The Roman steps to the temple: an examination of the influence of Robert Southwell, SJ, upon George Herbert.

Bouchard, Gary M.

WHILE SCHOLARS HAVE GENERALLY acknowledged the poetic influence of Robert Southwell, SJ, upon George Herbert, no one has yet presented a substantial consideration either of the specific nature of that influence or of its implications. I propose within the following article to at least begin to do so. First, I will explore briefly the complicated nature of Southwell's influence upon those who read and imitated his religious poetry in the wake of his dramatic public execution at Tyburn in 1595. Second, I will suggest several instances of similarity in the poetry of Southwell and Herbert. And finally, I will note some important differences between the poetry of the two men, helping us to understand, perhaps slightly better, the distinctiveness of Herbert's voice and his place in the history of the religious lyric.

Robert Southwell's Execution and Influence

None of the decaying heads on the pikes at London's Great Stone Gate in the late winter of 1595 would have been as conspicuous as that of Robert Southwell's. Here, after all, was the head of a young Englishman who had for several years been regarded as public enemy number one of the realm, and who was, even now as his head rotted upon a pike, enjoying his first significant literary success. Elizabeth and her advisors would have preferred that this charismatic and eloquent young English Jesuit priest die quietly and unceremoniously during his prolonged imprisonment in the tower. They certainly did not need another Campion for recusant Catholics to adore. But Southwell--not only willing but desirous to be another Campion and weary of his nearly two-year imprisonment in the tower--appealed in a letter to his cousin Robert Cecil that he either be executed or brought to trial. The court accommodated by doing both. Though the finding of guilt by a puppet jury was a forgone conclusion, Southwell's trial was not without its drama. Inevitably the physically broken priest, without so much as a book or paper, was confronted by learned doctors of the Church of England, engaged in doctrinal debate, and urged to confess the errors of his ways. Southwell, by all accounts, defended himself brilliantly, though his most memorable line from the trial was his simple declaration to his torturer, Richard Topcliffe: "Thou art a bad man."

If the condemned Jesuit moved some hearts during his trial, it was during his execution that he evoked the very kind of sympathetic attention that Elizabeth would have preferred to avoid. The crowd of course lined London's street to see Southwell's body being drawn to Tyburne, where, in his final public words, he managed to out-Campion Campion. His confession of himself as a Roman Catholic, a priest, a member of the Society of Jesus, and his accompanying declaration of love and loyalty to his Queen moved, not only many in the crowd, but apparently his executioner, who allowed the condemned man's body to hang for an unusually long time upon the rope so that he would not experience consciously the quartering and disemboweling of his own body. This macabre act of kindness prompted one in the crowd to shout: "I see our hangman does not love the Queen!" Then there is the story that on the very night of Southwell's execution a copy of his verses were brought to Queen Elizabeth, who upon reading in his dedicatory poem the priest's impassioned appeal for poets to reform their talents to the service of God, silently shed tears of her own.

Whether or not the sincerity of Southwell's words combined with the gruesomeness of his end actually managed to evoke the sympathy of England's majesty, it is clear that Elizabeth and others must have looked the other way when the first editions of the dead priest's poems were published within a month after his execution. As many have noted, the popular demand for the dead priest's poetry reflects the extraordinary response of the London crowd to Southwell himself. (1) In fact, if we did not know better, we might regard Southwell's execution as a macabre publicity stunt yielding a remarkable and lasting commercial success. Several editions of his devotional poetry and prose were printed within the next decade, meaning that his audience must have included, besides covert Catholics, many devout Anglicans. Few today recognize how widely Robert Southwell's poetry was read or how well readers in the latter years of the Elizabethan age recollected specific passages and lines of his poetry. Consider that in 1602, seven years after Southwell's execution, John Bodenham published Belvedere, or The Garden of the Muses.

 This large collection of quotations from contemporary poets
 is a rough guide to the fame and popularity of the poets
 represented. Drayton has the largest number of quotations in the
 book (269), followed by Spenser (215), Shakespeare (214),
 and Lodge (79). Southwell shares the fifth place with Daniel;
 both are represented by 75 quotations. In Southwell's case
 the quotations are all from the two small books, Saint Peter's
 Complaint and Moeoniae. (2)

Southwell's appeal to the pious as well as the ordinary reader is irrefutable, and from a contemporary standpoint it is remarkable that he should have been counted among the top five most popular Elizabethan writers. Why, we must ask, did no poets of that age, save Ben Jonson, tell us so? (3)

To answer this, we might imagine ourselves having just purchased from a London book stall a copy of Southwell's poems, and then, coming to the entry of London Bridge, glancing up to behold the poet's dismembered head. In other words, since the public dismemberment of Southwell's body so closely coincided with the public assembly of his poetical works, we need to recognize that the influence that he exercised upon readers involved a complex entanglement of his words and his life, or rather, his death. As Arthur Marotti has recently observed, "the corpse of the author and the corpus of his world" during this age resided in "close imaginative proximity." How much more so for an author whose quartered body parts were burned and publicly defiled on the one hand and sought as relics on the other. The separate actions of termination and proliferation within a matter of only a month's time yielded, at the very least, a complicated mixed message. Consider this example offered by Marotti from the publisher William Leake's dedication to a 1620 edition of Southwell's writings. He "first collected these dismembered parcels into one body," the printer tells his patron, "and published them in an entire edition."'

Simply stated, Southwell's body of poetical works, with its accompanying implorations and imbedded instructions on how to write sacred verse, was a textual body charged with the fresh memory of his more political body, very recently drawn, hanged, and disemboweled before an unusually sedate and sympathetic crowd at Tyburne. And though time would come between Southwell's execution and the many subsequent editions of his works, so too would stirring oral and written accounts of his heroic life and death as well as plenty of anti-Jesuit propaganda. Southwell's writings would likely be promoted as the sacred remains of a martyred priest or dismissed as the pious drivel of a Romish pseudomartyr. (6) Whatever people felt privately, in public discourse there would have been little or no rhetorical middle ground. The life and death of the man, therefore, would remain inseparably entangled with his works, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers, both Roman and Anglican, would have had a hard time separating "the dancer from the dance." One might purchase and read a volume of Southwell's poetry in London soon after his death, as many apparently did, but one would not necessarily boast or even speak publicly of having done so.

As to those like Herbert who would heed Southwell's call and turn their talents to the service of devotional Christian poetry, they would be exceedingly cautious, not just about acknowledging Southwell as a source of influence but even his very existence. Referring to Southwell as "the invisible influence," Alison Shell observes,

 Simply from reading what Elizabethan poets have to say about
 their mentors, one would assume that the turn towards religious
 poetry at this date [1595-6], was spearheaded almost
 entirely by Edmund Spenser, Guillaume Salluste du Bartas
 and the spirit of Philip Sidney. It is not that Southwell
 is never mentioned at all since a number of contemporaries
 praise his style; But it is as if a martyred Catholic could not
 escape an ideological miasma of a kind which did not prevent
 his being read or imitated by non-Catholics, but which may
 well have impeded their overt acknowledgment of him as an
 example. (7)

The popularity of his poetry notwithstanding, Southwell's status as executed traitor did not diminish with time, and events like the Gunpowder Plot (1605) only made worse the oppressive conditions that English Catholics had hoped might improve under the new monarch. Well into the seventeenth century, an Anglican poet like Herbert, following Southwell's implorations to write sacred verse and perhaps imitating his many fine examples, would enter upon such literary exercises with a caution that would make Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence look like a bad case of Freudian nerves. One might attend to Southwell's poetic examples, shedding particularly papists elements, and take great care to leave his name and works unmentioned. Thus any external traces of Southwell's poetic influence are as invisible as his public whereabouts when alive and as impossible to locate, say, as his martyred remains. Even so, four hundred years later, we ought to recognize that when a devout Christian Englishman like George Herbert put on the garb of a religious poet, he did so mindful that it was originally a Roman habit, and mindful too of the politically complex and violent history accompanying that habit.

Herbert Following Southwell's Call

Robert Southwell had been dead for fifteen years when the pious, young George Herbert composed his first surviving poems. Sometime before doing so he had in all likelihood read more than once the famous dedicatory epistle to Southwell's poems in which the poet declared that the devil had possessed most poets to compose idle fancies:

 For in lieu of solemne and devout matter, to which in duety
 they owe their abilities, they noe busy themselves in expressing
 such passions, as onely serve for testimonies to how
 unwoorthy affections they have wedded their veils.... And
 because the best course to let them [poets] see the errour of
 their workes, is to weave a new webbe in their owne loome;
 I have here layd a few course threds together, to invite some
 skillfuller wits to goe forward in the same, or to begin some
 finer peece, wherein it may be scene, how well verse and vertue
 sute together. (8)

God willed us, Southwell insisted, "to exercise our devotion in Himmes and Spirituall Sonnets," and the young George Herbert took up the charge with particular literalness, fashioning two sonnets, which he sent to his mother "as a New-years gift." The poems, he told her, express "my resolution ... that my poor Abilities in Poetry shall be all, and ever consecrated to Gods glory."

Far from indicating poor ability, these early poems clearly show Herbert to be one of "the skillfuller wits" who Southwell had urged to go forward. The sonnets take up the very complaint that the young Southwell had made some eighteen years earlier. Consider these lines from Herbert's first sonnet:

 My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee,
 Wherewith whole shovels of Martyrs once did burn,
 Besides their other flames? Doth Poetry
 Wear Venus Livery? only serve her turn?
 Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and layes
 Upon thine Altar burnt? Cannot thy love
 Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise
 As well as any she? Cannot thy love
 Out-strip their Cupid easily in flight? (9)

Now compare these lines with the prefatory verse to Southwell's Saint Peter's Complaint:

 This makes my mourning muse resolve in teares,
 This Theames my heavy penne to plaine in prose.
 Christes Thorne is sharpe, no head his Garland weares:
 Still finest wits are stilling Menus Rose.
 In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent:
 To Christian workes, few have their tallents lent.

 License my single penne to seeke a phere
 You heavenly sparkes of wit, shew native light:
 Cloude not with mistie loves your Orient cleere,
 Sweete flightes you shoote; learn once to levell right.
 Favor my wish, well wishing workes no ill:
 I moove the Suite, the Graunt rests in your will. (13-24)

This final couplet of Southwell's, intended perhaps to admonish the author of Venus and Adonis, may have spurred the will of the devout young Herbert, who would become the most skillful wit to take up Southwell's call to follow the sacred muse. (10)

It was Herbert's editor, F. E. Hutchinson, who first pointed out the similarities in the above passages from the two poets. The most striking instance being the conversion of Southwell's "finest Wits stiling Venus Rose" to Herbert's question "Doth Poetry / Wear Venus Livery?" The goddess's name is italicized in both instances. We certainly cannot be sure whether or not Herbert would have imagined Southwell to be among the "showls of Martyrs" who "once did burn" with "ancient heat towards thee" or whether the reference to "Besides their other flames" might even be meant to reference the Protestant "martyrs" set ablaze by Bloody Mary. Nevertheless, when Southwell seeks divine inspiration to best the vain efforts of other poets, "License my single penne to seeke a phere / You heavenly sparkes of wit, skew native light: / Cloude not with mistie loves your Orient cleere" ("Complaint," 19-23), his prayer is echoed by Herbert who in his second sonnet bests Southwell. After complaining of Lillies and Roses being used to describe a woman's cheek (i.e., "Mistie Loves"), Herbert declares, "Such pooer invention burns in their low mind, / Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go / To praise, and on thee Lord, some Ink bestow" (9-11). Both poets, burning with "that ancient heat," desire "heavenly sparks of wit" that would send their singular pens upward to seek an eternal sphere. Both poets also insist that such heavenly sparks would not originate from an imaginary female muse. Southwell's complaint in this regard, "Ambitious heades dream you of fortune's pride: / Fill volumes with your forged Goddesse praise" ("Complaint," 31-32) are converted by Herbert into a rhetorical question: "Cannot thy love / Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise / As well as any she?" ("Sonnet I," 6-8).

Even if we were to dismiss all of the above echoes as mere coincidence, we would still be left to admit that Herbert's declaration to write only sacred verse has no more substantial precedence than Southwell's epistle and accompanying poem. John Donne was enjoying the patronage and praise of George Herbert's mother at the time when her son composed his New Year's gifts and set his determined course as a writer of sacred verse. Donne at this time was several years away from taking holy orders and had not yet written one divine poem. It is a commonplace to speak of the older Donne's influence upon Herbert, but might there have been something of the reverse at work? We ought to recall that Herbert's determination to devote his poetry exclusively to "God's glory" (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam is the Jesuit motto) preceded Donne's turn to sacred subject matter by some five years. It is at least possible that Donne's turn toward divine poetry, coinciding with his religious profession in 1615, owes something to Magdalene Herbert's pious young son who, like Southwell, had utterly rejected the subtleties of neo-Platonic poetry. Donne's middle period of poetry had celebrated with argumentative vigor the idea of ascent toward the divine by way of earthly beauty. (11) Young Herbert's declaration to his mother in the above Southwellian-inspired sonnets would seem to challenge her own taste as a patroness of such verse: "Open the bones, and you shall nothing find / In the best face but filth, when Lord, in thee / The beauty lies, in the discovery" ("Sonnet II," 12-14).

In any case, Herbert's first poetic steps to the temple were determined ones from which, spiritual angst notwithstanding, he would not shrink, and each reaffirmation of his purpose recalls the determination of Southwell to convert the use of English poetry to the service of God. Southwell's own apostolate of letters is summarized aptly in the dedicatory prayer that precedes Herbert's Temple: "Turn their eyes hither who shall make a gain: / Theirs, who shall hurt themselves or me, refrain" (5-6). And the mature Herbert asks bluntly, "Who says that onely false hair / Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?" resolving: "Nor let them punish me with losse of rime, / Who plainly say, My God, My King" ("Jordan I," 1-2; 14-15). Herbert would never be so imprudent as to make any explicit mention of Robert Southwell or his poetry, though in "Jordan II," as he describes the "quaint words ... curling with metaphors" with which he first attempted to write poetry, he describes his rejection of what seem to be the fineries of Elizabethan verse, and he offers what may be the subtlest of allusions to Southwell, first in a possibly condensed form of the poet's name: "My thoughts began to burnish, sprout and swell" ("Jordan II," 4; italics mine). Speaking of the "thousands of notions in [his] brain," he says, "This was not quick enough, and that was dead" (10), and then uses Southwell's most famous metaphor of "weaving a new webbe in others' looms" to describe his own faltering creative process: "So did I weave myself into the sense" (14).

Besides their common use of words to comfort and convert people, Herbert and Southwell shared as well a sacramental ministry, something we rarely associate with John Donne, whose priesthood is typically characterized by his brilliant preaching. Herbert's Temple is sometimes just that, a sacred place of sacramental worship, and where sacramental imagery in poetry is concerned Southwell is once again his best precedence. Consider, for example, the similarities between the two poets' respective temples. Amidst a meditation on the Blessed Sacrament, Southwell offers his English Catholic readers a brief catalog of lavish liturgical ingredients that they experienced otherwise only in their memories:

 To ravishe eyes here heavenly bewtyes are,
 To winne the care sweete musicks sweetest sound,
 To lure the tast the Angells heavenly fare,
 To sooth the sent divine perfumes abounde,
 To please the touch he in our hartes doth bedd
 Whose touch doth cure the dephe, the dumm, the dedd.
 ("Of the Blessed Sacrament of the Aulter," 31-36)

Herbert's "The Banquet," though more lyrically provocative, is no less lavish:

 O what sweetnesse from the bowl
 Fills my soul,

 Such as is, and makes divine!
 Is some starre (fled from the sphere)
 Melted there,

 As we sugar melt in wine
 Or hath sweetnesse in the bread
 Made a head

 To subdue the smell of sinne;
 Flowers, and gummes, and powders giving
 All their living,

 Lest the enemie should winne? (7-18)

In both instances the ordinary sinfulness of the worshipers is overcome through the senses. In Southwell's poem the sacrament ravishes eyes, wins ears, lures tastes, sooths s[c]ent, and pleases touch. (12) In Herbert's more Anglican stanzas the ingredients are more simple and more personal ("my") though no less enticing or triumphant. "Lest the enemie should winne," the sweetness of the bowl fills the speaker's soul, and the smell of sin is subdued, not by incense (a vanished papist ingredient) but by the sweetness in the bread.

As in the above passages, when one finds similarities in selected passages of the two poets, one also finds that Herbert has typically improved upon any lyrical thoughts he may have derived from Southwell. Southwell's poetic fault typically lies in the baroque habit of saying too much. Consider this unedifying paradox in a couplet from "Of the Blessed Sacrament of the Aulter": "Twelve did he feede, twelve did their feeder eate, / He made, he dressed, he gave, he was their meate" (11-12). Here the delicacy vanishes and the too obvious metrical pattern ironically furnishes a kind of cacophony in the completion of the now apparent catechism. Herbert would use these very same two words in the couplet that ends his poem "Love (III)" in which Jesus as the host of an inn invites the hesitant sinner to partake: "You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat / So I did sit and eat" (17-18). If Herbert is borrowing from Southwell here, he is doing so with better effect, the imbalance of the lines and the simplicity and directness of the invitation startling the reader into the loving offer of the Eucharist.

The same baroque excess may be seen in another of Southwell's treatments of the Eucharist, "Christ's Bloody Sweat":

 Fat soil, full spring, sweetie olive, grape of blisse,
 That yeelds, that streams, that pours, that dots distil,
 Untild, undrawne, unstampt, untoucht of presse,
 Deare fruit, cleare brookes, faire oile, sweete wine at will:
 Thus Christ unforst prevents in shedding blood
 The whips, the thornes, the nails, the speare, and roode. (1-6)

This poem would have been appealing to Herbert, if only because the dramatic force of its repetitive monosyllables makes it so un-Elizabethan. If the compressed thought of this stanza's final couplet is difficult to comprehend, a near iambic duplicate of the same idea that Christ's suffering spares our own may be heard in Herbert's "Good Friday." Herbert writes,

 That when sinne spies so many foes,
 Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
 All come to lodge there, sinne may say,
 No room for me, and flie away. (25-28)

This very sentiment is repeated again in Herbert's "Affliction II" where he reverses Southwell's notion that Christ was "untouched of presse": "Thy crosse took up in one, / By way of imprest, all my future mone" (14-15). In this same poem Herbert echoes the title of Southwell's poem, noting that if all of humanity's tears were combined "They would discolour thy most bloody sweat" (10). Southwell's essential idea of Christ being turned into a sweet and saving wine may be heard in Herbert's more famous poem "The Bunch of Grapes" where Herbert again insists that Christ was indeed pressed: "But can he want the grape who hath the wine? ... But much more him I must adore / Who of the laws sowre juice sweet wine did make, / Ev'n God himself, being pressed for my sake" (22, 26-28).

Robert Southwell was determined to show that the popular poetic techniques and conceits of his day could be easily converted to religious purposes. This sacred parody, as we have come to call it, yielded several poems whose stanzas are transparently Petrarchan. In his poem "I Die Alive," for example, Southwell writes, "I live, but such a life as ever dies, / I die but such a death as never ends" (5-6). Herbert repeats this very sentiment from St. Paul's epistle in "Affliction II," but avoids the worn-out tone of Petrarchan complaint. The result is a couplet that is less enigmatic and more powerful: "Though I in a broken pay / Die over each houre of Methusalems stay" (4-5). In "Man's Civill Warre" Southwell again presents a conventionally Petrarchan image of spiritual anguish: "My hovering thoughts would flie to heaven / And quiet nestle in the skie, ... But mounting thoughts are hailed downe / With heavy poise of mortall load" (1-2, 5-6). Herbert's version of this very predicament in "Affliction IV" retains the violence and the weight but is more startling and therefore more memorable:

 My thoughts are all a case of knives,
 Wounding my heart
 With scatter'd smart
 As watering pots give flowers their lives. (8-11)

The provocative image of thoughts inflicting physical wounds is in fact anticipated by another Southwell poem, "A Phansie turned to a sinners complaint," where Southwell writes,

 O thoughts, no thoughts but wounds,
 Sometime the seate of joy,
 Sometime the store of quiet rest,
 But now of all annoy. (45-48)

This poem, while it retains Petrarchan tone and imagery ("As one that lives in shewe, / And inwardly dooth die"), contains as well a personal tone that makes it far more than mere conventional sacred parody. It seems, perhaps for this reason, that it may have served as a particular influence upon Herbert. In the poem's opening stanza Southwell's speaker describes himself as

 Hee that his mirth hath lost
 Whose comfort is to rue,
 Whose hope is fallen, whose faith is cras'de,
 Whose trust is found untrue. (1-4)

His "cras'de" faith anticipates the "brittle crazie glasse" that is man in Herbert's "Windows." And when Southwell's sinner refers to himself as one "Whose hart the Altar is" we recognize Herbert's famous shaped poem "The Altar" in which the speaker begins by declaring, "A broken ALTAR Lord, thy servant reares, / Made of a heart and cemented with teares" (1-2).

Southwell's "Phansie" furnished a rhetorical model that is reflected in Herbert's Affliction poems, in which the speaker describes his movement from past happiness to present misery. The following stanzas from Southwell's poem suffice to demonstrate the progression from contentedness to spiritual despondency that characterizes each of Herbert's Affliction poems:

 I sow'd the soyle of peace,
 My blisse was in the spring;
 And day by day the fruite I sate,
 That Vertues tree did bring.

 To Nettles now my corne,
 My field is turn'd to flint;
 Where I a heavie harvest reape,
 Of cares that never stint.

 In was, stands my delight,
 In is, and shall my woe,
 My horrour fastned in the yea
 My hope hangd in the no.

 Forsaken first by grace,
 By pleasure doth procure,
 Of nothing else but care and plaint,
 Can she the minde assure. ("Phansie," 49-60, 77-80)

These lines of poetry are as close as Southwell comes in his poetry to the kind of self-introspection that better characterizes the poetry of Herbert and Donne. And even in this lengthy complaint the speaker reaches a predictable resignation to the precepts of his faith: "Yet Gods must I remaine" (105).

Herbert's Distinctiveness

The lack of personal lament, what Louis Martz terms "quivering intensity," is what most distinguishes Southwell's religious poetry from that of Herbert's. There are other differences between their poetry as well. For example, as a devout Anglican, Herbert barely glances upon the religious subject matter that preoccupies much of Southwell's works, namely, the Blessed Mother whom English reformers had eradicated from liturgical and public prayers but who still kept small vigil in the recesses of English imaginations. Among his other works, Southwell composed more nativity poems than any other poet before or since. Yet, nothing of his "Sequence on the Virgin Mary" or other nativity poems is even remotely echoed in the poetry of Herbert.

In his treatment of figures like Mary, Joseph, Magdalene, and Peter, Southwell (following the prescription given to him by Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises) often employs the first person pronoun, exploring the circumstances and examples of these biblical figures by way of their own internal account of their relationship to Christ. Much more seldom is his use of "I" as in the above poem where the I examines his own spiritual predicament. By contrast, and even more than John Donne whose irrepressible wit counterbalances his sincerity, Herbert is the first great protestant voice in religious poetry. Exploring the inside of a temple that serves as a metaphorical representation of his own self, the poet depicts more vividly than either Southwell or Donne the interior struggle of an individual to come to God. Southwell had prudently depicted such struggles in the characters of Peter or Magdalene, whose errors, repentance, and redemption are legendary, and whose tears are emblematic of all who would imitate them. Since the I in Herbert's poetry is an eloquent everyman, there is genuine suspense and doubt as to the outcome of any given poem. For example, "the Collar" begins with the speaker striking the board and declaring "No more. I will abroad" and then proceeds, like the "Affliction" poems, to recall the miseries of his life, which in contrast to the harrowing drama of Southwell's life, are but the boredom, disappointments, and ill-health of a devout rural pastor who has forsaken the accoutrements of wealth and fame. One senses that, even if furnished paper and pen in his cell in the tower, the tormented Southwell would have steered his writing away from the autobiographical and toward the communal; he likely would have regarded his own spiritual struggles with God, his "dark night of the soul" or "private ejaculations" as they would come to be called by Vaughan, as being of no particular pastoral or literary value. (13)

The essential difference then between Southwell and Herbert's verse, therefore, is not just the specificity of Herbert's imagery or the fact that his piety is less formulaic and more subtle. Nor is it simply that Southwell's sacred parody of Elizabethan verse makes much of his poetry conventionally Petrarchan and sometimes cumbersomely baroque. Rather it is Herbert's embrace and articulation of what Shell calls a "Protestantised aesthetic" in which, spiritually speaking, "the fight [is] the thing." (14) The speaker who discourses with God in Herbert's poems is both bolder than Southwell and more sincere than Donne. Seeking spiritual consolation, to discover the truth for himself, Southwell's speaker asks, "Faire soule, how long shall veyles thy graces shroud?" and "How long shall this exile withhold thy right?" ("At Home In Heaven," 1-2). Herbert's speaker inquires much more emphatically, "Sweet Peace, where dost thou dwell? I humbly crave / Let me once know" ("Peace," 1-2). The contrition in Southwell's poem is born of the pain that the speaker's sins cause Christ: "O Lord my sinne doth over-charge thy brest, / The poyse thereof doth force thy knees to bow" ("Sinnes Heavie Loade," 1-2). Herbert's speaker, by contrast, demands relief for himself: "Wherefore my faults and sinnes, / Lord, I acknowledge; take thy plagues away" ("Confession," 25-26).

Recently Alison Shell modified Louis Martz's claim of several decades ago that Robert Southwell was the first significant writer of a new kind of poetry. Shell demonstrates that there was a ripe literary context for the religious lyric when Southwell came to England in the late 1580s. "It would be a mistake," she says, "to claim that Southwell single-handedly re-introduced imaginative religious poetry to England after the Reformation." (15) Even so, she argues, "the posthumous publication in 1595 of Saint Peters Complaint gave sacred verse a definitive new direction, and helped to create a climate in which non-biblical religious poetry became increasingly acceptable." (16) George Herbert composed his poetry within this climate that Southwell helped to create, and mindful of the complexity and hazard of following his poetic precedence, he himself seems quite deliberately to have fashioned a new kind of poetry: orthodox in its beliefs, yet personal in its expression of those beliefs. Herbert retains the essential ingredients of the sacramental life while emphasizing the necessity of good preaching. At the same time he heightens the drama of private prayer and meditation.

Despite the evident and sometimes precarious divide between the Church of England and that of Rome and the resulting differences in the lives and poetry of these two poet-priests, what they shared in common (particularly in retrospect) may ultimately have been more substantial than the differences that distinguished them. For central to the poetry and life of each man was the Christian sacramental life, with its accompanying words and images, and an understanding and acceptance of human suffering within the context of the paschal mystery of suffering, death, and resurrection. Both Southwell and Herbert accompanied their vocations with an early and sustained commitment to the creation of poetry "wherein it may be scene, how well verse and vertue sute together," and which served readers, only after the poets' deaths, as a source of comfort and conversion.

Notes

(1.) Robert Southwell, The Poems of Robert Southwell, ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford at the Clarendon press, 1967), Iv (hereafter cited in text with reference to line numbers).

(2.) Frank Brownlow, Robert Southwell (New York: Twane, 1996), 126.

(3.) Ben Jonson's remark to Drummond of Hawthornden "that Southwell was hanged, yet so he had written that piece of his The Burning Babe he would have been content to destroy many of his" is well known and chiefly responsible for the continual anthologizing of the one Southwell poem. Hence the hanged poet now hangs again, this time in the English canon upon the tentative weight of one peculiar poem.

(4.) Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism Discourses in Early Modern England, ed. Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997) S4.

(5.) Ibid., 53.

(6.) In Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy Marotti makes a compelling case that Southwell's published writings would have been regarded by many as a kind of relic. "Despite confessional differences and the atmosphere of polemical viciousness within print culture, the literary remains of a Catholic author could be both preserved and venerated."

(7.) Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1999) 59.

(8.) Southwell, The Poems, 1.

(9.) George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1974) lines 1-6 (hereafter cited in text with reference to line numbers).

(10.) Southwell biographer, Christopher Delvin (The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr [New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956]) was the first one in the twentieth century to expound upon Southwell's connections--familial and literary--to Shakespeare. Since then others have followed: Frank Brownlow (Robert Southwell), John Klause ("New Sources for Shakespeare's King John: The Writings of Robert Southwell," Studies in Philology 98, no. 4-[2001]), and Richard Wilson ("A Bloody Question: The Politics of Venus and Adonis," Religion and the Arts 5, no. 3 [2001]: 297-316). Wilson and Klause are both bringing forth entire books on this topic. Klause's work is especially persuasive and astute in noting a remarkable number of textual echoes between the works of the two poets.

(11.) "The Cannonization," "The Relic," and "The Ecstasy" are but three notable examples.

(12.) Recusant Catholics' experience of the Mass in a makeshift home chapel certainly would not have enjoyed the scent of incense, the bold singing of hymns, or any other liturgical ingredients that might attract attention or that could not be easily hidden away in the event of a raid. Southwell is therefore giving his readers in poetry an experience they could not have in life.

(13.) Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, 101.

(14.) Ibid., 58.

(15). Ibid.

(16.) Because of the compelling drama of his life, readers have predictably looked to Southwell's works with an autobiographical expectation. Until very recently his Hundred Meditations on the Love Of God were believed, as their nineteenth-century editor claimed in his preface, to be the window into the soul of a martyr. Only in recent decades was it discovered that the prose meditations were actually a translation by Southwell of an Italian work, which was itself the translation of the original meditations composed by a Spanish Franciscan in the fifteenth century.

Other Works Referenced

Martz, Louis. The Poetry of Meditation. Yale University press, 1954

--. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England. London: Macmillan press, 1999.

--. The Prose Works of Robert Southwell: Containing Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears, The Triumphs Over Death, and An Epistle of Comfort from the Editions of 1593. Ed. W. Jos. Walter. London: Keting, Brown & Co., 1828.