need for money loomed large as her primary motive, and as had Dryden, she looked to the London stage for revenue and reputation. She certainly viewed herself as a poet, but her best poetry seems to exist within the context of her plays.

One problem in discussing Behn’s poetry is that one cannot always catalog with confidence those pieces attributed to her and written by others. Also, there is confusion regarding those pieces actually written by her but attributed to others. For example, as late as 1926, and again in 1933, two different editors of quite distinct editions of the earl of Rochester’s poetry erroneously assigned three of Behn’s poems to Rochester, and that error remained uncorrected until 1939. Textual matters aside, however, Behn’s poetry still provides substantive issues for critical discussion. Commentators have traditionally favored the songs from her plays, maintaining that the grace and spontaneity of these pieces rise above the artificiality of the longer verses—the latter weighed down by convention and lack of inspiration. True, her major poem (at least in terms of its length) of two thousand lines, A Voyage to the Island of Love, while carrying the romantic allegory to extremes, does succeed in its purpose: a poetic paraphrase of the French original, and nothing more. Indeed, Behn, as a playwright, no doubt viewed poetry as a diversion and exercise; she considered both activities useful and important, and both provided added dimensions to her art. She was certainly not a great poet; but few during her time were. Her poetic success, then, must be measured in terms of her competence, for which she may, in all honesty, receive high marks and be entitled to a permanent place on the roster of poets.

Abdelazar

At the head of the list are two songs from the play Abdelazar: Or, The Moor’s Revenge (pr. 1676), the first a sixteen-line lyric known by its opening, “Love in fantastic triumph sate.” Despite the trite (even by Restoration standards) dramatic setting—the usurper who murders his trusting sovereign and puts to death all who block his path to the throne—the poem reflects pure, personal feeling, as the poet laments over the misery of unrequited love. Behn depicts Love as a “strange tyrannic power” that dominates the amorous world; there is nothing terribly complicated, in either the sound or the sense of the language, for she relies upon simple sighs, tears, pride, cruelty, and fear. In the end, the poem succeeds because it goes directly to the central issue of the poet’s personal unhappiness. “But my poor heart alone is harmed,/ Whilst thine the victor is, and free.” The other song from Abdelazar is a dialogue between a nymph and her swain. The young lady, cognizant of the brevity of “a lover’s day,” begs her lover to make haste; the swain, in company with shepherds, shepherdesses, and pipes, quickly responds. He bears a stray lamb of hers, which he has caught so that she may chastise the creature (“with one angry look from thy fair eyes”) for having wandered from the flock. The analogy between man and beast is obvious and nothing more need be said; the swain begs her to hurry, for “how very short a lover’s day!”

Songs and elegies

There are other songs of equal or slightly less merit, and they all seem to contain variations on the same themes. In one, “’Tis not your saying that you love,” the speaker urges her lover to cease his talk of love and, simply, love her; otherwise, she will no longer be able to live. Another, a song from Lycidus beginning “A thousand martyrs I have made,” mocks “the fools that whine for love” and unmasks the fashion of those who, on the surface, appear deeply wounded by the torments of love when they actually seek nothing from love but its shallow pleasures. In a third song, “When Jemmy first began to love,” Behn returns to the shepherd and his flock motif. On this occasion, the nymph, overpowered by Jemmy’s songs, kisses, and general air of happiness, gives herself completely to him. Then the call to arms beckons; Jemmy exchanges his sheep hooks for a sword, his pipes for warlike sounds, and, perhaps, his bracelets for wounds. At the end, the poor nymph must mourn, but for whom it is not certain: for the departed Jemmy or for herself, who must endure without him? Finally, in one of the longest of her songs, a 140-line narrative titled “The Disappointment,” Behn introduces some of the indelicacies and indiscretions of which Victorian critics and biographers accused her. By late seventeenth century standards, the piece is indeed graphic (although certainly not vulgar or even indecent); but it nevertheless succeeds in demonstrating how excessive pleasure can easily turn to pain.

Although Behn, whether by choice or situation, kept outside the arena of poetic competition of the sort engaged in by Dryden and his rivals, she managed to establish personal relationships with the major figures of her age. Dryden always treated her with civility and even kindness, and there are those who maintain that a piece often attributed to Behn—“On Mr. Dryden, Renegade,” and beginning “Scorning religion all thy lifetime past,/ And now embracing popery at last”—was not of her making. In addition, she remained on friendly terms with Thomas Otway, Edward Ravenscroft, Edmund Waller, and the earl of Rochester.

“On the Death of the Late Earl of Rochester”

Behn wrote elegies for Waller and Rochester, and both poems are well suited to their occasion; yet they are two distinctly different poems. “On the Death of the Late Earl of Rochester” (1685) is an appeal to the world to mourn the loss of a great and multifaceted personality: The muses must mourn the passing of a wit, youths must mourn the end of a “dear instructing rage” against foolishness, maidens the loss of a heaven-sent lover, the little gods of love the loss of a divine lover, and the unhappy world the passage of a great man. Draped in its pastoral and classical mantles, the poem glorifies a subject not entirely worthy of glorification; yet, if the reader can momentarily forget about Rochester, the piece is not entirely without merit. After all, the poet did demonstrate that she knew how to write a competent elegy.

“On the Death of Edmund Waller”

More than seven years later, on October 21, 1687, the aged poet Edmund Waller died, and again Behn penned an elegiac response, “On the Death of Edmund Waller.” Her circumstances, however, had changed considerably since the passing of Rochester in July, 1680. Her health was poor, her finances low, her literary reputation not very secure. Apparently she had to write the piece in some haste, specifically for a collection of poems dedicated to Waller and written by his friends. Finally, Behn was deeply affected by Waller’s death and chose the opportunity to associate that event with her own situation—that of the struggling, ailing, and aging (although she was then only forty-seven) artist. Thus, she sets the melancholy tone at the outset by identifying herself as “I, who by toils of sickness, am become/ Almost as near as thou art to a tomb.” Throughout, she inserts references to an untuned and ignorant world, the muses’ dark land, the low ebb of sense, the scanty gratitude and fickle love of the unthinking crowd—all of which seem more appropriate to her private and professional life than to Waller’s. Still, the poem is not an unusual example of the elegy; Behn was not the first poet to announce her own personal problems while calling upon the world to mourn the loss of a notable person.

Midway through the elegy to Waller, Behn provides a clue that may well reveal her purpose as a poet and, further, may help to establish her legitimacy within the genre. She writes of a pre-Wallerian world of meaningless learning, wherein dull and obscure declamations prevented the blossoming of sensitive poets and true poetry and produced nothing that was “great and gay.” During those barren years, she laments, there existed only thoughtless labor, devoid of instruction, pleasure, and (most important) passion. In a word, “the poets knew not Love.” Such expressions and sentiments may appear, on the surface, as attempts to elevate the memory of her subject; in reality, they serve well to underline her own concerns for poetry as a means of bringing harmony to disorder, comfort to discord, and love to insensitivity. As a woman, she looked upon a poetic field dominated by masculine activity and masculine expression, by masculine attitudes and masculine ideals. Where, she must certainly have asked herself, could one find the appropriate context in which to convey to an audience composed of both males and females those passions peculiar to her sex and to her person?

Whether she actually found the form in which to house that passion—or whether she even possessed the craft and the intellect to express it—is difficult to determine. One problem, of course, is that Behn did not write a sufficient quantity of poetry beyond her plays and novels to allow for a reasonable judgment. Nevertheless, she never ceased trying to pour forth the pain and the love that dominated her emotions. She wrote (as in “’Tis not your saying that you love”) that actions, not words, must reinforce declarations of love, for only love itself can sustain life. Without love, there is no life. Throughout her poems, that conclusion reverberates from line to line: Love is a triumph, a lover’s day is short, the death of one partner means the spiritual (and automatic) death of the one remaining; a lover’s soul is made of love, while the completion of an empty (and thus meaningless) act of love leaves a lover “half dead and breathless.”

Exotic settings

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Behn’s poetry is her taste for exotic settings. These backdrops appear to contradict her very way of life. Behn was a woman of the city, of the urban social and intellectual center of a nation that had only recently undergone political trauma and change. She belonged to the theater, the drawing room, the coffeehouse, the palace—even to the boudoir. Not many of those settings, however, found their way into her poetry. Instead, she selected for her poetic environments a composite that she called the “amorous world” (“Love in fantastic triumph sate”), complete with listening birds, feeding flocks, the aromatic boughs and fruit of a juniper tree, trembling limbs, yielding grass, crystal dew, a lone thicket made for love, and flowers bathed in the morning dew.

Even the obviously human subjects, both alive and dead, rarely walk the streets of the town or meditate in the quiet of their own earthly gardens. Thus, Dryden, in the midst of religious disorientation, wanders about upon the wings of his own shame, in search of “Moses’ God”; Rochester flies, quick as departing light, upon the fragrance of softly falling roses; and Waller, a heaven-born genius, is described as having rescued the chosen tribe of poetry from the Egyptian night. Of course, in the last two instances, Behn wrote elegies, which naturally allowed her departed subjects greater room for celestial meanderings. Love, however, had to be relieved from its earthly, banal confines. Love was very much Behn’s real subject as a poet, but she was never prepared to discuss it within the context of the harsh and often ugly realities of her own time and place.