SOURCE: Allison, Alexander Ward. “The Refinement of Our Language.” In Toward an Augustan Poetic: Edmund Waller's “Reform” of English Poetry, 24-46. University of Kentucky Press, 1962.

[In the following essay, discusses the influences of Waller's poetic diction.]

There is general consent, now as in 1700, that the language of English poetry should simultaneously fulfill our expectations of our tongue as it is spoken and be set apart from the most ordinary discourse. But there also existed then a rather general consensus that felicitous combinations of familiar words alone could not sustain the style of serious poetry. Neoclassical poets might rejoice in lines and phrases which were at once natural and noble. Dryden was pleased that for “Open the door,” there existed the alternative “Set wide the palace gates.”¹ But most poets and critics of the period also advocated the avoidance of low words in nobler or politer ventures and the cultivation of a distinctively poetic idiom.

The poet before Waller who had contributed most toward such an idiom was Edmund Spenser, and Spenser had purchased his style at the expense of eccentricity. Shakespeare was thought to have been sometimes mean and sometimes tumid; one could not say of him even at his best that he had raised his diction consistently above the commonplace. The language of Ben Jonson and John Donne, finally, had represented a regression rather than an advance. Though both men had employed a current English—avoiding Spenser's error—they had adopted the idiom of an unpolished, or at least of an insufficiently polished, conversation. It had remained for Waller at once to elevate the language of poetry and to confine it to the best current usage; which is to say, if one chooses to look at literary history in that light, to recreate Spenser's achievement without incurring Spenser's faults. And the fusion of elements in his vocabulary associates him quite properly with Spenser in certain ways.

Waller's diction is spruce and single-minded, and the tenor of his style is at best quite elegant and at worst inoffensive.² When the choice confronts him, he is precious rather than mean. Describing the Countess of Carlisle in mourning, he writes not of her black dress and bright face but of her “sable vestments” and “bright aspect.” (I.22.4) When he would say that a brilliant dawn forecasts the heat of the day to follow, he writes that its “refulgent Ray / Foretells the fervour of ensuing day.” (I.5.121-22) And when an ailing courtier is (putatively) brought back to health by the sympathy of court ladies, Waller asks,

Who would not languish by so fair a train,
To be lamented and restor'd again?

(I.34.39-40)

A certain elegance here resides in the phrase “so fair a train” and in the verbs of foreign etymology.

He further increases the formality of his verse by frequent periphrasis. When he might have written that a lady's admirers had nothing else to hope for, he wrote instead that they had no other occasion to “employ their hope.” (I.26.10) Instead of the same lady's becoming more glorious, she “admits increase / Of glory.” (I.22.11-12) A favor greater than he dares think of becomes a favor greater than his “awful thought / Durst entertain.” (I.51.10-11) Hardly before in English poetry had the arts of paraphrase been devoted to ends so purely polite.

He is at his best in the Panegyric to Cromwell, in which, since he rarely reaches for a sheerly rococo elegance, we may not notice that the language is lifted above the commonplace until we consider what it might have been. We can regard the couplets:

Oft have we wonder'd how you hid in Peace
A minde proportion'd to such things as these?

(II.15.129-30)

For whom we stay'd, as did the Grecian State,
Till Alexander came to urge their Fate.

(II.13.71-72)

He might have written:

We often wonder how you could have hid
Your powers of mind as fully as you did.
We waited like the Greeks, who had to wait
Till Alexander came to hurry fate.

And if these alternatives seem to sink below anything which a recognized poet might have written even in an earlier and wholly gothic age, we can recall Ben Jonson's lapses into bathos:

Shee was the Lady Jane, and Marchionisse
Of Winchester; the Heralds can tell this.(3)
Then Royall Charles, and Mary, doe not grutch. …(4)

It is from such a graceless and tuneless blurting out of the sense that Waller saved English poetry.

Two components of his diction may, I think, be singled out and allowed to stand for the rest. Latin verbs used in, or with awareness of, etymological senses lend it polish and precision. Conventional epithets amplify and sweeten it; tending to be “pathetic” even when applied to inanimate objects, these diffuse throughout his verse a genial quality wherein much of his politeness consists.

He had a livelier sense than we of the etymologies of loan words, for he was writing during a period when many of these were still being domesticated in English. When in a reference to the Earl of Warwick and the Lady Bona of Savoy, he writes that the Earl, “himself deluded, mocks the Princely dame,” (I.2.22) the English word has the force of a gloss upon the Latin. When he writes of “a heart large in magnanimity,” (I.18.45-46) he is resolving the Latin compound into its elements. In his classical allusions, especially, etymologically Latin diction sometimes has a specific literary source. Aeneas, “repeats the danger of the burning Town” (urbem repeto),⁵ and Juno pursues “the hated relics of confounded Troy” (reliquias Troiae).⁶ Elsewhere he writes of heaven confused (I.51.1) with earth in primeval chaos and of a woman compressed (I.12.37) by mighty Jove. When Sacharissa's admirers are compelled together with her in a crowd of people, the god of Love insults (I.51.11,13), which is to say frisks or exults. Voicing a complaint to the same lady, Waller finds that his song conspires (I.65.28) with the nymph herself to do the singer wrong.

In all these instances, he appeals to meanings which, having long ago petrified, are wholly constant and which, since our acquaintance with them is chiefly academic, are further associated with lexical purity. Words which convey such meanings stand for language shorn of irrelevance and releasing a simple denotative “sense.” Being free of commonplace associations as well as of irrelevancy, they are also poetically proper. A few such words in each poem, together with many, more fully assimilated Latin words possessing the same characteristics in diminished degree, help him to realize the Augustan ideal of “correctness” in its twin senses of precision and politesse.

When we have isolated a principle of precision in neo-classical poetry, we often become aware of a softer principle complementing it. Despite the somewhat neutral quality of these etymologically Latin verbs, many of them also suggested some form of humane agency, and, when used in contexts from which such agency was absent, they lent an air of civility to the action described. When Waller writes that a football is urged⁷ this way and that by the players, the verb imparts the semblance of courtesy to an activity which would otherwise seem mean. When he writes that wind salutes (II.38.88) the field, the action seems gracious. And when, upon the Royal Navy's coming into sight, the French and Spaniard

Forget their Hatred, and consent to Fear,(8)

the consent implies obeisance as well as agreement. In the last example, which is altogether characteristic of Waller and of neoclassical poetry generally, the tidy and somewhat precious Latinism serves not only to express a feeling but to civilize the same feeling; the lexical order which it imposes stands for a complex of aesthetic and social restraints. Such are the ideal uses of the Latinate verb.

The functions of setting his language apart from the commonplace and of giving it a civil and humane quality devolved also upon attributive adjectives, which abound in his work as hardly elsewhere in seventeenth-century poetry except in Milton and the little family of Spenserians.⁹ Stock epithets sweeten and diffuse his style. Testifying also that he is minding his literary manners, they sort well with his other polite locutions. They are often “pathetic,” finally, and serve the interest of civility by calling sentiment to its aid. Upon this last function I want to dwell, for it aptly represents the general drift of his style.

Since several of his poems celebrate naval engagements, we may conveniently consider the manner in which he has described the ocean. Having applied attributive adjectives to the sea on thirty-eight occasions in all, he has twenty-five times given it attributes belonging to humanity or at least to sensate life. It is usually unfriendly: “angry” or “rude” or “raging.” Less often it is sympathetic: “obsequious” or “injured” or “troubled.’ Sometimes it is wittily suspended between life and lifelessness, depending on the connotation of an epithet like “silent” or “yielding.” Sometimes it is referred to in periphrases indicating its utility or want of utility to man: it is a “watery field” for a battle, a “watery wilderness,” “the world's great waste.” Once it is merely the “liquid main.”

One could hardly find an assortment of epithets and phrases more conventional than these. Virgil's ocean had been variously saevus, inimicus, placatus, tacitus, vastus, a campus liquens, and liquidae undae; Spenser's had been “angry,” “raging,” “yielding,” a “watery wilderness,” a “watery plain,” and “liquid waves.” To this assortment Edward Fairfax contributed “buxom,” which Waller modernized into “yielding,” and the specific epithets “troubled” and “silent.” Shakespeare, incidentally, has “rude,” “raging,” and “ruthless” seas, permits Cleopatra's barge to ride on “amorous” water, and translates the concept vastus into “vasty” and “wilderness of sea”; he has also a merely “watery” main.

As conventional as Waller's epithets and phrases are, however, we perhaps notice that some altogether traditional attributes of the sea are not named among them. The entire class of words of which “winedark” is the type is missing. In the works which I have used as a basis of comparison and which, excepting Shakespeare's, are among Waller's principal models, concretely descriptive epithets and periphrases make up from one-third to two-thirds of all those referring to the sea. In Waller, they make up fewer than one-eighth. He has no equivalents to “torquent spumas et caerula verrunt,”¹⁰ or “draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea.”¹¹ The attributes he grants the sea which seem most nearly devoid of pathos are the very general ones “smooth” and “swelling.” In his Aeneid fragment, he translates Virgil's caerula as “yielding.”¹² The sharply visual image of a ship's ploughing the water he converts into wit: “We plough the Deep, and reap what others Sowe.” (II.12.64)

In sum, he confines himself almost wholly to expressions which endow the sea with human emotions or otherwise assimilate it to mankind. And the language called attention to is representative of his diction generally. Whenever a suitable occasion offers, the pathos riots. The following passage—a relief from seascapes—describes the picture of a young man painted after he was dead:

As gather'd Flowers, whilst their wounds are new,
Look gay and fresh, as on the stalke they grew,
Torn from the root that nourisht them, a while,
Not taking notice of their fate, they smile,
And in the hand, which rudely pluckt them, show
Fairer than those that to their Autumne grow;
So Love and Beauty, still that visage grace,
Death cannot fright them from their wonted place.(13)

In most contexts the pathetic words work together with a standard honorific vocabulary—with “sweet” and “fair” in poems of feminine compliment and “good” and “great” in his graver ventures. In a poem on the Duchess of Orleans' departure from England, he unites pathos with praise:

But we must see our Glory snatcht away,
And with warm tears increase the guilty Sea:
No wind can favour us; howe're it blowes,
We must be wreckt, and our dear Treasure loose:
Sighs will not let us half our sorrows tell;
Fair, Lovely, Great and best of Nymphs, Farewell.

(II.72.11-16)

The same elements are combined in a poem on the Lord Admiral:

This we observ'd, delighting to obey
One who did never from his great self stray:
Whose mild example seemed to engage
Th' obsequious Seas, and teach them not to rage.

(I.31.13-16)

The summary facts are that the language of general qualification tends to displace all concretely descriptive words in his poetry and that an element of pathos or sentiment is always present and often primary.

His diction and tenor stand, I conclude, for a somewhat novel synthesis of traditional elements. He took from his predecessors whatever was sufficiently tame and general for his purposes and pruned away those details which displayed an unmanageable independence or a barbarous resistance to civility. Everything in his verse is accommodated to man; it is accommodated to him, furthermore, as a creature of quite exquisite sensibility. When Augustan critics found Waller an initial civilizing influence on English poetry, they knew whereof they spoke.

It remains only to insist that his diction was more closely akin to Spenser's than to that of any other major English predecessor. A stanza of Spenserian panegyric reads,

Thenceforth eternall vnion shall be made
          Betweene the nations different afore,
          And sacred Peace shall louingly perswade
          The warlike minds, to learne her goodly lore,
          And ciuile armes to exercise no more:
          Then shall a royall virgin raine, which shall
          Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore,
          And the great Castle smite so sore with all,
That it shall make him shake, and shortly learne to fall.(14)

Spenser here freely endows abstractions and inanimate objects with human attributes and freights his lines with sentimental and honorific appeal. When he writes that sacred Peace shall lovingly persuade men of her lore and that the Castle shall learn to fall, the tenor is that of Waller's lines:

Whose mild example seemed to engage
Th' obsequious Seas,

(I.31.15-16)

and

Well chosen love is never taught to die.

(I.40.79)

Again, in the spruce and Latin line,

And ciuile armes to exercise no more,

Spenser elevates his language by the means which Waller was to employ in lines like

We had occasion to resume our Arms,

(I.76.36)

and

From Civill Broyles he did us disingage,
Found nobler objects for our Martiall rage.

(II.35.23-24)

Waller is kept from being a more complete Spenserian than he is chiefly by virtue of what he does not do. In Spenser, the sentimental and honorific words compete with eccentricities of archaic and dialectal vernacular and with an element of vigorous description (“smite the Castle so sore that it shall shake”); in Waller, they face no competition from eccentricity and very little from lively concretion. In Spenser, again, the Latinisms appear upon a groundwork of pure and simple English; in Waller, the groundwork itself is considerably elevated. The points of difference are as forcible as the points of similarity. Nevertheless Spenser anticipates Waller in that he uniformly tames and qualifies his subject matter and in that he uses Latinisms to dignify his style.

The chief intermediary between Spenser and Waller was Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso. Though working in a generally Spenserian tradition, Fairfax affected less archaism than his master and reduced also the amplitude of Spenser's syntax and phrasing. He thereby made available to the heroic couplet a style which, in its pristine state, was too “incorrect” to admit of neoclassical imitation and too leisurely and diffuse to be contained in any verse form other than a concatenated stanza. The line of descent from Spenser to Fairfax to Waller contains, as the Jonsonian inheritance does not, those features of diction which lift the consciously polite couplets of the Augustan age above ordinary discourse.

But before pronouncing on this diction further and measuring, as it were, its degree of elevation, one must consider the order in which Waller arranged his words as well as the words themselves.

Of the verbal patterns which distinguish poetic language from prosaic, a poet will normally rely upon those which have been held up to him as examples. And if his formal tutelage has been chiefly in Latin, he will rely on those devices which have a local habitation and a name in Latin grammars and appear frequently in Augustan Latin literature. Such devices had long served the convenience of English poets. Thomas Carew referred to them slightingly as

                                                                                          the subtle cheat
Of slie Exchanges, and the jugling feat
Of two-edg'd words, or whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greeke, or Latine tongue.(15)

Carew claimed, with partial justice, that John Donne had purged English poetry of these and substituted a wholly native idiom; but he prophesied, perhaps with a cold eye on his young contemporary Waller, that later poets would introduce them again.

Among these devices were the use of nouns as grammatical coordinates when the logical relationship between them does not admit such a parallel or the illogical use of any words in grammatical pairs—in a word, the figures of hendiadys and zeugma. So, for example, the sense “buried in alcoholic sleep” may be expressed by coordinate nouns “buried in wine and sleep,” and the sense “whether waging war or keeping the peace” may be shortened into the logically dubious but current expression “whether waging war or peace.”

Verbal manipulation of this sort was useful to all poets—perhaps especially to verse translators, who might reproduce it or not when they found it in their originals and might add it expletively as the spirit urged or as meter and rhyme required. In general, the need to accommodate an irreducible body of matter to a fixed metrical form gave verse translators a lively appreciation of all available rhetorical and syntactical aids. And Waller was as strongly influenced by English translations of foreign works as by native English poetry.

George Chapman, whose Iliad he professed himself unable to read without transport,¹⁶ had sought to capture by analysis the rich content of Homer's compound epithets and to make up whatever deficiency remained by adding ornamental expressions of his own. “Phthia, the rich-soiled nurse-of-men,” he rendered most happily, “Phthia, whose bosome flowes / With corne and people.”¹⁷ “Clytemnestra, my wedded wife” he expanded into “Clytemnestra, … that grac't my nuptiall roome / With her virginitie and flowre.”¹⁸ George Sandys had found a rhyme-word by converting Ovid's “honored with temples” into “with praire / And Temples dignifi'd.”¹⁹ Spenser had found one by converting the sense “because they loved her” into “for her sake / And love.”²⁰ Fairfax, the most potent single influence upon Waller, had written “storms and seas” for “stormy seas,”²¹ and had made, as he thought, a virtue of loosely aggregating series of nouns under the same regimen: his Turks, on one occasion, fill the crusaders' tents “with ruin, slaughter, death, and blood.”²²

Waller, who remembered the phrase “buried in wine and sleep,” from Virgil or Ovid, writes of persons whom “wine and sleep betray / To frantic dreams.”²³ Of a woman whose thoughts rise to heaven he writes that “Heaven and her transcendent thoughts” (I.80.5) have placed her above mortal ills. His best-known zeugma, illustrating the tendency of the figure to involve pun or what Carew called the juggling feat of two-edged words, is from “Go, lovely rose,”

Tell her that wasts her time and me.

(I.128.2)

Elsewhere he writes “Charles and his virtue” (I.3.54) for “the virtuous Charles,” “his conduct and his sword” (II.76.16) for “his military prowess,” and “storms and winter” (II.8.2) for “stormy winter.” He often loosely aggregates words under the same regimen in Fairfax's manner, as in the line, “Night, horror, slaughter, with confusion meets” [sic]. (II.24.45)

In addition to rhetorical figures like hendiadys and zeugma, some features of classical syntax served English poets for convenience and ornament. These included uses of the participle in absolute constructions and of the gerundial participle in phrases of which “from the city founded,” meaning “from the founding of the city,” is a type. These constructions may actively recall the classical languages, as when Spenser writes that Britomart “heard tell / Of Troian warres and Priams Citie sackt,”²⁴ or as when Waller, commending a recent translation of Lucretius, writes,

Ovid translated, Virgil too
Shew'd long since what our tongue could do.

(II.22.29-30)

When Waller made the phrase “for Patroclus slain” (I.11.10) sustain the meaning “for the death of Patroclus,” or when he wrote

                                                                                                                        Troy wall'd so high,
Th' Atrides might as well have forc'd the sky,

(I. 18.59-60)

he may still have felt that the syntax was especially appropriate to the matter. Elsewhere he writes “his lost sons” (I.31.19) for “the loss of his sons” and “towns stormed” (II.17.177) for “the storming of towns.” Once he relies wholly on the Latin idiom for intelligibility: in the couplet,

The worlds Restorer never could endure
That finish'd Babel should those men secure,

(I.16.27-28)

the words “secure finished Babel” must be construed to mean “secure the completion of Babel” before the sense is yielded up.

Such constructions had the merit of economy, the Latin idiom being briefer, as a general rule, by two syllables or more. They supplied phrases, moreover, which were easily transposed and were useful for piecing out lines and couplets. The construction upon which Waller settles in the following passage is susceptible of indefinite extension:

'Tis all accomplisht by his Royal Word,
Without unsheathing the destructive Sword;
Without a Tax upon his Subjects laid,
Their Peace disturb'd, their Plenty or their Trade.

(II.102.59-62)

He here anticipates Pope's capability of piling up partly autonomous phrases until he has series of couplets suspended in a kind of grammatical continuum.

More properly poetic than these idioms are uses of the participle which were inherently artificial, even in the inflectional languages. When Ovid writes “strike the shaken oaks”²⁵ for “strike the oaks and shake them,” he is in pursuit of a neater and more attractive locution. And when George Sandys, translating a passage of which a more literal rendering would be “struck the rock, and from the cleft a fountain broke,”²⁶ writes “strake / The cleaving rock, from whence a fountaine brake,” he is improving upon Ovid. Embracing this principle, Waller writes of “that shipwrackt vessel which the Apostle bore,” (I.16.1) of a sword “which of the conquer'd world had made them Lord,” (II.16.158) of fruit which “loads the bending boughs” (I.94.3) of a tree, and of “calling descending Cynthia from her seat.” (I.23-48) Such participles can combine with etymologically Latin words to give an air of spruce Latinity:

                                                                                Romes conquering hand
More vanquish'd Nations under her command,
Never reduc'd.

(I.35.11-13)

None of the devices named, however, or even all of them together, were sufficient to give his style the remoteness from common speech which he apparently desired. Contributing further to that end was a word order which rather consistently differed from that of prose and was usually more schematic.

In departing from a normal English word order, he was again responding, at least in part, to classical example. Perhaps under the influence of George Chapman, who “had failed, where he had not succeeded, by endeavouring to write English as Homer had written Greek,”²⁷ Waller converted the sentence, “Delighted with the sweet sound of this harmonious lay, dolphins play about the keel,” into the couplet,

With the sweet sound of this harmonious lay
About the keel delighted Dolphins play.

(I.2.33-34)

The sentence, “So, vexed with the news of Sacharissa's wrongs, her servants blame those envious tongues,” he converted into

So with the news of Sacharissa's wrongs
Her vexed servants blame those envious tongues.

(I.50.5-6)

And for “thy mind diverted with wonders,” he wrote, “with wonders thy diverted mind.”²⁸

A more forcible example than Chapman's, perhaps, and certainly a more salutary one, was the neat and flexible patterning of the best Augustan Latin poetry, which exerted a general influence on English poets throughout the Renaissance and the neoclassical period. In the Aeneid fragment which Waller translated, one may single out a line like

Fusaque in obscenum se vertere vina cruorem(29)
Flowing to foul: is turned: wine into blood.

Though an English poet can reproduce only a few such effects, their example will persuade him that he ought to arrange his own lines artificially and he will act upon that conviction in whatever way he finds possible.

A feature of Waller's verse which was favorably noticed in his lifetime was a kind of verbal repetition called the “turn of words,” to which diversity of inflectional endings had invited. As in the following examples from Virgil, these are sometimes graces beyond the reach of the English poet's art:

avi numerantur avorum(30)
grandsires of grandsires are numbered
ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes.(31)
to pass forgotten indeed, if the shades knew how to forget.

Ovid's verbal schemes tend to be more obvious than Virgil's, often dwindling into mere prattle. His seventeenth-century translator George Sandys, who completed his labors at about the time Waller began to write, was sensitive to these and sought to reproduce them, as the subjoined instances show:

extemplo cum voce deus, cum voce deoque
somnus abit, somnique fugam lux alma secuta est.(32)
He with the Voice, with him and Voice away
Sleep flew: fled Sleepe persude by chearefull Day.
heu quantum scelus est in viscera viscera condi
congestoque avidum pinguescere corpore corpus.(33)
                                                                                                              How horrible a Sin,
That entrailes bleeding entrailes should intomb!
That greedie flesh, by flesh should fat become!

The major English poet before Waller who had most successfully employed such turns of words had been Spenser. Spenser had woven into his lines effects characteristic of Arcadian prose:

Withall she laughed, and she blusht withall,
That blushing to her laughter gaue more grace,
And laughter to her blushing, as did fall.(34)

There is, finally, an organization of the poetic line, characteristic of Ovid, which involved the paralleling of two clauses with temporary suspension of the verb serving them both. To examples from Ovid, I again subjoin Sandys' translation:

in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt.(35)
Haire into leaues, her Armes to branches grow
nam caelo terras et terris abscidit undas.(36)
Who Earth from Heaven, the Sea from Earth divides.

Spenser had so organized a few of his lines:

The fields my food, my flocke my rayment breed.(37)

Fairfax had followed suit:

With virtue fury, strength with courage strove.(38)

Fairfax, whose influence on Waller was early and strong, had preserved Tasso's artificial verbal arrangements when he could and had introduced much verbal and phrasal inversion of his own—sometimes for the sake of more even phrasing or for line periodicity and sometimes merely for convenience. Tasso writes, for example,

Svelte notor le Cicladi diresti
per l'onde, e i monti co i gran monti urtarsi.(39)

Fairfax translates,

The Cyclades seem'd to swim amid the main,
And hill 'gainst hill and mount 'gainst mountain smote.

Again, Tasso writes,

Qui con lo scettro e co 'l diadema in testa
mesto sedeasi il re fra gente mesta.(40)

Fairfax translates,

Where crown'd with gold, and all in purple clad,
Sate the sad king among his nobles sad.

He is clearly interested in conserving the schemata of the original and in containing verbal figures neatly within the line. But he also transposes many words and phrases out of carelessness or weariness alone. Waller's early reading of Fairfax encouraged him to balance his lines as tidily as possible and increased his tolerance of miscellaneous inversions. He acquired from him in particular the habit of transposing verbs and verbals to the ends of lines.

Waller's own schemes of balance are sometimes exact:

The ship their Coffin, and the sea their Grave.

(II.25.50)

The pay of Armys and the pride of Courts.

(II.25.68)

He occasionally gains variety by inverting both members of the line:

Lost were her pray'rs, and fruitless were her tears.

(II.29.3)

To pardon willing, and to punish loath.

(II.15.117)

He very often gains it by inverting one member:

Increast her terrour and her fall foretold.

(II.30.30)

They bath in Summer, and in Winter slide.

(II.40.24)

His somewhat elementary turns of words, which were once called “those beauties which gave the last perfection to his works,”⁴¹ are usually accommodated within balanced lines:

Resolv'd to Conquer, or resolv'd to Die.

(II.49.18)

They joy'd so justly, and so justly grieved.

(I.34.24)

They are themselves sufficient to lend a schematic balance:

That scarce a Brother can his Brother know.

(I.29.10)

In general, Waller's turns are like Fairfax's and Sandys'; they are less musical at least than Virgil's or Spenser's.

Lines in which he parallels two clauses and temporarily suspends the verb serving them both appear not infrequently, and, since they embody pervasive characteristics of his style, balance and periodicity, they seem more frequent than they are:

Their beauty they, and we our loves suspend.

(I.34.31)

Makes Clouds above, and Billows fly below.

(II.56.224)

Vertue with Rage, Fury with Valour strove.(42)

He consistently conserves the periodicity which this figure illustrates by transposing verbs and verbals to the ends of lines:

We have you now with ruling wisdom fraught,
Not such as Books, but such as Practice taught.

(II.37.45-46)

One squadron of our winged Castles sent
O'r-threw their Fort, and all their Navy rent.

(I.14.21-22)

As in old Chaos Heaven with Earth confus'd,
And Stars with rocks, together crush'd and bruis'd,
The Sun his light no further could extend
Than the next hill, which on his shoulders lean'd:
So in this throng bright Sacharissa far'd,
Oppress'd by those who strove to be her guard.

(I.51.1-6)

The last lines, however, cannot be said to illustrate figures of words at all. And many of his verbal arrangements not only fail to conform to traditional rhetorical patterns but subserve no evident rhetorical principle. He separates syntactically parallel elements:

Justice to crave, and Succour at your Court.

(II.11.30)

The spots return'd or graces of his mind.

(I.30.14)

He forces refractory sentences into his metrical scheme by transpositions of every sort. The sentence, “The stem and the sap thus threatened in thee, all the branches of that noble tree droop,” becomes

The stem thus threatned, and the sap in thee,
Droop all the branches of that noble Tree.

(I.34.29-30)

The sentence, “Where shining pearl, coral, and many a pound of ambergris is found on the rich shore,” becomes

Where shining Pearl, Coral, and many a pound
On the rich shore, of Amber-greece is found.

(I.66.9-10)

The sentence, “Had you run this race of glory some ages past, we should read your story with amazement,” becomes

Had you some Ages past, this Race of glory
Run, with amazement, we should read your story.

(II.16.145-46)

One rationale for such inversions will be noted in another chapter: many of them were instruments of metrical balance and line closure. A further rationale is equally good for all departures from a normal word order. When words fall elsewhere than in their accustomed place in the sentence, they resist easy subsumption into syntactical patterns and attract individual attention. Each one stands above the groundwork of its sentence; each seems a little neater and more consequential than it otherwise would. The diction in the line

Their beauty they, and we our loves suspend

(I.34.31)

has been elevated above the same diction in the normally ordered sentence, “They suspend their beauty, and we our loves.” A factitious impressiveness rewards even such nearly desperate transpositions as

Where shining Pearl, Coral, and many a pound
On the rich shore, of Amber-greece is found.

The air at once of tidiness and circumstance which stylistic inversion lends to Waller's language is one source of the “correctness” of which etymological precision is another source.

We have now come to the lowest common denominator of poetic style: to a style concerning which we might merely say, reasoning like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, that it is not the style of prose and that there is only one other mode of discourse with which to identify it. But we can reason more respectably, with Coleridge, that no poem can be all poetry and that the poet needs some idiom which is in keeping with poetry to use in the meantime.⁴³ During the late-Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, when much discursive and more or less journalistic poetry was being written—when poets wrote voluminously in the meantime, so to speak—the need for such an idiom was unusually pressing. Augustan poets were indebted to Waller precisely for having supplied them with a common denominator of style.

An influence of this sort is hard to assess, there being few instruments of demonstration general enough to suit the topic, yet specific enough to prove informative. Perhaps it will be appropriate merely to quote two characteristic Augustan couplets and point out that the means by which the style is elevated are those which Waller customarily employs.

Dryden begins his most celebrated character sketch with the couplet,

Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst.(44)

Pope begins an unusually firm pronouncement,

When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
Th' Affront is mine, my Friend, and should be yours.(45)

These couplets are not flat and relaxed statements:

The false Achitophel was the first of these—
A name which will be thought accursed in future times.
When Truth or Virtue is insulted,
The insult is mine, my friend, and ought to be yours.

Though we should hesitate to call them intrinsically poetic, the locutions “to all succeeding ages” and “an affront endures” are clearly more acceptable than the alternative possibilities. The element of ceremony in the language supports the assurance, the magisterial quality, of the judgments rendered.

Augustan critics justly identified such a command of style with the abilities fitting a man to converse in a polished society. They also, and quite as justly, identified it with the correctness which Edmund Waller had imparted to English poetry when “his happy genius refined our tongue.”⁴⁶ For the rather pedestrian poet whose sense of the polite recommended to him the periphrases “employ our hope” and “admit increase of glory,” and whose instinct for tidiness told him that

We have you now with ruling wisdom fraught

offered at least the appearance of definitive phrasing, was calling into being the poise we admire in later masters of Augustan poetry.

Notes

1. Essays, I, 105.

2. John Dennis, in “The Impartial Critick” (1693), represents a young connoisseur of poetry as surprised to find that Waller can err at all. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, III, 169-70.

3. Poems, p. 269, vss. 19-20.

4. Ibid., p. 236, vs. 7.

5. I.73.64; Aeneid ii. 749.

6. I.4.88; Aeneid v. 787.

7. I.3.50. Pope so uses the word in Dunciad, IV, vs. 592, and Gray in “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” vs. 30.

8. I.15.4. This word, sometimes connoting “concent,” is a favorite of Waller's. For a use illustrating the conclusions which follow, see Pope's “Summer,” vs. 8.

9. See the table on p. 30 and the note on Phineas Fletcher on p. 18 of Josephine Miles' The Continuity of Poetic Language … (Berkeley, 1951).

10. Aeneid iv. 583. See note 12 below.

11. Shakespeare, Henry V, II, prologue.

12. II.33.134. The entire line “adnixi torquent spumas et caerula verrunt,” he renders, “the lusty Trojans sweep / Neptune's smooth face, and cleave the yielding deep.”

13. II.67.1-8. The simile is conveyed from Aeneid xi. 67-71.

14. The Faerie Queene, III.iii.49; The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. S. Smith (3 vols.; Oxford, 1909).

15. “An Elegie upon … Dr. Iohn Donne,” vss. 33-36; Poems, p. 72.

16. So Dryden reports; Essays, II, 14.

17. Iliad i. 155. The Iliad, Vol. I of Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (New York, 1956), Bk. I, vss. 156-57.

18. Iliad i. 113-14; Chapman I, 110-111.

19. Metamorphoses xv. 818. Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis Englished … (Oxford, 1632), p. 508.

20. The Faerie Queene, III.iii.56.

21. Godfrey of Bulloigne, trans. Edward Fairfax (New York, 1845), Bk. IX, stanza 31.

22. Ibid., stanza 24.

23. I.69.21-22. The phrase somno vinoque sepulti, appearing in some of Waller's Latin verses (II.20.17), is from Aeneid ii. 265. The same hendiadys appears in Amores i. 4. 53.

24. The Faerie Queene, III.ix.38.

25. Metamorphoses i. 303.

26. Met. vi. 75-77. Sandys, p. 203.

27. So Coleridge observed. Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, ed. John Payne Collier (London, 1856), pp. xxxi-xxxii. Chapman can fall into tangles like “heaven's whitearm'd Queene (who everywhere cut short / Beholding her lov'd Greeks by death) suggested it.” Iliad, I, vss. 52-53.

28. I.65.39. Cf. Pope's “From the crack'd bag the dropping Guinea spoke,” Moral Essays, Epistle III, v. 36.

29. Aeneid iv. 455.

30. Georgics iv. 209. Dryden supplies this example and those cited in notes 31 and 33 below in his discussion of the “turn of words” in “The Origin and Progress of Satire,” Essays, II, 108-10.

31. Georgics iv. 489.

32. Metamorphoses xv. 663-64. Sandys, p. 505.

33. Met. xv. 88-89. Sandys, p. 493.

34. The Faerie Queene, II.xii.68. This remembers Sidney's Philoclea, “blushing, and withall smiling, making shamefastnesse pleasant, and pleasure shamefast.” The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922-26), I, 217.

35. Metamorphoses i. 550. Sandys, p. 13.

36. Met. i. 22. Sandys, p. 1.

37. The Faerie Queene, VI.ix.20.

38. Fairfax IX. 50. Pope parodies lines so organized in Rape of the Lock, I, vss. 101-02.

39. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata; Opera, ed. Bartolo Tommaso Sozzi (Turin, 1955), Canto XVI, stanza 5.

40. Tasso X. 34.

41. Dryden, Essays, II, 108.

42. II.76.27. A modification of Fairfax's line cited on p. 40.

43. Biographia Literaria, Chap. 14; ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), II, 11.

44. “Absolom and Achitophel,” vss. 150-51, The Poetical Works of John Dryden, ed. George R. Noyes (Boston, 1909), p. 111.

45. “Epilogue to the Satires,” Dialogue II, vss. 199-200.

46. “The Art of Poetry” (of Boileau), trans. Sir William Soames and John Dryden (1683), Canto I, vs. 135; Dryden, Poems, p. 909.