The Poet
[An American educator specializing in English literature, Link has published editions of works by Behn, John Dryden, Hannah Cowley, and Walter Scott. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of Behn's poetry.]
Most of Mrs. Behn's poetry is occasional—the work of a professional dramatist with a considerable lyric talent and a constant need for money. For her plays she wrote prologues and epilogues, only occasionally obtaining them from a fellow writer; these works constitute a clearly defined group. A second grouping is more miscellaneous: some forty songs written to be sung within the plays, several sets of commendatory verses, a number of topical pieces, and several translations. Elegies and panegyrics, often written in the loosely organized irregular stanza popularized by Abraham Cowley a generation earlier, make up a final group. A brief study of some of these poems suggests Mrs. Behn's unusual versatility and shows the quality of her best work.
PROLOGUES AND EPILOGUES
The prologues and epilogues are typical of the period. They are always in couplets, though more triplets appear than Pope would have approved; and they are usually satiric and topical. The speaker, usually one of the important characters in the piece, addresses the audience directly; comments on the state of the theater and of the playgoers are staple fare. The audience is rarely praised for its good taste; in one prologue after another Mrs. Behn criticizes the trend toward farce and "entertainment" which she saw debasing the legitimate stage:
Alas! a poet's good for nothing now,
Unless he have the knack of conjuring too;
For 'tis beyond all natural sense to guess
How their strange miracles are brought to pass.
Your Presto Jack be gone, and come again,
With all the hocus art of legerdemain;
Your dancing tester, nutmeg, and your cups,
Outdoes your heroes and your amorous fops.
Some of the pieces document the change. The prologue to The Emperor of the Moon, for example, traces the progress of recent drama from heroic tragedy through "humbler comedy" to farce. The attack on the taste of the playgoer is conventional, of course, but it is made too often to have no basis in fact. The fore- and afterpieces themselves give at least two reasons for the decline in quality. One is the thinning audience, a basic economic fact which forced most playwrights to take any measures necessary to fill the house. The epilogue to The Second Part of the Rover speaks of the poets as kings of wit summoning their parliaments by playbill; the new play used to be "the speech that begs supply":
But now—
The scanted tribute is so slowly paid,
Our poets must find out another trade;
They've tried all ways th' insatiate clan to please;
Have parted with their old prerogatives—
Their birthright satiring, and their just pretense
Of judging, even their own wit and sense—
And write against their consciences, to show
How dull they can be to comply with you.
They've flattered all the mutineers i' th' nation,
Grosser than e'er was done in dedication;
Pleased your sick palates with fantastic wit,
Such as was ne'er a treat before to th' pit;
Giants, fat cardinals, Pope Joans, and friars,
To entertain right worshipfuls and squires….
The prologue to Abdelazer chides the gallants for having been so long absent and for coming "only on the first and second days"; the epilogue to The Emperor of the Moon laments that "Not one is left will write for thin third day."
The other reason suggested for the decline is the turbulent political situation. The actress Elizabeth Currer comes on stage at the start of The Feigned Courtesans to ask:
Who would have thought such hellish times to've seen,
When I should be neglected at eighteen?
That youth and beauty should be quite undone,
A pox upon the Whore of Babylon.
Apparently, many of the audience no longer supported the Tory side, particularly in the late 1670's and early 1680's: "And yet you'll come but once, unless by stealth, / Except the author be for commonwealth."
The gallants and fops who made up a large share of the audience are often baited in a good-humored way, especially for their capriciousness and love for the cheap and spectacular: "Vain amorous coxcombs every where are found, / Fops for all uses but the stage abound." The prologue to The Young King, in like vein, mocks the "Sparks who are of noise and nonsense full, / At fifteen witty, and at twenty dull." But a stronger lash is reserved for country squires, city merchants, and of course Puritans. The country bumpkin "At last by happy chance is hither led, / To purchase clap with loss of maidenhead"; he comes to be "all burlesque in mode and dress," and nothing more than "mighty noise and show." The "cit" is often an upstart, and nearly always Whiggish. Satire against the Whigs is both general and specific, as in the references to the Ignoramus jury and to Titus Oates. Mrs. Behn follows the Tory line in identifying Shaftesbury and his group with the cant and violence of the Good Old Cause. The prologue to The Roundheads, a typical example, has the ghost of Hewson "Roused by strange scandal from th' eternal flame" to ask whether all the furor over Jesuit plots can "Act mischief equal to Presbytery":
Pay those that rail, and those that can delude
With scribbling nonsense the loose multitude.
Pay well your witnesses, they may not run
To the right side, and tell who set 'em on.
Pay 'em so well, that they may ne'er recant,
And so turn honest merely out of want.
Pay juries, that no formal laws may harm us;
Let treason be secured by Ignoramus.
The political theme appears in some form in nearly half of the twenty-two prologues and epilogues presumably written by Mrs. Behn. The epilogue to The Rover draws an analogy between Puritanism and those who would "with canting rule … the stage refine," and Mrs. Behn attacks "dull method" also in the prologue to The Amorous Prince and in the epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy. The reverse of the coin appears in the frequent panegyrics to Charles and his policies. The epilogue to The Young King, for example, develops a not so obscure contrast between the Arcadian shepherd in peaceful command of his flock and the chaotic state of England; the concluding reference, "And keep the golden age within our woods and plains," makes use of an image common in Tory poetry.
Many, if not all, of these themes appear frequently in prologues and epilogues by other hands; they occasionally serve to confirm and emphasize themes in the plays they accompany, but only more personal themes like the defense of women in the epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy and in the prologue to The Forced Marriage are peculiar to Mrs. Behn.
Mrs. Behn's handling of the couplet form is usually competent and often distinguished. Sustained metaphors like that in the epilogue to Part Two of The Rover remind one of Dryden, the greatest master of the genre. The form demands an ear for the rhythms of speech, and the technical skill to achieve variety and interest within the limitations of the two-line unit. Mrs. Behn has both. In one piece after another she manages to bring off a goodhumored attack on the foibles of her audience, allude satirically to contemporary politics, and simultaneously evoke the mood most suitable for introducing her play and for bringing the evening to a close. The prologue to Sir Patient Fancy, spoken by the actor Thomas Betterton, adopts the bantering, familiar tone characteristic of the period:
Oh the great blessing of a little wit!
I've seen an elevated poet sit
And hear the audience laugh and clap, yet say,
Gad, after all, 'tis a damned silly play;
He, unconcerned, cries only—Is it so?
No matter, these unwitty things will do
When your fine, fustian, useless eloquence
Serves but to chime asleep a drowsy audience.
Who at the vast expense of wit would treat,
That might so cheaply please the appetite?
The positioning of great and little, the irony of blessing, and the pun of elevated are important details. The rhymes in lines 2, 3, and 4 are naturally produced without inversion of normal syntax; the use of the pyrrhic foot in line 3, forcing a slight accent on the yet, emphasizes the disjunction stated in the couplet and the variability of the audience. Mrs. Behn places her caesuras to achieve maximum variety within the lines, and she guards against monotony by varying iambs with trochees (ll. 1 and 9) and by using polysyllables in almost every line. The alexandrine in line 8 is perhaps too obviously the metrical equivalent of drowsy, but the alliteration and accent shift in fine fustian produce exactly the desired effect.
Mrs. Behn rarely uses the superb organizing images which inform Dryden's best prologues. But the political situation provides her with a ready-made metaphor which she manipulates with great skill. The same prologue furnishes a good example:
But now, like happy states luxurious grown,
The monarch wit unjustly you dethrone,
And a tyrannic commonwealth prefer,
Where each small wit starts up and claims his share;
And all those laurels are in pieces torn,
Which did e'er while one sacred head adorn.
The sacred head is Dryden, but the metaphor takes the passage beyond a single literary figure. Dryden becomes Charles; his "dethronement" by a mob of hack poets and pamphleteers is made to suggest not merely the destruction of literary values but the fate of the royal martyr and its consequences in the Commonwealth period. The use of the word sacred establishes still another level of meaning: beyond the "death" of Dryden is the death of Charles; beyond it is that of Christ. The effect of the passage is to connect two apparently unrelated phenomena—the state of literature and the state of the nation; assert that the one is caused by the other; and use the religious image to condemn republicanism in all three areas of life.
A final example of her skill may be cited from the prologue to The City Heiress, which uses an extended metaphor from the business world to satirize an abortive dinner of "thanksgiving" planned by the Whigs to discomfit the Tories:
Who, but the most incorrigible fops,
For ever doomed in dismal cells, called shops,
To cheat and damn themselves to get their livings,
Would lay sweet money out in sham Thanksgivings?
Sham-plots, you may have paid for o'er and o'er;
But whoe'er paid for a sham treat before?
Had you not better sent your offerings all
Hither to us, than Sequestrators Hall?
I being your steward, justice had been done ye;
I could have entertained you worth your money.
In ten lines, Mrs. Behn identifies the leading Whigs as foppish shopkeepers, refers slyly to the collapse of the Oates plot, and wittily suggests that her Tory play would have been better entertainment for the Whigs than anything they themselves could have planned for the same money.
SONGS AND OTHER SHORT POEMS
The Restoration wits perfected a sophisticated and impersonal style which for elegance, wit, and precision of tone has seldom been surpassed in English poetry. The mode they adopted was limited and artificial, but its limits were self-imposed and its artificiality deliberate. Mrs. Behn's best songs bear comparison with those of the court poets and of Matthew Prior; few of them fail to give pleasure after nearly three hundred years.
Her lyric gift is evident from the first. The masque in Act V of The Forced Marriage is graceful enough, but the page's song in II. vi is at another level of achievement:
The sophisticated pastoralism exemplified by the conscious and half-ironic use of personification (pitying streams) and by the light oxymoron (false charming) is quite typical. Mrs. Behn accepts both the language and the themes dictated by the convention; the names and the setting are as appropriate as the sentiments. The stylization is obvious, the lyric quality and the handling of rhythm exceptional.
Other fine examples are Hippolita's song in III.iii of The Dutch Lover, and the song for II.vi of the same play:
His charming eyes no aid required,
To tell their amorous tale:
On her that was already fired
'Twas easy to prevail.
He did but kiss, and clasp me round,
Whilst they his thoughts expressed;
And gently laid me on the ground—
Ah! Who can guess the rest?
The later plays show no decline in Mrs. Behn's powers. The magnificent song which opens Abdelazer—"Love in Fantastic Triumph Sat"—has been often reprinted, and is probably her best known poem. The songs in The Town Fop are almost as good. The comic serenade in Sir Patient Fancy (III.ix) is deliberately bathetic and beautifully illuminates Sir Credulous' character. Both The Second Part of the Rover and The City Heiress contain fine songs: Sir Anthony's catch in Act III scene i of the latter is as appropriate for him as for the situation in which it occurs.
All of these songs come early in Mrs. Behn's career. Many of them were collected in her Poems upon Several Occasions: With a Voyage to the Island of Love (1684). By that time she had written a considerable number of other lyrics. Some of them, like "Our Cabal," have unclear biographical significance; most are in the usual pastoral vein, as artless as art could make them, and written with that detached gaiety so typical of the Restoration period and so foreign to the twentieth century. The last stanza of "When Jemmy First Began to Love" is a good example:
Additional lyrics appeared in Miscellany, Being A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1685), a volume edited by Mrs. Behn. Among them is the worst of her poems, a painful paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, but also the excellent song, "Cease, Cease, Aminta to Complain," and a graceful dialogue "made in an entertainment at court." The last substantial group of poems is found in A Miscellany of New Poems, appended to Lycidus; or, The Lover in Fashion (1688). No songs are among them, and such poems as the two to Alexis add nothing to her earlier achievements. By this time she was near death, and much involved in fiction and translation—activities that seem to have brought in more money than lyric poetry. After her death, poems by her, or attributed to her, appeared for a number of years; but none of them matches the quality of the dozen or so songs already mentioned.
Among Mrs. Behn's shorter poems are a number of narrative and satiric efforts, and a few miscellaneous pieces. The narratives are distinctly inferior to the lyrics, partly because Mrs. Behn's handling of rhythm and rhyme in them is inadequate. "On a Juniper Tree," for example, is written in tetrameter couplets and seems to end every few lines. The reader comes down hard on the rhymes; only one line in six or seven has any internal pause. "Our Cabal," written in the same form, is not much better. The only good narrative poem is a paraphrase of an unnamed French original, entitled "The Disappointment." She adopts a more flexible rhyme scheme to tell LySander's story in stanzas, and the effect is that of a series of short lyrics held together by the sequence of action.
Satiric poems are rare outside the prologues and epilogues. "A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation" is one example; the best is her verses "On a Conventicle," first printed in Charles Gildon's Miscellany Poems upon Several Occasions (1692):
Behold that race, whence England's woes proceed,
The viper's nest, where all our mischiefs breed,
There, guided by inspiration, treason speaks,
And through the holy bagpipe Legion squeaks.
The Nation's curse, religion's ridicule,
The rabble's God, the politician's tool,
Scorn of the wise, and scandal of the just,
The villain's refuge, and the women's lust.
ELEGIES AND PANEGYRICS
The last group of Mrs. Behn's original poems—the elegies and panegyrics—bulks larger than all the rest. The poems comprising it are occasional in the strict sense of that word: they are written upon someone's birth, death, or marriage; upon a friend's departure; or perhaps upon a fellow author's new book. Most of them are addressed to members of the royal family or to the nobility and are at least semi-public in character. These circumstances dictated an elevated form. Mrs. Behn ordinarily chose the pindaric, the highest suitable form in the contemporary hierarchy of genres; less frequently, she used the couplet.
Some poems in this type appeared in the early collections. The 1684 Poems contains "The Golden Age"; "A Farewell to Celadon, on His Going into Ireland"; "On the Death of Mr. Grinhil, the Famous Painter"; "To Mr. Creech … on His Excellent Translation of Lucretius"; "To Mrs. W. On Her Excellent Verses … "; "To My Lady Morland at Tunbridge"; "On Mr. J. H. in a Fit of Sickness"; and "To the Honorable Edward Howard…." Of these only the poem to Lady Morland is in regular couplet form; most are irregular in both rhyme scheme and meter. Most of them are conventional and overly rhetorical; they tell the reader very little about their subjects and sound, therefore, like a hundred other forgotten pieces written on similar occasions.
One, however, is of greater interest. The poem on the golden age, which opens the volume, is a free paraphrase of an English translation from the French. Its pastoral primitivism recalls Mrs. Behn's earliest plays, and adumbrates more than one passage in Oronooko. The versification is undistinguished; in fact, part of the first stanza is cited in Peri Bathous as an example of the florid style. But the poem is the author's most explicit statement of a major theme: the conflict between sex and society. In the Edenic world of the poem, in which "Right and Property were words since made," lovers are restrained only by their vows to each other, which are "inviolably true":
Honor is society's invention, designed to destroy paradise:
Honor belongs to courts and palaces, where it may disturb the politician's sleep. The natural man, aware that beyond death is an eternal night, seizes his chance for happiness: "The swift paced hours of life soon steal away: / Stint not, ye Gods, his short-lived joy."
The Miscellany of 1685 added four more poems to this group: "On the Death of the Late Earl of Rochester"; "A Pindaric to Mr. P. Who Sings Finely"; "On the Author of … The Way to Health…"; and "A Pastoral to Mr. Stafford…" None of these is especially good, but the poem to Rochester is remarkable for genuineness of feeling. Mrs. Behn admired him both as man and as poet: "He was but lent this duller world t' improve / In all the charms of poetry, and love." Finally, the poems at the end of Lycidus included "On the Honourable Sir Francis Fane…," "A Pastoral Pindaric…," and "On Desire." The second of these states again the superiority of love to the restrictions of society. Dorset and his wife will be happy because their marriage was not determined by "portion and jointure" but by common interest and affection.
Many poems in the form, and particularly those written on state occasions, were published in folio or quarto shortly after the event which they celebrate. The first of these was A Pindaric on the Death of Our Late Sovereign (early 1685), which had a second London and a Dublin edition within the year. Mrs. Behn's Tory sentiments are nowhere more obvious than in this elegy, which compares Charles with both Christ and Moses and which draws the logical conclusion about Charles' ultimate destiny: like Christ, he fell "a bleeding victim to atone for all!" and, "transfigured all to glory, mounts to Heaven!" (st. 4). A Poem Humbly Dedicated to the Great Pattern of Piety and Virtue Catherine Queen Dowager, published later in 1685, indulges in hyperboles on her grief and carries on the metaphor of divine correspondence: "So the blest Virgin at the world's great loss, / Came, and beheld, then fainted at the cross."
The last, and by far the longest, of the 1685 poems is A Pindaric Poem on the Happy Coronation of…James II. Mrs. Behn's joy in the event is unfeigned; the Gods themselves are happy in her poem:
Gay robes of light the young divinities put on,
And spread their shining locks to outvie the sun.
On pillows formed of yielding air they lie,
Placed in the mid-way regions of the sky….
(st. 4)
The elaborate description of the coronation is not very good. The verse is frequently stilted and artificial, the flattery gross if not fulsome, and the sentiments expressed in exaggerated diction. Occasionally the poem, like that on the death of Charles, comes alive, especially when Mrs. Behn deals with her personal feeling about the Stuarts:
Howe'er I toil for life all day,
With whate'er cares my soul's oppressed,
'Tis in that sunshine still I play,
'Tis there my weaned mind's at rest;
But oh vicisitudes of night must come
Between the rising glories of the sun!
(st. 19)
When the personal note is missing, these poems become mere hack work, praise tailored in advance of an order and perhaps never paid for. The pindaric To … Christopher Duke of Albemarle (1687) is perhaps the worst of the entire group, largely for this reason. On the other hand, the elegy To the Memory of … George Duke of Buckingham, published in May, 1687, is surprisingly good. Mrs. Behn, who obviously regarded this celebrated wit very highly, rises to her occasion. "When so much wit, wit's great reformer dies," the very muses come to his obsequies. Care may dog the steps of the ordinary statesman, but in his handling of the ship of state,
Great Buckingham a sprightlier measure trod:
When o're the mounting waves the vessel rod[e],
Unshocked by toils, by tempests undismayed,
Steered the great bark, and as that danced, he played.
(ll. 39-42)
He was a phoenix, but with a difference:
Thy matchless worth all successors defies,
And scorned an heir should from thy ashes rise:
Begins and finishes that glorious sphere
Too mighty for a second charioteer.
(ll. 80-83)
During her last days, Mrs. Behn published panegyrics on every important Tory occasion, probably because her financial need was great. The Queen's pregnancy produced the appropriate congratulation, full of Tory imagery:
Like the first sacred infant, this will come
With promise laden from the blessed womb,
To call the wand'ring scattered nations home.
Adoring princes shall arrive from far,
Informed by angels, guided by his star,
The new-born wonder to behold, and greet;
And kings shall offer incense at his feet.
The subsequent poem on the birth of the Prince of Wales, in its delight at the perpetuation of the Stuart line, is more than a little ironic in its references to the future of the prince who became the Pretender: "No monarch's birth was ever ushered in / With signs so fortunate as this has been" (st. 3). Sir Roger L'Estrange's History of the Times occasioned a poem to this loyal Tory (1688), but the events of that memorable year were fatal to Mrs. Behn's political hopes, and the two subsequent panegyrics are markedly different in tone.
A Congratulatory Poem to … Queen Mary upon Her Arrival in England presents its author bewailing "an unhappy dear loved monarch's fate"; her stubborn muse lay "sullen with stubborn loyalty," aroused only by the memory of Mary's blood relationship to Charles II:
And thou, great lord of all my vows, permit
My muse who never failed obedience yet,
To pay her tribute at Maria's feet,
Maria so divine a part of you,
Let me be just—but just with honor too.
(ll. 54-58)
The last of these poems was written during Mrs. Behn's fatal illness. Gilbert Burnet, the great Whig divine, had considerately inquired about her health, and the pindaric to him was her response. His writings, she says, have almost persuaded her of the justice of the Glorious Revolution. But old loyalties are stronger, and in the fourth and sixth stanzas of the poem she presents her case in the most moving lines in all her poetry:
Few Whigs had so generous and sincere a compliment from an ardent Tory, and few monarchs can have had such unswerving loyalty where there was no obligation and very little reward. One must pity the blindness of Mrs. Behn's devotion, especially in the case of James II; but one cannot help admiring its integrity and strength.
The substantial poems Mrs. Behn produced for great occasions have been largely forgotten and do not merit revival. The handful of exquisite lyrics, slight as they are, have proved less ephemeral: it is owing to them and to her prologues and epilogues that she may claim a place as a minor Restoration poet.
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