SOURCE: Praz, Mario. “The Epic of the Everyday: The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore.” In The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, translated by Angus Davidson, pp. 413-43. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

[In the following essay, originally published in Italian in 1952, Praz explores the metaphysical elements of The Angel in the House.]

He thinks of writing a poem to be the poem of the age.

—Letter from Alfred Fryer, referring to Coventry Patmore

The poetry of Coventry Patmore again occupies a place of honour in our present century, thanks to its ‘discovery’ by Paul Claudel and to the translation he made of a group of odes from The Unknown Eros in 1911.¹ In this work (published in 1877) Patmore showed how closely related he was to the English religious poets of the seventeenth century, to the ‘metaphysical’ tradition on one side (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan), and on the other to the whole of the mystical tradition. He therefore found favourable terrain in the rebirth of interest—soon to be transformed into a fashion—for Donne and his school, which had its beginning with Professor Grierson's edition (1912) of the works of the great metaphysical poet of the seventeenth century. But the figure of a mystical, metaphysical Patmore, the only one known to modern readers, is very different from that of the poet who in the eighteen-fifties enjoyed a few years of great popularity with his Angel in the House, which seemed like an incarnation of Victorian Biedermeier ideals and identified itself to such a degree with the bourgeois conception of life that Swinburne's description of it as ‘idylls of the dining-room and the deanery’ was an epigram that fitted it like a glove. In reality, as we shall see, the metaphysical influence is just as strong in this poem as the intention to convey the atmosphere of everyday life in its every detail. This latter element was due—is it necessary to say?—to Wordsworth, one of Patmore's youthful enthusiasms, whom he imitated even more closely in his first volume of verse (Poems, 1844), particularly in “The Woodman's Daughter,” which he wrote at the age of sixteen.

Patmore's contemporaries failed to notice, in The Angel in the House, the first expression of what was to be the dominant motif of his whole work, of what was, for him, ‘the burning heart of the universe’²—the conception of earthly love as a first stage, a prefiguration of divine love. The love between God and the Soul is the love between the Spouse and the Espoused, elevated to its highest perfection; the only means of comprehending and achieving supernatural relations is by meditation and by the contemplation of their types in Nature; the invisible is known through the visible; and we are able, even through the gross medium of the senses, when clarified by the spirit, to perceive ultimate perfection:

Bright with the spirit shone the sense,
As with the sun a fleecy cloud.

What for Wordsworth had been intimations of immortality through childhood memories, became, for Patmore, intimations of the soul's union with God, communicated through the physical materiality of carnal love.³ Thus corporal pleasure, to which the poet was exceptionally partial, came to be sublimated through its symbolic interpretation: ‘Glorify God in your body.’ There was only one Church which seemed to countenance the poet's theory of human love—the Catholic Church, with its symbolic interpretation of the sensual theme of the Song of Songs, and its exaltation of Woman as the image of Paradise. The conversion of Patmore to Catholicism was therefore a foregone conclusion.⁴

Patmore's face, no less than that of Thackeray, tells its own story—with its brow wide as Caesar's, the grey eyes of the fanatic beneath curiously circumflex lids, the nez fureteur like that of a pointer, and the sensual lips, fleshy, pendulous, again like those of a sporting dog.⁵ Some dictatorial and at the same time Don Quixote-like quality is apparent in the whole emaciated figure, which is like that of a military man as El Greco might have painted it. And if we look at him in a scene from everyday life, in a photograph taken on the lawn in front of his house at Hastings, surrounded by his family at the tea-table, the impression we get of his domestic life—perhaps owing to the stiffness of Victorian formality which has shrivelled up the two unmarried daughters standing at the back, and the maid in cap and apron ready to hand round the cake—is not quite what one would expect from a reading of The Angel in the House. The old poet lying back in his easy chair, twisting his face round above the high, stiff collar—a face that tries to look good-natured—towards the group formed by his third wife and his beloved son Piffie, has the possessive air of an ancient patriarch set apart on his own special throne.⁶ And his sensual tastes were indeed those of the patriarch or the pasha, not limited to women but extending, as with an Oriental, to precious stones: and not merely did he enjoy the handling of emeralds, pearls, and diamonds, but he knew how to estimate the water of jewels, and for a certain period of his life actually bought and sold them. His third wife, the one in the picture, who followed the example of Becky Sharp and rose from governess to mistress of the house, survived the poet; but the first wife died of consumption, the second soon became a semi-invalid and died suddenly in 1880, while Patmore's favourite daughter, Emily Honoria, who had become a nun and was obsessed, in her last moments, by the guilty feeling that she had loved her father too much,⁷ also died of consumption, as did the most beloved of the poet's sons, Henry, himself a poet. So that one comes to wonder whether the poet was not one of those fatal germ-carriers who, although they themselves remain immune, sow death all around them. Anyhow, Patmore's life was not the mirror of felicity that one might think; it was, in fact, troubled by bereavements, by incomprehension (after he lost his first wife, he was lacking in tact in his relations with his sons), and, in his last period, disturbed by a senile passion—not at all conjugal, this time!—a real, genuine physical passion, which was not reciprocated, for Alice Meynell.⁸ And he himself remarks ‘that the happiest life was a tragedy or a series of tragedies’.⁹

But it is not Patmore's life nor even the very personal type of his mysticism that interests us here, but rather his highly successful poem, and the reasons for which it was bound to have an appeal to contemporaries who saw certain of their own aspirations mirrored in it.

Looked at from the distance from which we now see it, The Angel in the House, the epic and paean of conjugal love, no longer seems the bold invention that in truth it was. The reign of Queen Victoria had at its centre a conjugal idyll, the idyll of Victoria and Albert: have not Tennyson's Idylls of the King been called in view of this, ‘idylls of the Prince Consort’? The Angel in the House may therefore seem to us the natural product of a whole society, that of the age of Albert the Good, and to be the poetic mouthpiece of an already acclimatized conception of life. Wordsworth's popularity had lasted almost until 1850. And had not Wordsworth, repudiating his youthful ideals, proclaimed:

I travelled among unknown men,
          In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
          What love I bore to thee.
'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
          Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
          To love thee more and more.
Among thy mountains did I feel
          The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
          Beside an English fire.

Had not Wordsworth proclaimed this?¹⁰ And Patmore¹¹ sang of the interdependence of love and conjugal faithfulness:

Such perfect friends are truth and love
          That neither lives where both are not.
Praise then my Song where'er it comes,
          Ladies, whose innocence makes bright
England, the land of courtly homes,
          The world's exemplar and delight.

And the twelfth letter in Book II of the poem that was a sequel to The Angel in the House, The Victories of Love, an imaginary letter from the protagonist of the Angel to his wife, concludes with:

… yet, ere wrath or rot destroy
Of England's state the ruin fair,
Oh, might I so its charm declare,
That, in new Lands, in far-off years,
Delighted he should cry that hears:
‘Great is the Land that somewhat best
Works, to the wonder of the rest!
We, in our day, have better done
This thing or that than any one;
And who but, still admiring, sees
How excellent for images
Was Greece, for laws how wise was Rome;
But read this Poet, and say if home
And private love did e'er so smile
As in that ancient English isle!’

Thackeray, as we have seen,¹² wrote in Pendennis:

I think it is not national prejudice which makes me believe that a high-bred English lady is the most complete of all Heaven's subjects in this world. In whom else do you see so much grace, and so much virtue; so much faith, and so much tenderness; with such a perfect refinement and chastity? And by high-bred ladies I don't mean duchesses and countesses. Be they ever so high in station, they can be but ladies, and no more. But almost every man who lives in the world has the happiness, let us hope, of counting a few such persons amongst his circle of acquaintance—women in whose angelical natures there is something awful, as well as beautiful, to contemplate; at whose feet the wildest and fiercest of us must fall down and humble ourselves, in admiration of that adorable purity which never seems to do or to think wrong.

And here, in fact, we have the Angel in the house:

Her disposition is devout,
          Her countenance angelical …
.....In mind and manners how discreet!
          How artless in her very art;
How candid in discourse; how sweet
          In concord of her lips and heart;
How simple and how circumspect;
.....How humbly careful to attract,
          Though crown'd with all the soul desires,
Connubial aptitude exact,
          Diversity that never tires.(13)

But, whereas novelists had lingered over the delights of married life, to poets the subject had always seemed far from heroic. If English romanticism had not, like the French variety, reached the point of identifying love with adultery, even to it the terms passion and matrimony seemed, if not contradictory, to be certainly an ill-assorted pair. It has been remarked¹⁴ that, after all, at the time when The Angel in the House appeared, Shelley's Epipsychidion was still fresh in men's minds, and hardly less fresh was Byron's Don Juan. So that Patmore, in considering love sanctioned by the Church and State as a theme worthy of poetry, nay, as the worthiest of all themes, brought about a parallel revolution to that of the Victorian prose-writers who proclaimed the dignity and beauty of humble everyday things as against the conventional romantic idea of the heroic. The Prologue of the First Book of The Angel in the House stresses the humdrum character of its inspiration in a stanza which reminds us of the programme of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life and of Thackeray's Small-Beer Chronicle. Reminiscent of George Eliot, too, are the first two lines of Patmore's ode to “Winter”:

I, singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved. …

“Winter” is like a Dutch picture, an unattractive landscape in which the artist discovers a beauty that is not obvious. The Prologue of the First Book, then, declares:

Mine is no horse with wings, to gain
          The region of the sphered chime;
He does but drag a rumbling wain,
          Cheer'd by the silver bells of rhyme;
And if at Fame's bewitching note
          My homely Pegasus pricks an ear,
The world's cart-collar hugs his throat,
          And he's too wise to kick or rear.

Patmore imagines a poet of the name of Vaughan (the same name, be it noted, as that of the mystical seventeenth-century poet) who, on the eighth anniversary of his marriage, confides to his wife that he has undertaken a poem on an entirely new subject:

I, meditating much and long
          What I should sing, how win a name,
Considering well what theme unsung,
          What reason worth the cost of rhyme
Remains to loose the poet's tongue
          In these last days, the dregs of time,
Learn that to me, though born so late,
          There does, beyond desert, befall
(May my great fortune make me great!)
          The first of themes sung last of all.
In green and undiscover'd ground,
          Yet near where many others sing,
I have the very well-head found
          Whence gushes the Pierian Spring.

It is curious to note that in those same years (The Angel in the House appeared in two parts, The Betrothal in 1854, The Espousals in 1856) another poet, in France, feeling, also, that he had arrived as it were too late, when the main subjects of inspiration had all been exploited, went in search of it ‘à l'extrémité du Kamtchatka littéraire’, into an unexplored province where he found—oh, a very different subject from Patmore's—the beauty of evil, Les Fleurs du mal!

Vaughan's wife, in the Prologue to The Angel in the House, asks the poet what theme he has chosen:

                    ‘What is it, Dear? The Life
          Of Arthur, or Jerusalem's Fall?’
‘Neither: your gentle self, my wife,
          And love, that grows from one to all.’

Conjugal love: this is ‘the most heart-touching theme’ that voice of poet ever intoned; he will live as long as those poets who sang the praises of Laura and Beatrice, and commentators will dispute over his lines, attributing a ‘mythological intent’ to his praises of Woman, in whom some will see a symbol of Faith, others of Charity, others of Hope, and others again, wiser, of all three.¹⁵ The pedestrian tone of the octosyllabics with alternate rhymes confers no solemnity at all upon these declarations, so that the reader skims over them, as it were, as if they were the voluble chit-chat of some humble, provincial Muse. And the poem, as it proceeds, seems to confirm him in this provincialism:

‘Your arm's on mine! these are the meads
          In which we pass our living days;
There Avon runs, now hid with reeds,
          Now brightly brimming pebbly bays;
Those are our children's songs that come
          With bells and bleatings of the sheep;
And there, in yonder English home,
          We thrive on mortal food and sleep!’

It is a rustic, Wordsworthian world, it is a provincial poet trying to fit the laurels of Dante or Petrarch on to his own brow, rather like the ‘newly made knight’ in Fedotov's picture who, proud of his title, strikes an attitude like an ancient Roman. Each canto consists of short preludes which contain considerations of metaphysical character intended to form the intellectual background of the poem, and of narrative sections characterized by a realism which is minute, caressing, and often unintentionally grotesque in its attempt to relate itself closely to everyday existence. Patmore chose an elastic form, as T. S. Eliot was to do in our own day for The Cocktail Party, the metre of which had to be capable of throbbing with transcendental solemnity and also of flattening itself out in such a way that the listener could not tell it was different from prose. Patmore's quatrains seem indeed to be modelled on the tune of the ‘Old Hundredth’ psalm, as Professor Grierson and J. C. Smith¹⁶ point out; but one notices with surprise that the metre is the same as that of Donne's Extasie.

Nevertheless the kinship with Donne and the other metaphysical poets is not at first apparent. The familiar, Biedermeier, Wordsworthian tone is what first strikes us:

If rightly you persue the Lay,
          You shall be sweetly help'd and warn'd.

The purpose the poet seems to be establishing for himself is to be instructive, practical, and pedestrian.

Thou Primal Love, who grantest wings
          And voices to the woodland birds,
Grant me the power of saying things
          Too simple and too sweet for words!(17)

How can we fail to hear an echo, in these lines, of Wordsworth's: ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’ (Intimations of Immortality)? The same undertaking that the poet formulates farther on (Book I, Canto VI, Preludes, 2, “Love Justified”):

This little germ of nuptial love,
          Which springs so simply from the sod,
The root is, as my Song shall prove,
          Of all our love of man and God—(18)

—this undertaking to soar from conjugal to divine love, from ‘home sweet home’ to the Empyrean, is announced candidly, like the naïve discovery of a country schoolmaster. The provincial, Victorian atmosphere is clearly conveyed and unalterably fixed in the oft-quoted lines from the first narrative section, “The Cathedral Close”:

Once more I came to Sarum Close,
          With joy half memory, half desire,
And breathed the sunny wind that rose
          And blew the shadows o'er the Spire,
And toss'd the lilac's scented plumes,
          And sway'd the chestnut's thousand cones,
And fill'd my nostrils with perfumes,
          And shaped the clouds in waifs and zones,
And wafted down the serious strain
          Of Sarum bells, when, true to time,
I reach'd the Dean's, with heart and brain
          That trembled to the trembling chime.
'Twas half my home six years ago.
          The six years had not alter'd it:
Red-brick and ashlar, long and low,
          With dormers and with oriels lit.
Geranium, lychnis, rose array'd
          The windows, all wide open thrown;
And some one in the Study play'd
          The Wedding-March of Mendelssohn.

These last lines, particularly, are as it were the quintessence of Victorianism, and as such have been often quoted; but there are flowers scattered here and there all over the poem, flowers as vivid as those in a piece of Victorian cross-stitch or a Victorian keepsake. Now it is the geranium, the carnation, and the rose which are used as terms of comparison (Book I, Canto II, Preludes, 1, “The Paragon”; and Canto IV, “The Morning Call,” 2: ‘geranium-plots, a rival glow of green and red’: Patmore is the first poet who ever sang of the geranium, that exquisitely Victorian plant), now it is the buds of the foxglove, opening by couples, which provide an image of ‘confidences’ between a young man and a young woman that ‘heavenwards blew’ (Book I, Canto II, “Mary and Mildred”); and elsewhere it is the yellow water-flags (Book I, Canto I, Preludes, 6), clematis (Book I, Canto IV, “The Morning Call,” 1), hyacinths and primroses (Book II, Canto VII, “The Revulsion,” 1), violets blue and white (Book I, Canto V, “The Violets,” 2) guelder-roses (Book I, Canto VII, “Aetna and the Moon,” 2) harebells (Book I, Canto VIII, “Sarum Plain,” 5). This taste for flowers, evocative, to us, of the Victorian atmosphere, must have given pleasure to Patmore's contemporaries—not so much to the learned ones, as to readers of only moderate culture, amongst whom the poem was especially popular (250,000 copies of it were printed during the poet's lifetime);¹⁹ and readers of this type saw mirrored in The Angel in the House even the quiet Victorian domesticity, even the conversations with their commonplace phrases that were their own daily experience, without minding whether such passages in the body of the poem were regarded by critics as examples of extreme bathos, as illustrations of the category of the grotesque. Like Wordsworth in the first place, and George Eliot later, Patmore had no fear of being over-pedestrian: in fact he deliberately insisted upon the pedestrian, thus falling in with the general tendency of Victorian poetry, which cultivated the subdued note in opposition to the heroic, the everyday in place of the eccentric, such as had formed the stock-in-trade of the Romantic Muse. In The Angel in the House the subject itself has nothing apparently heroic or dramatic about it. A young man of good family, Felix Vaughan, with six hundred a year, falls in love with Honoria, one of the daughters of the Dean of Sarum, Dr. Churchill, she herself having a dowry of three thousand pounds; he woos her, and after some mild rivalry on the part of the girl's cousin, Frederick Graham, a naval officer, finds his love reciprocated, asks the Dean for his daughter's hand in marriage, obtains it and leads her to the altar. The minute events of this wooing, the visits, the dinners, the departures by train, all are registered with a realism which, as happens with writers of the second rank, with the minor masters, has preserved the whole flavour of the period and to us seems amusing or charming (although the charm here lies more in the manners than in the poetry): it was pleasing to Patmore's contemporaries, as I have said, because they saw reflected in it their own habits and their taste for moral orderliness and neatness.

For something that abode endued
          With temple-like repose, an air
Of life's kind purposes pursued
          With order'd freedom sweet and fair.
A tent pitch'd in a world not right
          It seem'd, whose inmates, every one,
On tranquil faces bore the light
          Of duties beautifully done,
And humbly, though they had few peers,
          Kept their own laws, which seem'd to be
The fair sum of six thousand years'
          Traditions of civility.(20)

And again, speaking of men of exemplary character (Book I, Canto X, Preludes, 1):

They live by law, not like the fool,
          But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
          And finds in them, not bonds, but wings.
Postponing still their private ease
          To courtly custom, appetite,
Subjected to observances,
          To banquet goes with full delight;
Nay, continence and gratitude
          So cleanse their lives from earth's alloy,
They taste, in nature's common food,
          Nothing but spiritual joy.
They shine like Moses in the face,
          And teach our hearts, without the rod,
That God's grace is the only grace,
          And all grace is the grace of God.

The principle is the same as that of Wordsworth's “Ode to Duty,” that happiness is to be sought not in ‘unchartered freedom’ but in strict adherence to a rule, to a law. Read again the last but one stanza of the “Ode to Duty”:

Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face—

and compare it with the image which concludes this prelude by Patmore: the very rhyme grace-face reveals the source to which Patmore's accents can be traced.

As regards its ethical basis, then, The Angel in the House was grafted upon the Wordsworthian tradition, which was at the height of its renown during the first half of the nineteenth century and was diffused amongst all grades of society, not limited to literary circles. There was to be found, in this poem, Wordsworth's loftiest note, and there was also his pedestrian side, his bathos, carried to the point of the most deliberate carelessness. Scattered throughout the poem are specifications and conversations of the most banal type, such as to challenge the conventional concept of the poetic. We find put into verse the ‘luncheon-bell’ (Book I, Canto II, “Mary and Mildred,” 3), ‘tea on the lawn’ (Book I, Canto VI, “The Dean,” 4), plans for the day announced at breakfast (Book I, Canto VIII, “Sarum Plain,” 1: ‘Breakfast enjoy'd …’), rent-collecting (Book I, Canto IV, “The Morning Call,” 2: ‘Three hundred pounds for half the year’), an invitation to dinner (Book I, Canto V, “The Violets,” 2: ‘Papa had bid her send his love, And would I dine with him next day?’); and we find a passage like this (Book I, Canto III, “Honoria,” 1):

                                        I rode to see
The church-restorings; lounged awhile
          And met the Dean; was ask'd to tea,
And found their cousin, Frederick Graham,
          At Honor's side—

which, if it does not represent the whole of Trollope in a nutshell, if it does not condense the whole of the Barchester Novels into one epigram, as has been said, nevertheless gives the quintessence of England round about 1850. The following lines, in other respects, are no less typical (Book I, Canto IV, “The Morning Call,” 2):

Her sisters in the garden Walk'd,
          And would I come? Across the Hall
She took me; and we laugh'd and talk'd
          About the Flower-show and the Ball.
Their pinks had won a spade for prize;
          But this was gallantly withdrawn
For ‘Jones on Wiltshire Butterflies’:
          Allusive! So we paced the lawn,
Close-cut, and, with geranium-plots,
          A rival glow of green and red;
Then counted sixty apricots
          On one small tree; the gold-fish fed;
And watch'd where, black with scarlet rings,
          Proud Psyche stood and flash'd like flame,
Showing and shutting splendid wings;
          And in the prize we found its name.(21)

And in Book I, Canto VI, “The Dean,” 2, 3:

Towards my mark the Dean's talk set:
          He praised my ‘Notes on Abury’,
Read when the Association met
          At Sarum; he was glad to see
I had not stopp'd, as some men had,
          At Wrangler and Prize Poet; last,
He hoped the business was not bad
          I came about: then the wine pass'd.
A full glass prefaced my reply:
          I loved his daughter, Honor; he knew
My estate and prospects; might I try
          To win her? To mine eyes tears flew.
He thought 'twas that. I might. He gave
          His true consent, if I could get
Her love. A dear, good Girl! she'd have
          Only three thousand pounds as yet;
More bye and bye. …

The subdued tone, the ‘undrest, familiar style’ (Book II, Canto III, Preludes, 1), the enjambements give the passage a laboured, lurching rhythm, like prose put on the Procrustes' bed of verse rather than a natural sermo pedestris, and with a forced effect that reminds one of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, the poem that sought to adapt bourgeois material and everyday conversation to the heroic metres of Homer.²²The Angel in the House abounds in banal conversations. Thus in Book II, Canto I, “Accepted,” 2:

I paced the streets; a pistol chose,
          To guard my now important life
When riding late from Sarum Close;
          At noon return'd. Good Mrs. Fife,
To my, ‘The Dean, is he at home?’
          Smiled, ‘No, Sir; but Miss Honor is’;
And straight, not asking if I'd come,
          Announced me, ‘Mr. Felix, Miss’,
To Mildred, in the Study. There
          We talk'd, she working. We agreed
The day was fine; the Fancy-Fair
          Successful; ‘Did I ever read
De Genlis?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Do! She heard
          I was engaged.’ ‘To whom?’ ‘Miss Fry.
Was it the fact?’ ‘No!’ ‘On my word?’
          ‘What scandal people talk'd!’ ‘Would I
Hold out this skein of silk?’ So pass'd
          I knew not how much time away.

It might almost be a page from Jane Austen, with its typical indirect remarks, put into verse. Of the same kind are these warnings from the aunt, who is against her niece marrying Vaughan (Book II, Canto II, “The Course of True Love,” 3):

‘You, with your looks and handsome air,
          To think of Vaughan! You fool! You know,
You might, with ordinary care,
          Ev'n yet, be Lady Harrico.(23)
You're sure he'll do great things some day!
          Nonsense, he won't; he's dress'd too well.
Dines with the Sterling Club, they say;
          Not commonly respectable!
Half Puritan, half Cavalier!
          His curly hair I think's a wig;
And, for his fortune, why, my Dear,
          It's not enough to keep a gig.
Rich Aunts and Uncles never die;
          And what you bring won't do for dress;
And so you'll live on “Bye-and-bye”,
          With oaten-cake and water-cress!’

But later the aunt calms down a little on hearing that Honoria's fiancé has bought her ‘a carriage and a pair of bays’. The speech of the housekeeper (Book II, Canto V, “The Queen's Room,” 2) illustrates the same pedestrian tendency, and a tiresome complacencyy, like that of one of the mimiambi of Herodas, in following the mental processes of a person of humble position. On the other hand a gossipy dialogue with a friend, Charles Barton (Book II, Canto III, “The County Ball,” 4) was cut out almost entirely in the final version; and the same thing happened to a banal conversation with another friend, Frank (Book II, Canto IX, “The Friends,” 3), and to the following words exchanged between the young woman and her father (Book II, Canto XI, “The Wedding,” 3):

‘Adieu, dear, dear Papa, adieu!
          To-morrow I'll write.’ ‘No, Pet,—’. ‘I will!
You know I'm very happy; and you
          Have Mary and Mildred with you still!
Mary, you'll make Papa his tea
          At eight exactly. Au revoir!
Only six weeks! How soon 'twill be!’
          Then on us two they shut the door.

Later on Patmore was to be put on his guard against the prosaic quality of many passages and expressions by Hopkins, who considered them infra dignitatem.²⁴ But the poet did not change his point of view, and in the final edition, as in the first, we find this perfect example of realism à outrance (Book II, Canto VI, “The Love-Letters,” 2):

I ended. ‘From your Sweet-Heart, Sir,’
          Said Nurse, ‘The Dean's man brings it down.’
I could have kiss'd both him and her!
          ‘Nurse, give him that, with half-a-crown.’(25)

It would be difficult to find in the poetry of the period—for poetry usually keeps to a vaguer, more universal tone than narrative—pictures which so fully portray the customs of the age: but only the poetry of the period that marked the triumph of the genre picture could have produced them.

The train (Book I, Canto IX, “Sahara,” 1-3):

I stood by Honor and the Dean,
          They seated in the London train …
…
The bell rang, and, with shrieks like death,
          Link catching link, the long array,
With ponderous pulse and fiery breath,
          Proud of its burthen, swept away;
And through the lingering crowd I broke,
          Sought the hill-side, and thence, heart-sick,
Beheld, far off, the little smoke
          Along the landscape kindling quick.(26)

The hedgehog and the children (Book II, Prologue, 4): the poet has scarcely begun to read the second book of the poem about his wooing, when the children burst into the corner of the garden where he is:

                                                            But, with a roar,
          In rush'd the Loves; the tallest roll'd
A hedgehog from his pinafore,
          Which saved his fingers; Baby, bold,
Touch'd it, and stared, and screamed for life,
          And stretch'd her hand for Vaughan to kiss,
Who hugg'd his Pet, and ask'd his wife,
          ‘Is this for love, or love for this?’
But she turn'd pale, for, lo, the beast
          Found stock-still in the rabbit-trap,
And feigning so to be deceased,
          And laid by Frank upon her lap,
Unglobed himself, and show'd his snout,
          And fell, scatt'ring the Loves amain,
With shriek, with laughter, and with shout;
          And peace at last restored again,
The Bard, who this untimely hitch
          Bore with a calm magnanimous,
(The hedgehog kick'd into a ditch,
          And Venus sooth'd), proceeded thus. …

The poet's betrothed, dancing (Book II, Canto III, “The County Ball,” 2):

Her ball-dress seem'd a breathing mist,
          From the fair form exhaled and shed,
Raised in the dance with arm and wrist
          All warmth and light, unbraceleted.
Her motion, feeling 'twas beloved,
          The pensive soul of tune express'd,
And, oh, what perfume, as she moved,
          Came from the flowers in her breast! …

The following little scene of the buying of the sand-shoes (Book II, Canto XII, “Husband and Wife”) is truly a poesia scritta col lapis, a poem written in pencil, as this product of a minor Muse has been described by an Italian poet of the present day, Marino Moretti:

I while the shop-girl fitted on
          The sand-shoes, look'd where, down the bay,
The sea glow'd with a shrouded sun.
          ‘I'm ready, Felix; will you pay?’
That was my first expense for this
          Sweet stranger whom I call'd my wife:(27)
How light the touches are that kiss
          The music from the chords of life!
Her feet, by half-a-mile of sea,
          In spotless sand left shapely prints;
With agates, then, she loaded me,
          (The lapidary call'd them flints);
Then, at command, I hail'd a boat,
          To take her to the ships-of-war,
At anchor, each a lazy mote
          Black in the brilliance, miles from shore.

In “The Kites” (Book II, Preludes, 2) a naïve symbolism which is at the same time Hellenistic and Biedermeier permeates the genre picture. Three cupids launch three kites, on one of which is written ‘Plato’, on another ‘Anacreon’, on the third ‘Vaughan’: the first falls ‘for want of tail’, the second fails to rise because it has a lump of earth tied to it, the third, ‘freighted … with a long streamer made of flowers, the children of the sod’ (but not the sod itself) rises in the sunlight. An emblem of earthly passion spiritualized.

The following passage, which has become famous and has been included in many anthologies, is a compendium of nineteenth-century fashion-books (Book I, Canto IV, Preludes, 2, “The Tribute”):

Boon Nature to the woman bows.
          She walks in all its glory clad,
And, chief herself of earthly shows,
          Each other helps her, and is glad.
No splendour 'neath the sky's proud dome
          But serves for her familiar wear;
The far-fetch'd diamond finds its home
          Flashing and smouldering in her hair;
For her the seas their pearls reveal;
          Art and strange lands her pomp supply
With purple, chrome, and cochineal,
          Ochre, and lapis lazuli;
The worm its golden woof presents;
          Whatever runs, flies, dives, or delves,
All doff for her their ornaments,
          Which suit her better than themselves;
And all, by this their power to give,
          Proving her right to take, proclaim
Her beauty's clear prerogative
          To profit so by Eden's blame.(28)

English literature is not rich in poems upon feminine clothes, and, if one looks for further examples, one is naturally reminded of the seventeenth-century Herrick's Delight in Disorder, from which Patmore, as he himself confessed (final note to the 1858 edition) borrowed the last two lines of “The Pearl” (Book II, Canto VII, Preludes, 1). In other respects “Delight in Disorder” has nothing in common with “The Tribute” except for the generic theme:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fair distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

But that Herrick's poem was present in Patmore's mind is revealed by a more exact imitation of it, to be found in the poem that forms a sequel to The Angel in the House, The Victories of Love, where we read (Book, I, Canto XIII, letter from Lady Clitheroe to Mary Churchill):

The indolent droop of a blue shawl,
Or gray silk's fluctuating fall,
Covers the multitude of sins
In me.

.....

Actually Patmore drew far more inspiration from the English poets of the seventeenth century than has been recognized even by our own contemporaries who have restored these poets to a position of honour—not to mention Patmore's own contemporaries, who were entirely unaware of any such vein of inspiration.²⁹

We need only read the fourth section of “The Koh-i-Noor” in Canto VIII of The Angel in the House to become aware of a double inspiration:

‘You have my heart so sweetly seized,
          And I confess, nay, 'tis my pride
That I'm with you so solely pleased,
          That, if I'm pleased with aught beside,
As music, or the month of June,
          My friend's devotion, or his wit,
A rose, a rainbow, or the moon,
          It is that you illustrate it.
All these are parts where you're the whole!
          You fit the taste for Paradise,
To which your charms draw up the soul
          As turning spirals draw the eyes.
Nature to you was more than kind;
          'Twas fond perversity to dress
So much simplicity of mind
          In such a pomp of loveliness!
But, praising you, the fancy deft
          Flies wide and lets the quarry stray,
And when all's said, there's something left,
          And that's the thing I meant to say.’
‘Dear Felix!’ ‘Sweet, sweet love!’ But there
          Was Aunt Maude's noisy ring and knock!
‘Stay, Felix; you have caught my hair.
          Stoop! Thank you!’ ‘May I have that lock?’
‘Not now. Good morning, Aunt!’ ‘Why, Puss,
          You look magnificent to-day.’
‘Here's Felix, Aunt.’ ‘Fox and green goose!
          Who handsome gets should handsome pay.’
‘Aunt, you are friends!’ ‘O, to be sure!
          Good morning! Go on flattering, Sir;
A woman's like the Koh-i-Noor,
          Worth just the price that's put on her.’

While the second part (from ‘Dear Felix’ to the end) is simply the verse rendering of a conversation such as we have seen earlier, the first part, with its argumentative character, its out-of-the-way images (‘As turning spirals draw the eyes’) recalls Donne's love lyrics.³⁰ And as for the central conceit, we find it is a conceit taken straight from Donne's “Good-morrow,” and diluted:

… But this, all pleasures fancies bee.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir'd, and got, t'was but a dreame of thee.

The line ‘All these are parts where you're the whole!’ is particularly reminiscent of Donne. We find the same argumentative, metaphysical turn in a passage in Book I, Canto V, “The Violets”:

I thought how love, whose vast estate
          Is earth and air and sun and sea,
Encounters oft the beggar's fate
          Despised on score of poverty;
How Heaven, inscrutable in this,
          Lets the gross general make or mar
The destiny of love, which is
          So tender and particular;
How nature, as unnatural
          And contradicting nature's source,
Which is but love, seems most of all
          Well-pleased to harry true love's course;
How, many times, it comes to pass
          That trifling shades of temperament,
Affecting only one, alas,
          Not love, but love's success prevent.

A line like ‘Not love, but love's success prevent’, if isolated, might well be ascribed to Donne. In the same way, the lines from the Second Prelude (“Love Justified”) of Book I, Canto VI: ‘Is that elect relationship Which forms and sanctions all the rest’ seem to breathe the atmosphere of The Extasie; while the following comparison from Book I, Canto II, Preludes, 1:

And as geranium, pink, or rose
          Is thrice itself through power of art,
So may my happy skill disclose
          New fairness even in her fair heart—

manifestly derives from:

A single violet transplant,
          The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poore, and scant),
          Redoubles still, and multiplies.
When love, with one another so
          Interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
          Defects of loneliness controules.

Even more obvious is the derivation of this passage (Book I, Canto VII, “Aetna and the Moon,” 3):

But, now and then, in cheek and eyes,
          I saw, or fancied, such a glow
As when, in summer-evening skies,
          Some say ‘It lightens’, some say ‘No’—

from “A Valediction: forbidding mourning”:

As virtuous men passe mildly away,
          And whisper to their soules, to goe,
Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,
          The breath goes now, and some say, no …(31)

In “Going to Church,” 4 (Book I, Canto X) we read:

If oft, in love, effect lack'd cause
          And cause effect, 'twere vain to soar
Reasons to seek for that which was
          Reason itself, or something more—

which is in the metaphysical tradition of the love lyric based on syllogisms. The same could be said of the Second Prelude in Book II, Canto II:

That ugly good is scorn'd proves not
          'Tis beauty lies, but lack of it, &c.

The following are word-plays in the manner of Donne: ‘And did for fear my fear defy’ (Book I, Canto XI, “The Dance,” 3),³² and ‘He thought I thought he thought I slept’ (Book II, Canto VIII, Preludes, 3):³³ and we constantly encounter metaphors derived from astronomy or from everyday circumstances, such as the metaphysical poets employed. In “The Dance,” 1:

He who would seek to make her his
          Will comprehend that souls of grace
Own sweet repulsion, and that 'tis
          The quality of their embrace
To be like the majestic reach
          Of coupled suns, that, from afar,
Mingle their mutual spheres, while each
          Circles the twin obsequious star.

And in the first of the Preludes in Book II, Canto III:

And let the sweet, respective sphere
          Of personal worship there obtain
Circumference for moving clear,
          None treading on another's train.

In the First Prelude of Book II, Canto II:

And, like that fatal ‘I am thine’,
          Comes with alternate gush and check
And joltings of the heart, as wine
          Pour'd from a flask of narrow neck.(34)

Farther on in the same prelude, a military comparison recalls another famous one in one of Donne's Holy Sonnets (‘Batter my heart, three person'd God …’):

With her, as with a desperate town
          Too weak to stand, too proud to treat,
The conqueror, though the walls are down,
          Has still to capture street by street. …(35)

The allusion to an exotic geographical circumstance which occurs in “The Course of True Love,” 7 (Book II, Canto II):

She pass'd, and night was a surprise,
          As when the sun at Quito dips—

is also in the taste of Donne, whereas the legal terminology which we find farther on in the same poem may point to Donne as well as to Shakespeare's sonnets:

‘At best, can longest life afford
          That tyranny should thus deduct
From this fair hand, which calls me lord,
          A year of the sweet usufruct!’

But no one else except Donne could have written (Book II, Canto IV, “Love in Idleness,” 4):

… love, which is the source of law,
And, like a king, can do no wrong.

Donne's rugged syntax, together with unusual metaphors, is to be found in a passage in “The County Ball” (Book II, Canto III), which in the final version has disappeared. It indicates the self-contained isolation of the two lovers as they dance together:

If either for all else but one
          Was blinder than the mole that delves,
Dark-lanterns for all else, we shone
          But to each other and ourselves.

And the following stanza (Book II, Canto IV, “Love in Idleness,” 4):

‘A road's a road, though worn to ruts;
          They speed who travel straight therein;
But he who tacks and tries short cuts
          Gets fools' praise and a broken shin’—

seems to repeat the scheme of this one of Donne's (“A Valediction; forbidding mourning”):

Moving of th' earth brings harmes and feares,
          Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheares,
          Though greater farre, is innocent.

Once we are aware of this metaphysical influence, it is an easy game to detect its traces in The Angel in the House. Thus at the end of Canto IV of Book II:

For as the worm whose powers make pause
          And swoon, through alteration sick,
The soul, its wingless state dissolved,
          Awaits its nuptial life complete.

In Canto VI of Book II, “The Love-Letters,” Preludes, 1:

Yet 'tis a postulate in love
          That part is greater than the whole.(36)

And in the first of the love-letters:

‘I'll nobly mirror you too fair,
          And, when you're false to me your glass,
What's wanting you'll by that repair,
          So bring yourself through me to pass.’(37)

In “The Revulsion,” 1 (Book II, Canto VII):

I sigh'd, ‘Immeasurable bliss
          Gains nothing by becoming more!
Millions have meaning; after this
          Cyphers forget the integer.’(38)

The Fourth Prelude of Book II, Canto X contains this “Demonstration” (the very title has a Donneish air about it):

Nature, with endless being rife,
          Parts each thing into ‘him’ and ‘her’,
And, in the arithmetic of life,
          The smallest unit is a pair;
And thus, oh, strange, sweet half of me,
          If I confess a loftier flame,
If more I love high Heaven than thee,
          I more than love thee, thee I am;
And, if the world's not built of lies,
          Nor all a cheat the Gospel tells,
If that which from the dead shall rise
          Be I indeed, not something else,
There's no position more secure
          In reason or in faith than this,
That those conditions must endure,
          Which, wanting, I myself should miss.

In “The Wedding,” 2 (Book II, Canto XI):

                                        ‘… recollect
The eye which magnifies her charms
          Is microscopic to defect.
Fear comes at first; but soon, rejoiced,
          You'll find your strong and tender loves,
Like holy rocks by Druids poised,
          The least force shakes, but none removes.’(39)

And finally, the First Prelude to the last Canto, “Husband and Wife,” contains a long comparison derived from the custom of subjects' kissing the queen's hand on Court reception-days; this, too, is reminiscent of Donne.

In The Victories of Love Marvell's influence is revealed not only by the metre, but also by the recurring echo of the famous lines “To his Coy Mistress”:

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near—

in:

                                                  … I hear
Under her life's gay progress hurl'd,
The wheels of the preponderant world—(40)

and in:

                                        … hear
At dawn the carriage rolling near—(41)

and in the word ambergris in proximity to the word shore:

With here and there cast up, a piece
Of coral or of ambergris,
Which, boasted of abroad, we ignore
The burden of the barren shore—(42)

reminding one of the well-known passage in Marvell's Bermudas:

Proclaim the ambergris on shore.

Why did Patmore, unlike the other Victorians,⁴³ seek his inspiration in the metaphysical tradition which had died out after the close of the seventeenth century? Was he attracted to Donne by the theory expounded in The Extasie which maintained the necessity and dignity of the sensual part of love (‘To our bodies turne wee then, that so Weake men on love reveal'd may looke’)? This is likely; but he must also have been attracted by the fact that Donne had been the first to do away with the courtly tradition which banished from Parnassus all common things and common expressions, the first to introduce everyday life into verse, and to find a form of verse which lent itself equally well to the expression of that life and to the rendering of abstract, metaphysical thought in terms which the senses could apprehend.

But who thought of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets when The Angel in the House first appeared? People spoke of derivations from Tennyson, Browning, Keats. Of the real model no one was aware. And it is precisely because of its attempt to find a poetical language of the greatest possible elasticity and modernity that Patmore's experiment, representing, as it does, one aspect of the Victorian anti-heroic reaction, has seemed to us worthy of illustration, whereas usually critics linger over its message, over its spiritualization of sexual love—a fixation which is common to this poet and to a very different writer of our own century, D. H. Lawrence: to both of them divinity is revealed in carnal union.⁴⁴

Considered from this point of view, Patmore's work may seem strangely alien to the atmosphere of Victorianism, and the poet's figure, thus isolated, thus magnified, has been exalted (thanks mainly to Claudel and the fashion which followed him) to a height which is in truth superior to his merits.

The Angel in the House, and to a lesser degree The Victories of Love, have the merits of minor poetry that we have sought and found in them: a few groups of lines, a mild impression of the ‘household round of duties’ (The Victories of Love, Book II, Canto XI) and of a comfortable, ordered existence pervaded by affectionate, thoughtful sensuality (‘On settl'd poles turn solid joys, And sunlike pleasures shine at home’) are all that survives from a poem which diffuses a Victorian ‘keepsake’ atmosphere over the cult of Priapus.⁴⁵

Notes

1. In the Nouvelle Revue française, Sept. and Oct. 1911, with a biographical essay on Patmore by V. Larbaud.

2. See Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins including his Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, Oxford University Press, 1938, p. xxxii.

3. On the subject of love in general he wrote to his friend Henry Sutton: ‘A minute of the sense of love is better than a play of Shakespeare's’ (quoted in Derek Patmore, The Life and Times of Coventry Patmore, London, Constable, 1949, p. 64). To Théophile Gautier, Shakespeare's plays had served as a comparison for a different kind of spectacle—the bullfight: for Gautier the situation of the matador face to face with the bull ‘vaut tous les drames de Shakespeare’.

4. He found flashes of Catholic intuition even in the licentious novelists of the French eighteenth century, and—perhaps in one of those outbursts of paradox in which he took pleasure—declared that Crébillon fils was a good Catholic. Hidden behind the shelves of his library at Heron's Ghyll was a complete set of the privately printed books of the Eroticon Biblion Society. See D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 148.

5. As an adolescent, still uncertain of his vocation, Patmore consulted the phrenologist Deville, in Paris, who exhorted him to think of himself as a poet, ‘and this perhaps gives us the date, Oct. 1839, for Patmore's sudden burst into verse’, observes Frederick Page (quoted by D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 39).

6. This patriarch could at times assume the aspect of the Old Man of the Mountains in the Arabian Nights. In 1894, unable to go out alone on account of weakness and vertigo, he used to grasp his son Francis by the neck and lean on him for support. Francis Patmore relates:

   I was thus a human walking-stick, and though I often reached home almost broken by fatigue, for he was heavy to support, it pleases me to know that I never let him suspect the often acute suffering he quite unwittingly caused. During these walks he would often exclaim aloud: ‘My God, how cold, how cold!’ One hot July night, as I was sweating under his weight, I ventured to protest that he could not possibly be cold, especially as he always wore at night a heavy ulster. He said, ‘Oh, it is a spiritual cold I feel.’ And in this internal, spiritual life, his last years were far from happy, and his soul longed, I think, for death and to see his God face to face. (D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 237.)

   Of this he had no doubt. He wrote to Alice Meynell shortly before he died: ‘Our meeting again in Heaven depends on your fidelity to the highest things you have known.’ (D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 238.)

7. D. Patmore, op. cit., pp. 173-4: ‘Especially she was haunted by a conviction that she had loved her father too much, and had been too proud of him.’

8. D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 233. In Nov. 1895 he wrote to Francis Thompson, another of Alice Meynell's unsuccessful lovers: ‘My heart goes forth to you as it goes to no other man; for are we not singularly visited by a great common delight, and a great common sorrow? Is not this to be one in Christ?’ Patmore sees religious sentiment even in the brotherhood of two rejected lovers.

9. D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 4.

10. See above, p. 43.

11. The Angel in the House, 1858 edition, Book I, Canto X, Preludes, 2, Truth and Love.

12. See above, p. 239.

13. Book I, Canto IV, Preludes, 1, The Rose of the World. But the whole of this Prologue deserves to be quoted. And in Canto X of the same Book, Going to Church, 6: ‘And when she knelt, she seem'd to be An angel teaching me to pray’. Compare her with Dickens's Agnes Wickfield (see above, pp. 135-6).

14. By Osbert Burdett, The Idea of Coventry Patmore, Oxford University Press, 1921, p. 12.

15. Thus in the original version, which we follow. In the final form of the poem there are a great number of transpositions and alterations, some of them due to suggestions by G. M. Hopkins.

16. Herbert J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, London, Chatto & Windus, 1944, p. 453: ‘the tune of the Old Hundredth’; the hundredth psalm is the famous old Puritan hymn.

17. Book I, Canto I, Preludes, 5, The Impossibility.

18. See also Book II, Canto VII, Preludes, 3: ‘But fools shall feel like fools to find (Too late inform'd), that angels' mirth Is one in cause, and mode, and kind With that which they despised on earth.’

19. G. M. Hopkins wrote, on May 14th, 1885, to Patmore that ‘to dip into it [The Angel in the House] was like opening a basket of violets’ (an appropriate comparison, in view of what I have just observed regarding the flowers with which the poem is besprinkled), and that the fact of the poem being in its sixth edition showed a ‘steady popularity or a steadily reading public’: ‘But it is a popularity and a public rather below the surface’ (see Further Letters, cited, pp. 214-15).

20. The Cathedral Close, 5.

21. In the final version in the Collected Poems this passage has been altered here and there. Instead of ‘But this was gallantly withdrawn’, &c. we read: ‘And stepping like the light-foot fawn, She brought me “Wiltshire Butterflies”, The Prize-book’, &c.

22. See, for example, chapter v, ‘Mir ist lästig, noch länger dies wunderliche Beginnen Anzuschauen. Vollendet es selbst! Ich gehe zu Bette.’ And in chapter iii the conversation of the chemist: ‘Manches hätt'ich getan, allein wer scheut nicht die Kosten Solcher Verändrung, besonders in diesen gefährlichen Zeiten! Lange lachte mir schon mein Haus im modischen Kleidchen, Lange glänzten durchaus mit grossen Scheiben die Fenster …’

23. ‘Clitheroe’ in the final text.

24. See Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, cited. Hopkins's chief observations, however, are concerned with points of religion.

25. Cf. The Victories of Love, Book I, Letter XVIII: ‘My wife … gave him his hire, and sixpence more.’

26. Hopkins (op. cit., p. 255) observed, with regard to ‘link catching link’: ‘Only goods trains do this; passenger trains are locked rigidly.’

27. In the final edition: ‘Sweet Stranger, now my three days' Wife.’

28. The final version offers a few variants. ‘To profit so by Eden's blame’—i.e. the covering of the body after the Fall. Similar in subject, but with a different moral, is the sonnet by Alberto Ròndani quoted by B. Croce, La Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. ii, p. 242.

29. Some of Patmore's declarations might in any case put one on the wrong track: for instance in 1864 he described, from Paris, his enthusiasm for Gérard's Cupid and Psyche: ‘Certainly love has never been expressed with more force, delicacy, and spiritual science than in the Cupid and Psyche of Gérard. As I mean to have a vignette of this picture for the title-page of the next edition of The Angel in the House, I will say no more about it’ (D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 122). The vignette might have been more suitable for the ode Eros and Psyche.

30. I have illustrated the character of Donne's lyric poetry in Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra, Florence, 1925, reprinted later in La poesia metafisica inglese del Seicento, John Donne, Rome, Edizioni italiane, 1945.

31. It is odd to find, close beside an imitation of Donne, another passage in the familiar style: ‘“Honoria”, I began—No more. The Dean, by ill or happy hap, Came home; and Wolf burst in before, And put his nose upon her lap.’

32. Cf. Donne, The Good-morrow: ‘For love, all love of other sights controules.’

33. One is reminded also of Dante (Inferno, xiii. 25): ‘Cred'io ch'ei credette ch'io credesse’; in Donne's The Dreame: ‘But when I saw thou sawest my heart’; in Love's Exchange: ‘Let me not know that others know That she knowes my paines. …’

34. It has been observed that the image is already to be found in Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, xxiii. 113: ‘His violent sorrow remained within him because it all wished to come out with too great haste. So sometimes we see water stay in the bottle that has a large belly and a narrow neck, because when it is turned upside down, the water that wishes to get out hastens so much and is so confined in the narrow passage that it comes out with difficulty, drop by drop.’ (Trans. Professor Allan H. Gilbert; New York, Vanni, 1954, vol. i, p. 399.)

35. Cf., in Donne's sonnet: ‘I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due, Labour to'admit you. …’

36. Cf. Donne, Lovers Infinitenesse: ‘Loves riddles are, that though thy heart depart, It stayes at home. …’ The last part of this prelude of Patmore's consists of a series of paradoxes of love: ‘He worships her, the more to exalt The profanation of a kiss. …’

37. Cf. Donne, A Valediction: of my name, in the window: ‘'Tis much that Glasse should bee As all confessing, and through-shine as I, 'Tis more, that it shewes thee to thee, And cleare reflects thee to thine eye. But all such rules, loves magique can undoe, Here you see mee, and I am you.’ See also, in The Victories of Love, Book II, Canto VIII: ‘She bade me then, in the crystal floor, Look at myself no more; And bright within the mirror shone Honoria's smile, and yet my own!’ A similar theme was treated by D. G. Rossetti in Willowwood.

38. Cf. the argument in Donne's Lovers Infinitenesse. The last line of this passage of Patmore and the last line of the Second Prelude of Book II, Canto III: ‘Or beauty's apparition so Puts on invisibility’, sound like anticipations of Emily Dickinson.

39. These are the words of the Dean to the husband.

40. Book I, Canto III.

41. Book I, Canto XIV.

42. Book I, Canto IX.

43. With the exception of Browning, upon whom the influence of Donne worked in a very different and much less ascertainable way.

44. Husband and wife were, to Patmore, ‘priest and priestess to one another of the divine womanhood and divine manhood which are inherent in original Deity’. In the exaltation of their finite union the veil is lifted for an instant, and they understand infinity. We are not concerned here with Patmore's odes, in which he ‘dared to describe feelings and emotions that tore the veil away from subjects which Victorian Society considered both “unpleasant” and “unmentionable”’ (D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 195) but, though I once thought so, I now doubt whether Patmore should be considered ‘no longer the slightly ridiculous poet of matrimony, but a mystic and a religious poet of the highest order’, as Derek Patmore maintains he appears to the moderns, or actually, as Desmond MacCarthy claimed, ‘the greatest religious poet in the English language since the seventeenth century’ (D. Patmore, op. cit., p. 5).

45. Newman disapproved of Patmore's poetry for ‘mixing up amorousness with religion’—elements which to him appeared irreconcilable; and Housman went so far as to speak of a ‘nasty mixture of piety and concupiscence’.