Purcell and Cowley

We purchased this album of Purcell "catch songs", a cantata set to a poem by Abraham Cowley, and an ode to Saint Cecilia at one of the used record stores in Wichita. The LP was from the Musical Heritage Society, the budget mail-order record company, and the music is performed by The Deller Consort. The Musical Heritage Society licensed the material from Harmonia Mundi, which released the recording as a CD. The theme of the album is that composers like Purcell had to be active both in the secular and the sacred world--the "ale-house and the Chapel Royal, as well as the playhouse and the church."

The songs on A side of the LP combine "strict counterpoint and scatological verse", according to Denis Stevens' liner notes, while the B side contains the more serious works, including the setting of Cowley's poem:

If ever I more riches did desire

Than cleanliness and quiet do require, 

If e'er Ambition did my fancy cheat, 

With any wish so mean as to be great, 

Continue, Heav'n, still from me to remove 

The humble blessings of that life I love. 

Upon the slipp'ry tops of human state, 

The gilded pinnacles of fate, 

Let others proudly stand, and for awhile 

The giddy danger to beguile, 

With joy and with disdain look down on all, 

Till their heads turn, and down they fall. 

Me, O ye Gods, on earth, or else so near, 

That I no fall to earth may fear, 

And, O ye gods, at a good distance seat 

From the long ruins of the great. 

Here wrap'd in the arms of Quiet le me lie; 

Quiet, companion of Obscurity. 

Here let my life with as much silence slide 

As time, that measures it, does glide. 

Nor let the breath of Infamy or Fame 

From town to town echo about my name, 

Nor let my homely death embroider'd be 

With scutcheon or with elegy: 

An old plebeian let me die. 

Alas, all then are such as well as I. 

To him, alas, to him, I fear, 

The face of Death will terrible appear, 

Who in his life flatt'ring his senseless pride 

By being known to all the world beside, 

Does not himself, when he is dying, know, 

Nor what he is, nor whither he's to go.

Abraham Cowley was one of the Metaphysical poets and a friend and admirer of Richard Crashaw. According to this biography:

Poet and essayist Abraham Cowley was born in London, England, in 1618. He displayed early talent as a poet, publishing his first collection of poetry, Poetical Blossoms (1633), at the age of 15. Cowley studied at Cambridge University but was stripped of his Cambridge fellowship during the English Civil War and expelled for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1644. In turn, he accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria to France, where he spent 12 years in exile serving as her secretary. During this time, Cowley completed The Mistress (1647). Arguably his most famous work, the collection exemplifies Cowley’s metaphysical style of love poetry. After the Restoration, Cowley returned to England, where he was reinstated as a Cambridge fellow and earned his MD before finally retiring to the English countryside.

Richard Crashaw's Hymn to "The Name and Honour" of St. Teresa of Avila

As today is her feast, it seems appropriate to post Richard Crashaw's poetic tribute to St. Teresa of Avila. As Robert T. Petersson notes in his book, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw, St. Teresa was one of many leaders of the Counter Reformation in Spain. Petersson states that Spanish reformers led the way, in fact, from St. Ignatius of Loyola to St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, in the efforts to renew and revive the Catholic Church after the Protestant Reformation.

LOVE, thou are absolute, sole Lord
Of life and death. To prove the word,
We'll now appeal to none of all
Those thy old soldiers, great and tall,
Ripe men of martyrdom, that could reach down
With strong arms their triumphant crown:
Such as could with lusty breath
Speak loud, unto the face of death,
Their great Lord's glorious name; to none
Of those whose spacious bosoms spread a throne
For love at large to fill. Spare blood and sweat:
We'll see Him take a private seat,
And make His mansion in the mild
And milky soul of a soft child.
Scarce has she learnt to lisp a name
Of martyr, yet she thinks it shame
Life should so long play with that breath
Which spent can buy so brave a death.
She never undertook to know
What death with love should have to do.
Nor has she e'er yet understood
Why, to show love, she should shed blood;
Yet, though she cannot tell you why,
She can love, and she can die.
Scarce has she blood enough to make
A guilty sword blush for her sake;
Yet has a heart dares hope to prove
How much less strong is death than love....

Since 'tis not to be had at home,
She'll travel for a martyrdom.
No home for her, confesses she,
But where she may a martyr be.
She'll to the Moors, and trade with them
For this unvalued diadem;
She offers them her dearest breath,
With Christ's name in 't, in charge for death:
She'll bargain with them, and will give
Them God, and teach them how to live
In Him; or, if they this deny,
For Him she'll teach them how to die.
So shall she leave amongst them sown
Her Lord's blood, or at least her own.

Farewell then, all the world, adieu!
Teresa is no more for you.
Farewell all pleasures, sports, and joys,
Never till now esteemed toys!

Farewell whatever dear may be--
Mother's arms, or father's knee!
Farewell house, and farewell home!
She 's for the Moors and Martyrdom.

Sweet, not so fast; lo! thy fair spouse,
Whom thou seek'st with so swift vows,
Calls thee back, and bids thee come
T' embrace a milder martyrdom....

O how oft shalt thou complain
Of a sweet and subtle pain!
Of intolerable joys!
Of a death, in which who dies
Loves his death, and dies again,
And would for ever so be slain;
And lives and dies, and knows not why
To live, but that he still may die!
How kindly will thy gentle heart
Kiss the sweetly-killing dart!
And close in his embraces keep
Those delicious wounds, that weep
Balsam, to heal themselves with thus,
When these thy deaths, so numerous,
Shall all at once die into one,
And melt thy soul's sweet mansion;
Like a soft lump of incense, hasted
By too hot a fire, and wasted
Into perfuming clouds, so fast
Shalt thou exhale to heaven at last
In a resolving sigh, and then,--
O what? Ask not the tongues of men.

Read the rest here.

Richard Crashaw was a Catholic convert from Anglicanism at a dangerous time--during the English Civil War. After being born the son of a most anti-Catholic, Puritan, father, William Crashaw, he had attended Pembroke College at Cambridge, a High-Church Anglican college and been a fellow at Peterhouse College, but was too Catholic for that oldest of Cambridge colleges. He fled to the Continent in 1644 and, destitute, was introduced to Queen Henrietta Maria in exile at St. Germain-en-Laye by a friend Abraham Cowley. From St. Germain he went to Rome and died soon after becoming sub-canon the Cathedral of Santa Casa in Loretto. He is  not only one of the Metaphysical Poets, but he is a Baroque poet. The St. Austin Review featured Crashaw in the September/October 2013 issue as "English Poet; Catholic Exile"; the cover is pictured above.

Preview of the July/August Issue of StAR

Joseph Pearce previews the next issue of the St. Austin Review, and you might guess at my interest in the issue by the title (and the list of New poetry at the bottom!):

The next issue of the St. Austin Review will soon be winging its way to the printers. The theme is St. Robert Southwell: Priest, Poet, Martyr.

Highlights include:

   F. W. Brownlow reflects on “A Plaintive Muse: Robert Southwell’s Attack on Elizabethan Terror”.

   Joseph Pearce examines “The Bard and the Jesuit: Robert Southwell’s Influence on William Shakespeare”.

   Joseph Pearce reveals “Shakespeare’s Homage to Robert Southwell” in King Lear.

   Gary M. Bouchard sees “The Enduring Legacy of Robert Southwell” in his influence on a host of other poets from John Donne to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

   Melissa Siik discusses “Robert Southwell and the Formation of English National Identity”.

   Fr. Benedict Kiely rejoices in “The Joyful Witness of the English Martyrs”.

   The full colour art feature focuses on the work of Gwyneth Holston and her perceptions of “The Role of Art and the Vocation of the Artist”.

   Kevin O’Brien sees the use of torture today and in Elizabethan England as “The Destruction of God in Man”.

   Fr. Dwight Longenecker sees the parallels between “Science Fiction and the Metaphysicals”.

   James Bemis’s regular film review focuses on Monsieur Vincent.

   Donald DeMarco vents his justifiable spleen against the blatant bias of the New York Times.

   Regis Martin, Greg Peters, Paula Gallagher, Stephen Mirarchi, Thaddeus Kozinski, Rachel Ronnow, Ken Colston, Mitchell Kalpakgian and Marie Dudzik review eleven new books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

 

New poetry by Pavel Chichikov, Donald DeMarco, Stephanie A. Mann and Lisa Salinas.

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That's really extraordinarily humbling and delightful--to have a poem I wrote published in a magazine issue dedicated to such a great martyr-poet! (St. Robert Southwell is in the poem.) I look forward to seeing it in print next month.

Herbert and Donne: Metaphysical Poets

John Stubbs reviews Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury in this month's Literary Review, including a comparison and contrast of George Herbert and John Donne:

Quite unlike Donne's life of adventure, disgrace, regretful isolation and self-fashioned redemption, Herbert's followed a steady trajectory of study, duty and meditation. His main dilemma seems to have been whether to pursue a public career - as his talents, social connections and perhaps family pressures disposed him to - or to take the cloth. There was, of course, no direct contradiction between the two: a bishop in the 1620s could still become a high-ranking minister. Yet Herbert seemed aware that the priesthood would take him in another direction towards simplicity and comparative solitude. He followed the example set by men such as Lancelot Andrewes, the famed preacher and one-time dean of Westminister, who would spend the entire morning alone in prayer when his duties allowed: events were always counterpointed by steady and, by any standard, gruelling rituals of prayer, reading, repeating and mastering declensions. Not a life for everyone; yet it helped quieten rather than stifle the heart.
 
I struck the board, and cried, No more.
I will abroad.
What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My life and lines are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.

Herbert as much as Donne voices the waywardness of the passions, the anger that can send a child charging like an escaping balloon. But Herbert looks for a solution where Donne insists there is only a puzzle. For Donne, knowledge lies in dilemma, in paradox; for Herbert, this is only a stage. Their poetic language is also entirely different. In his famous 'Song: Go, and catch a falling star', for example, in telling his listener to 'Ride ... Till age snow white hairs on thee', Donne uses a metaphor from Horace, which an ancient book on rhetoric, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, explicitly disapproved of as 'far-fetched'. He even goes a step or three further. Snow is a metaphor for the visible effects of old age (white hair) and indeed age itself, but it is hard or even silly to visualise 'white hairs' literally snowing down onto someone's head. We have to go beyond that idea, by degrees, to the one Donne intends.

There is no such bad behaviour in Herbert. Because of this and other differences, the two poets have their camps of rival supporters; Drury avowedly belongs to Herbert's. In life, Donne and Herbert took mutual benefit from their diverse casts of mind. Although Donne was twenty years senior, he didn't treat Herbert as the younger man. They spent the summer of plague in 1625 together at the home of Herbert's stepfather in Chelsea and became respectful friends. By then Donne was the dean of St Paul's and was finding new self-definition in a venue that demanded preaching 'loose as the wind, as large as store' to fill its vast Gothic chamber. Herbert's path, on the other hand, lay towards minimalism, the quietness of retreat. He worked in small parishes, doing much to restore to his church at Leighton Bromswold and supporting the religious community at Little Gidding, the group in Huntingdonshire invoked in the fourth of T S Eliot's Four Quartets. Eliot, in many ways torn between the vision of Donne and the brighter influence of Herbert, illustrates the futility of asking which poet might be greater: we need both.

John Drury's excellent book is a fine guide and companion to such questions, bringing Herbert's 'life and lines' along the road without ever forcing a step. His attitude to Herbert the poet is one of inexhaustible wonder and inquiry, while to the man who died at 39 he is almost father-like, tender and humane. Music at Midnight should not cause readers or students to neglect Amy Charles's Life of George Herbert (1977), but no one interested in this writer should be without it.

Note that John Stubbs is the author of a biography of John Donne: Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006). 

Christina Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and Catholicism

Christina Rossetti, the pre-Raphaelite poet and sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the movement's founders, was born on December 5, 1830. She is best known for her book of poetry Goblin Market and Other Poems, published in 1862 and for two Christmas Carols: "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Love Came Down at Christmas":

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and Angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,
Love Incarnate, Love Divine;
Worship we our Jesus:
But wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,
Love shall be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

She was engaged for a time to the artist James Collinson, who like her was an Anglo-Catholic--but then in 1850, they broke off the engagement when he became a Catholic. This site provides some background to the connections between the Pre-Raphaelite and Tractarian movements in Rossetti's poetry:

The resemblances between Rossetti's poem and Tractarian religious values have been convincingly enumerated and to some extent elaborated by Raymond Chapman, George B. Tennyson, and, in less detail, Georgina Battiscombe. Chapman observes Tractarian influence in the sacramental emphasis of those poems by Rossetti that literally or metaphorically employ motifs of baptism, communion, and marriage; and those that stress the value of virginity, the need for obedience, or the inevitability of guilt and the desirability of penitence. He remarks upon her concern with the self as individual, citing Newman's insistence that "God beholds [us] individually." Further, Chapman suggests a direct connection between Tractarianism and Rossetti's "attraction to the conventual life"; her veneration of St. Augustine; her interest in good works and social reform; her insistence upon self-sacrifice, self-denial, and self-abnegation; her uses of typological symbolism; and even her strong sense of heaven as a reality, a sense that is counterpointed by a Puseyite quest for "total union with Christ" (Faith and Revolt, 175-96, passim.). Tennyson similarly determines that Rossetti's uses of typology, nature imagery, and liturgical forms are characteristically Tractarian, as are her poems based upon the Church calendar, those inspired by acts of prayer, those that yearn. for oneness with God, and, finally, those that demon [68/69] strate the viability of poetry itself — as a mode of artistic discourse — in "seeking deity" (VDP, 200-203).

Such direct connections between Rossetti's art and Tractarianism become more convincing in light of the significant "hard" evidence that she was attracted to works by members of the Oxford Movement. Such evidence includes her elegiac sonnet on Newman (Works, 280); her possession of his Dream of Gerontius; and her hand-illustrated and underlined copy of The Christian Year by Keble. (8) Though, according to William Michael Rossetti, Christina "thought nothing of Keble as a poet" (Bell, 335), she clearly did admire the work of Isaac Williams, whom she quoted (on the value of auricular confession) to Dante Rossetti in a letter of 1881 (FL, 103), mentioned admiringly in her preface to Seek and Find, and remarked upon repeatedly in her letters. Also crucial in this connection is Rossetti's religious tutelage at the hands of the Revs. William Dodsworth and W J. E. Bennett, along with Canon Burrows, all of whom had close relations with Pusey and the Tractarian movement.

Thomas Traherne and His Centuries

Thomas Traherne, the Anglican minister and Metaphysical poet, died on October 10, 1674.

Wonder

How like an angel came I down!

How bright are all things here!

When first among his works I did appear

O how their glory me did crown!

The world resembled his eternity,

In which my soul did walk;

And ev'ry thing that I did see

Did with me talk.

The skies in their magnificence,

The lively, lovely air;

Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!

The stars did entertain my sense,

And all the works of God, so bright and pure,

So rich and great did seem,

As if they ever must endure

In my esteem.

A native health and innocence

Within my bones did grow,

And while my God did all his glories show,

I felt a vigour in my sense

That was all spirit. I within did flow

With seas of life, like wine;

I nothing in the world did know

But 'twas divine.

Harsh ragged objects were conceal'd,

Oppressions tears and cries,

Sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes

Were hid, and only things reveal'd

Which heav'nly spirits, and the angels prize.

The state of innocence

And bliss, not trades and poverties,

Did fill my sense.

The streets were pav'd with golden stones,

The boys and girls were mine,

Oh how did all their lovely faces shine!

The sons of men were holy ones,

In joy and beauty they appear'd to me,

And every thing which here I found,

While like an angel I did see,

Adorn'd the ground.

Rich diamond and pearl and gold

In ev'ry place was seen;

Rare splendours, yellow, blue, red, white and green,

Mine eyes did everywhere behold.

Great wonders cloth'd with glory did appear,

Amazement was my bliss,

That and my wealth was ev'ry where:

No joy to this!

Curs'd and devis'd proprieties,

With envy, avarice

And fraud, those fiends that spoil even Paradise,

Flew from the splendour of mine eyes,

And so did hedges, ditches, limits, bounds,

I dream'd not aught of those,

But wander'd over all men's grounds,

And found repose.

Proprieties themselves were mine,

And hedges ornaments;

Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents

Did not divide my joys, but all combine.

Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteem'd

My joys by others worn:

For me they all to wear them seem'd

When I was born.

The Thomas Traherne Association promotes his work here:

Thomas Traherne was born within the walls of Hereford City in about 1637, close to All Saints Church, where he was probably baptised. He was about 5 when the Civil War came to the city. He may have been at Hereford Cathedral School in 1649 when King Charles I was beheaded. In later life he wrote of the King as martyr.

In 1653, in the midst of the Commonwealth, he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, one of the most puritan colleges, gaining his BA in 1656. But he could find no one who would teach him felicity – happiness, which he wrote of as ‘the mistress of all other sciences’. And so he returned to Hereford. In 1657 he was appointed Rector of St Mary’s Church Credenhill, 5 miles NW, supported by Presbyterian clergy who were preachers at Hereford Cathedral. With the Restoration, and the return of King Charles II in 1660, he sought ordination. With no Bishop of Hereford, he journeyed to Launton near Bicester to be ordained by the exiled Bishop of Oxford, on 20th October 1660.

At this time he was finishing one of his first works, ‘Select Meditations’ containing thinking which had developed through England’s darkest days. In it he sought to ‘teach Immortal Souls the way to Heaven’. This underestimated manuscript did not come to light until it was found in Birmingham in 1964. It was finally published in 1997, and has remained in print.

He continued writing poetry and prose throughout 17 years as parish priest, but it was not until 1673 that he had a book published – Roman Forgeries. In 1674 he finally left Credenhill for London to become domestic chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman (former Lord Keeper of the Great Seal) at Teddington. There he prepared his last work for publication – ‘Christian Ethicks – the way to Blessedness’. In the Autumn he died, and was buried on 10th October 1674 in St Mary’s Church, Teddington. Christian Ethicks was published within months. , but neither of the two printed books attracted any attention, and he was forgotten for over 200 years.

Much of his hand written poetry was rediscovered in the nick of time: on a street bookstall in London in the winter of 1896-7, together with a work which many have thought his finest – his prose ‘Centuries of Meditations’ published in 1908 (poetry, 1903). The writer Edward Thomas wrote of Traherne, in his book ‘Wales’ (1905), as “that fine poet of the 17th Century”. He quoted his poem about childhood, ‘Eden’ :
‘A learned and a happy ignorance / Divided me / from all the vanity / …sloth, care, pain and sorrow that advance the madness and the misery of men.

Major discoveries of other unknown handwritten works have followed. ‘The Commentaries of Heaven’, an encyclopaedia of happiness, was rescued from a burning rubbish tip near Wigan in about 1967 by a man looking for spare parts for his car. And in 1997 five more works were found in Lambeth Palace Library, including his major work ‘The Kingdom of God’. These have all now been published.

The image above is of the Traherne windows in the Audley Chapel at Hereford Cathedral.