Religion is in the poem's subtitle: "A Song in Honor of St. Cecilia's Day." Ostensibly, "Alexander's Feast" is a religious poem, specifically a Catholic work, an ode intended to be recited (actually sung) at the celebration of the feast of St. Cecilia on November 22. 1688, in the court of James II.

James himself was a devout Catholic who had ascended to the throne in 1685 after a nearly century-long civil war that had set Catholics and Protestants against each other over the religious direction of England. Just weeks after the feast day, in early 1689, James II was deposed as king and replaced by the Protestant monarchs William and Mary in what is now called the Glorious Revolution.

Therein lies the poem's dilemma. As the poem recounts the intoxicated celebrations of Alexander the Great and his army, the poem seems strangely un-Christian. The pagan Alexander fancies himself a God, or at least "godlike;" his victorious troops, after a long day of slaughter, carelessly, wantonly drink to excess; Thais, Alexander's mistress, is bent on apocalyptic-style vengeance; and in the closing stanzas Alexander's drunken troops burn down the entire capital city, people and all. For a religious poem, Dryden's ode is not very, well, religious.

The dilemma is suggested in the poem's coda, the last stanza that hastily, awkwardly introduces the saint who was supposedly the occasion for the poem. That closing stanza, so abrupt and so intrusive and so not part of Alexander's feast, feels taped on, an afterthought. Had the poem ended with the drunken Greeks torching the city of Persepolis in response to the jangling anthem that the minstrel suddenly pounds out on the lyre, the poem would expose Dryden's decidedly un-Christian argument. But, after recounting the electrifying atmosphere generated and then manipulated by a court minstrel, Timotheus, the closing stanza dutifully, if reluctantly, turns the poem's vision upward. Oh yes, the speaker says as if reminding himself that there is that saint, and by the way, she had a magnificent voice.

An old-school veneration of a saint might seem a bit Renaissance for an England within a dozen years of the eighteenth century. England was moving into a new era. Therein lies the thematic complexity of the poem. Dryden straddles two eras: the Renaissance, with its veneration of the Christian vision amid and against the emergence of what would come to be called the Enlightenment, with its respect for science and its challenge to the centuries-old perceptions about the cosmos that had long sustained the Christian faith.

"Alexander's Feast" is grounded in one of history's most recognized figures. Historians of Antiquity know much about the towering figure of Alexander the Great—historians know about his father, his teachers, his many lovers, and even his horse. But not his minstrel. Timotheus is a fictional construct. More than its joyous celebration of the power of music, the poem breaks new ground by using a fictional character as a way to explore the tension between the vertical and horizontal visions, the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

To be generous, Dryden was a Catholic, yes, but his late-in-life conversion (in 1688) was less a matter of spiritual urgency or religious conviction and more a pragmatic matter of job security. To remain in the favor of the British court (Dryden had been England's Poet Laureate since 1668), Dryden converted to Catholicism after the ascension to the throne of James II, a Catholic.

In what will emerge as one of the defining tenets of the Enlightenment, Dryden's poem argues the power of the artist in an era when God was being quietly but...