[In the following essay, Ho offers an in-depth analysis of Caelica, focusing on what this work reveals about Greville's personal development and his aesthetic as a writer.]

Greville scholars and critics have always liked Caelica, for it offers a quasi-narrative from which teasing allusions to the writer's personal life and plentiful demonstrations of contextual influences seem available. First published as a sequence in 1633, with the poems arranged, according to Geoffrey Bullough, in the order they were composed, Caelica has become the focus of biographical speculation and of judgments about Greville's aesthetic and philosophical evolution.¹

There is a major critical tendency to trace in Caelica a development from youthful self-definitions as Petrarchan lover to a more mature and austere Calvinistic inwardness, and the progressive rejection of the rhetoric of courtly love in favor of a plain, unadorned style.² What this linear narrative of ethico-spiritual progress does not allow for is the possibility that the discourses of Petrarchanism and Calvinism, while apparently irreconcilable, are engaged in a kind of textual interplay. At various moments in the sequence, it is possible to locate discursive intersections which contribute to the verbal and intellectual density of Greville's poetry.³

Caelica is a Calvinistic narrative of the self that takes the form and rhetoric of an earlier and ideologically alien, Petrarchan, discourse. At the time when Caelica was begun, in the 1580s, the Petrarchan sonnet sequence had been available for more than two centuries as a mode of self-narrative and self-examination. The favored mode of Calvinistic self-representation by the later seventeenth century is not the lyric but autobiography, a development along the lines of the diary (ca. 1580) of the Puritan, Richard Rogers. This essay will argue that Caelica witnesses in detail a singular instance of how a late sixteenth-century poet, well versed in Petrarchan forms and poetic strategies, redeploys them to voice the essential tenets of Calvinist self-reform. And this interplay happens at a time when the emergent prose voice of Puritan autobiography promised, but had yet to define clearly, an alternative literary aesthetic. The artistic construction of the Calvinist self in Caelica is informed by the English Reformation's iconoclasm and Calvinist soteriology. At appropriate moments in this essay, I will draw attention to how contemporary English divines interpret Calvin's strictures on self-probing, identification of inner error, repentance, and justification by faith. It is an English Calvinism that meets (and finds a use for) an English Petrarchanism in Caelica.

The iconic, Petrarchan she, the conventional sign of Neo-Platonic aspirations about love, undergoes intense criticism and progressive fragmentation in the sequence. It is a critical commonplace that the Elizabethan Petrarchists have toned down the ascetic elements of the Italian original. The lady continues to be represented in idealist, Neo-Platonic terms, but in the course of the Elizabethan sequences, she is also perceived as courtly rather than divine, with a fair mixture of the courtesan in her. Her distance from the lover is a measure not so much of her spiritual pre-eminence, but a deliberate ploy to enhance her desirability. Caelica takes this development to its late sixteenth-century, Calvinist conclusion, in disconnecting the material form of the lady from metaphysical significations. There are occasional moments in Caelica, as we shall see, when the Petrarchan paradigm seems to reassert itself, when the voice of desire in a poem cries out from amidst the stringent critiques of profane love that surround it. These eruptions, especially in the middle section when the Calvinist indictments are conscious and vigorous, are possible because Caelica, in the manner of Petrarch's Rime Sparse, can function not only as a sequence, but also as an assemblage of separate poetic fragments. These Petrarchan remnants remind the reader of Caelica's origins without seriously deflecting the Calvinist counter-discourse that begins with the questioning of the lady's superior virtues.

Caelica opens with a paean to the lady which restates the Neo-Platonic aspirations of Petrarchan praise.⁴ The precise catalog of “Love,” “Delight,” “Vertue,” and “Reason” in the first stanza invokes those ethico-spiritual virtues which conventionally signify the lady's quasi-divine presence on the one hand and the lover's metaphysical aspirations on the other. The lover recognizes that the lady's “wisdom” is “imaged in her words and deeds,” but the emblematic quality of the Petrarchan she is stated rather than demonstrated. What one sees is not the figuring of the Petrarchan icon, but its pieces returned to their subtextual abstractions of “Beauty,” “honour's fame,” “wonder,” and “wisdom.” These abstractions, in their turn, take on a certain life in the senses: the fame of honor is “the ear's sweet music,” “wisdom” is like “clear springs” flowing from the heart, “worth” is both wounding and cure to the speaker.

Yet the image itself of the woman never inhabits this life of the senses but is an absence, as though the speaker bypasses the emblem and offers instead a commentary on the messages it signifies. The speaker's skills as image-maker are channeled towards the figuration of fragmented abstractions previously enclosed by a recognizable, feminine form. While appearing to reconfirm the status of the Neo-Platonic she, poem I subverts the unity between emblematic form and pure idea, and presages the speaker's admonition to love in poem “X:”

Rather goe backe vnto that heauenly quire
Of Natures riches, in her beauties placed,
And there in contemplation feed desire,
Which till it wonder, is not rightly graced;
For those sweet glories, which you doe aspire,
Must, as Ideas only be embraced
          Since excellence in other forme enioyed,
          Is by descending to her Saints destroyed.

William Perkins, the Calvinist divine whose published work was extremely popular during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, declares: “They [the Roman Catholics] hold … that the Saints in heaven … doe make intercession to God for particular men … but this doctrine we flatly renounce … the Saints departed see not the state of the church on earth, much lesse do they know the thoughts and praiers of men. … No creature … can bee a Mediatour for us to God, saving Christ alone, who is … the onely Advocate of his Church.”⁵

In Caelica, as a sign of her descent from pure idea to metamorphic form, the lady is made known by several names. The eponymous Caelica, derived from the Latin caelum,⁶ is also Myra and Cynthia. And the corruptible and transient nature of forms is underlined in the slippage of her name between Caelica and Myra in “XXXVII,” Caelica and Cynthia in “XLVIII,” Myra and Cynthia in “XLVI,” and in the most extreme instance, in “LXXIV,” all three. The power of the iconic Petrarchan she—which has always resided in her singularity and her command of singular devotion—is considerably diminished through dispersal into fragmented images. She acquires multiple forms, as the lover discovers mobile loyalties.

She is, in common with many of the Elizabethan heirs of Laura, unyielding to the point of being punitive in her response to the lover's worship (“XVIII,” “XXVII,” “XXXIV-V”); she can also be coquettish (“XXV”), duplicitous (“XX”), and inconstant (“XXXII,” “XXXVI”). Caelica exploits these Neo-Petrarchan modifications of the feminine ideal—familiar to English readers since Wyatt—to represent fallen woman. Her imperfections not only render the lover's continued devotion questionable, but also implicitly indict his fallen judgment. At a much later moment in the sequence, he will admit: “And while in you my selfe I seeke to find, / I see that you your selfe haue lost your minde” (“LXX”).

Joseph Hall, the Calvinist preacher, a friend and client of Greville, delivered this satiric portrait:

The loue-sicke Poet, whose importune prayer
Repulsed is with resolute dispayre,
Hopeth to conquer his disdainfull dame,
With publique plaints of his conceiued flame.
Then poures he forth in patched Sonettings
His loue, his lust, and loathsome flatterings:
As tho the staring world hangd on his sleeue,
When once he smiles, to laugh: and when he sighs, to grieue.(7)

This attack on the Petrarchan lover and his self-fashioning represents the brutal face of Calvinistic poetics.⁸ The lover/speaker of Caelica engages in a more subtle act of inner iconoclasm that takes as its starting point the error of Petrarchan devotion. English Calvinists believed that repentance was “the very substance of all religion, and the whole sum of Christianitie.”⁹ Repentance takes the form of self-scrutiny for the purpose of making known to the reprobate the location and depth of his sin. The diary of Richard Rogers was written because Rogers wished “to know mine owne hart better, where I know that much is to be gotten in understaunding of it, and to be acquainted with the diverse corners of it and what sin I am most in daunger of and what diligence and meanes I use against any sin and how I goe under any affliction.”¹⁰

The protean changes of the “hart” are the very substance of Petrarchan discourse, its repertory of tropes the poetic medium by which the lover enacts fine discriminations of feelings and desires. Furthermore, Petrarch's Rime Sparse and its Elizabethan imitations offer a narrative in time of a more generalized kind than the type suggested by the diary. Caelica forges the imaginative connection between the record of love and the record of error, and reconstructs the temporal scheme of Petrarchan devotion as Calvinist progress Sub specie aeternitatis.¹¹ Inspired by the austerity of Calvinistic belief, Caelica embarks on a concerted and thoroughgoing critique of Petrarchan ideology and poetic construction of love, which is all the more effective because it deploys those very strategies—situations, topoi, rhetoric—that Petrarchanism has rendered familiar. Most significantly, this negative reaction functions as a means to a religious end: anti-Petrarchanism takes the form of self-examination, the finding and naming of inner error which is the first stage of the Calvinistic progress towards repentance and justification.

Calvinism offers no accommodation of material existence except as an arena where the determinations of Divine power and grace are seen to work out to their unquestionable ends. The iconoclastic attack on the Petrarchan she in Caelica is to be understood within the speaker's anxiety about his attachment to the physical life, and his recurrent attempts at breaking that attachment. While the target of poem I of Caelica is the lady, poem II turns to the Petrarchan lover's sensuality that underwrites his complaint that the mistress' domestic pets have more intimate access to her than he has. This complaint, in poems such as Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 59, functions on the level of playful innuendo. In an implied critique of this sexual/bestial exchange, it is represented by the figurative language of poem II as the actual debased condition of the lover's relationship with the lady.

In the poem, the bestial invocation of the lady—with its derogatory insinuations throughout the poem of unbridled female lust and cruelty—is co-present with the lover's body, displayed in all its macabre and repelling injury. Mangled and disemboweled, the lover's body pleads for favor, “That with thy tongue thy bytings may be healed.” Though confessing to his own helplessness, the lover makes no concession to the lady—the quasi-beast invited to lick his wounds. In the self-humbling rhetoric of the Petrarchan lover, the poem exposes those unspoken and unspeakable tendencies subliminal to Petrarchan adoration. It is an example of the “importune prayer” of “The loue-sick Poet” so lamented by Joseph Hall, but it is also a prayer to a bestial idol; the poem is at once iconoclastic and idolatrous.

The opening poems rehearse the Petrarchan dichotomy of spirit and body, the substance of the lover's inwardness. One thinks of the “authentic” voice of Astrophil speaking from the brink of virtue and desire. They also plot the realignment of Petrarchan modes of praise and worship of an ideal Other along Calvinist terms of faith. A process of rewriting Petrarchanism is clearly at work, and poem III offers a clue as to its outlines and imperatives. In each of the two stanzas of the poem, the quatrain draws an idealistic vision of the lady similar to that in poem I, while the end couplet internalizes the vision. Together, the stanzas enact a sense of self in which parts correspond in a unified whole: “If in my heart all Saints else be defaced, / Honour the shrine, where you alone are placed”; “If in my heart all Nymphs else be defaced / Honour the shrine, where you alone are placed.”

The pagan association of “Nymphs” may signify concessions to the erotic, but this decorous rhetoric is hardly adequate to contain the salacious outcries of animal desire in poem II. The body is largely written out of this construction of the unitary self. The spiritualized rhetoric of the couplets is also shot through with iconoclastic fervor; the “defacing” of “saints” precedes the achievement of a singular self reconciled to its own internal pressures. Poems I and III may rehearse the familiar topos of the Petrarchan's lover's triumph over passion, but the erasure of the body and the iconoclasm are signs that the triumph is moderated by a covert but unmistakable Calvinistic discourse. In the language of poem IV, where the speaker pleads with “Loue” to choose him not by his own “worth” but her “election” (my italics), the traditional Neo-Platonic figurations of the lady's superiority and the lover's abjectness again bear the trace of a Calvinistic rewriting.

The opening poems of Caelica articulate but also denigrate desire by figuring it in a damaged body which is then cut out of the model self. In doing so, they betray an anxiety about the body which continues to permeate the first section (“V”-“XXXVII”) of the sequence. The lover perceives his frailty (“XV,” “XXVII”) and the lady's (“XVIII,” “XXV”-“VI”), and sees change in love as the acme of the inconstant condition of mortality (“XXVIII,” “XXX”). It is true that the images of burning and freezing in “XV,” the lover's fear in “XXVII,” as well as the lady's changeableness in “XVIII” and “XXVI” may point as much to emotional as to physical frailty. But in these poems, emotional frailty is inextricably linked to the life of the senses, specifically to sight and seeing. And in many of the poems of the first section, the insight of concupiscent man is signified by physical disablement. In the speaker's recurrent identification with blind Cupid, the familiar Renaissance emblem of concupiscence, the Calvinistic critique of the physical life comes into sharper focus.

In poem “XII,” the lover describes how he first took pity on Cupid:

Thy nakednesse I in my reason clothed,
Mine eyes I gaue thee, so was I deuoted.

But this was only to be betrayed:

No sooner he into mine eyes was gotten,
But straight he clouds them with a seeing blindnesse,
Makes reason wish that reason were forgotten.

Blindness is a sign of the lover's surrender to passion in an act of self-betrayal. But “seeing” is coterminous with “blindnesse”; mortal vision is allowed utterance but then immediately demoted to unseeing. Here is a critique of passion, but also in a further study of what it implies, of human reason in debilitating conflict with itself—makes reason wish that reason were forgotten.”

“Seeing blindnesse” is not just the usual Petrarchan paradox. To Calvinists, confidence in reason is a fundamental error. William Perkins states that when God brings men to Christ, “first, he prepareth their hearts, that they might be capable of faith.” This internal preparation is by “bruising” or “humbling” men so that through humiliation, they might obtain a “sight” of their sins.¹² From this vantage point, “seeing blindnesse” suggests the internalization of Calvinistic doctrine. The Petrarchan lover as Calvinist reprobate is at once deprived of his mortal sight but also enabled to see how corrupt his reason is.

The transition from the opening poems to the poems about insight and blindness is marked by poem “X.” In terms resonant with Calvinist self-consciousness, the poet states that “Loue, of mans wandring thoughts the restlesse being” has “fall'n” from the celestial joys to which it aspires to the speaker's “darkened minde.” In this new and corrupt domicile,

Truth clouds it selfe, Wit serues but to resemble,
Enuie is King, at others good offended,
Memorie doth worlds of wretchednesse assemble,
Passion to ruin passion is intended,
My reason is but power to dissemble;
          Then tell me Loue, what glory you diuine
          Your selfe can find within this soule of mine?

In the light of this Calvinistic judgment of the fallen mind, the later poems on the lover's betrayal by Cupid, and his realization that he will surely die, reenact the Fall. These poems take on the character of an iconoclastic project, resignifying the Petrarchan paradox of “seeing blindnesse” as fallen reason afflicted with knowledge of its own corruption from which it also knowingly recoils. The poem chips away at the long-established Petrarchan model of inner complexity and exposes its own paradoxical modes of consciousness and rhetoric as its very source of error. Greville rewrites the Petrarchan lover as the object lesson of the Fall and its impact on human existence.

However, this Calvinistic vantage point is not immediately apparent to the speaker of the poems. That this is so can be seen by comparing the Cupid poems of the first section with those of the middle section. Of the first forty poems, Cupid figures in seventeen, most of the time as a juvenile participant in the drama of courtship whose maneuvers the speaker grapples with but hardly understands. In the middle section, Cupid (with a single exception, poem “LXXVI,” which I shall discuss later) is no longer a central figure or subject of entire poems; he appears marginally in only ten poems before the farewell to love in “LXXXIV.” Cupid has always played the role of intermediary between the speaker and the lady. His recession as dramatic figure signals a change in the ways the speaker understands and represents himself. Instead of experiencing and figuring himself in terms of Cupid's dramatic antics, he increasingly steps back to take the measure of Cupid's exercise of power without responsibility:

Sweet Cupids shafts like Destinie
Doe causelesse good or ill decree;
Desert is borne out of his bow,
Reward vpon his wing doth goe;
          What fooles are they that haue not knowne,
          That Loue likes no Lawes but his owne.

Furthermore, desire is seen not simply as a function of the erotic but a complex interplay of subliminal motivations. In “LXII,” Cupid is harnessed with Mars and Mercury and man's worship of these pagan gods demystified:

Mercurie, Cupid, Mars, they be no Gods,
But humane Idols, built vp by desire,
Fruit of our boughs, whence heauen maketh rods,
And babyes too for child-thoughts that aspire:
          Who sees their glories, on the earth must prye;
          Who seeks true glory must looke to the skye.

The act of “Idol”-breaking here is the logical extension from the defacement of “Saints.” Both implicitly place Petrarchan discourse as another episode in man's aberrant history. The Augustinian idea of history as decline is stated in “XLIV” where the speaker contrasts the “Golden Age” of the past with the “Brasen Age” of the present and places Caelica firmly in the latter. The cherished Petrarchan icons of the self-in-love and the lady cannot be fragmented without implications for the ideology of love and worship which guarantees them. The concluding couplet of “LXII,” “Who sees their glories, on the earth must prye; / Who seeks true glory must looke to the skye,” seems to point backwards to the perspective of the opening. But the implicit reminder that “Caelica” originates from caelum, the sky, is charged with the ironical awareness of the radical change in the firmaments which the poem's iconoclasm advances.

It is this awareness that marks the distinct shift from the perplexed and frustrated negotations with Cupid in the first section and the conscious indictments of love in the middle section. From the Calvinistic vantage point, the Petrarchan discourse of the first section acquires a distinctively postlapsarian character. Early in the middle section, in poem “XXXIX,” the lover laments:

The pride of Flesh by reach of humane wit,
Did purpose once to ouer-reach the skye;
And where before God drown'd the world for it,
Yet Babylon it built vp, not to dye.
God knew these fooles how foolishly they wrought,
That Destiny with Policie would breake,
Straight none could tell his fellow what he thought,
Their tongues were chang'd, & men not taught to speake:
So I that heauenly peace would comprehend,
In mortall seat of Caelica's faire heart,
To babylon my selfe there, did intend,
With naturall kindnesse, and with passions art:
          But when I thought my selfe of her selfe free,
          All's chang'd: she vnderstands all men but me.

The Old Testament allusion situates the lover's experience as the latest intertext in a typological reading of history. Petrarchan discourse—and its representation of the inner self—is reinserted into the biblical scheme of things, dislodged from its traditionally privileged mediation of reading and writing man's experience of love. There is a significant transition from “Babylon” to “babylon” which Bullough glosses as a verb, meaning “elevate.”¹³ William Perkins wrote that the Gospel was “as it were the conduit pipe of the Holy Ghost to fashion and derive faith into the soul; by which faith they which believe do, as with an hand, apprehend Christ's righteousness.”¹⁴ Something very like what Perkins is saying is at work in the poem. The reading of the Biblical example of “Babylon” is internalized—“to babylon myself”—in the lover. A Biblical lesson has illuminated his fallen consciousness, and enables him to pinpoint his source of error—“to babylon my selfe there, did intend” (my italics).¹⁵

The Calvinistic infiltration of Petrarchan discourse can be seen in the quasi-pulpit rhetoric of the first two stanzas. It continues in the formal move from the admonitory to the more familiar topos of the lover's self-deception in the last stanza, and the way in which this move affects the poem's outcome. The poem may seem to end on an indecisive note reiterating the lover's characteristic helplessness at his own plight. But as a response to the admonitions which precede it, the last stanza reads like a sinner's confession, in which the knowledge that he cannot extricate himself from sin marks the first step to spiritual recovery. Caelica is transformed, after the reprobate's self-scrutiny, from the “mortall seat” of “heavenly peace” to the most recent example of the whore of Babylon—a grim joke at the expense of both the lady and the gentleman: “All's chang'd: she vnderstands all men but me.” The poems of the middle section which I have discussed, and others like them, seem to add up to a more determinedly intrusive Calvinistic discourse. And yet it is within the Petrarchan nature of Caelica to function as both a connected sequence, and a succession of separate poetic moments. The plural, disparate form of the Petrarchan sequence, with its repetitions, contradictions, and anomalies, is one strong reason for the attenuation of the Petrarchan self. To look at Caelica in this way is to imply that while certain poems may prescribe a reading of those among which they are placed, this prescription cannot be a matter of absolute certainty, that is to say, become a proscriptive stricture.

Poem “XL” immediately follows the “babylonic” self-consciousness of “XXXIX.”

The nurse-life Wheat within his greene huske growing,
Flatters our hope and tickles our desire,
Natures true riches in sweet beauties shewing,
Which set all hearts, with labours loue, on fire.
No lesse faire is the Wheat when golden eare
Showes vnto hope the ioyes of neare enioying:
Faire and sweet is the bud, more sweet and faire
The Rose, which proues that time is not destroying.
Caelica, your youth, the morning of delight,
Enamel'd o're with beauties white and red,
All sense and thoughts did to beleefe inuite,
That Loue and Glorie there are brought to bed;
          And your ripe yeeres loue-noone (he goes no higher)
          Turnes all the spirits of Man into desire.

The celebration of human passion in terms of Nature is a time-honored literary practice; Nature, in the Rime Sparse, is the arena of signification where the ascetic and the erotic engage in rhythmic and cyclical negotiations, defining each other through likeness and difference. The octave of poem “XL” gives this conventional practice a new lease on life in the closely wrought similitudes that give passion physical substance, but also render it mysterious and unknowable. The second quatrain suggests an image of desire at the moment of “neare-enioying” but also moves past it, through the images of the budding and full-blown rose, to the moment of desire's gratification.

This is also the moment when the subterranean fear of mortality, of desire's destruction, is closest to the surface. It is contained in the sensuous “rose,” the traditional sign of carpe diem, and it elicits the rather awkward assertion from the speaker, “which proues that time is not destroying” (in which “proues” carries an anxious ambiguity). The sestet, in contrast, never comes this far. The synecdochic exchanges of natural and human desire bring the speaker to the point of passion's climax and then fix him there. Desire becomes perpetual; its ruin perpetually held in abeyance because the gratification which it anticipates remains a matter of “beleefe,” an invitation never taken up.

It is possible but unnecessary to read poem “XL” as an example of the self-deluding fantasy of concupiscent, fallen man. There is no suggestion in the poem that the erotic is in any sense compatible with the spiritual. But if the recognition of the spirit's triumph is an essential element of the sequence's Calvinistic determinism, then the poem invokes a countervailing discourse and its moment of glory. On the same lines, Cupid, sidelined and—with Mars and Mercury—the object of iconoclasm in “LXII,” completely appropriates the subject position of the Petrarchan ‘I’ in “LXXVI:”

I, when I haue shot one shaft at my mother,
That her desires a-foote thinke all her owne,
Then straight draw vp my bow to strike another,
For Gods are best by discontentment knowne.
And when I see the poore forsaken sprite,
Like sicke men, whom the Doctor saith must dye,
Sometime with rage and strength of passion fight,
Then languishing enquire what life might buy:
          I smile to see Desire is neuer wise,
          But warres with Change, which is her paradise.

Again, this poem might read as an indictment of desire. But it also brings back vividly the image of the ailing body still locked in a violent struggle with its mortality.

At its most extreme, in poem “LVI,” desire assumes Ovidian proportions. In an erotic dream-like sequence, the lustful speaker steps out under a starry light in search of the lady, Cynthia, until he stands “like Articke pole” (37) beside her “Naked on a bed of play” (46). He seems unaware of any moral depravity; indeed, his tone in conclusion is self-congratulatory as he turns away from the Neo-Platonic heavens to survey what he is about to enjoy:

Let no Loue-desiring heart,
In the Starres goe seeke his fate,
Loue is onely Natures art,
Wonder hinders Loue and Hate.
          None can well behold with eyes,
          But what vnderneath him lies.

Poem “LVI” and other poetic moments dispersed in the middle section suggest that the voice of desire will not be totally suppressed or silenced; it continues to penetrate the stringent critique of human love and history.

From the persistent perspective of desire, the conventional farewell to Cupid in “LXXXIV” seems at first sight no more than pro forma: “But Cupid now farewell, I will goe play me, / With thoughts that please me lesse, & lesse betray me.” This final bidding seems another rehearsal of “Ile hold no more, false Caelica, liue free; / Seeme faire to all the world, and foule to me” in “XLII,” or “And I no more will stirre this earthly dust, / Wherein I lose my name, to take on lust” in “LXXI.” The perspective of desire, crisscrossed with Calvinistic lines of thought, charts the outlines of an inner conflict that is recognizably Petrarchan in its origins and mode of expression. In this light, the Calvinistic discourse of the middle section appears not only as a critique of Petrarchan discourse, but also ironically exploits what it sets out to oppose. The consequence of this irony is an extreme indeterminacy of self, veering from austere convictions to the pained expressions of desire unrequited. The nadir of this self is marked by the destabilization of “Greville” as “Greiv-Ill” in “LXXXIII.” His awareness of inner pain and emptiness,

Forlorne desires my Clocke to tell me euery day,
That time hath stolne Loue, Life and All but my distresse away.
For Musicke heauy sighes, my Walke an inward woe,
Which like a shadow euer shall before my body goe:
And I my selfe am he, that doth with none compare,
Except in woes and lacke of worth; whose states more wretched are.
Let no man aske my name, nor what else I should be;
For Greiv-Ill, paine, forlorne estate doe best decipher me,

resonates in the prose of another Calvinist penitent, John Winthrop, who describes how the Lord laid

[me] lower in myne owne eyes then at any time before, and showed me the emptiness of all my guifts, and parts; left mee neither power nor will … I knew I was worthy of nothing for I knew I could doe nothing for him or for my selfe. I could only mourn, and weep to think of free mercy to such a vile wretch as I was.¹⁶

Petrarchan situations and rhetoric provide the means by which doctrine is enacted, dramatized, and authenticated as inner conflict. The problem, of course, is that the progressive identification of error within Petrarchan terms has led to the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the Petrarchan self. To what extent can the artistic strategies of the Petrarchan convention be still deployed when it is perceived as entirely corrupt? This is a problem that is unique to Caelica and distinguishes it from sequences written and completed during the vogue of Elizabethan sonneteering: Astrophil and Stella, Amoretti, Delia, and Shakespeare's Sonnets. While the indeterminate self defines the outcome of major Elizabethan sequences, Caelica consciously closes off this conventionally open-ended self in the final section (“LXXXV”-“CIX”). The farewell to Cupid in “LXXXIV,” which has seemed a familiarly inconsequential gesture, becomes a crucial point of departure:

I bow'd not to thy image for succession,
Nor bound thy bow to shoot reformed kindnesse,
Thy playes of hope and feare were my confession,
The spectacles to my life was thy blindnesse;
But Cupid now farewell, I will goe play me,
With thoughts that please me lesse, & lesse betray me.

Implicit in this farewell is not only the resolute rejection of the self understood and represented in profane terms. As the ultimate sign of the self-in-love, Cupid is determinedly restrictive. The confinement of earthly love to the erotic rules out the interpenetration of the world and the spirit inscribed in the Petrarchan model of the self-in-love. The body, regarded as irreparably disabled, is to be excised rather than accommodated. The farewell is not only an act of individual renunciation; it attempts to close off discursive interplay by shutting down the Petrarchan system, and initiates an alternative mode of existential and textual complexity. Poem “LXXXV” proclaims a purged and puristic redefinition of love and self:

Loue is the Peace, whereto all thoughts doe striue,
Done and begun with all our powers in one:
The first and last in vs that is aliue,
End of the good, and therewith pleas'd alone.
Perfections spirit, Goddesse of the minde,
Passed through hope, desire, griefe and feare,
A simple Goodnesse in the flesh refin'd,
Which of the ioyes to come doth witnesse beare.
Constant, because it sees no cause to varie,
A Quintessence of Passions ouerthrowne,
Rais'd aboue all that change of obiects carry,
A Nature by no other nature knowne:
          For Glorie's of eternitie a frame,
          That by all bodies else obscures her name.

An all-powerful metaphysical desire, signified by “thoughts” in line 1, has taken over fleshly desire, belonging to eyesight. Here, then, is the destination of the passage “through hope, desire, grief and fear,” a summary of the fretful record of the preceding poems, a translation of gratification forever withheld to hopeful anticipation of “joys to come.”

And yet the sestet proceeds to define “Loue” in precisely those terms which the octave implies have been cast aside. For all its protestations of purity, “Loue,” the codeword of a revised inner self, is definable by language no other than that which also signifies its antithesis. The absolute difference of “Loue” can hardly be made known without a knowledge of those elements—“Passions,” “change”—that precede it, against which it is defined, and hence are implicated in its being. This covert, binary process has left a trace in the quasi-assonance of “Glorie's” and “bodies” in the end couplet which otherwise asserts the triumph of the abstract and the timeless over the phenomenal.

The farewell to Petrarchan discourse could be interpreted as a mark of faith operating internally to enable repentance in the form of utter rejection of a self perceived as entirely corrupt. In Calvinistic belief, men, of their own abilities, are incapable of repentance; it could only happen as a sign of the ingrafting of divine grace. Although the residues of a former self linger in language, interior reformation must be manifest by a new mode of conduct, and among other external signs, the adoption of a new manner of speech.¹⁷

In the final section, the space vacated by Petrarchan discourse is to be filled by a reconstructed rhetoric of praise, of worship, of the inner self. And yet time and again, this practice of rhetoric comes up against the Calvinist suspicion of deceptive forms. One outstanding consequence of this which we can see in the final poems is an anxiety about verbal forms and their relations with the reformed inner self. Some of the poems, which hark back to the pulpit rhetoric of the previous section, explicitly counsel vigilance against linguistic deception. In poem “XCII,” the speaker places manipulations of language in relations of power:

Nobilitie, this pretious treasure is,
Laid vp in secret mysteries of State,
Kings creature, subiections gilded blisse,
Where grace, not merit, seems to gouerne fate.
          Mankinde I thinke to be this rod diuine,
          For to the greatest euer they incline.
Eloquence, that is but wisdome speaking well,
(The Poets faigne) did make the sauage tame;
Of eares and hearts chain'd vnto tongues they tell;
I thinke Nobilitie to be the same:
          For be they fooles, or speake they without wit,
          We hold them wise, we fooles be-wonder it.

The speaker undermines the supposed repository in “Nobilitie” of “secret mysteries of State” and the almost mystical power of “Eloquence” to tame the “sauage.” He unveils the deceptions common to both by equating the severed connection between “grace” and “merit” with that between language and thought. This is in explicit contrast to his description of the “Golden-Age” in poem “XLIV” where “Desire was free, and Beauties first-begotten; / Beauty then neither net, nor made by art, / Words out of thoughts brought forth, and not forgotten” (my italics). Under the corrupt circumstances of the present, “Eloquence” is nothing but vacuous display, captivating “ears and hearts” in the same way as corrupt eyesight used to be enamored of what it sees. This mistrust of language is elaborated in A Treatie of Humane Learning where, as part of a general attack upon the different aspects of classical learning, Greville disparages “Eloquence” as but “the craft of words” designed “to flatter, or beseech, / Insinuate, or perswade.” The “true Art of Eloquence,” he adds, in lines reminiscent of Caelica “XLIV,” should be “formes of speech, / Such as from liuing wisdomes doe proceed,” and its task is “to declare / What things in Nature good, or euill are” (Bullough, p. 181).

To return to “XCII,” one could argue that the speaker in the poem is referring to certain rhetorical uses of language and not to how language operates in general. Putting aside for the moment the self-referential implications of this line of argument, it can be further said that the speaker is only indicting a specific poetical language and its superfluity to a genuinely reformed inner self. But there is surely an inescapable trap for the Calvinist having to speak in a language that is fallen. In this section, one can find evidence of the speaker's watchfulness of this inner self in the very process of being reconstructed in language. For example, in poem “LXXXIX,” he admonishes:

We seeme more inwardly to know the Sonne,
And see our owne saluation in his blood;
When this is said, we thinke the worke is done,
And with the Father hold our portion good:
          As if true life within these words were laid,
          For him that in life, neuer words obey'd.

Doubts about language, its eloquence or more importantly, its treachery against the spirit's repossession of the inner world have significant implications for the speaker's devotional progress. Poem “XCIX,” for example, reveals an interior landscape from which linguistic signs are all but absent:

Downe in the depth of mine iniquity,
That vgly center of infernall spirits;
Where each sinne feeles her owne deformity,
In these peculiar torments she inherits,
          Depriu'd of humane graces, and diuine,
          Euen there appeares this sauing God of mine.
And in this fatall mirrour of transgression,
Shewes man as fruit of his degeneration,
The errours ugly infinite impression,
Which beares the faithlesse downe to desperation;
Depriu'd of humane graces and diuine,
Euen there appeares this sauing God of mine.
In power and truth, Almighty and eternall,
Which on the sinne reflects strange desolation,
With glory scourging all the Sprites infernall,
And vncreated hell with vnpriuation;
          Depriu'd of humane graces, not diuine,
          Euen there appeares this sauing God of mine.
For on this sp'rituall Crosse condemned lying,
To paines infernall by eternall doome,
I see my Sauiour for the same sinnes dying,
And from that hell I fear'd, to free me, come;
          Depriu'd of humane graces, not diuine,
          Thus hath his death rais'd up this soule of mine.

The passions of the tormented soul preoccupy the first quatrain of each stanza and are pitted against the relative stability of the couplet refrain. The torments are conceived as non-verbal processes: the feelings of deformity in the first stanza, the reflection of degeneration's image in the second and the third, and the vision of the Crucifix in the last.

At the same time, the actual conversion in the couplet refrain of the first three stanzas happens in despite of—or “refrains” from—the process of the linguistic. It rests on the repetitions of the visual: “Euen there appeares this sauing God of mine” (my italics). This visual effect is not conjured by language—the subject does not cry out de profundis—but is the product of revelation; the speaker is the passive recipient of the vision. The climax of the conversion occurs at the moment when he “see[s]” the image of the Crucifix. The specular shapes of “degeneration” which haunt the speaker are displaced by this authentic visual sign of Divine presence within. It is contradistinct from the earlier image of “the Sonne” actively conjured by the “words” (“LXXXIX”) of the sinner.

The speaker's gaze, directed at the beginning towards an immaterial Other, turns, in the final moments of the sequence, inwards towards an interior construct justified by a masculine, Divine presence, who, in His patient endurance of suffering partakes of traditional feminine qualities. The revealed image of the “Sauiour … dying” becomes the cynosure of the speaker's gaze, and confirms the burden of mortality which is also the burden of the spirit; the Crucifixion signifies bodily affliction as the site of spiritual affliction. The body reinserts itself into a discourse of the self which so overtly proscribes its presence.

The conception of spiritual progress as more or less independent of linguistic signs poses problems for the speaker in his alternative position as evangelical preacher in the final section, for he can hardly persuade without using the very medium which he suspects. His task of conversion cannot be performed without implicit acknowledgement that he and his audience, or readership, belong to a community constituted in the main by a shared common language. In important ways, the fostering of a spiritual community depends on the effectiveness with which the preacher deploys the resources of language. In the reconstruction of a shared rhetoric, we can see the poet-preacher's experiment with a language that admits instability without surrendering the claim to Truth. Poem “LXXXVI” is a good example:

The Earth with thunder torne, with fire blasted,
With waters drowned, with windie palsey shaken
Cannot for this with heauen be distasted,
Since thunder, raine and winds from earth are taken:
Man torne with Loue, with inward furies blasted,
Drown'd with despaire, with fleshly lustings shaken,
Cannot for this with heauen be distasted,
Loue, furie, lustings out of man are taken.
Then Man, endure thy selfe, those clouds will vanish;
Life is a Top which whipping Sorrow driueth;
Wisdome must beare what our flesh cannot banish,
The humble leade, the stubborne bootlesse striueth:
          Or Man, forsake thy selfe, to heauen turne thee,
          Her flames enlighten Nature, neuer burne thee.

The poem uses a language of public prophecy—the self is now generic, the self of “Man”—a language intertextual with the Old Testament, and derives its justification from this intertextuality. The poem also returns the meteorological affliction to its proper seat of signification within the human condition. Sound and fury they may be, related to each other in some unstable, elemental system, but they are also the specular forms of “inward furies” that have plagued men from time immemorial.¹⁸

The speaker persuades by offering two paths of conversion: through suffering the mortification of the flesh—“Then Man, endure thy selfe,”—or spiritual transcendence—“Or Man, forsake thyselfe.” The endurance of the life of the body becomes a sign of that patience which, in turn, signifies spiritual regeneration. Through the convoluted passage of “Love, fury, lustings,” the body becomes reattached to its spiritual nexus, from which it has been severed, and to which it has appeared as dichotomous.

A number of poems (“C,” “CI,” “CIII”-“VIII”) discuss and explore a range of misconceptions. Linking these poems with the devotional poems focused on the interior struggles of the ‘I’ (“XCVIII”-“IX,” “CII”) are the eyes that signify the perceptual powers of the illuminated spirit. “In Night,” says the speaker in poem C:

                                        when colours all to blacke are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone downe with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses plac'd,
Not seeing, yet still hauing power of sight,
…
          And from this nothing seene, tels newes of devils,
          Which but expressions be of inward euils.

Because man is implicated in the world of the flesh, he partakes of all its disabilities, particularly those which place him within the human community. In its negotiations with the external world, the inner self is subject to unstable visual and linguistic signs. Poem “CIX,” the last of the sequence, enacts the closure of the problematic relations of visual and linguistic signs and the reformed self:

Syon lyes waste, and thy Ierusalem,
O Lord, is falne to vtter desolation,
Against thy Prophets, and thy holy men,
The sinne hath wrought a fatall combination,
          Prophan'd thy name, thy worship ouerthrowne,
          And made thee liuing Lord, a God vnknowne.
Thy powerfull lawes, thy wonders of creation,
Thy Word incarnate, glorious heauen, darke hell,
Lye shadowed vnder Mans degeneration,
Thy Christ still crucifi'd for doing well,
          Impiety, O Lord, sits on thy throne,
          Which makes thee liuing Light, A God vnknown.
Mans superstition hath thy truths entomb'd,
His Atheisme againe her pomps defaceth,
That sensuall vnsatiable vaste wombe
Of thy seene Church, thy vnseene Church disgraceth;
          There liues no truth with them that seem thine own,
          Which makes thee liuing Lord, a God vnknowne.
Yet vnto thee, Lord, (mirrour of transgression)
Wee, who for earthly Idols, haue forsaken
Thy heauenly Image (sinlesse pure impression)
And so in nets of vanity lye taken,
          All desolate implore that to thine owne,
          Lord, thou no longer liue a God vnknowne.
Yet Lord let Israels plagues not be eternall,
Nor sinne for euer cloud thy sacred Mountaines,
Nor with false flames spirituall but infernall,
Dry up thy mercies euer springing fountaines,
          Rather, sweet Iesus, fill vp time and come,
          To yeeld the sinne her euerlasting doome.

Like poem “XCIX,” “Downe in the depth of mine iniquity,” this poem is prayer-like, with the couplet at the end of each stanza performing the function of refrain. The preacher transforms the devotional moment into a moment of communal self-revaluation, assuming the plural voice—“Wee” in stanza four—and articulating the interior desires of his spiritual flock. In the closing moment of the narrative of spiritual progress, the poem constructs the rhetoric of assurance, and also performs the function of making assurance known. The “wee” deploys the images and registers of the Old Testament voice of the chosen people of Israel to signify, and also to confirm, their election. The biblical intertext is, of course, Isaiah 64:10. And through this language, the subsumed self, the “wee,” and the sequence, place themselves in an unbroken and scripturally justified history. But the poem also revises the Old Testament from the perspective of a New Testament inwardness in which “Christ [is] still crucifi'd,” and anticipates the final vision of the Second Coming—“Rather, sweet Iesus, fill vp time and come, / To yeeld the sinne her euerlasting doome.” It encloses private insight made known in a public idiom and Revelational history, conjoins inwardness and communication, time and eternity.

Much of Caelica witnesses the struggle between two discursive constructions of selfhood and its place in time and eternity. That this is so should hardly be surprising considering that Caelica has its roots in the 1580s but, unlike its contemporaries, reaches beyond to another, increasingly divisive age. Indeed the Calvinistic possession of the discursive field of the sequence advances, and is symptomatic of, this division.

Notes

1. Morris W. Croll's doctoral dissertation later published as The Works of Fulke Greville (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1903), pioneered the study of poems from Caelica. From Croll, Geoffrey Bullough draws the argument that Caelica is “a collection … divided into two parts, the first of love-poems and the second of political and religious poems, … substantially presented in the order in which it was written.” “Introduction,” Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, 2 vols. (London and Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1938), 1:37. This in turn develops into a reading of Caelica as a record of Greville's artistic and spiritual growth which adapts itself well to and is enhanced by Ronald Rebholz's biography, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Critics who have approached Caelica from the dual perspectives of Greville's life and Elizabethan poetic and philosophical traditions include William Frost, Fulke Greville's “Caelica”: An Evaluation (VT: printed privately by The Vermont Printing Co., 1942); Thom Gunn, ed., Selected Poems of Fulke Greville (London: Faber and Faber, 1968); Richard Waswo, The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1972), pp. 9-41; Charles Larson, Fulke Greville (Boston: Twayne-G.K. Hall, 1980), pp. 25-42, 109-136.

2. Profane poems from the early sections of Caelica are referred to in Rebholz's study of Greville's youth, while the Calvinist lyrics of the final section offer material for Rebholz's chapter on Greville, “The Reformed Christian” (ch. 13). Yvor Winters's essay, “The 16th Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation,” Poetry 53, 5 (January 1939): 258-72 (part 1); 320-35 (part 2); Poetry 54, 1 (April 1939): 35-51 (part 3); rev. and rpt. in Forms of Discovery (Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967), ch. 1, pioneered the study of Greville's poetic style in this century. D.L. Peterson considers both Wyatt and Greville as important exponents of the “plain style” of writing in the sixteenth century. His book, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), and Norman Farmer, Jr.'s “Fulke Greville and the Poetic of the Plain Style,” TSLL 11, 1 (Spring 1969): 657-70 develop Winters's ideas.

3. Caelica was begun in the 1580s, and revised and expanded throughout Greville's lifetime until shortly before his death in 1628. For a discussion of dating, see the introduction to Bullough, Poems and Dramas, vol. 1, G.A. Wilkes, “The Sequence of Writings of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke,” SP 56, 3 (July 1959): 489-503, and Rebholz, Life, Appendix I. A reconsideration of the dating and the biographical approach to Caelica which follows from it lies outside the scope of this article. But this article does raise the question of whether the model of the Calvinist self is the consequence of a deliberate arrangement of the poems of Caelica along ideological lines. In “The Rewriting of Petrarch: Sidney and the Languages of Sixteenth-Century Poetry,” in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 69-83, Gary Waller discusses Petrarchanism's domination of the discourse of love in the Renaissance, and proposes a Bakhtinian reading of Astrophil and Stella as a discursive negotiation of Petrarchanism and English Reformation ideology.

4. All quotations of Caelica and other Greville poems are from Bullough, Poems and Dramas, vol. 1.

5. William Perkins, Workes, 3 vols. (London: 1612-13), 1:603-604.

6. See Frances Yates, “Fulke Greville,” TLS, 7 August 1937, p. 576.

7. Virgidemiarvm (1598) “Sat. VII,” rpt. Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1949), p. 18.

8. Ernest B. Gilman has studied the different ways in which writers, schooled in Italian Renaissance poetics, manage the contrary pressure of a Calvinist ethos hostile to images and imaginative literature. Gilman sees tension, conflict, accommodation; but neither in the poetry of Spenser, Donne, and Milton, nor in the emblems of Francis Quarles, does an aesthetics of reconciliation present itself. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986). Also see, in this issue of SEL, Peter C. Herman, “The Shepheardes Calender and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment.”

9. John Udall, Certaine Sermons, Taken Out of Several Places of Scripture (London, 1596), sigs. H.iiiv, I.iiv.

10. “The Diary of Richard Rogers,” in Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. M.M. Knappen (Chicago: American Society of Church History, 1933), p. 62.

11. Recently, Patrick Collinson has proposed three dialectical stages in the interaction of religion and culture in Reformation England. In the first stage, “Protestantism embraced the cultural forms which already existed and employed them for its own purposes, both instructively and as polemical weapons against its own opponents.” During the second stage, which sees the ascendancy of Puritanism, “many protestant publicists turned their backs on these same cultural media, which now became the enemy no less than popery itself.” The consequence is a separation, unprecedented in English literary history, of the sacred from the secular which, in turn, fuels the “biblicism” of the third stage, when “an authentically protestant literary culture emerged.” The Birthpangs of Protestant England (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 98.

12. Perkins, Workes, 1:5.

13. The OED cites this as the single instance of the usage of “babylon” to mean “to place or establish in a magnificent abode.”

14. Perkins, Workes, 3:259.

15. In discussing Quaker symbolism, Owen Watkins observes that “the identification of Biblical Babylon with a man's inner self was consistent with the practice of finding the true importance of all revelation in subjective experience” (The Puritan Experience [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972], p. 215).

16. Winthrop Papers, 1:158-59, cited in John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 32.

17. Puritans believe that interior reform is manifested in outward changes which signify sanctification. These changes involve renouncing dissolute habits of the past and acquiring a new manner of speech and new company. See Charles H. George and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570-1640 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 95-114. The development of a new Reformed style of preaching is the subject of J.W. Blench's Preaching in England in the late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Study of English Sermons 1450-c. 1600 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 168 ff. For a discussion of the style and diction considered appropriate to a Puritan sermon, see Morgan, Godly Learning, ch. 7.

18. The common language of Puritan conversion enters into the discourse of another godly believer, Robert Bolton, who describes that “[t]he first newes he heard of GOD was not by any soft and still voice, but in terrible tempests and thunder, the LORD running upon him as a gyant, taking him by the necke and shaking him to peeces, as he did Iob; beating him to the very ground, as he did Paul.” Last & Learned Worke (London, 1632), “Life of Bolton,” sig. b5, cited in Morgan, Godly Learning, p. 31.