[In the essay below, Sadler offers a biography of Thomas Carew, considers his reputation, and praises him for showing variety and care in his work.]

As one can see from the Chronology, facts about the life of Thomas Carew are rare. The would-be biographer is further hampered by the confusion and ambiguities that lace such “facts” as do exist. Was he born in 1594 or 1595? Where was he born? Which of the three contemporaries, Thomas Carew/Carey, is the poet? Was his college Merton or Corpus Christi? Did he die in 1638 or 1639 at age forty-four, in 1640 at age forty-five, in 1645 at age fifty, or when he was much older? Did he die of syphilis? Did he receive the Manor of Sunninghill from King James or King Charles, and was it recalled for lack of payment before or at his death? Did he marry a rich widow? Did he marry at all? Did he become Ben Jonson's “research assistant” for a history of Henry V? Which is his authentic portrait? Is there a portrait of Carew? The problems indicated here persist into current criticism, not to mention the disorder among older treatments of Carew.

Only ten poems were published during Carew's life, and some of those lacked his name and his authorization. His masque, Coelum Britannicum, was also published without his name. His signature in the Oxford subscription register and three letters survive. For the remainder of his works and life story, modern critics have been obliged to seek manuscripts, random records, anthologies, and miscellanies. Even the advent of the standard edition in 1949 has not entirely settled the inconsistencies among this mishmash of materials.

I. GENERALLY ACCEPTED INFORMATION ABOUT CAREW

Thomas Carew was born, perhaps in the family county of Kent, though he is not listed in its baptismal records, in 1594 or 1595. His clan was well connected; and his father, Matthew, hailed by one critic as his “son's worst enemy,”¹ was a Master in Chancery. He eventually practiced law in London and was knighted about 1603. Sir Matthew would have liked for his son to become a lawyer, too.

The family, according to its antiquarian, Richard Carew, Thomas's cousin, “came over” with William the Conqueror and took its name from carru, “plow.” However, Professor Rhodes Dunlap derives the surname from Carew (Caer Yw) Castle, County Carmarthen.² Whatever its etymology, its pronunciation is also in doubt: “Ca-rew” versus “Car-ey.” The latter seems the more promising³ and perhaps accounts for at least part of the confusion of Thomas Carew, the poet, with the two contemporaries who spelled their names “Thomas Carey.”

The first Thomas Carey (1597-1634), the son of the Earl of Monmouth, was a favorite of James I and served as Groom of the Bed-Chamber to the King. He married one Margaret Smith, received Sunninghill Manor from King James, and died on April 9, 1634. To make matters more confusing, he, like Thomas Carew, the poet under discussion, had poems (two) set to music by Henry Lawes. The second Thomas Carey was a member of Gray's Inn and Gentleman-Porter of the Tower. He translated Puget de la Serre's Mirrour which flatters not.

While the information about his early education is also scant, it is known that Carew entered Merton College, Oxford, in June 1608, at age thirteen. He received his B.A. on January 31, 1610/11, somewhat early, and, by February, was a reader in the Bodleian Library, being incorporated a B.A. of Cambridge in 1612. He was apparently meant to follow his father in the pursuit of law and was admitted to the Middle Temple on August 6, 1612. The events forestalling his projected legal career remain undetermined.

II. CAREW AND THE CARLETONS

Perhaps the financial reverses that plagued Sir Matthew Carew during his last years brought about Thomas's change of mind about the profession of lawyer. At any rate—no doubt with the urging of his father, who recorded that his son “studied the law very little”—he entered the service of Sir Dudley Carleton, probably in the position of secretary. Lady Carleton was Sir Matthew Carew's niece. Thus Thomas was exposed to the culture of Italy, where Carleton was ambassador to Venice in 1613. Italian influence is marked in his poetry, and a letter by him, dated 1616, speaks of the languages he was able to acquire in Carleton's service. He remained in this position during Sir Dudley's embassy to The Hague. Sometime, however, in the course of this second tour of duty, a disruption in relations occurred. Carleton somehow discovered Carew's written slanders (“to set his head aworke without any meaneng either to shew it to anye, or to make any other use therof then to hym selfe”⁴) of Lady Carleton and himself. Carew was not told of the discovery; rather, Lord Carleton urged his return to England to find other employment that would more readily advance his career.

Once back home, about the middle of August 1616, Thomas acted upon Sir Dudley's advice. He first approached, unsuccessfully, his kinsman Lord Carew, who had recently become a member of the Privy Council. Next he turned to Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, whom he had apparently met in Italy and who favored Thomas's suit but had already promised the place being sought to another. While engaged in this search for a position, Thomas plied Lord Carleton with letters citing his failures to secure other employment and requested that he be allowed to return to his “primum mobile,”⁵ the director of his course. He also begged for a letter of recommendation to the Earl of Arundel. His father, too, baffled by his son's unannounced arrival in England, wrote to his kinsman in letters proclaiming his dismay at the turn of Thomas's fortunes. Sir Matthew's own financial troubles were deepening, and the loan which Carleton had promised to help him meet the mortgage on his London home was not forthcoming. Ultimately, Lord Carleton had his agent, Edward Sherburne, inform the old man (and the Earl of Arundel) of the reasons for Thomas's dismissal. In Sherburne's presence, Sir Matthew called his unrepentant son to account, thereby launching the quarrel that persisted between them.

Thomas seems to have spent this difficult period (1616-18) in visiting those whose connections might help him, in cutting a fine figure, and in continuing his tendency to make ill-chosen comments. He accompanied his brother Matthew to Woodstock, where the court was. He certainly saw Lady Carleton's stepfather, Sir Henry Savile, a kinsman by marriage and Warden of Merton College during Thomas's tenure there. He proceeded to incense his onetime benefactor further with Savile's subsequent report that Thomas had spoken lightly of Sir Dudley Carleton's horses. Carew was obviously not very tactful; but whether, as his father indicated by letter to Sir Dudley (September 1, 1616), he “thought too highly of himself” and suffered from “self-pride,” cannot be surely known. His demand for a letter of apology to Carleton being of no avail, the ailing father gave his son up for lost and complained bitterly of him in a letter to Carleton dated October 4, 1617. Sir Matthew recorded, not without some sense of God's justice, that Thomas now suffered from the “new disease” (presumably syphilis)⁶ and that all of his plans for his son had come to naught. Sir Matthew died on August 2, 1618, at age eighty-five. Of his three children, he was pleased only with his daughter.

III. DUTIES IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

Perhaps as a result of some of his visiting patterns during the period of his rift with Carleton and his father, Carew was making his way at court. He is recorded as being among the most elegant in attendance when Charles was installed as Prince of Wales on November 4, 1616. He may also have begun his wooing of the lady celebrated in so many of his poems as “Celia.” Finally, in May of 1619, he accompanied Sir Edward Herbert (later Lord Herbert of Cherbury, also a poet) in his embassy to Paris and became the fast friend of John Crofts, whose family home of Saxham was to assume an important place in his life and poetry. A number of his poems seem to have been written during his stay in France. He may also have met, in Paris, the Italian, Giambattista Marino, who influenced his poetic style.

Much later, during the period from 1630-33, he cemented his ties with the English court, being named, first, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary and then Sewer in Ordinary to the King.⁷ The latter appointment was made despite the fact that the Scots were promoting another candidate. A life of some ease was thus achieved, and Carew became known as one of the wittiest poets and courtiers of Charles I.

IV. ANECDOTES ABOUT CAREW

Carew's contemporary reputation as a witty courtier is borne out by a series of anecdotes told of him. For example, George Clarke, once Lord of the Admiralty, reported to Sir John Percival this confirmation of Carew's “quickness.” Lighting King Charles to Henrietta Maria's chamber, Carew saw Jermyn Lord St. Albans with his arm around the Queen's neck. He feigned a stumble, put out the light, and thus helped to secure the gentleman's escape. While the King never knew of the episode, the Queen naturally became one of Carew's great patrons.

In the winter of 1624-25, Carew was rumored to be on the verge of marrying the rich widow of Sir George Smith. His friend, fellow poet, and fellow Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Sir John Suckling, chided him for such a rash proposal and received Carew's clever reply. Both letters were printed in parallel columns, paragraph for paragraph, with Carew forcefully surmounting each charge (e.g., “… I'le marry a Widow, who is rather the chewer, then thing chewed”⁸). So far as is known, Carew was never married.

One report, in a letter from James Howell to Sir Thomas Hawke on April 5, 1636, provides a glimpse of Carew the man: “I was invited yesternight to a solemn supper by B. J. [Ben Jonson], where you were deeply remembered; there was good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and jovial welcome: one thing intervened, which almost spoiled the relish of the rest, that B. began to engross all the discourse, to vapour extremely of himself and by vilifying others to magnify his own muse. T. Ca. [Thomas Carew] buzzed me in the ear, that though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seems he had not read the Ethics, which, among other Precepts of Morality, forbid Self-commendation.”⁹ As will be seen, Carew was no submissive “Son of Ben,” but could see faults wherever they were to be found.

Finally, there is the story of the supposed deathbed recantation, though variations of this anecdote are so characteristically applied to famous men as to be immediately suspect. Like many of his peers at Charles I's court, Carew was reputed to be a profligate and a libertine. During one of his illnesses (another bout of syphilis?), when he thought he was dying, he sent for John Hales, who had been a fellow of Merton College in 1606, and who had become connected with Thomas by marriage. At the poet's promise to amend his life, Hales gave him absolution. However, upon recovering, Carew resumed his “life scandalous.” Then, according to information gathered by Izaak Walton for a life of Hales, in the poet's last illness when he again called upon Hales for spiritual aid, he was refused both the sacrament and absolution. The account of this double repentance is also provided by Joseph Hunter in the Chorus Vatum Anglicanorum from the narration of Lady Salter, to whose son Hales was tutor.

The truth of this tale of contrition cannot be known, but Carew had a reputation for licentiousness such that his poems were blasted in Parliament as part of the traffic of pornography afoot in London. And Lord Clarendon, Carew's friend, records (thereby adding more confusion as to the length of Thomas's life): “… his Glory was that after fifty Years of his Life, spent with less Severity or Exactness than it ought to have been, He died with the greatest Remorse for that Licence, and with the greatest Manifestation of Christianity, that his best Friends could desire.”¹⁰

Others cite Carew's choice of Psalms for translation and adaptation, as well as his self-“laceration” in “To My worthy friend Master Geo. Sand[y]s, on his translation of the Psalmes,” as evidence of his intended correction of his life. The Psalms he paraphrased, however, were probably early efforts written during his first siege of syphilis while he was under his father's care. They show no particular personal revelations. Of the nine Psalms he elected to deal with, only Numbers 51 and 119 have any special penitential cast. The commendation of Sandys¹¹ seems little more than the homage of one poet to another upon such an occasion:

I Presse not to the Quire, nor dare I greet
The holy place with my unhallowed feet;
My unwasht Muse, polutes not things Divine,
Nor mingles her prophaner notes with thine;
Here, humbly at the porch she listning stayes,
And with glad eares sucks in thy sacred layes.
Perhaps my restlesse soule, tyr'de with persuit
Of mortall beauty, seeking without fruit
Contentment there, which hath not, when enjoy'd,
Quencht all her thirst, nor satisfi'd, though cloy'd;
Weary of her vaine search below, Above
In the first Faire may find th' immortall Love.

(ll. 1-6, 23-28)¹²

V. THE ABSENCE OF A PORTRAIT OF CAREW

Another bit of gossip introduces the problems concerning the authenticity of the portraits of the poet. Carew's friend Thomas Killigrew quarreled with Cecilia Crofts (later his wife) and asked Carew to intervene. To oblige, Carew wrote the poem “Jealousie,” used in a masque at Whitehall Palace in 1633 and included in Killigrew's play, Cicilia and Clorinda, or Love in Arms (written 1649-50). Horace Walpole subsequently reported, quoting other sources, that Anthony Van Dyck's 1638 portrait of Killigrew and Carew commemorated this argument of the lovers and Carew's service as intermediary. However, Professor Dunlap has conclusively shown that this is an impossible interpretation of the origin of the portrait.¹³

Van Dyke's painting, in the Royal Collection of Windsor Castle, shows Killigrew on the left holding a paper with two female figures drawn on pedestals. On the right, Carew holds a paper, too. Following the lead of Ernest Law's study of the Van Dyck pictures at Windsor, Dunlap suggests that the two women were intended for a sepulchral monument to Cecilia Crofts Killigrew and to the Countess of Cleveland, who died in 1637/38; both were sisters of John Crofts. Carew's paper may represent his avocation of poet. While Law has discounted the authenticity of the likeness of Carew, Professor Dunlap accepts this half of the Van Dyck portrait as the only genuine one of the poet. However, since the standard edition of Carew's works was published, further research has been done on the Van Dyck portrait. The figure once thought to be Carew is almost certainly Thomas Killigrew's brother-in-law, William, Lord Crofts.¹⁴

Many of Carew's editors and critics, including one publishing as recently as 1960, have used for Carew's picture one from a medal produced by Jean Warin/Varin of Thomas Carey, the Gentleman of the Bedchamber. William Carew Hazlitt went so far as to alter the medal's inscription in order to use a copy of it for his edition of Carew in 1870.

VI. CAREW'S DEATH

Carew's “To my friend G. N. [Gilbert North?] from Wrest” (86-89), probably his last poem, sheds some light on the actual facts of his death. It contrasts the munificence of Wrest Park Manor in Bedfordshire, which belonged to the De Greys, with the deprivation of the expedition led by King Charles against Scotland in 1639:

I Breathe (sweet Ghib:) the temperate ayre of Wrest
Where I no more with raging stormes opprest,
Weare the cold nights out by the bankes of Tweed,
On the bleake Mountains, where fierce tempests breed,
And everlasting Winter dwells; where milde
Favonius, and the Vernall windes exilde,
Did never spread their wings: but the wilde North
Brings sterill Fearne, Thistles, and Brambles forth.

(ll. 1-8)

Carew apparently was with Charles in this First Bishops' War, and the rigors they encountered, it is conjectured, hastened his death, which occurred about March 21, 1639/40. At any rate, after a rather costly funeral, he was buried in St. Anne's Chapel, the Church of St. Dunstan's-in-the-West. The church was remodeled in the early nineteenth century, and no trace of the tomb of Thomas Carew is now to be found.

Despite their estrangement, Thomas was interred beside Sir Matthew Carew, a fact all the more unexpected in view of the distance between Thomas and the rest of the family. After Matthew Carew's death, his London house was sold, and his widow went to live with her older son, Matthew, in the country. Her highly detailed will, dispensing properties and goods down to her grandchildren, servants, and tenants, failed to mention Thomas. It seems likely that no reconciliation was ever effected.

VII. CAREW'S “SCHOOL” OF POETRY

Thomas Carew continues to be presented principally in anthologies, which label him, without very careful qualification, a “Cavalier” poet along with Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace. The tag derives from their association with King Charles, from their use of military imagery, and particularly from their supposed lack of high seriousness. The two greatest influences upon his poetry are John Donne¹⁵ and Ben Jonson.¹⁶ He owes much directly to the Classical tradition: specifically to the Latin poets, as Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Gaius Valerius Catullus, and Sextus Propertius;¹⁷ and more generally to the Greeks, as Anacreon and other lyric poets and the Greek Anthology. Constant echoes of the Elizabethan “Petrarchan”¹⁸ sonneteers are also to be found in Carew's poems. Strongly marked are the effects of the Continental poets: from France, Pontus de Tyard, Pierre de Ronsard, Philippe Desportes, and the whole libertin (libertine) tradition;¹⁹ from Italy, Torquato Tasso, Giovanni Battista Guarini, and especially the great leader of the Baroque, Giambattista Marino, whom Carew probably met in Paris.²⁰

Carew assimilates all of these forces and influences and yet stamps his poetry with his own witty mark. As a lyricist and a court poet, mildly cynical and skeptical, he combines the accents of pure worship of the lady from the Petrarchan tradition with a prosaic, rather detached, worldliness. Commendatory and occasional verse fill most of his pages; but he is best known as a writer of amorous, not infrequently erotic, poetry. Typically, he polishes his gemlike poems with care, revising and improving.²¹ He may nonetheless occasionally lapse into inexact syntax, not so excessively, however, as his fellow Cavalier, Richard Lovelace. If Sir John Suckling's description in “A Sessions of the Poets” (c. 1638) can be taken as any indication, Carew seems to have had a reputation among his contemporaries similar to that of his mentor, Ben Jonson—his Muse was “hard-bound,” delivering her offspring only with hard work and concentration. Carew learned this craftsmanship from Jonson²² and his attitude toward it from the Elizabethans; for, generally, the reader is hardly aware of effort in his poems. He has imbibed the sprezzatura tradition of Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney and so hides his labor under a smooth demeanor that earned him the dubious later reputation of writing effortlessly and sometimes carelessly.

This reputation for lack of care was aided by the slender content of the majority of his poems. The court poetry of his day did not moralize or philosophize. Writing poetry was still an avocation of the courtier, who used it to demonstrate his own and the court's urbanity. The reader must accept that view of poetry before accusing Carew of a failure of depth and high purpose as a poet.

Carew does avoid the large-scale allegories of the Elizabethans but occasionally adopts such Petrarchan analogies as the “ship of love” or the “besieged fort.” Similarly, he may fleetingly dip into Neo-Platonic lore but could never be labeled a “Neo-Platonist” in the manner of Spenser. At the same time, he borrows from Italian and French poets who were interested in both Petrarchanism and Neo-Platonism.²³

From Donne (and his own short-lived legal training), he derives his use of logic; his conversational, often colloquial tone in the midst of the most “hallowed” service at his lady's shrine; perhaps his occasional obscurity; some of his conceits, especially those he uses to show their limitations and obsolescence; much of his wit; and his use of well-developed, emphatic, and bold metaphors and occasional juxtapositions of disparate materials. In contrast to the poetry of Donne, Carew's poetry remains almost totally secular, with no flights of mysticism. He is also more conscious of regularity of meter than is Donne, to the extent that Pope ultimately included him in the School of Waller and that modern critics find in his works a tone of civility and a precision of form (both from Jonson and the Classical writers) that anticipated Pope and other Neoclassical and Augustan poets.

Perhaps an examination of two poems, the second better than the first, will help to point out the difficulties of classifying Carew even at his least original.

The first, “To her in absence. A Ship” (23), is thoroughly derivative:

Tost in a troubled sea of griefes, I floate
Farre from the shore, in a storme-beaten boat,
Where my sad thoughts doe (like the compasse) show
The severall points from which crosse winds doe blow.
My heart doth like the needle toucht with love
Still fixt on you, point which way I would move.
You are the bright Pole-starre, which in the darke
Of this long absence, guides my wandring barke.
Love is the Pilot, but o're-come with feare
Of your displeasure, dares not homewards steare;
My fearefull hope hangs on my trembling sayle;
Nothing is wanting but a gentle gale,
Which pleasant breath must blow from your sweet lip:
Bid it but move, and quick as thought this Ship
Into your armes, which are my port, will flye
Where it for ever shall at Anchor lye.

Among its most positive attributes, aside from the smooth, pentameter couplets, is the concentration upon developing the Petrarchan conceit of the unrequited lover adrift on a “sea of griefes” (also adumbrated by Classical writers like Catullus and Virgil). Though a different kind of compass, the compass image may suggest Donne as well as Carew's own “An Excuse of absence” (131) and “To Celia, upon Love's Ubiquity” (123-24); but it remains Elizabethan here rather than Metaphysical or Donnean. This claim is further supported by the fact that the companion image (“You are the bright Pole-starre”) evokes comparison with Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, ll. 5-8.²⁴ Carew's poem, however, achieves a simplicity of statement that makes the reader entirely forget the combined influences. Sounded at the last is a hope of amendment that sets itself in opposition to the “head-banging,” forlorn lover of sonnet lore. The natural, instinctive sweetness in the lady herself belies the “disdainful one” of the same school.

The second poem, “The Comparison” (98-99), proves that Carew knows the ways of Elizabethan compliment and commendation, yet immediately indicates that he is going to adopt the skeptical tone of Shakespeare's or Donne's deflation of Petrarchan conceits (e.g., Sonnet 130 or “The Canonization,” respectively):

Dearest thy tresses are not threads of gold,
Thy eyes of Diamonds, nor doe I hold
Thy lips for Rubies: Thy fair cheekes to be
Fresh Roses; or thy teeth of Ivorie:
Thy skin that doth thy daintie bodie sheath
Not Alablaster [sic] is, nor dost thou breath
Arabian odours, those the earth brings forth
Compar'd with which would but impaire thy worth.
Such may be others Mistresses, but mine
Holds nothing earthly, but is all divine.
Thy tresses are those rayes that doe arise
Not from one Sunne, but two; Such are thy eyes:
Thy lips congealed Nectar are, and such
As but a Deitie, there's none dare touch.
The perfect crimson that thy cheeke doth cloath
(But onely that it farre exceeds them both)
Aurora's blush resembles, or that redd
That Iris struts in when her mantl's spred.
Thy teeth in white doe Leda's Swan exceede,
Thy skin's a heavenly and immortall weede,
And when thou breath'st, the winds are readie strait
To filch it from thee, and doe therefore wait
Close at thy lips, and snatching it from thence
Beare it to Heaven, where 'tis Joves frankincense.
Faire Goddesse, since thy feature makes thee one,
Yet be not such for these respects alone;
But as you are divine in outward view
So be within as faire, as good, as true.

Carew is not so crass as Shakespeare, avoiding such excesses as “in some perfumes is there more delight / Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.” Yet he takes the Shakespearean route of rebuking the inanities of the traditional Petrarchan and Elizabethan blazon (ll. 1-8). Then he shocks the reader by dropping the realism of Shakespeare's final compliment to trumpet forth extravagances more extravagant than those he has rejected (ll. 9-24). These lines also, however, employ a characteristic Carew touch of logic, as they build to the obvious conclusion. Since the poet's mistress lacks the attributes of mortal mistresses, he can only accept that she is divine. Having drawn parallel after parallel with Classical figures, the poet must address her in the new identity he has provided for her: “Faire Goddesse, since thy feature makes thee one.”

Then comes an additional witty twist, strangely reinstating at least part of the Petrarchan tradition he has banished—the emphasis on spiritual as well as physical beauty. Yet this reinstatement is tempered by realism and stated as directly, gracefully, and simply as are the last lines of “To her in absence. A Ship.” (Carew is almost without exception excellent in his endings.) The final couplet is worth repeating: “But as you are divine in outward view / So be within as faire, as good, as true.” Many women can look like goddesses. The trick is to be better-than-mortal internally. Neither does there seem to be any shrinking of the meaning of these lines to the libertine view that “being ‘good’ means being my mistress.”

Carew is neither totally Jonsonian, Donnean, Elizabethan, nor Cavalier. When he is at his best, synergism occurs.

The two poems above are in Carew's favorite form, iambic pentameter couplets. The striving for regularity is emphasized by the use of elision or telescoping of syllables (as l. 4 of “To her in absence. A Ship” and ll. 7, 20, and 24 of “The Comparison”).

The regularity one so often finds in Carew's poetry has been partially responsible for his being known as a facile, largely negligible poet. Yet his verse forms show a great variety and care,²⁵ and he experiments rather frequently with catalexis or lines terminating in imperfect feet, and with truncation or omission of syllables at the beginning of lines. Some of his best-known poems in fact contain truncated lines (e.g., “Disdaine returned,” 18), catalectic lines (e.g., “An Excuse of absence,” 131), or both (e.g., “The Complement,” 99-101). At his most successful, Carew seems aware of form as meaning.

Of the 130 canonical poems, which include nine translations from the Psalms, some eighty employ rhyming couplets. Approximately thirty-eight of those are in pentameter and thirty-seven in tetrameter (octosyllabic couplets). Classical influence shows itself especially in Carew's tetrameter lines (as in “A New-yeares gift. To the King,” 89). The tetrameter poems may use various stanzaic patterns and may display shifts to pentameter by catalexis or in the final couplet. For the poems, the iambic foot is Carew's overwhelming choice, with trochaic variations worth noting in “To my Cousin (C.R.) marrying my Lady (A.)” (47) and “The tinder” (104). Both in couplets and in stanza forms, Carew is fond of alternating line length and sometimes uses such combinations as trimeter and dimeter, tetrameter and dimeter, tetrameter and trimeter, or pentameter and dimeter. Several (e.g., “Upon some alterations in my Mistresse, after my departure into France,” 24) present pentameter, dimeter, trimeter, and tetrameter lines.

After rhyming couplets, Carew prefers six-line stanzas (used in sixteen poems). Most of these rhyme ababcc, but there are variations. He provides a refrain for one (“Song. To a Lady not yet enjoy'd by her Husband,” 36) and occasionally adds an extra couplet to the last stanza or uses a final couplet, set off from the poem, as a coda for the whole.

Couplet stanzas are used in one (“Psalme 119,” 144-49) of the translations of the Psalms (which, despite being early projects, show much experimentation). The eight poems in tercets are all regular (aaa) except for the unusual handling of the rhyme scheme in “An Hymeneall Song on the Nuptials of the Lady Ann Wentworth, and the Lord Lovelace” (114). Six poems are in quatrains, ten in five-line stanzas, two in seven-line stanzas, two in eight-line stanzas, and one in eleven-line stanzas. Carew has four “sonnets,” so-called only from the fourteen lines in each, for they are highly experimental.

Carew does not always or often in fact succeed in making the form of the verse inherently functional. He is best at creating the illusion that each stanza or unit (often a verse paragraph) moves deftly to the point of the whole poem. His method is frequently the use of graceful, easy caesuras within the line and connective words at the beginning of lines. This illusion of logical movement, culminating in a terse, sometimes gnomic final couplet or statement, is one of his principal characteristics and prevents him from being cloyingly sweet. The sensation of movement also derives from his free-flowing couplets, almost never end-stopped but spilling over to form whole units (as “paragraphs”) of thought.

Notes

1. Arthur Vincent, ed., Poems of Thomas Carew (London, 1899), p. xix.

2. The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque Coelum Britannicum (Oxford, 1949), p. xiv. The link between the name and a plow persists, appearing, for example, in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York, 1966), p. 125.

3. See Jack Dalglish, ed., Eight Metaphysical Poets (London, 1961), p. 147; Vincent, p. xxviii. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Adventures in Criticism (Cambridge, 1926), p. 14, points out that Carew's editor, Ebsworth, in his dedicatory prelude, is mistaken in pronouncing the name “Carew;” he also scans verses from seventeenth-century poems to show that the pronunciation is “Carey.” Cf. Dunlap, p. xiv, n.

4. So Sir Matthew describes his son's revelation of his purposes. The letter quoted in the text was written to Carleton on October 4, 1617. See Dunlap, pp. xxii-xxviii, for this and Matthew Carew's other letters to Sir Dudley.

5. Dunlap gives Carew's three letters in Appendix C, pp. 201-206. This compliment occurs in the one dated September 2, 1616.

6. In “Upon T. C. having the P.,” given in Dunlap, p. 209, Sir John Suckling twits Carew for suffering from the “French disease.”

7. Both offices were largely ceremonial by Carew's day. Members of the Privy Chamber attended the King in his private quarters. The Sewer in Ordinary originally helped with the arrangements of the royal table.

8. Both are given in Dunlap, pp. 211-12.

9. Epistolae Ho-Elianae. Cited in Vincent, pp. xxiv-xxv.

10. The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon … Written by Himself. Cited in Dunlap, p. xxxix.

11. George Sandys (1578-1644) was also a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. He is best known for his translation of the Psalms and of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

12. Dunlap, pp. 93-94. All references for the works of Carew are to this edition, and page numbers are given in the text in parentheses.

13. Pp. xliv-xlv, 244-45.

14. According to a letter to the writer from the Lord Chamberlain's Office, St. James's Palace, dated October 1, 1974.

15. Among the poems offering suggestions of Donne's influence are “Secresie protested” (11), “To my Mistresse in absence” (22), “Eternitie of love protested” (23-24), “To T. H. a Lady resembling my Mistress” (26-27), “Upon a Ribband” (29), “Upon the sickness of E. S.” (31-32), “To one that desired to know my Mistris” (39-40), “A Rapture” (49-53), “Maria Wentworth” (56), “Incommunicabilitie of Love” (62), the elegy on Donne (71-74), “To my friend G. N. from Wrest” (86-89), “The Comparison” (98-99), “The tinder” (104), “The tooth-ach cured by a kisse” (109-10), “Upon a Mole in Celias bosome” (113-14), “To Celia, upon Love's Ubiquity” (123-24), “An Excuse of absence” (131), “On the Duke of Buckingham” (57), “An Hymeneall Dialogue” (66), “Obsequies to the Lady Anne Hay” (67-68), “Loves Courtship” (107-108), and “An Hymeneall Song on the Nuptials of the Lady Ann Wentworth, and the Lord Lovelace” (114-15). Carew shows Donne's fondness for alchemical images and calentures. See also Chapter 4. (In this and the following footnotes on Carew's sources, the writer acknowledges help from Dunlap and other critics.)

16. Jonson's influence is shown less in individual poems, but see especially “To the Reader of Master William Davenant's Play” (97), “To Ben. Johnson” (64-65), “To Saxham” (27-29), “To my friend G. N. from Wrest” (86-89), “Mediocritie in love rejected” (12-13), “To my worthy Friend, M. D'avenant, Upon his Excellent Play, The Just Italian” (95-96), and “To the King at his entrance into Saxham” (30-31). All of the elegies and country-house poems and Carew's masque should be compared to Jonson's efforts in those genres. See Chapters 4-6.

17. For Ovid, see, for example, “A flye that flew into my Mistris her eye” (37-38), “Celia singing” (38), “Truce in Love entreated” (41), “A Rapture” (49-53), “Incommunicabilitie of Love” (62), “Upon Master W. Mountague his returne from travell” (77-78), “Upon my Lord Chiefe Justice” (83-84), and “To my friend G. N. from Wrest” (87-89); for Catullus, see “Secresie protested” (11), “A Rapture” (49-53), “A New-yeares gift. To the King” (89-90), “To his mistresse retiring in affection” (129-30), “To my inconstant Mistris” (15-16), “To her in absence. A Ship” (23), and “Good Counsell to a young Maid” (25); for Propertius, see “To my inconstant Mistris” (15-16), “Ingratefull beauty threatned” (17-18), “The willing Prisoner to his Mistris” (37), “On the Marriage of T. K. and C. C. the morning stormie” (79-80), and “The Complement” (99-101). Minor Latin influences are Lucretius and Horace (especially in the Jonsonian poems).

18. For the probable influence of Francesco Petrarch himself, see “The Spring” (3), “My mistris commanding me to returne her letters” (9-11), “A prayer to the Wind” (11-12), “Mediocritie in love rejected” (12-13), “A flye that flew into my Mistris her eye” (37-38), “Truce in Love entreated” (41), and “A Rapture” (49-53). A good discussion of the Petrarchan tradition as it is applicable to Carew is to be found in Francis G. Schoff, “Thomas Carew: Son of Ben or Son of Spenser?” Discourse, 1 (1958), 8-24.

19. Primarily, the French poets of the Pléiade, who had influenced such sixteenth-century English poets as Edmund Spenser and Samuel Daniel. For probable influence of Pierre de Ronsard, see “Perswasions to enjoy” (16), “The Spring” (3), and the epitaph on Mary Villiers (“This little Vault …,” 54); for Desportes, see “My mistris commanding me to returne her letters” (9-11), “Truce in Love entreated” (41), and “To the Painter” (106-107); for Pontus de Tyard, see “The willing Prisoner to his Mistris” (37).

20. For Tasso, see “A cruell Mistris” (8), “Mediocritie in love rejected” (12-13), “In the person of a Lady to her inconstant servant” (40), “A Rapture” (49-53), and “Upon a Mole in Celias bosome” (113-14); for Guarini, see “A flye that flew into my Mistris her eye” (37-38), “Upon a Mole in Celias bosome” (113-14), “A Ladies prayer to Cupid” (131), and “An Excuse of absence” (131); for Marino, see “To A. L. Perswasions to love” (4-6), “A beautifull Mistris” (7), “Lips and Eyes” (6), “A Looking-Glasse” (19), “Upon the sicknesse of (E. S.)” (31-32), “Red, and white Roses” (46-47), “For a Picture where a Queen Laments over the Tombe of a slaine Knight” (81), “The Complement” (99-101), and “The tinder” (104).

21. For Carew's revisions of his poems, see Dunlap, pp. lvii-lix.

22. Cf. John Erskine, The Elizabethan Lyric, A Study (New York, 1903), pp. 233-34, who traces Carew's standard form to Thomas Campion.

23. Carew's “Neo-Platonism” may be only generalized borrowings. For ideas suggesting comparison with the doctrines of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, however, see these poems: “A divine Mistris” (6-7), “Ingratefull beauty threatned” (17-18), “Celia singing” (39), “Epitaph on the Lady S.” (55), “To A. D. unreasonable distrustfull of her owne beauty” (84-86), and “An Hymeneall Song on the Nuptials of the Lady Ann Wentworth, and the Lord Lovelace” (114-15).

24. See Alan J. Biggs, “Carew and Shakespeare,” Notes & Queries, N.S., 3 (1956), 225.

25. The verse has been studied by Charles J. Sembower, “A Note on the Verse Structure of Carew,” Studies in Language and Literature in Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of James Morgan Hart (New York, 1910), pp. 456-66, and Rufus A. Blanshard, “Thomas Carew's Master Figures,” Boston University Studies in English, 3 (1957), 214-27.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Dunlap, Rhodes, ed. The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque Coelum Britannicum. London: Oxford University Press, 1949; rpt. 1970.

Vincent, Arthur, ed. The Poems of Thomas Carew. London: Lawrence & Bullen, Ltd.; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899.

Secondary Sources

Biggs, Alan J. “Carew and Shakespeare.” Notes and Queries, 3 (1956), 225. On “To her in absence. A Ship.”

Blanshard, Rufus A. “Thomas Carew's Master Figures.” Boston University Studies in English, 3 (1957), 214-27. Carew's use of four figures from George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie.

Dalglish, Jack. Eight Metaphysical Poets. London: Heinemann, 1961. Brief but good account of Carew, the leading representative of the Caroline school.

Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur. Adventures in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926 [1896]. An amusing discourse on the pronunciation of Carew's name.

Schoff, Francis G. “Thomas Carew: Son of Ben or Son of Spenser?” Discourse, 1 (1958), 8-24. Invaluable article pressing for recognition of Elizabethan influences on Carew.

Sembower, Charles J. “A Note on the Verse Structure of Carew,” Studies in Language and Literature in Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of James Morgan Hart. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1910, pp. 456-66. Carew's variety seldom organic. Best at the “arch pretense of logic.”