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Catholicism and Rhetoric in Southwell, Crashaw, Dryden and Pope
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
Extract
The 150 years separating Southwell from Pope saw great changes in English Catholicism. In the later sixteenth century the Catholic faith was still native English, and the older poetical tradition of lyric religious meditation, which Southwell found flourishing about him when he returned from Rome in July 1586, blended readily in his own poetry with the newly passionate and ingenious devotion of the Counter-Reformation. The enterprise of reviving the Faith in England was vigorous and young, and the blood of the martyrs flowing in the very streets of London as once it had flowed in the streets of Rome must have made of the Church in its most deeply traditional and heroic aspect a present English reality. The passionate ingenuity of the Counter-Reformation; the plainness of the English religious and gnomic tradition; the edge of sober reality and depth given to meditation, even curious meditation, on the sufferings of Christ and the saints by the virtual certainty of the gallows; together with a rhetorical hold on the Faith deeper and older than the Counter-Reformation devotion he found in Italy, to be found rather together with the lives of the early martyrs in his breviary: all combined in Southwell's best poetry in a taut and assured style, full of balanced tensions. But as the years passed, England was not converted and the time of martyrdom ended. Where bloody persecution failed, exile and neglect began to succeed. A sense of the Church as thoroughly English and as in the fervour of its first centuries gradually disappeared. English Catholic devotion in the poetry of Crashaw became contemporary and sometimes uncontrollably ingenious and Continental, with martyrdom a metaphor, though exile a reality. In Dryden's poetry, the Church also appeared in very much its contemporary aspect, though expressing itself now not so much in devotional as in apologetic terms. Dryden's conversion was clearly genuine and his apologia sincere, but he had in his poetry an oddly restricted hold on the Faith, speaking of the Church's relation to other Christian sects often in political or social language. Dryden suffered willingly, however, for his belief, though not exile or martyrdom; whereas the suspicion with Pope is always that, though he remained a Catholic, his Catholicism was a social disability to be borne in much the same way as his physical disability. In the poetry of Pope, Catholicism is a remnant, contributing rather little to an assurance about final realities as impressive perhaps in its way as Southwell's.
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References
Notes
1 The Poems of Robert Southwell, ed. by McDonald, James H. & Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford, 1967), p. 1.Google Scholar
2 Poems of Southwell, p. 2.
3 In Timber, or Discoveries (Works of Ben Jonson, ed. by Herford, C. H., P. & E. Simpson, vol. VIII [Oxford, 1947], p. 625).Google Scholar
4 Pierre, Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer (London, 1935), p. 69.Google Scholar
5 Breviarium Romanum, Pii. V. Pont. Max. iussu editum, Salmanticae, 1590: Dom. infra Oct. Nativitatis, ad Matutinum, in 111 Noct.
6 Sicut in lectione evangelica, fratres diarissimi, audistis, caeli Regi nato, Rex terrae turbatus est, quia nimirum terrena altitudo cbnfunditur, cum celsitudo caelestis aperitur. Sed quaerendum nobis est, quidnam sit, quod, Redemptore nato, Pastoribus in ludaea Angelus apparuit, atque ad adorandum hunc ab Oriente Magos non Angelus, sed stella perduxit? Quia videlicet ludaeis, tamquam ratione utentibus, rationale animal, id est, Angelus praedicare debuit: Gentiles vero, quia uti ratione nesciebant, ad cognoscendum Dominum non per vocem, sed per signa perducuntur: unde et per Paulum dicitur: Linguae in Signum sunt non fidelibus, sed infidelibus: prophetiae autem, non infidelibus, sed fidelibus. Quia et Ulis prophetiae tamquam fidelibus, non infidelibus: et istis signa tamquam infidelibus non fidelibus data sunt. Et notandum, quod Redemptorem nostrum cum iam perfectae esset aetatis, eisdem Gentiiibus Apostoli praedicant, loquentem, Stella Gentibus denunciai: quia nimirum rationis ordo poscebat, [my emphasis] ut et loquentem iam Dominum loquentes nobis praedicatores innotescerent, et necdum loquentem dementa muta praedicarent. Sed in omnibus signis, quae vel nascente Domino, vel moriente eo monstrata sunt, considerandum nobis est, quanta fuerit in quorumdam ludaeorum corde duritia, qui hunc nec per prophetiae donum nec per miracula agnoverunt. Omnia quippe elementa auctorem suum venisse testata sunt. Ut enim de eis quiddam usu humano Ioquar: Deum hunc caeli esse cognoverunt, quia Stellam protinus miserunt. Mare cognovit, quia sub plantis eius calcabile se praebuit. Terra cognovit, quia eo moriente contremuit. Sol cognovit, quia lucis suae radios abscondit. Saxa et parietes agnoverunt, quia tempore mortis ejus scissa sunt. Infernus agnovit, quia hos, quos tenebat mortuos reddidit. Et tarnen hunc, quem omnia insensibilia elementae Dominum senserunt, adhuc infidelium ludaeorum corda Deum minime esse cognoscunt, et duriora saxis, scindi ad poenitendum nolunt.
7 Poems of Southwell, p. 3.
8 Ibid., pp. 57-58.
9 Ibid., pp. 15-16.
10 Ibid., p. lxxxix.
11 Ibid., p. 79.
12 Ibid., p. 99
13 Austin, Warren, Richard Crashaw (London, 1939), p. 60.Google Scholar
14 The First Anniversary, 1, 213.
15 The Poems of Richard Crashaw, ed. by Martin, L. C. (Oxford, 1927), pp. 307–08.Google Scholar
16 Poems of Crashaw, p. 309.
17 Ecclus. xxxv, 18-19.
18 Poems of Crashaw, pp. 326-7.
19 The Hind and the Panther, 1, 1-4.
20 Ibid., 1, 452-69.
21 Ibid., 1, 154-65.
22 Ibid., 2, 208-223.
23 Ibid., 2, 389-402.
24 Ibid., 2, 150-163.
25 Ibid., 1, 557-72.
26 An Essay on Man, Ep. II, 1-18.
27 Poems of Pope, Twickenham Edition, Vol. IV, ed. by John, Butt (London, 1939), pp. 168–9,Google Scholar note to 1,60.
28 ‘The Universal Prayer’, 49-52.
29 An Essay on Man, Ep. I, 99-112.
30 The Epistle to Arbuthnot, 267-74.
31 Ibid., 262-67.
32 An Essay on Man, Ep. I, 267-94.