angel nor god nor demon precisely, but charged nonetheless – whose job it was to read this book that each thinking person wrote with the pen of their life. Perhaps this is just as well: even among the very young (such as ourselves), that book is apt to be unbearably personal. Not something anybody would want to share even with those who know them best.

So imagine our surprise here at Stevereads when we read this week’s New Yorker and found one of our own basic heart-texts paraded out in the open for all to see. Usually, it’s safely buried in random obscure anthologies. But here it was, in James Woods’ very, very talented review of Robert Alter’s frankly stunning new translation of the Book of Psalms (a gorgeous production complete with commentary).

The lines in question come from the busy quill-pen of George Herbert, whose works lie largely forgotten today except by students forced to read him. George Herbert, who was shy and well-spoken and endlessly sympathetic to everyone who ever told him a sad story. If ever in the sad history of mankind there was a person whose life directly depicted the struggle between avid, inconclusive flesh and the thing Christians call the soul, George Herbert was that person. On the naked membrane of his life the age-old struggle was hammered out daily, and he was spared none of it, and he, in his turn, spared us none of it. His poetry is therefore harrowing, and yet always there is light in it, and so very belatedly, one of his little lyrics made its way into our own innermost book. Only a hyper-intelligent young mortal caught in the coils of the faith-virus that has plagued mankind since its inception could bleed out the words we saw so callously printed for every bored dentist in Larchmont to read:

“Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
So will I do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.”

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, not the whole but at least one single page of our own personal book (those of you in a position to know will perhaps be able to guess a couple of others, although, as is only fitting, nobody knows the whole text). ‘I will lament, and love’ … the forlorn yet somehow valiant hopelessness of such line … we can honestly say: George Herbert taught us that.

(the implicit challenge here is to you all: append one line, one segment, one verse that forms a plank in your own existence … we promise not to tell)