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Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 by Samuel Johnson

S >> Samuel Johnson >> Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1




In the following odes, where Cowley chooses his own subjects, he
sometimes rises to dignity truly Pindarick; and, if some deficiencies of
language be forgiven, his strains are such as those of the Theban bard
were to his contemporaries:

Begin the song, and strike the living lyre:
Lo, how the years to come, a numerous and well-fitted quire,
All hand in hand do decently advance.
And to my song with smooth and equal measure dance;
While the dance lasts, how long soe'er it be,
My musick's voice shall bear it company;
Till all gentle notes be drown'd
In the last trumpet's dreadful sound.

After such enthusiasm, who will not lament to find the poet conclude
with lines like these:

But stop, my muse--
Hold thy Pindarick Pegasus closely in,
Which does to rage begin
--'Tis an unruly and a hard-mouth'd horse--
'Twill no unskilful touch endure,
But flings writer and reader too that sits not sure.

The fault of Cowley, and, perhaps, of all the writers of the
metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to the last
ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality; for of the
greatest things the parts are little; what is little can be but pretty,
and, by claiming dignity, becomes ridiculous. Thus all the power of
description is destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration, and the force of
metaphors is lost, when the mind, by the mention of particulars, is
turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that
from which the illustration is drawn, than that to which it is applied.

Of this we have a very eminent example in the ode entitled the Muse, who
goes to "take the air" in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses
fancy and judgment, wit and eloquence, memory and invention: how he
distinguished wit from fancy, or how memory could properly contribute to
motion, he has not explained; we are, however, content to suppose that
he could have justified his own fiction, and wish to see the muse begin
her career; but there is yet more to be done:

Let the _postillion_, nature, mount, and let
The _coachman_ art be set;
And let the airy _footmen_, running all beside,
Make a long row of goodly pride;
Figures, conceits, raptures, and sentences,
In a well-worded dress,
And innocent loves, and pleasant truths, and useful lies,
In all their gaudy _liveries_.

Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber of magnificence; yet I
cannot refuse myself the four next lines:

Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne,
And bid it to put on;
For long, though cheerful, is the way,
And life, alas! allows but one ill winter's day.

In the same ode, celebrating the power of the muse, he gives her
prescience, or, in poetical language, the foresight of events hatching
in futurity; but, having once an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to
show us that he knows what an egg contains:

Thou into the close nests of time dost peep,
And there with piercing eye
Through the firm shell and the thick white dost spy
Years to come a-forming lie,
Close in their sacred fecundine asleep.

The same thought is more generally, and, therefore, more poetically
expressed by Casimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and faults
of Cowley:

Omnibus mundi dominator horis
Aptat urgendas per inane pennas,
Pars adhuc nido latet, et futuros
Crescit in annos.

Cowley, whatever was his subject, seems to have been carried, by a kind
of destiny, to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require
still more ignoble epithets. A slaughter in the Red sea "new dies the
water's name;" and England, during the civil war, was "Albion no more,
nor to be named from white." It is, surely, by some fascination not
easily surmounted, that a writer professing to revive "the noblest and
highest writing in verse," makes this address to the new year:

Nay, if thou lov'st me, gentle year,
Let not so much as love be there,
Vain, fruitless love I mean; for, gentle year,
Although I fear
There's of this caution little need,
Yet, gentle year, take heed
How thou dost make
Such a mistake;
Such love I mean alone
As by thy cruel predecessors has been shewn:
For, though I have too much cause to doubt it,
I fain would try, for once, if life can live without it.

The reader of this will be inclined to cry out, with Prior,

Ye criticks, say,
How poor to this was Pindar's style!

Even those who cannot, perhaps, find in the Isthmian or Nemaean songs
what antiquity has disposed them to expect, will, at least, see that
they are ill represented by such puny poetry; and all will determine,
that if this be the old Theban strain, it is not worthy of revival.

To the disproportion and incongruity of Cowley's sentiments, must be
added the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the
liberty of using, in any place, a verse of any length, from two
syllables to twelve. The verses of Pindar have, as he observes, very
little harmony to a modern ear; yet, by examining the syllables, we
perceive them to be regular, and have reason enough for supposing that
the ancient audiences were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought,
therefore, to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was
wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to
have supplied smoothness of transition and continuity of thought.

It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the "irregularity of numbers is the very
thing" which makes "that kind of poesy fit for all manner of subjects."
But he should have remembered, that what is fit for every thing can fit
nothing well. The great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure
of the lines, and uniform structure of the stanzas, by which the voice
is regulated, and the memory relieved.

If the Pindarick style be, what Cowley thinks it, "the highest and
noblest kind of writing in verse," it can be adapted only to high and
noble subjects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the
critick, or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in
verse, which, according to Sprat, is "chiefly to be preferred for its
near affinity to prose."

This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of
the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately
overspread our books of poetry; all the boys and girls caught the
pleasing fashion, and they that could do nothing else could write like
Pindar. The rights of antiquity were invaded, and disorder tried to
break into the Latin: a poem[21] on the Sheldonian theatre, in which all
kinds of verse are shaken together, is unhappily inserted in the Musae
Anglicanae. Pindarism prevailed about half a century; but, at last, died
gradually away, and other imitations supply its place.

The Pindarick odes have so long enjoyed the highest degree of poetical
reputation, that I am not willing to dismiss them with unabated censure;
and, surely, though the mode of their composition be erroneous, yet many
parts deserve, at least, that admiration which is due to great
comprehension of knowledge, and great fertility of fancy. The thoughts
are often new, and often striking; but the greatness of one part is
disgraced by the littleness of another; and total negligence of language
gives the noblest conceptions the appearance of a fabrick, august in
the plan, but mean in the materials. Yet, surely, those verses are not
without a just claim to praise; of which it may be said with truth, that
no man but Cowley could have written them.

The Davideis now remains to be considered; a poem which the author
designed to have extended to twelve books, merely, as he makes no
scruple of declaring, because the Aeneid had that number; but he had
leisure or perseverance only to write the third part. Epick poems have
been left unfinished by Virgil, Statius, Spenser, and Cowley. That we
have not the whole Davideis, is, however, not much to be regretted; for
in this undertaking Cowley is, tacitly, at least, confessed to have
miscarried. There are not many examples of so great a work, produced by
an author generally read, and generally praised, that has crept through
a century with so little regard. Whatever is said of Cowley, is meant of
his other works. Of the Davideis no mention is made; it never appears in
books, nor emerges in conversation. By the Spectator it has been once
quoted; by Rymer it has once been praised; and by Dryden, in Mac
Flecknoe, it has once been imitated; nor do I recollect much other
notice from its publication till now, in the whole succession of English
literature.

Of this silence and neglect, if the reason be inquired, it will be found
partly in the choice of the subject, and partly in the performance of
the work.

Sacred history has been always read with submissive reverence, and
an imagination overawed and controlled. We have been accustomed to
acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentick narrative,
and to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence as suppresses
curiosity. We go with the historian as he goes, and stop with him when
he stops. All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that
which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion seems not only
useless, but, in some degree, profane.

Such events as were produced by the visible interposition of divine
power are above the power of human genius to dignify. The miracle of
creation, however it may teem with images, is best described with little
diffusion of language: "He spake the word, and they were made."

We are told, that Saul "was troubled with an evil spirit;" from this
Cowley takes an opportunity of describing hell, and telling the history
of Lucifer, who was, he says,

Once gen'ral of a gilded host of sprites,
Like Hesper leading forth the spangled nights;
But down, like lightning which him struck, he came,
And roar'd at his first plunge into the flame.

Lucifer makes a speech to the inferiour agents of mischief, in which
there is something of heathenism, and, therefore, of impropriety; and,
to give efficacy to his words, concludes by lashing "his breast with
his long tail." Envy, after a pause, steps out, and, among other
declarations of her zeal, utters these lines:

Do thou but threat, loud storms shall make reply,
And thunder echo to the trembling sky:
Whilst raging seas swell to so bold an height,
As shall the fire's proud element affright.
Th' old drudging sun, from his long-beaten way,
Shall, at thy voice, start, and misguide the day.
The jocund orbs shall break their measur'd pace,
And stubborn poles change their allotted place,
Heaven's gilded troops shall flutter here and there,
Leaving their boasting songs tun'd to a sphere.

Every reader feels himself weary with this useless talk of an
allegorical being.

It is not only when the events are confessedly miraculous, that fancy
and fiction lose their effect: the whole system of life, while the
theocracy was yet visible, has an appearance so different from all other
scenes of human action, that the reader of the sacred volume habitually
considers it as the peculiar mode of existence of a distinct species of
mankind, that lived and acted with manners uncommunicable; so that it is
difficult, even for imagination, to place us in the state of them whose
story is related, and, by consequence, their joys and griefs are not
easily adopted, nor can the attention be often interested in any thing
that befalls them.

To the subject thus originally indisposed to the reception of poetical
embellishments, the writer brought little that could reconcile
impatience, or attract curiosity. Nothing can be more disgusting than a
narrative spangled with conceits; and conceits are all that the Davideis
supplies.

One of the great sources of poetical delight, is description, or the
power of presenting pictures to the mind. Cowley gives inferences
instead of images, and shows not what may be supposed to have been seen,
but what thoughts the sight might have suggested. When Virgil describes
the stone which Turnus lifted against Aeneas, he fixes the attention on
its bulk and weight:

Saxum circumspicit ingens,
Saxum antiquum, ingens, campo quod forte jacebat,
Limes agro positus, litem ut discerneret arvis.

Cowley says of the stone with which Cain slew his brother,

I saw him fling the stone, as if he meant
At once his murther and his monument.

Of the sword taken from Goliah, he says,

A sword so great, that it was only fit,
To cut off his great head that came with it.

Other poets describe death by some of its common appearances. Cowley
says, with a learned allusion to sepulchral lamps, real or fabulous,

'Twixt his right ribs deep pierc'd the furious blade,
And open'd wide those secret vessels where
Life's light goes out, when first they let in air.

But he has allusions vulgar, as well as learned. In a visionary
succession of kings:

Joas at first does bright and glorious shew,
In life's fresh morn his fame does early crow.

Describing an undisciplined army, after having said with elegance,

His forces seem'd no army, but a crowd
Heartless, unarm'd, disorderly, and loud,

he gives them a fit of the ague.

The allusions, however, are not always to vulgar things; he offends by
exaggeration, as much as by diminution:

The king was plac'd alone, and o'er his head
A well-wrought heaven of silk and gold was spread.

Whatever he writes is always polluted with some conceit:

Where the sun's fruitful beams give metals birth,
Where he the growth of fatal gold doth see,
Gold, which alone more influence has than he.

In one passage he starts a sudden question, to the confusion of
philosophy:

Ye learned heads, whom ivy garlands grace,
Why does that twining plant the oak embrace;
The oak, for courtship most of all unfit,
And rough as are the winds that fight with it?

His expressions have, sometimes, a degree of meanness that surpasses
expectation:

Nay, gentle guests, he cries, since now you're in,
The story of your gallant friend begin.

In a simile descriptive of the morning:

As glimm'ring stars just at th' approach of day,
Cashier'd by troops, at last drop all away.

The dress of Gabriel deserves attention:

He took for skin a cloud most soft and bright,
That e'er the mid-day sun pierc'd through with light;
Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spread,
Wash'd from the morning beauties' deepest red;
An harmless flatt'ring meteor shone for hair,
And fell adown his shoulders with loose care;
He cuts out a silk mantle from the skies,
Where the most sprightly azure pleas'd the eyes;
This he with starry vapours sprinkles all,
Took in their prime ere they grow ripe and fall;
Of a new rainbow, ere it fret or fade,
The choicest piece cut out, a scarf is made.

This is a just specimen of Cowley's imagery: what might, in general
expressions, be great and forcible, he weakens and makes ridiculous
by branching it into small parts. That Gabriel was invested with the
softest or brightest colours of the sky, we might have been told, and
been dismissed to improve the idea in our different proportions of
conception; but Cowley could not let us go, till he had related where
Gabriel got first his skin, and then his mantle, then his lace, and then
his scarf, and related it in the terms of the mercer and tailor.

Sometimes he indulges himself in a digression, always conceived with his
natural exuberance, and commonly, even where it is not long, continued
till it is tedious.

I' th' library a few choice authors stood,
Yet 'twas well stor'd, for that small store was good;
Writing, man's spiritual physick, was not then
Itself, as now, grown a disease of men.
Learning (young virgin) but few suitors knew;
The common prostitute she lately grew,
And with the spurious brood loads now the press;
Laborious effects of idleness.

As the Davideis affords only four books, though intended to consist
of twelve, there is no opportunity for such criticism as epick poems
commonly supply. The plan of the whole work is very imperfectly shown by
the third part. The duration of an unfinished action cannot be known. Of
characters, either not yet introduced, or shown but upon few occasions,
the full extent and the nice discriminations cannot be ascertained. The
fable is plainly implex, formed rather from the Odyssey than the Iliad;
and many artifices of diversification are employed, with the skill of a
man acquainted with the best models. The past is recalled by narration,
and the future anticipated by vision: but he has been so lavish of his
poetical art, that it is difficult to imagine how he could fill eight
books more without practising again the same modes of disposing his
matter; and, perhaps, the perception of this growing incumbrance
inclined him to stop. By this abruption posterity lost more instruction
than delight. If the continuation of the Davideis can be missed, it is
for the learning that had been diffused over it, and the notes in which
it had been explained.

Had not his characters been depraved, like every other part, by improper
decorations, they would have deserved uncommon praise. He gives Saul
both the body and mind of a hero:

His way once chose, he forward thrust outright,
Nor turn'd aside for danger or delight.

And the different beauties of the lofty Merah and the gentle Michol, are
very justly conceived and strongly painted.

Rymer has declared the Davideis superiour to the Jerusalem of Tasso;
"which," says he, "the poet, with all his care, has not totally purged
from pedantry." If by pedantry is meant that minute knowledge which
is derived from particular sciences and studies, in opposition to the
general notions supplied by a wide survey of life and nature, Cowley
certainly errs, by introducing pedantry far more frequently than Tasso.
I know not, indeed, why they should be compared; for the resemblance of
Cowley's work to Tasso's is only that they both exhibit the agency of
celestial and infernal spirits, in which, however, they differ
widely; for Cowley supposes them commonly to operate upon the mind by
suggestion; Tasso represents them as promoting or obstructing events by
external agency.

Of particular passages that can be properly compared, I remember only
the description of heaven, in which the different manner of the two
writers is sufficiently discernible. Cowley's is scarcely description,
unless it be possible to describe by negatives: for he tells us
only what there is not in heaven. Tasso endeavours to represent the
splendours and pleasures of the regions of happiness. Tasso affords
images, and Cowley sentiments. It happens, however, that Tasso's
description affords some reason for Rymer's censure. He says of the
supreme being,

Ha sotto i piedi e fato e la natura,
Ministri umili, e'l moto, e chi'l misura.

The second line has in it more of pedantry than, perhaps, can be found
in any other stanza of the poem.

In the perusal of the Davideis, as of all Cowley's works, we find wit
and learning unprofitably squandered. Attention has no relief; the
affections are never moved: we are sometimes surprised, but never
delighted; and find much to admire, but little to approve. Still,
however, it is the work of Cowley; of a mind capacious by nature, and
replenished by study.

In the general review of Cowley's poetry it will be found, that he wrote
with abundant fertility, but negligent or unskilful selection; with much
thought, but with little imagery; that he is never pathetick, and
rarely sublime; but always either ingenious or learned, either acute or
profound.

It is said by Denham, in his elegy,

To him no author was unknown,
Yet what he writ was all his own.

This wide position requires less limitation, when it is affirmed of
Cowley, than, perhaps, of any other poet.--He read much, and yet
borrowed little.

His character of writing was, indeed, not his own: he unhappily adopted
that which was predominant. He saw a certain way to present praise; and,
not sufficiently inquiring by what means the ancients have continued to
delight through all the changes of human manners, he contented himself
with a deciduous laurel, of which the verdure, in its spring, was bright
and gay, but which time has been continually stealing from his brows.

He was, in his own time, considered as of unrivalled excellence.
Clarendon represents him as having taken a flight beyond all that went
before him; and Milton is said to have declared, that the three greatest
English poets were Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley.

His manner he had in common with others; but his sentiments were his
own. Upon every subject he thought for himself; and such was his
copiousness of knowledge, that something at once remote and applicable
rushed into his mind; yet it is not likely that he always rejected a
commodious idea merely because another had used it: his known wealth was
so great, that he might have borrowed without loss of credit.

In his elegy on sir Henry Wotton, the last lines have such resemblance
to the noble epigram of Grotius on the death of Scaliger, that I cannot
but think them copied from it, though they are copied by no servile
hand.

One passage in his Mistress is so apparently borrowed from Donne, that
he probably would not have written it, had it not mingled with his own
thoughts, so as that he did not perceive himself taking it from another:

Although I think thou never found wilt be,
Yet I'm resolv'd to search for thee:
The search itself rewards the pains.
So, though the chymic his great secret miss
(For neither it in art or nature is,)
Yet things well worth his toil he gains;


And does his charge and labour pay
With good unsought experiments by the way. COWLEY.

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,
Say, where his centric happiness doth lie:
I have lov'd, and got, and told;
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old;
I should not find that hidden mystery;
Oh, 'tis imposture all!
And as no chymic yet th' elixir got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
So lovers dream a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summer's night. DONNE.

Jonson and Donne, as Dr. Hurd remarks, were then in the highest esteem.

It is related by Clarendon, that Cowley always acknowledges his
obligation to the learning and industry of Jonson; but I have found no
traces of Jonson in his works: to emulate Donne appears to have been
his purpose; and from Donne he may have learned that familiarity with
religious images, and that light allusion to sacred things, by which
readers far short of sanctity are frequently offended; and which would
not be borne, in the present age, when devotion, perhaps, not more
fervent, is more delicate.

Having produced one passage taken by Cowley from Donne, I will
recompense him by another which Milton seems to have borrowed from him.
He says of Goliah:

His spear, the trunk was of a lofty tree,
Which nature meant some tall ship's mast should be.

Milton of Satan:

His spear, to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great admiral, were but a wand,
He walked with.

His diction was, in his own time, censured as negligent. He seems not to
have known, or not to have considered, that words, being arbitrary, must
owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only,
which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought: and,
as the noblest mien, or most graceful action, would be degraded and
obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or
mechanicks; so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and
the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by
words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar
mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications.

Truth, indeed, is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have
an intrinsick and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectual
gold which defies destruction; but gold may be so concealed in baser
matter, that only a chymist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in
unrefined and plebeian words, that none but philosophers can distinguish
it; and both may be so buried in impurities, as not to pay the cost of
their extraction.

The diction, being the vehicle of the thoughts, first presents itself to
the intellectual eye; and, if the first appearance offends, a further
knowledge is not often sought. Whatever professes to benefit by
pleasing, must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something
sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise. What
is perceived by slow degrees may gratify us with the consciousness of
improvement, but will never strike with the sense of pleasure.

Of all this, Cowley appears to have been without knowledge, or without
care. He makes no selection of words, nor seeks any neatness of phrase:
he has no elegancies, either lucky or elaborate: as his endeavours were
rather to impress sentences upon the understanding than images on
the fancy, he has few epithets, and those scattered without peculiar
propriety or nice adaptation. It seems to follow from the necessity of
the subject, rather than the care of the writer, that the diction of his
heroick poem is less familiar than that of his slightest writings. He
has given not the same numbers, but the same diction, to the gentle
Anacreon and the tempestuous Pindar.

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We do not know the women's names, but their voices are quite distinct. All are pregnant. But while the first woman awaits the birth of her baby with a moon-like serenity, the other two are not so lucky. One, whose previous pregnancies have failed to go to term, is experiencing a heartbreaking late miscarriage; the other is a young student whose accidental pregnancy will end in her child being put up for adoption.

Sylvia Plath's only play was never intended for the stage, being broadcast instead on BBC radio in August 1962. Less than six months later, Plath killed herself, but not before the burst of astonishing creative energy that produced her extraordinary, terrifying Ariel poems.

Anyone who knows Plath's poetry will see the connection between Three Women and Plath's subsequent poems, particularly in the way she talks about the agony of childbirth, the rush of love for this tiny alien being, and both the wonder and wounded rawness of motherhood. It is a beautiful piece, full of startling imagery that draws you in through the sheer intensity of its femaleness, and because it so precisely articulates the emotions that are often thought but seldom voiced by women - certainly not in the early 1960s - about men, motherhood and our relationship to our bodies.

It's been 20 years since there has been an attempt at a professional stage version and - in a theatre world that happily accepts the poetic offerings of Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green, or the staged possibilities of The Waves, one of Plath's own inspirations for the piece, I see no reason why it shouldn't be brought to life. Sadly, it doesn't breathe here, in a production by Robert Shaw that is clearly a labour of love, but which never finds a way to give the internal a physical reality. Plath's poetry, like most babies, is more robust than it appears - and won't break if treated with a little less reverence and considerably more grit.

Instead, what we are offered is tinkling piano music, mournful mood lighting, an innocuous pale setting, as well as three perfectly good but indisputably ladylike performances that capture none of the wounded redness of Plath's poetry, and do her the disservice of making her sound bleached and somewhat prissy. It's a pity. What might have been a wonder ends up a mere curiosity.

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