A Little History of Literature (10 page)

Even in later years, when he was respectably married and later the Dean of St Paul's in London, Donne's verse – now sacred, not libertine, in tone – is marked by breathtaking intellectual daring. Johnson's ‘violence’ of the imagination is there to the end. Literally the end. On his deathbed, Donne wrote a poem about his approaching death called ‘Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness’. It is not a young woman he now addresses, but his Maker whom he will, in an hour or two, meet face to face. The poem is, among other things, a rehearsal for his singing for the rest of eternity in God's angelic choir – he is not in the chamber of death, but a kind of vestry, about to enter the church proper. Here are the first three verses:

The hymn is as daring as anything Donne ever wrote. And it requires some work by the reader to follow the complex lines of thought. The conceits are packed in together, like sardines in a tin. His death will be a voyage of exploration; he will join the great seagoing voyagers on this last journey of his life. His physicians – soon to get to work on the autopsy – will find his dead body to be a map of where he is going, just as cosmographers discover the universe. Where is he going? West, into the cold dark night of the grave. But he has to pass through the east and the hot straits of his fatal fever (
per fretum febris
) to get there. Walton records that his friend ‘was so far from fearing Death, which to others is the King of Terrors, that he longed for the day of his dissolution’. One can only hope the Almighty admires fine poetry as much as we do.

For those who find the complexity of Donne too rich a brew to swallow comfortably, there is simpler poetry to be found in the work of his fellow Metaphysical, George Herbert (1593–1633). Like Donne, Herbert was a clergyman – but not a high dignitary of the church. He was a country parson, and wrote a manual on how such lowly clergymen should carry out their duties. He also wrote exquisitely ‘plain’ verse. The following is the opening verse from his poem ‘Virtue’:

The ‘conceit’, or central idea, here is that nightfall is a forecast of our death. The secondary idea, that night is the ‘child’ or offspring of the earth and sky (in the dark, they meet, seamlessly, at the horizon to produce it), is beautifully original. But look at how simple the
language is – every word is a monosyllable, apart from ‘bridall’ (a pun: it means bridle, as in what joins two horses in harness, and bridal, as in marriage).

Has complex verse ever been made out of simpler – and in Donne's case, ‘low’ – materials? Eliot was right. This is poetry that breaks all the rules – and is the greater for it.

CHAPTER
10

Nations Rise

M
ILTON AND
S
PENSER

During the forty-five years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I – ‘good Queen Bess’ – there is a new ‘feel’ to literature: a growth of national pride and bursting confidence. England felt a certain ‘greatness’ in itself – a greatness, daring spirits might think, equal to that of ancient Rome. It expressed itself through literature in two ways: writing about England and writing in English, appropriating, where required, the literary forms of other supremely great nations and their literatures. Put another way, nationalism takes centre-stage.

The first great English poem about England is Edmund Spenser's
The Faerie Queene
of 1590–96. It was composed during Elizabeth's mature years and is dedicated to her. Spenser was a courtier, a soldier, and a high-stakes political player, as well as a poet. He was not a
professional
writer. His pen was never Spenser's main source of income (although it could win him patrons who would bring him money) and it was not his main ambition in life to be a great figure in English literature. Ironically, that is precisely what he was destined to become.

Edmund Spenser (
c
. 1552–99) was born the son of prosperous cloth maker, in the rising middle classes, and educated at Cambridge University. His early career was as a colonial administrator in Ireland where his principal duty was to enforce martial law, root out troublemakers, and put down rebellion. He did this efficiently and often brutally. As a reward the Queen gave him an Irish estate.

Spenser was an ambitious man. He wanted more than Elizabeth had given him. And it was to further his ambitions, and to flatter her, that he conceived
The Faerie Queene
. The poem was prefaced by a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh who was pleasing their monarch in a different way, by making Britannia ruler of the waves.

The Faerie Queene
won Spenser a small pension but not, alas, the great favours he craved. Subsequently his life was marked by disappointment. His castle was burned down by Irish rebels in 1597 and it is thought that he lost members of his family in the attack. He moved back to London where he died in distressed circumstances, in his mid-forties. We don't know why he ended his life penniless.

Spenser's career as a politician had been less than successful but his achievement as a poet was outstanding. Appropriately, his tomb lies alongside that of his ‘master’ Geoffrey Chaucer in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. At his death the notable writers of the time (including Shakespeare, reportedly) threw commemorative verses into his grave. It was not just his passing but the dawning greatness of English literature that they were celebrating.

The subject of
The Faerie Queene
is England itself – glory, and Gloriana (the name of the queen of the faerie court, and also as Elizabeth was known). An epic poem, it was originally intended to run to twelve books, but Spenser completed only six. It nonetheless remains one of the longest poems in the language and not one of the easiest. The half of
The Faerie Queene
which Spenser completed addresses itself to six moral virtues necessary to the establishment of a nation, one virtue in each book. These virtues are: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice and Courtesy. Each is embodied as a different kind of knightly hero, five men and a woman, all in armour and embarked on quests to set the world to rights and bring to civilisation to a pagan and primitive world. Given
the title and origins of the poem, we are particularly interested in the female knight, Britomart, in Book III. Like the Virgin Queen, whom the book overtly compliments, Britomart is the embodiment of militant chastity. No man can dominate or ‘own’ her. If Elizabeth had a favourite part of the poem, this, surely, was it.

Spenser's poem is made up of rhymed verses, which we now call ‘Spenserian stanzas’ – complicated rhyming verses, extraordinarily hard to master. It is written in what is called ‘poetic diction’ – a ‘heightened’ language. With
The Faerie Queene
begins the convention that the language of English poetry is never the language of the day, nor of everyday discourse. The main poetic device in
The Faerie Queene
is allegory: saying one thing in terms of another, apparently quite different, thing. Let's look at the first lines of the poem's first stanza, which are a prime example of poetic diction and allegory:

No one, even in the sixteenth century, actually spoke in this pseudoantique way. (‘Pricking’, by the way, means the knight is driving his spurs into the horse to make it gallop.) But it creates exactly what Spenser wanted – an otherworldly (‘faerie’) effect. And the verse is rich with meaning as regards ‘holiness’ (this first book's particular virtue). Why, for example, is the knight encased in
battered
armour? The detail points to the fact that the great battles of Christianity have been won for us already by our ancestors. We shall not be required to become martyrs, or be burned at the stake, to prove our holiness. Virtually every stanza of the poem is packed in this way with allegorical meaning and is rich in its ‘Spenserian’ artificial language.

English poetry took another important step forward a hundred years later, with the works of John Milton (1608–74). England, since the death of Elizabeth, had endured religious conflicts,
in which Milton had played an active part on the side of the Commonwealth. The country was still in the process of defining itself. But the national confidence, so prominent in
The Faerie Queene
, is just as evident in Milton's
Paradise Lost
, which he began writing during the period of the Commonwealth and which was printed in 1667 during the reign of Charles II. Milton frankly acknowledged Spenser (as Spenser had acknowledged Chaucer) as his literary predecessor and a main influence. English literature now has a great ‘tradition’. These three poets are connected, like links in a chain.

In
Paradise Lost
Milton set out to do something dauntingly ambitious. To write an epic – something to rival Virgil's
Aeneid
or Homer's
Odyssey
– and use that epic to ‘justify the ways of God to man’, as he put it. He would, in other words, re-tell the opening books of the Bible in a way that would make clearer some of the theological difficulties it poses. For instance, is it really wrong to eat ‘the apple of knowledge’? Is Eden a place where no work of any kind is done by Adam and Eve? Are they ‘married’? Milton grapples with these issues in the poem. It's the same kind of mission we saw in the mystery plays (now long gone from the great towns which gave them birth). But what Milton came up with was anything but literature of the streets.
Paradise Lost
is a poem that presupposes a highly educated reader – ideally one who knows some Latin.

Milton's composition of
Paradise Lost
, which he conceived as his life's work and which, incredibly, he wrote after being stricken with blindness, began with two dilemmas. The first was, what language should he write in? Milton was a scholar. The languages of scholarship, over the centuries, were Ancient Greek and Latin. Milton was fluent in both. He had written much poetry in Latin. If his poem was going to be truly Virgilian, or Homeric, should he not use their language? He decided on English, but an English so flavoured with the ancient language that it sounds more like Latin.

The other dilemma he faced was what ‘form’ he should write it in. He was steeped, as a scholar, in Aristotle's
Poetics
, and he recalled that the Greek critic had called tragedy the noblest literature. Milton toyed for some time with the idea of writing his great work
as a tragedy, along the lines of Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex
. He went so far as to write a plan for this tragedy called ‘Adam Unparadised’. In the event he went for the epic – a looser narrative form. A main reason for this was that, like Virgil, he resolved to create a work of literature that would celebrate the growth of a great nation. Milton believed that England was now a great nation, and that is a major assumption underlying
Paradise Lost
and the two choices Milton made.

Whether Milton succeeded in his great mission is debatable. In his telling of the serpent's seduction of Adam and Eve – and more particularly, Satan's war with God narrated in the first books of the poem – he comes close, as the poet William Blake put it, to ‘being of the devil's party and not knowing it’. Milton doesn't quite know whose side he is on. Satan is a rebel and, in his own life, the poet was a rebel too; he had risked his life by opposing Charles I. Better to ‘reign in hell than serve in heaven’, says Satan. In context it sounds heroic. Also, Milton was clearly unsure whether he, personally, would not have eaten an ‘apple of knowledge’, whatever the consequences, or remained for all time in a state of innocent, guiltless, ‘blank’ ignorance. And Milton's view of the relationship of man and woman rubs many modern readers up the wrong way. This is how Adam and Eve are first pictured: