SOURCE: Miner, Earl. “The Social Mode.” In The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton, pp. 15-42. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

[In the following excerpt, Miner analyzes Waller's works to demonstrate the use of conventional motifs in Cavalier poetry.]

II. THE CREATION OF PERSON AND PLACE

One purpose of this study is to show how the best Cavalier poetry works, how it enlivens conventions, whether social or literary, and how, to a reader grown accustomed to the accent of this province of English poetry, it has something enduringly important to say. As Charles Cotton had served my purpose earlier to convey something of the quality of the musical key, as it were, of the social mode, so now Edmund Waller may be taken to show something of the range of Cavalier motifs after Jonson. Waller's name is no longer the coffee-house word it was to critical Dick Minims in the eighteenth century, and his poetry has not been analyzed out of existence. To such negative reasons for choosing him, I may add the historical one that he did truly seem to another generation of writers to have played a significant role in the development of poetry in their times. I also like him. Waller's “Of the last Verses in the Book” provided him with an opportunity to be personal in the manner of a Roman poet (or Chaucer) bidding his little book farewell. Instead he seems about to write a public poem.

When we for Age could neither read nor write,
The Subject made us able to indite …

(1-2)

Here and in the next ten lines we encounter the “we” that so distinctly marks public poetry. The last verse paragraph, however, triumphantly shifts to a middle, social mode; significantly, it provides the best poetry. The preceding two lines (11-12) may be given in order to mark the shift in quality and mode by a contrast.

Clouds of Affection from our younger Eyes
Conceal that emptiness, which Age descries.
          The Soul's dark Cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Let's in new Light thrô chinks that time has made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser Men become
As they draw near to their Eternal home.
Leaving the Old, both Worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the Threshold of the New.

(11-18)

What in Carew's poetry is so worthy of being termed Metaphysical in nature as those six lines? In spite of that, in spite of Waller's purity of tone, and in spite of his concern with “life,” it was Carew that F. R. Leavis chose to dignify as one in “the line of wit.” Very strange Leavis's choice may seem, although we must observe that Waller does lack a passionate private address, or rather that he speaks at most with a “wilde civility.” The truth of the poem concerns not so much of me precisely, nor yet of us, but of “Men.” Waller mediates among these implicit rivals with the social mode.

Another of his poems, this one certainly dating from before the Restoration, “At Pens-hurst” (“While in the Park I sing, the listning Deer”) is in some ways yet more instructive, because its claims are so unabashedly Cavalier that we may forget the Metaphysicals, Milton and Dryden, or other alternatives and enjoy Waller.¹ But we are led to recall with this poem, and with another to which Waller gave the same title, Jonson's splendid poem. Unlike the other poem, however, this does not echo To Penshurst, and Waller truly adapts the motifs of topographical poetry with fetching subtlety. Sacharissa's wooer is out of doors, in the park at Penshurst, where nature responds to his song of lover's woe. She remains cold.

To thee a wild and cruel soul is given,
More deaf than trees, and prouder than the heaven!(2)

Sacharissa resembles neither parent. Her descent is inhuman: “to no humane stock / We owe this fierce unkindness; but the rock …” (19-20). Such complaint may seem merely a heightened version of Petrarchan convention. What the convention (if this is that convention) requires is either a retraction, or some kind of recovery revealing that the lover had momentarily lapsed into madness. But not Waller (at least not until four unfortunate lines at the end). He proceeds almost directly on the hypothesis that the man has full right in his cause. As a poet, he says, “I might like Orpheus with my numerous moan / Melt to compassion” that obdurate stone, Sacharissa. But “my traitrous song / With thee conspires to do the Singer wrong.” His poetry fails to assuage his suffering, fails to make progress with her, and indeed fails in all respects except for providing poetry for him and us.

At this point Apollo enters,

Highly concerned, that the Muse should bring
Damage to one whom he had taught to sing.

(35-36)

The tone seems perfect: the lover's problem has become Apollo's. And with the entry of Apollo's wrinkled brow, the poet (Sacharissa's lover) and we stand off in an interest mingling concern with amusement. The best the god of the caduceus can propose is departure from Penshurst for the mind-relieving “wonders” of the seaside. Life by the seaside held no attraction at all to the seventeenth century, and the sea itself was variously thought a desert or a treacherous medium, and not without good reason.

Ah cruel Nymph from whom her humble swain
Flies for relief unto the raging main;
And from the windes and tempests do's expect
A milder fate than from her cold neglect …

(41-44)

The four lines following do in fact provide the conventional palinode, but, as their relative brevity shows, the effort proves perfunctory. They provide a possible basis for another poem and only mar the present one.

The first forty lines give us another, much superior poem. Sacharissa is out of harmony with the wooer, with nature, and with her family estate. She is “wild and cruel” like that sea which, ironically, is supposed to promise some relief to the wooer. Like the man, unlike the woman, the park is harmonious and sympathetic. Only that daughter of the rock (which might better be by the side of the wild sea), Sacharissa, is inhuman, unnatural, unmoved by art or even by the very god of art. Such extraordinary accusations are preferred without euphemism. But they enter in the right tone, one entailing self-respect and a conviction on the lover's part of the justice of his cause. A poem of this kind must avoid attenuation, and this Waller does do; but it must also avoid as well the contrary danger of excess, and here Waller ran his greatest risks. The danger was run in the accusations; it was avoided by the rightness of phrasing in rhythm and language. But how, the devotee of seventeenth-century poetry will ask, how is Waller's mind engaged?

“At Pens-hurst” obviously draws on the resources of the topographical, or “loco-descriptive,” poem. Waller's originality lies in his fundamental rearrangement of elements. The encomium on the Sidney family is founded on that exception, Sacharissa, whose aberration provides the poem with its reason for being. The contrast between her and the place, like the sympathy between her lover and her place, renders the topographical poem into amorous complaint as much as the reverse. The reality of the place serves to prove the reality of the complaint: she should return his love. We do not find it difficult to observe such polarities as the wild/civil, in-nature/out-of-nature. We are probably less aware of the poem's basis in two topographical motifs that become explicitly thematic in lines 41-44. Estate poems and sea poems are two of the several kinds of topographical motifs.³ Waller combines the two in a causal theme: the mistress differs so much from the park that the lover must go to the wild sea for relief from her yet greater cruelty.

Attention having been given to the interests of Waller's poem in itself, we may reintroduce comparison with other poets. “At Pens-hurst” skillfully employs the motif of the eavesdropping god begun in love poetry (so far as my knowledge extends) by Ovid's first elegy (Amores, I.i), a technique often involving shifts in audience as well as in speaker, as Donne's poem “The Indifferent” well shows.⁴ The three poems share a lively wit, an agility in maneuvering speakers and audiences that almost conceals the sleight of hand. With Waller, we can observe that the first response gained by the speaker comes from nature, which therefore proves to be his first audience (1-6). Then he turns, by contrast, to Sacharissa, addressing her (7-32) and obtaining even less positive response. With the entrance of “just Apollo, President of Verse,” the lover as well as Sacharissa becomes the audience of the god, who tells him to go to the shore (33-40). In the last eight lines, the despairing lover addresses Sacharissa as (apparently) he is about to leave for the seaside. The shifts in the identity of the speaker and of the audience give the poem the liveliness it requires.

In its technical virtuosity, “The Indifferent” is one of Donne's most dazzling poems, and his dramatic effect is much stronger than Waller's in this poem. But unless I am much mistaken, comparison of these two poems alone shows Waller's to possess more of what we recognize to be human truth. There really is a significant bond in his social attitude. The conventional language is one symptom, and not the happiest. The playing off, throughout the poem, of mid-stopped and end-stopped lines is a better symptom, because it echoes in little a balance or restraint with a freedom that are essential together for social intercourse. Numerous details reveal how sure Waller is of his world: the atmosphere of a country seat whose very animals and plants make up a sympathetic audience (1-6); the mention of the family name (10) and of Sir Philip Sidney (11-14); and the easy introduction of “just Apollo, President of Verse” (with his due social title and a flicker of humor). What is of equal significance is that the world of which Waller is so sure is also a world that knows him and responds to him. Such assurance enables him to speak things about Lady Dorothy Sidney that neither Dryden nor especially Donne would dare say of their high-placed ladies.⁵

“At Pens-hurst” does not possess the same perfection, the same inevitability, as Waller's most familiar poem, the “Song,” “Go lovely Rose.” “At Pens-hurst” lacks such purity because it hazards more risks, which it handsomely overcomes—all but the very last. It seems closer to the Metaphysical line, some might say, although the differences are crucial. In Donne's poems, passion is defined but not circumscribed or controlled by awareness of it; and his speaker, usually a young man, feels his own amorous pulse and regards his woman for symptoms of her response. Any awareness of third parties entails their inferiority and his confirmed self-esteem. Waller's appeal to what is due himself entails limits, because it turns on an ethical question: ought Sacharissa behave so? Such qualification is very Cavalier, as is also the psychological qualification that Suckling so preeminently argues. Questions of ethical justice or psychological veracity necessarily appeal to an audience not eccentric in its norms, but rather one possessed of a jus gentium. This, the largest audience of the poem, includes us as part of that great world that is implicit throughout the poem and very nearly explicit in the contrast drawn between Sacharissa and her parents, or between her and Sir Philip Sidney who

                                                            could so far exalt the name
Of Love, and warm our Nation with his flame.

(11-12)

Waller of course does not suggest that the “Nation” includes the total population, but rather those who value Sidney as much as he does—men and women of quality in a double sense. Such persons of quality make up the social milieu of Cavalier poetry, but since we can also find value in Sidney and answer ethical questions when they are posed to us, we too are part of the social world of the Cavaliers. That is, we have terms on which we can prize it. By the same token, we enter that world on Waller's terms, and these are terms of fiction or myth, since he represents himself singing like another Orpheus who affects animals and trees (1-4) and by introducing Apollo as a major audience and speaker. Alongside us in the listening audience there stand deer and beeches, and to us comes “Apollo, President of Verse.” What we share with animals, trees, and the god unites us with the wooer and divides us from Sacharissa: a value of song and the passionate feelings of the singer.

Waller set a standard for lyric poetry to the end of the century, when his verses assisted Millamant and Mirabel in understanding themselves and each other. Waller of course lived into the Restoration and made up with others both the first and second of those two mobs of gentlemen that, Pope said, wrote with ease. Historically speaking, Cavalier poetry alone endures throughout the century. But one must admit that its canons become adjusted and its assumptions gradually yield to others. The songs or comparable lyrics by Restoration poets may sometimes be very Cavalier, as much of Waller or Cotton shows. But the alternative lyric form distances the situation by a greater fiction, often allowing for its existence only in the special context of a play, and often by a use of pastoral that does not invite us to identify the speaker of the poem with the poet. Only perversity would deny us an association of Waller and his speaker; and only perversity would associate Dryden with any of the speakers in his love songs. On the other hand, only perversity would deny us the association between Dryden and his speaker in such complimentary address to a lady as we find in To the Dutchess of Ormond. Dryden goes to considerable length to establish the nature of his relation to the Duchess, and what emerges must be accounted a genuine tie, and yet a tie that does not possess the equality of wooer and wooed, but a very different equality of the woman celebrated and the poet who immortalizes her. Sacharissa, like Sidney's Stella, may in the end lie beyond the wooer's reach, but the psychological and ethical concerns of Waller or Astrophil make them the norm in the experience of love, restoring the equality only seemingly lost in the Petrarchanism they share.

If Cavalier love poetry distinguishes itself by its characteristic development of Tudor attitudes in a new, more relaxed version of the social mode, it is the same social adjustment of poetry that enables us to distinguish Cavalier public poetry from the more fully public version of Milton, Dryden, and the Augustans. Later we shall have sufficient occasion to observe different strains of Cavalier poetry concerned with the times. In one, especially typical of Jonson, the ethical strain expresses itself in a degree of commitment so strong that we are taken to the utmost bounds and to a confession of personal ideals. Another ethical strain, especially common during the Interregnum, takes disengagement or withdrawal to the bounds of our bafflement, and sometimes beyond. A third ethical strain involves a degree of participation in a situation where other men and women may appear in groups. The third of course presents the closest approach to the Restoration mode and requires the closest discrimination in order that the resemblances, the differences, and the special achievements of the Cavaliers can be seen, and felt.

Waller's finest poem in the third ethical strain is On St. James's Park as lately improved by his Majesty. Charles II is the improver, but the situation of the poem resembles those in such earlier ones (with such awkward titles) on Charles I as: “Of the Danger His Majesty (being Prince) escaped in the rode at St. Anderes”; “Of His Majesties receiving the News of the Duke of Buckingham's Death”; “To the King On His navy”; or Upon His Majesties repairing of Pauls. The last of the poems was much the best known and often referred to in the century. Like the rest, it seems, in its cumbrous title, to wish to draw close to the subject but to wish the subject to stand at a distance. This element we find in On St. James's Park. We do not find it in Dryden, whose distance may vary but is always certain. The fact that Dryden joined others in praising Waller's poem on the efforts of Charles I to remodel St. Paul's⁶ suggests that he responded to this strain in Waller, and that on occasion at least he felt that there was more to Waller than the refiner of the language, more than a poet of natural phrasing, and easy prosody.⁷ Much in On St. James's Park could only have appealed to Dryden: the Royalism, the depiction of harmonious activity, the celebration of art and civilization. But the quality that would have appealed most to him is the quality affording the greatest interest today, a species of artistic unity that grows from admission of a maximum in detail and from a harmony combining form with dynamic movement.⁸

Waller begins by speaking of a paradise lost (1-2) and then of another regained. We have been taught recently to understand the workings of such topoi and their Royalistic implications in Dryden.⁹ It is no small art that enables Waller to introduce the traditional figures with such naturalness. A topic seems to come with ease, and so does the next in an associative process. And yet, one remarkable feature of the poem resides in Waller's unwillingness to introduce any topic or image of importance only once. The regaining of paradise seems to depart with as good a grace as it enters; but when it later enters with the same grace, we are conscious that it represents but one note in a complex, lovely harmony. If paradise is to be regained, what we require is, in Milton's phrase, “one greater man,” and that man is Charles, as Waller's concluding lines (127-36) make clear. By the close of the poem, Waller rises to magnificence. The star that shone in mid-day at the birth of Charles II Waller applies (and not in the first poem to do so nor the last) to the Star of Bethlehem, since being “Born the divided world to reconcile,” Charles plays on earth a role like that of Christ on earth and in heaven. The last line, which promises that the King will reform nations as he has made “this fair Park from what it was before,” clearly substantiates, validates the opening line of the poem.

The lengthier middle section of the poem (5-126) offers a number of versions of what the Park's essential significance may be. The versions seem discrete enough and sufficiently amenable to description. For example, one version presents the Park as a social gathering place.

Me-thinks I see the love that shall be made,
The Lovers walking in that amorous shade,
The Gallants dancing by the Rivers side;
They bath in Summer, and in Winter slide.

(21-24)

In a few lines we encounter another version of the Park as a natural scene.

Whilst over head a flock of new sprung fowl
Hangs in the ayr, and does the Sun controle:
Darkning the sky they hover or'e, and shrowd
The wanton Sailors with a feather'd cloud.

(27-30)

These two passages of four lines reveal how two versions of the Park (as meeting place and as natural scene) relate. Each is an aspect of the other. Lovers will meet: to walk in the (“amorous”) shade.¹⁰ Nature provides the gallants with a river to bathe in during the summer or to slide upon in the winter. Similarly, the newly fledged birds (which are surely waterfowl from the context) also assemble, shadowing “The wanton Sailors” visiting the Park. The sailors in the natural scene recall the Park as a meeting place, and the birds assembling in the air provide a yet subtler version. Moreover, as the sailors bring back the so-to-speak watery associations of the earlier scenes, the birds “shrowd” the sailors also as if the fowl were sails. In such fashion, Waller merges detail that we apprehend distinctly in our immediate encounters and yet that accumulates in our memories of what may be termed, with some appropriateness for this poem, the spatial and temporal dimensions of our experience of reading.

The Park also possesses a third version, the mythic. Speaking of the trees that have been newly planted, Waller says,

The voice of Orpheus or Amphions hand
In better order could not make them stand.

(15-16)

Orpheus and Amphion of course produced their effects on trees or the walls of Thebes through their music, and a later couplet, falling between the two quatrains on the Park as meeting place and as natural scene, picks up the musical implications of the myth and joins the two quatrains by writing of “water-music”:

Me-thinks I hear the Musick in the boats,
And the loud Eccho which returns the notes.

(25-26)

Waller does not mention the music of Orpheus and Amphion (it is rather the “voice” of the one and the “hand” of the other), any more than he draws an explicit connection between gallants in the river, boats, boat music, and “wanton Sailors.” But one comes to marvel at the ease, that negligent inevitability of Waller's art. The Orpheus and Amphion legends are of course used negatively, in the manner of Milton: the classical artist-creators could not surpass this scene.

Such discrimination introduces the middle section of the poem.

          Instead of Rivers rowling by the side
Of Edens garden, here flowes in the tyde.

(5-6)

Equal to the best of antiquity, the Park is not the same as the first paradise, Eden. But the Park represents of course the paradise lost of the preceding four lines and that regained at the end.

One experiences no difficulty in identifying the superficial details of the “mythic” version of the Park. One quickly finds “Cupids” (37), “Noahs Ark” (43), “Peters sheet” (44), a “muse” (67), “sacred Groves” (74), “Romes Capitol” (88), Augustus (123), and Hercules (124). Some of this detail may well seem “the goodly exil'd traine / Of gods and goddesses” that Carew credited Donne with banishing from “nobler Poems,” and all of it fits into something that might be termed lore of the Stuart myth. Certainly Waller never shirked a classical reference simply because it was familiar. But when the details fit, and when they make larger wholes, it does not matter whether the familiar detail is Hercules or a skylark. Charles II is meditating

What Ruling Arts gave great Augustus fame,
And how Alcides purchas'd such a name.

(123-24)

Augustus is a good model, obviously, for one who would practice the “arts” of ruling in peace. But Hercules may seem less to the point. By long tradition, however, Hercules was a type of the king, and especially “the type of a good king, who ought to subdue all monsters, cruelty, disorder, and oppression in his kingdom, who should support the heaven of the Church.”¹¹ Augustus is a type of the wise, politic ruler, and Alcides of the active, so that Charles as he meditates seeks to reconcile in an ideal or a mean the highest standards of kingship. Details that seem conventional may be so indeed, but then I doubt that Donne was the first to observe that it is exciting to make lover or Dryden the first that a nation thrives better in concert than in anarchy. Waller, that is, earns his right to use the common treasure of humanism.

Waller's Park has echoes and significant detail. The poem also employs a movement at once forceful and subtle. A comparatively simple example of such movement can be given by reference to the progression of the shadow images that we have already seen. First, we shared Waller's vision of “The Lovers walking in that amorous shade” (22). Next, we observed the eclipse by birds:

Whilst over head a flock of new sprung fowl
Hangs in the ayr, and does the Sun controle:
Darkning the sky …

(27-29)

That is fairly breathtaking. It also gives every reader a slight sense of threat, a threat that dominates in a later and seasonally contrary phrase, “Winters dark prison” (53). Such a threat must be overcome, and if it is too early in this book to emphasize the political significance of winter to the Cavaliers, we can understand Waller well enough by his shades.

          Near this my muse, what most delights her, sees,
A living Gallery of aged Trees,
Bold sons of earth that thrust their arms so high
As if once more they would invade the sky;
In such green Palaces the first Kings reign'd,
Slept in their shades, and Angels entertain'd.

(67-72)

Such lines require no praise, but they may be given some explanation. The easiest explanation will be found in James Howell's Δενδρολογία. Dodona's Grove, or, the Vocall Forest (London, 1640), an allegory of the parlous state of England in terms of talking trees. As Howell says “To the Knowing Reader,”

Then be not rash in censure, if I strive
An ancient way of fancy to revive,
While Druyd like conversing thus with Trees,
Under their bloomy shade, I Historize:
Trees were ordaind for shadow, and I finde,
Their leafs were the first vestment of Mankinde.

(sig. A 2^v)

In 1650, Howell had his second part of Δενδρολογία brought out. The King had been executed more than a year before, and this staunch Royalist has a sad allegory to relate. Indeed, he ends with a prayer that explains philosophically, or emblematically, why Charles II had to improve St. James's Park.

I Will conclude with my incessant orisons to Heaven that the All-powerfull Majesty of the Univers, without whose providence a leaf cannot fall; Hee who can turn Forests to frank-Chases, Chases into Parks, Parks into Warrens, and all four into a Common, and in lieu of Hart, Hind and Hare, with other harmless Cretures, can fill them with Tygers, Beares and Wolfs; May that All-disposing Deity who can turn Empires into Optimaces, Optimaces into Democraticall States, Democracies into Oligarchies at his pleasure; May that high Majesty, I pray, vouchsafe to put a period to these black Distractions in Druina [i.e., England] by an indissoluble bond of a setled Peace, and not turn the light of his countenance quite away from her; lest according to the words of the holy Prophet, The Trees of the Forest becom so few that a Child may write them; lest the places where the green reed and rush doth grow, becom dens for Dragons, and, which is justly to be feared, lest the whole Forest becom a Beggars Bush.

(pp. 286-87)

And there follows a picture of the robust author, in fine Cavalier garb and brown study, leaning on a tree, “Robur Britannicum” the British Oak. Or to put this lore of trees in brief, we may recall the motto of both parts of Howell's arborial allegory: “Let the tree be honored whose shade protects us.” Or, in view of the “darke conceit” of the work and perhaps implied by “shade” (umbra), “Let the Oak be honored, whose royal shade protects us.”¹²

Waller's poem of course strives for no allegorical shadows, but it does concern itself with history, natural or human, like Howell—or indeed like Martial. It is widely thought that the “loco-descriptive” poems by Jonson, Carew, and Waller have behind them one of Martial's longer epigrams, III. lviii. A comparison of Faustinus's villa in that poem with St. James's Park entails, really, only one point of resemblance: they are places of pleasure. No doubt there is an important sense in which St. James's Park is the country in the city (rus in urbe, Martial, xii. lvii. 21), but the poem by Martial that Waller most draws upon is IX. lxi (or lxii in older editions such as the Delphin [my copy, Paris, 1680]). Martial describes a Cordovan house at which Julius Caesar had planted a plane tree; Waller a park improved by the British Caesar. Both poems treat the crucial three images, trees, shade, and the stars or heavens (sidera celsa; Waller, 69-70, 128). Both poems involve myth and religion with a historic moment. Numerous differences exist between them, and no doubt the political shade (umbra) of Howell is as much to the point as the festive of Martial, since Waller has an “oraculous shade” as well as an “amorous” one. In just such interplays between present urgencies and classical norms we find much of what is most characteristic of some of the most resonant poetry of the century.

Waller's lines respond, then, to seventeenth-century experience by means of the emblems and recollections by which the century chose to understand itself, and they do so in lines of unusual force. Every reader must feel that those arborial “green palaces” belong to the seventeenth-century poetry in all styles. In much the same vein, and within ten lines, we hear of “this oraculous shade” (80) where the world's fortune is decided. The phrase of course recalls the earlier “amorous shade,” and the development of, as well as the qualification by, the earlier phrase in the later is very much in the witty cast of the century. The shadow imagery is not left in wit, however, but is taken to a transformation like that favored by the Cavaliers (see ch. iv, below). Both the passage earlier on the birds and that on the green palace of the trees had directed our attention toward the sky, and both had conveyed some sense of threat or violence. The danger is resolved, and the shadow imagery is transformed, by that star at Charles's birth:

          what the world may from that Star expect
Which at his birth appear'd to let us see
Day for his sake could with the Night agree.

(128-30)

The shade is transformed but not dispersed; it is reconciled with the light.

Such reconciliation provides us with another version of the significance of this park royal. The Park resolves numerous contraries (including some implied earlier) by the principle of discordia concors (or concordia discors, the two phrases being used to mean the same thing by classical authors).¹³ Waller's approach, at its simplest, involves stress on the evident reality: a park has a unity in its bounds and yet may be stocked with a variety of places, people, trees, and other inhabitants. But he takes pains to develop contraries, as for example of the gallants frolicking by the river: “They bath in Summer, and in Winter slide” (24). But even a talkative critic should let his poet speak for himself and should let his poet's images play their roles.

Yonder the harvest of cold months laid up,
Gives a fresh coolness to the Royal Cup,
There Ice like Crystal, firm and never lost,
Tempers hot July with Decembers frost,
Winters dark prison, whence he cannot flie,
Though the warm Spring, his enemy draws nigh:
Strange! that extremes should thus preserve the snow,
High on the Alps, or in deep Caves below.

(49-55)

What Nation shall have Peace, where War be made,
Determin'd is in this oraculous shade;
The world from India to the frozen North,
Concern'd in what this solitude brings forth.

(79-82)

From shades near Whitehall, the seat of government and the imperium, the King's vision directs us to Westminster Abbey and the sacerdotum.

From hence he does that Antique Pile behold,
Where Royal heads receive the sacred gold;
It gives them Crowns, and does their ashes keep;
There made like gods, like mortals there they sleep
Making the circle of their reign compleat,
Those suns of Empire, where they rise they set.(14)

Next, a glance at the Parliament, and a return to the Abbey.

Hard by that House where all our ills were shapt
Th' Auspicious Temple stood, and yet escap'd.
So snow on Aetna does unmelted lie,
Whence rowling flames and scatter'd cinders flie.(15)

And finally, the reconciliation of all in the King (and in Christ the King, who reconciled heaven and earth with His dual nature). Charles considers

          what the world may from that Star expect
Which at his birth appear'd to let us see
Day for his sake could with the Night agree.
A Prince on whom such different lights did smile,
Born the divided world to reconcile.

(128-32)

Having let Waller more or less speak for himself, I shall add a few small amplifications. In line 43, for example, Waller speaks of “The choicest things that furnisht Noahs Ark.” Among the significances attached to the ark is that of a unifying of great variety.¹⁶ Much the same significance of variety reconciled inheres in the poem's first depiction of Charles, although that significance does not perhaps emerge clearly until we have seen the other passages of the poem.

          Here a well-polisht Mall gives us the joy
To see our Prince his matchless force imploy:
His manly posture and his graceful mine
Vigor and youth in all his motion seen,
His shape so lovely, and his limbs so strong
Confirm our hopes we shall obey him long:
No sooner has he toucht the flying ball,
But 'tis already more than half the mall;
And such a fury from his aim has got
As from a smoking Culverin 'twere shot.

(57-66)

“His shape so lovely, and his limbs so strong.” The uniting of beauty and strength (often figured in Venus and Mars) is a key reconciliation in the lore of discordia concors, for from that reconciliation was born harmony. The vision of a prince relaxed (the art of relaxation being one that Charles II practiced to perfection) yields to a simile for war. Charles's retirement to the peace of the Park does not exclude the outside world; there is wide allowance for what has been only apparently left behind (see ll. 76 ff.). It is no wonder that the next twenty lines concern both civil and foreign war. The passage introducing the King plays a crucial thematic role, defining as it does in most important terms the version of the Park as a meeting place, introducing the chief character of the poem, and showing how far the Park is defined by the role of the King.

The King occupies the center of the poem, because the most complete version of the royal Park, one including the others, is that of the court and, by extension, the kingdom and the world. By restoring or improving the Park, Charles II exhibits the power of a good king to restore the world.

Whatever Heaven or high extracted blood
Could promise or foretell, he will make good;
Reform these Nations, and improve them more,
Than this fair Park from what it was before.

(133-36)

The version of the Park as microcosm of the world improved by the King absorbs the other versions, because they are part of the larger world: the gallants and ladies gathering socially, the natural scene (we have observed the symbolic function of the tree imagery), the mythical suggestions (with their emblems of harmony), and the minglings of the natural and human, of art and nature. That larger meaning of the Park as the regal world made into a paradise regained is, in one sense, a meaning led up to with great ease by the sequence of repeated and merging versions of lesser kinds. Such lesser kinds are attractive in themselves, and they need not have contributed to the larger end for this to be an exceptional poem. That they do so is a matter lending tribute to Waller's finer art, his larger capacity. Such capacious art enables us to dwell with firm delight on a new paradise, an improved world, with satisfaction in its individual parts, whether we consider those passages in the poem as we read or, more abstractedly, consider them as themes of the Park as a social gathering place, a lovely natural setting, and a mythic environment. The harmony the poet sought as his theme rises from a harmony of parts that might have been discordant in a lesser poetic music. No doubt darkens my assurance in saying that Waller's poem stands as one of the significant seventeenth-century poems, and one significant precisely after the seventeenth-century manner.

III. WHERE MEN ABIDE

The only doubt which I conceive possible is this: why not consider the poem a Restoration public poem? The poem was certainly written during the Restoration and necessarily reflects Restoration experience. But Donne wrote some of his poems even as Spenser was publishing his most important works. The true history involves our saying that the early Donne is an Elizabethan, the late Shakespeare a Jacobean, and Waller in this and other poems a Restoration poet. Certainly, whatever quarrels one has, those with history are the most futile. All I seek are certain discriminations and, at the moment, those involve the social mode. In his Horatian Ode, Marvell stands at one with his reader (if his reader could only be sure where Marvell chooses to stand). And in Astraea Redux, which frequently traverses paths with Waller's poem, Dryden carries the reader with yet greater assurance (though with less total poetic success). But what to my mind keeps Waller's fine poem social is his reservation. The poet, or whoever we imagine to be the speaking voice of Waller's poem, speaks for himself, refusing to enter into, declining to involve himself with, the scene and the central character of the poem, the King. He eschews direct address and he avoids including the reader in his observations. He says, in effect, this happened, and that is true, and he implies consensus rather than asserts it. I feel no doubt but that Waller's stance is one leading to that of Milton speaking to and of Man, or of Dryden speaking of and to men. But the refusal to take in the larger audience, with the willingness to accommodate society by observation of its norms and mores, involves a different poetic procedure from that which was becoming current even as Waller wrote. However sympathetically his poem or Denham's Cooper's Hill were viewed in the later seventeenth century, both poets stood off from the poetic scene. In this they curiously resemble that eighteenth-century figure, the Spectator of the world. And it does seem significant that public poetry once more yielded to private in the gradual (and by no means even) transition from poets immersed in the world created by the poems to poets detached from other men. If Waller leads to the full public poetry of Milton and Dryden, the graveyard poets were a step in a detachment that led to Romantic observers willingly or unwillingly cut off from their fellow men. The transition in the seventeenth century involved “the serene contemplator” and “the detached speculator.”¹⁷ The social mode of Waller's and other poems laid necessary groundwork for the public mode to evolve. But that is not to presume an identity.

Possibly Jonson or Carew, probably Denham (if he had written more than one outstanding original poem), possibly Marvell might have written On St. James's Park. But neither Dryden nor Pope would have written such a couplet as this:

Such various wayes the spacious Alleys lead,
My doubtful Muse knows not what path to tread.

(47-48)

Dryden's Muse, and even more Pope's, felt their uncertainties, but their dubieties reflected other problems. For good or ill, Milton, Dryden, and Pope knew what their worlds were like and shared their knowledge with other men and women. They exhibited an assured sense of their audience, and a familiarity with its claims, that Waller presumed. But they did not have his distance, detachment, and speculation.

          Near this my muse, what most delights her, sees,
A living Gallery of aged Trees.

(67-68)

Could anyone mistake this for a gesture by Milton, Dryden, or Pope? Waller's setting in a grove and his separation almost from his Muse (who has her own little preferences for trees), contribute to the sense that the poet speaks indirectly for all but immediately for himself. Waller's force derives equally from what he implies he shares with others, and from what he observes himself. Milton and Dryden depend for their bond with the reader on a world they and others fully share. The private world of the Metaphysicals depended crucially on what was not only observed but also valued by the poet himself. The Cavalier poets took the middle road, and if On St. James's Park and many other poems gravitated toward the public spectrum, they remained social, refusing to go the whole distance, enjoying a differing integrity.

The important reservations that keep On St. James's Park from becoming a public poem have their counterpart in hesitations that insure that the Cavalier poets' more personal poetry will include enough of a shared sense of values to keep a social tone in what I may term their more reserved lyrics. Again, as in Waller's best known poem, the “Song,” “Go lovely Rose,” we may almost seem to have moved from the Cavalier mode, now to the Metaphysical, although I very much believe that anyone would recognize it as an archetype, or at least as a genuine example, of a Cavalier poem.

          Go lovely Rose,
Tell her that wasts her time and me,
          That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
          Tell her that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spy'd,
          That hadst thou sprung
In desarts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended dy'd.
          Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retir'd;
          Bid her come forth,
Suffer her self to be desir'd,
And not blush so to be admir'd.
          Then die, that she,
The common fate of all things rare,
          May read in thee
How small a part of time they share,
That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

This is not the place to pause for extended discussion of a poem often so lightly read, whether that discussion turns on the traditional matters incorporated with such ease or on the way in which Waller manages to take us so gently to so grim a view. Let us say simply that the situation is something like that in a poem examined earlier, “At Pens-hurst.” Now a rose, rather than an estate, is responsive, although the woman remains as aloof as before. The sic vita trope of the transient flower is made to mediate beautifully between the two audiences. There is the perfect tact in asking the woman / rose that she “not blush so to be admir'd.” And after that good grace (it would be wrong to deem it flattery) there comes at once the harsh address, now to the rose / woman: “Then die.” The imperative tells them and us to face reality (again, it would be wrong to deem it a cruelty). “How small a part of time they share”: and not only those “That are so wondrous sweet and fair.” In “The Sunne Rising,” Donne could make a somewhat similar point by saying that when the lovers have come together in full joy, “Nothing else is” (l. 22). Here indeed we find the radical difference between the private and the social mode. To Waller, all that is precious about a rose, or all that makes human qualities valuable, is that they are shared socially. There would be no existence of value, “hadst thou sprung / In desarts, where no men abide.” To Waller's and the other Cavaliers' experience, even on occasions as personal as one's dismissal by a haughty woman who injures self-esteem, even then the experience was not fully real unless it was confirmed by “men.” Contrary to Donne, the world does exist, and everything else is.

No doubt “the social mode” can be described in other terms than those used here to explain how aesthetic distance and poetic handling combine to produce a special angle of vision on the world and oneself. Whatever our terms of reference, the important thing is that we describe and feel a literary phenomenon, an aesthetic possibility realized in practice, a musical key, as it were, of several generations of song. The Metaphysical poets show us how much we may prize the intimate and yet universal exclusiveness of certain kinds of experience. Milton and Dryden, like the Augustans in somewhat different ways, reveal how much we may prize the participating yet personal inclusiveness of certain kinds of experience. What I have termed the social mode and have considered to be the aesthetic radical of Cavalier poetry is that kind of experience that is intimate and yet inclusive, or at times participating and yet exclusive. The social mode, then, held this much in common with the religion for which, and for their estates, the Cavaliers fought: it was a via media, a compromise between possible extremes. Like all compromises, it could mean rather differing things to different people subscribing to it, and it could receive now one emphasis or now another, depending on what the situation or the felt need required. If my reader will be good enough to think that all this while I have been particularizing something that he has long since known and felt about poems like “Go lovely Rose,” then my modest end has been achieved. We agree that we are talking about a certain kind of poetry with a certain view of life. And we may now turn to ideals of that life, its problems, and its features—in historical reality and in poetic reality.

Notes

1. See the Appendix for the text of the poem.

2. Lines 7-8. The ordonnance and complexity of the couplet will be appreciated by a seventeenth-century view of nature and classical deities expressed in the opposition—wild (deaf) trees, cruel (prouder) heaven: you.

3. See Robert Arnold Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1936) and, with care, G. R. Hibbard, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xix (1958), 159-74.

4. I have tried to discuss this aspect of Donne's poem in The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton, 1969), pp. 15-18. The resemblance is a significant one, but I think Waller's poem depends for its effect on a stance more distant than Donne's “dramatic” procedure.

5. The biographical element in Cavalier poetry is in some ways even more difficult to allow for than in, say, Donne or Dryden. Sacharissa is a version of Lady Dorothy Sidney, as everyone knows, but no one knows how accurate a version it is (there is an account in Julia Cartwright, Sacharissa [London, 1893]), nor indeed how accurate Waller chose to be in describing his own feelings. There is an implicit caveat in the example of Robert Bell, editor of the Poetical Works of Edmund Waller (London, 1854). Bell had the temerity to order the Sacharissa poems into presumed chronological order and the assurance to say of Waller that it cannot “be assumed from his verses that his feelings were very deeply engaged” (pp. 19-20). Moreover, of the treatment of Sacharissa in this poem he says, in yet another contradiction, “the reproaches heaped upon her … are not creditable to the generosity of the writer” (p. 87). The “reproaches” are precisely the source of poetic energy, though I cannot pretend to untangle the biographical knots Bell ties himself into.

6. Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, st. 275.

7. Dryden is so ready with praise that many have failed to observe the strict delimitations of his encomia. In the Preface to Fables, he praises the line of Fairfax, Denham, and Waller for what may be called clarity and wit; but his line of genius runs from Chaucer to Spenser to Milton and, no doubt, to Dryden. See Of Dramatick Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London, 1962), ii, 270-71. Our usual opinions have been strikingly reviewed by Paul J. Korshin, “The Evolution of Neoclassical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham, and Waller as Poetic Theorists,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, ii (1968), 102-37.

8. For the text, see the Appendix.

9. See Alan Roper, Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (London, 1965), “The Kingdom of Adam,” pp. 104-35.

10. That epithet, “amorous,” for a “shade” reminds one of Marvell's Garden. Whatever the dates of composition, Waller's poem was published two decades before Marvell's, and it is well known that Waller is one of the poets that Marvell echoes with some frequency.

11. Alexander Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus (London, 1647 et seq.), s. v. “Hercules.” For some further lore, see The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), iii, 305.

12. “Arbor honoretur cujus nos umbra tuetur,” a proper hexameter. For similar poetic and political use of trees, see Herrick, “Farwel Frost, or welcome the Spring,” ll. 5-22, also the Latin verses, ll. 1-3, on the frontispiece of Hesperides.

13. See the outstanding analysis of Denham's Cooper's Hill by Earl R. Wasserman in The Subtler Language (Baltimore, 1959), pp. 45-88. In his critical discussion of the poem, Brendan O Hehir, Expans'd Hieroglyphicks (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), treats of the “harmony” in terms of diadic and triadic relations among “extremes” and similars.

14. Perhaps I may be permitted, in a note, to comment on two things: the emblematic character of the passage, with gold and the sun for kings; and the continuity of such emblems as those of the circle in the seventeenth century. It is sometimes supposed that the circle was broken and emblems were dead as Pan in 1660: this poem was probably written and certainly published in 1661. See also Absalom and Achitophel (1681), l. 838; To My Honour'd Kinsman (1700), l. 65; and the Dryden Concordance, s. v., “circle,” “circles,” “sphere,” “spheres,” etc. Important changes took place in poetry and life in the seventeenth century, and there were numerous alternative views; but certain kinds of fanciful ideas about early vs. late provide more comfort to superstition than to truth.

15. Lines 99-102. The Aetna simile derives ultimately from Claudian, The Rape of Proserpine, i. 163-70. But it was a frequent formula for discordia concors: see, e.g., Cowley, “To Mr. HOBS,” st. vi, and Cowley's note on it.

16. See, from 1656, Cowley, “ODE OF WIT,” st. viii; from 1667, Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. 732-37, 892-901; and from 1685, Dryden, Killigrew Ode, ll. 123-26.

17. My phrases are borrowed from two chapter titles in Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man, 2 vols. (Oslo and Oxford, 1954), i. iii and v, a study that will prove crucial to my next chapter.