[In the following essay, Inglis argues that Greville has been undeservedly neglected by critics and uses the poetry of Caelica to illustrate his claim that Greville's poetic works should be grouped with those of the later school of Metaphysical Poetry.]

At the beginning of Revaluation, Dr Leavis, in discussing The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, remarks:

After ninety pages of … Fulke Greville, Chapman and Drayton, respectable figures who, if one works through their allotments, serve at any rate to set up a critically useful background, we come to this [and Leavis quotes “The Good-morrow”]. At this we … read on as we read the living.

I wish to question this rather casual rating of Greville, and certainly to oppose the almost universal neglect of his poetry. For we have in Greville, I believe, a very fine poet indeed, and one who bears his own special relation to the metaphysical tradition, while speaking recognizably with the same dignity and accomplishment as Donne, Jonson and Herbert. The outlook he embodies is not one which is particularly congenial to that twentieth-century taste which uses poetry as a quarrying ground for post-symbolists hoping to find dazzling imagery. Nonetheless he is a great master of technique as well as a master of a particular body of thought, and since such mastery is rare in poetry at any time, Greville deserves much better at our hands than he generally gets today. His poetry, it is true, does not walk the line of wit and yet it has no less impressive and in some ways more robust qualities. The poems are serious in theme and, generally, short, and their language is exact, energetic, lean and confident without ever being bald or magniloquent; their texture is subtle, varied, and surprising but without deliberate pyrotechnics; and the whole achievement represents a profound and sustained understanding of human experience. It nurtures and transmits the “picked experience of the ages”. And yet while this account of his poetry might attract readers who take poetry seriously, Greville is hardly read at all. At best he is a “respectable figure” lumped in with the minor Drayton as part of a “critically useful background”. Why is he neglected?

I think the neglect goes along with a still common undervaluation of, for example, the best of Ben Jonson, because we are still reluctant to search for qualities in seventeenth-century poetry other than those demonstrated most notably by Eliot. Eliot's praise of “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone” goes along with his own method, in which diction and trope are intended to carry unique, amazing perception of a personal order—“Like a patient etherized upon a table”. We then get a poetry as Pound said “charged with meaning to the fullest possible degree”; that is, a poetry in which each word is packed so densely that the effect is opaque and suggestive, agitating the mind with a thousand half-formulated responses and ideas. Such poetry is indirect in its operation and may be very successful, but our admiration for it has led to the neglect of what we might call the “plain style”, poetry which is not so intensively cultivated and busy, but, rather, laconic and relying on the translucent weight of simple language instead of a more immediate brilliance. I do not wish to impugn the greatness of Eliot, but to extend our area of response. For the opposition to Eliot and the types of ambiguity has come only from the scholars. A book like Rosamond Tuve's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery sets out to show how incompetent we all are to understand the poetry of the time without a very detailed knowledge of Renaissance poetic and Ramist logic, the point being that all the poets of the time studied the two and drew largely upon their studies and their training. But of course the book (and the scholarship) seems complacently blind to the central issue: that in spite of the same training Marvell feels and writes differently from Sidney, and Greville from both. Nevertheless, I do not want particularly to attack the scholars or to suggest that “The Line of Wit” is not there, but rather to make room for a very powerful kind of seventeenth-century poetry which at the moment we tend to exclude. If this poetry is “charged with meaning to the fullest possible degree”, it is not so in Pound's sense. Rather, such poetry is of a peculiarly intense chastity in which the word (and subsequently the line) is so controlled by rhythm and syntax that it defines itself in its own context: it means everything possible and relevant, and precisely no more. In saying this, I am not excluding the profitable use of ambiguity, for this can and does enrich our experience in reading; but I do maintain that ambiguities must be relevantly intended by the poet to perform this extension within the context of the theme, not included merely to satisfy ingenuity. I suppose I am making a plea for a poetry which inclines towards statement—by which I don't mean crudely gnomic verse—a poetry which moves towards explicitness within a clear and strong frame of moral reference within which judgment is final and inevitable. This is Greville's kind of poetry.

In his essay “On Metaphysical Poetry” (Scrutiny, II, Dec. 1933) James Smith offers a deliberately literal-minded and admirable definition:

… I prefer … to venture upon my own definition of metaphysical verse. It is, that verse properly called metaphysical is that to which impulse is given by an overwhelming concern with metaphysical problems; with problems either deriving from, or closely resembling in the nature of their difficulty, the problem of the Many and the One. The definition sounds spare, but that I do not look upon as a defect. It is at any rate fairly clear.

Now a speculative mind of any quality is bound to concern itself with the experiential fact that the mass of discrete particulars with which it is faced admit of certain general interpretations: any moral decision we take is witness to this fact. But we cannot loosely apply the term “metaphysical” to any poet who attempts an account of this fact, for we should then be obliged to allow, say, Shelley as a metaphysical poet, and his verse lapses too readily into an easy and confused ecstasy in which we may perceive there is a problem, but no attempt to respond to it and discriminate about it. (An exception to this criticism is the famous and beautiful lines concluding “stains the white radiance of Eternity”, which seem to me properly metaphysical.) Nor would Dante (as Mr Smith points out) be properly thought of as “metaphysical”, since although he obviously preserves a lucidity and poise that Shelley does not, he is not finally concerned with the problem his belief presents, but with the triumphant celebration of that belief. A metaphysical poet will preserve his sharp perception of the colliding components of the metaphysical problem, and will preserve it even in love poetry (as Donne does), in the poetry of religious meditation (as Herbert does), and also when, as in Greville, the perception is itself subsumed within a body of religious conviction. Calvinism, in fact, encourages an acceptance of anomalous and contradictory metaphysical situations, but this doesn't in the least prevent a clear vision of the contradictions; it probably aids it, since the poet feels no urge to mitigate the bleakness and hostility of the problems he evaluates. Such poetry is concerned with the exploration and judgment of the fundamental mystery of human experience, and it is poetry we do not often encounter.

James Smith concludes his essay:

Metaphysical poetry, springing from a concern with problems with which the universe must always present mankind, is not confined to either one age or country. Yet the conditions in which it can be produced are by their nature somewhat rare in occurrence. Metaphysical distinctions must have been made; further, these distinctions must be so familiar that they are no longer felt merely as a challenge to the intellect. They must rouse an altogether different emotional reaction, tinged, perhaps, with a certain scepticism. It appears therefore, only at high points of civilization; perhaps only when that civilization is halting for a moment, or is beginning to decay. I find traces of it, I think, in Virgil; in Tasso of the Aminta, not of the Gerusalemme; but most of all, outside England, in the Spain of the Philips. There metaphysics was to be breathed in at the nostrils. In consequence, in some of the plays of Calderon, not the language merely, but the action is a metaphysical conceit; it is at once fleshly and spiritual, and the one, it seems, because the other. In his autos he developed a form of allegory—if that name indeed is appropriate—which would well repay examination. For in them it is not, for example, a beautiful woman who dies, nor is it Beauty that ceases to manifest itself on the earth; but Beauty itself, incredible as it seems, that dies. I mention this, because it appears to me that, in his approach to allegory, Calderon has much in common with Herbert. Herbert, Marvell and Donne, I would say, are the three English metaphysical poets.

I wish to argue that we find a comparable concern for metaphysical problems couched in a highly distinctive and excellent idiom in the best poetry of Fulke Greville.

Caelica, Greville's long sonnet-sequence of 109 poems, isn't even formally linked, as Astrophel and Stella is. Three mistresses are addressed and after “40” the poet effectually loses interest in what we may call the Petrarchan shorthand to concentrate on problems that far transcend the courtly situation. In “84” Greville takes formal leave of Cupid and the courtly style. The last couplet reads:

But Cupid, now farewell; I will go play me
With thoughts that please me lesse, and less betray me.

The brevity and directness of the couplet show many of Greville's lesser virtues, and fix something of his characteristic tone. After “84” he devotes himself to problems of a general moral or theological nature, expressed and examined in highly conceptual and abstract language. It is in this verse that he exhibits his distinctively metaphysical cast of mind: he holds powerful general opposites simultaneously in his verse, and resolves the poem by the perfection and completeness of his style. It is principally a triumph of tact, of handling abstract language so that it takes on a precision and a magnificence that we have come to expect only of particularized imagery.

Before we come to the later and finer verse, I think it is necessary to examine some of the earlier love poetry, not only so that we may see how Greville cultivated and developed his poetry from conventional beginnings, but also to recognize the skilful and personal modifications exercised upon those conventions. A fair example is Caelica “11:”

Juno, that on her head Love's liverie carried.
Scorning to weare the markes of Io's pleasure,
Knew while the Boy in Aequinoctiall tarried,
His heats would rob the heaven of heavenly treasure,
Beyond the Tropicks she the Boy doth banish,
Where smokes must warme, before his fire do blaze,
And Childrens thoughts not instantly grow Mannish,
Feare keeping Lust there very long at gaze:
But see how that poore Goddesse was deceived,
For Womens hearts farre colder there than ice,
When once the fire of lust they have received,
With two extremes so multiply the vice,
          As neither partie satisfying other,
          Repentance still becomes Desires mother.

The opening is rather ponderous, but after the first quatrain the movement is fluent and sure. Greville's laconic wry intelligence prompts the succinct realism of the line, “Feare keeping Lust there very long at gaze”, picks up the conventional notion of feminine frigidity, to arrive at the shocking generalization of lines 11-13, which in turn leads austerly to the last line, “Repentance still becomes Desires mother”. The voice withdraws from particular situations in order to comment at large and levelly on sexual behaviour.

There is a profound satisfaction to be derived from observing the growth to maturity in a poet. We may observe this progress in Greville and trust the chronological order of Caelica as we note his increasing mastery of his style and forms, until finally he can cast off the sometimes faded sumptuousness of the Petrarchan idiom and—remembering its lessons—speak out directly with a voice that is at once personal and profoundly impersonal. It is in this capacity to create a voice which is wholly poetic—flexible, adroit, audacious and confident, and at the same time appealing to a context of public assent—which we recognize as originality.

This originality is beginning to appear in “29:”

Faction, that ever dwells
In Courts where Wit excels,
          Hath set defiance:
Fortune and Love have sworne,
That they were never borne,
          Of one alliance.

A good deal of Greville's strength undoubtedly stems from the firmness of his logical patterns (though I do not think we need a training in Renaissance logic to detect this). But perhaps more significant is the increasing interest—which obviously indicates his own predisposition to such an idiom—in the plain style of poetry. It is a style that defines itself in the poems of its kind, and it is perhaps the most difficult to write. The danger of bathos to the high rhetorical manner is considerable, but plainness can much more treacherously become mere assertion, a dreary plodding kind of manner without even a surface interest in highly coloured language. George Gascoigne writing for poets in his Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575) recommends them “to frame your stile to perspicuity and to be sensible”. Style is a slippery word to handle, and I do not wish to be thought of as approving a sort of philistinism: the poetry of the blunt man, without any fancy stuff. But I think we can see what is meant by a “perspicuous style” in the development of Caelica. It is largely free of ornament (especially in the later poems) and sensory detail, and it is compact. In the first stanza of “29” quoted above a careful reader will note the brisk terseness of the beginning in which intimacy is offset by gnomic assertion, and that the generality of the nouns is reduced by the abrasiveness they engender side by side, “Faction” against “Wit”. Statement is transformed into action by the allegorical life of the stanza. The short line throws unusual weight on the words “set defiance”; the meagre phrase takes on vividness.

This austerity of line, with roots deep in English medieval practice, is seen in a more urbane and courteous example, Caelica “40.” Its opening exemplifies both Greville's characteristic vivacity and his evenness of quality:

The nurse-life wheat, within his greene husk growing,
Flatters our hope, and tickles our desire.

The image is a rarely dramatic one for Greville, but it expresses his familiar Calvinist pessimism, his grim courage before the unredeemable part of human behaviour and its large deceptions. The words “flatters” and “tickles” modify the traditional delights found in human love, and disqualify the conventional euphoria about “the rose, which proves that time is not destroying”. (Greville's later poetry confronts with steady courage this central fact of annihilation, and it offers no solace unless clear understanding is solace. Christianity is for Greville only tragic.) This poem is deflected from such a wintry conclusion by the contemplation of feminine beauty. In the penultimate two lines we hear Greville's music as triumphantly massive for the first time:

All sense and thoughts did to beleefe invite,
That Love and Glory there are brought to bed.

The dignity of that second line derives from the slight allegory, the strong monosyllables, and the trust in abstract language to do what is required of it.

To take another example of Greville's allegories, I turn to the concluding sestet of “38”:

Where that Curre, Rumor, runnes in every place,
Barking with Care, begotten out of feare:
And glassy Honour, tender of Disgrace,
Stands Ceraphin to see I come not there;
          While that fine soyle, which all these joyes did yeeld
          By broken fence is prov'd a common field.

As James Smith says of Calderon, “not the language merely, but the action is a metaphysical conceit: it is at once fleshly and spiritual …” We have been too accustomed to talk idly of any seventeenth-century hyperbole as metaphysical, but this is careless. What Greville does in “38” is extraordinary and memorable in a different way. The plain language becomes violent; the subtle energy of “Rumor” comes not only from its personification as a “Curre” running and barking, but also from its allegorical breeding “begotten out of feare”. It is a fleshly rumour and a spiritual dog, and “the one because of the other”. The tone of the sinewy line “And glassy Honour, tender of Disgrace” is subtly and movingly contemptuous; its vitality lives in the two peculiarly real adjectives. The last couplet is amazingly supple in tone: pungency, delight, contempt and regret are all gathered tacitly beneath its coolness. The tact and poignancy with which it is handled seem altogether preferable to the excitements of metaphysical hyperbole.

As I have suggested, however, the style is not fully formed and mastered until Greville moves from love poetry to more universal and in his case grander themes. Caelica “69” is the first in the mature manner (though no poetry could be less mannered) and one of the finest of its kind by any poet.

When all this All doth passe from age to age,
And revolution in a circle turne,
Then heavenly Justice doth appeare like rage,
The caves doe roare, the very Seas doe burne,
          Glory growes darke, the Sunne becomes a night,
          And makes this great world feele a greater might.
When Love doth change his seat from heart to heart,
And worth about the wheele of Fortune goes,
Grace is diseas'd, desert seemes overthwart,
Vowes are forlorne, and truth doth credit lose,
          Chance then gives Law, Desire must be wise,
          And looke more wayes than one, or lose her eyes.
My age of joy is past, of woe begunne,
Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace,
With them that walke against me, is my Sunne:
The wheele is turn'd, I hold the lowest place,
          What can be good to me since my love is,
          To doe me harme, content to doe amisse?

The last two lines come as a disappointment: they deny the large movement of the whole poem and constitute something of a sell-out to the old style. Having written a startling kind of poem, Greville finds himself unable to conclude it in the same manner. But the rest of the poem is sonorous and powerful, and I think frankly metaphysical. We are given in a total form the universal moral experience of moral desolation. This is the experience not of a single violent aberration (as Gerontion's is) but of all men who have at some time felt spiritual grace withdrawn. That is not definitively a Christian condition. Every heir to European thought lives in an atmosphere which recognizes moral obligation and deprivation. Greville in this poem registers the absence of grace, but if we like to soften the uncompromising language of theology and call the poem an evaluation of paranoia, it makes its achievement no less great. Its success is due in the first stanza partly to very violent imagery, operating within traditional figures—metaphor and oxymoron (“the very seas do burn”)—and partly to the irresistible splendour of the movement. The music of the second line, “And revolution in a circle turne”, moves slowly round some gigantic axis. The disturbingly vivid figures—“like rage”, “Glory grows dark”—gather their strange force from their very generality. We recall Vaughan's “Deep and dazzling darknesse”. Greville charges abstract language with electric vitality, so that thought “felt immediately as the odour of a rose” lives and moves in the poem. I think, in fact, that Greville is our greatest master of the poetry of traditional thought. Herbert is concerned with doctrine in day-to-day life; Jonson with morality and judgment; Donne in his religious poems with his own relation to doctrine. And since the seventeenth century no poet has been concerned with the personal redefinition in spiritual terms of a history of ideas. This is Greville's triumph: he exhibits a sombre command of thought, his poems involve a grasping in its totality of the thought in which he was trained. Such a grasp is an imaginative re-creation; it can only take place in poetry. The march of Caelica “69” is passionately logical; the antitheses are lucid but the insistent repetition makes each one more urgent. The problem, which is metaphysical, is—in scholastic language—presented in terms of substances and accidents, each animated by restless paradox. “Grace is diseas'd, desert seems overthwart”, so “Chance then gives Laws, desire must be wise” and consequently the desolate and awful vision,

Absence my presence is, strangeness my grace:
With them that walk against me is my Sunne.

Surely these last two lines do all that I have desiderated of metaphysical poetry, and do it concisely, movingly and permanently?

If the closing couplet of “69” impairs its unity of feeling, by the time we reach the last twenty-five poems, which succeed Greville's farewell to Cupid and the mannerisms of love-poetry, we encounter a series of short poems, brief but sufficiently unified, in which the poet's mastery of his material is complete. I propose to consider the two most distinguished: “99” and “100.”

Downe in the depth of mine iniquity,
That ugly centre of infernall spirits;
Where each sinne feeles her owne deformity,
In these peculiar torments she inherits,
          Depriv'd of humane graces, and divine.
          Even there appears this saving 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:
          Depriv'd of humane graces and divine,
          Even there appeares this saving God of mine.
In power and truth, Almighty and eternall,
Which on the sinne reflects strange desolation,
With glory scourging all the Spirites infernall,
And uncreated hell with unprivation;
Depriv'd of humane graces, not divine,
          Even there appeares this saving God of mine.
For on this spirituall Crosse condemned lying,
To paines infernall by eternall doome,
I see my Savior for the same sinnes dying,
And from that hell I fear'd, to free me, come;
          Depriv'd of humane graces, not divine,
          Thus hath this death rais'd up this soule of mine.

This sense of a redemptive grace which is potent in the midst of a terrifying awareness of sin is far from narrowly Calvinist; it is traditionally Christian. The vocabulary also is traditional and liturgical, and provides Greville with the transparent but meaningful context against which the particular event may take place. The relative pallor of the language distinguishes the economic, precise disturbance created, for example, by the words “peculiar” or “scourging”. The meagre intensity of the line “Where each sinne feeles her owne deformity” gives an odd tactile quality to “feeles” as the stress lingers on the extended vowels. The argument and the poetic are alike largely conceptual and generalized; the movement of the poem is logical and expository, and almost without sensuous imagery or startling rhetorical colours, yet the poem possesses an extraordinary power, grave, meditative and deeply moving. In the first two stanzas Greville explains his predicament, both private and universal. The tone is not conversational, but the feminine rhymes and the devout, familiar language make the situation communal. In the third stanza he progresses justly and inevitably to the redemption, and the progress is seen as astonishing and certain. The shock of the line, “And uncreated hell …”, for example, resides in the curious and compelling “uncreated” referring back to the Creator, and the paradoxical destruction of evil, the negative and destructive forces in life, by the reiterated negatives. There is not the scepticism which Mr Smith saw as inherently metaphysical. What there is, is an abiding sense of coexisting and irreconcilable opposites, of grace and punishment being both a part of earthly suffering. We are in the presence of a poet conversing with the same authority as Donne and Herbert, and no less intensely metaphysical. He has thrown off all the dated apparatus which would fix him in a merely historical context, and speaks with the gravity and command of a distinctive greatness.

The last poem I wish to examine is perhaps his most completely metaphysical:

In Night 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 having power of sight,
Gives vaine Alarums to the inward sense,
Where feare stirr'd up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough selfe-offence,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:
Such as in thicke depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the errour be,
And images of selfe-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations onely see;
          And from this nothing seene, tels newes of devils,
          Which but expressions be of inward evils.

The sensuous situation leads inevitably to the generalized reflection introduced by the severely logical “such as”. It also reflects and gives particularity and precision to the generalization. Then the characteristic life of his personifications manifests itself. We pay startled attention to that “witty” tyranny which stirs fear, and recoil before the nightmares of “impossibility” which are first “forged” in a heavy verb and then ponderously “raised”. In the sestet the scholastic doctrine of deprivation is intensified for us by the tangible suddenness of “thicke”. In the succeeding lines Greville attains a rare lucidity tempered by the kind of regretful compassion evident in the love poem Caelica “38” from which I quoted. It transpires in the indefinable pity felt behind these lines and nowhere markedly apparent, unless it is in the one adjective “hurt”. The massively comprehensive couplet could almost stand as a moving epigram, yet it depends completely on the careful exposition which has preceded it. It begins with a characteristic paradox, “And from this nothing seene”, and is completed by a traditional commonplace, briefly and inclusively moving. On the level of the vehicle, the poem is a vivid description of the panic felt in total darkness—which would be enough in one poem for most contemporary poets. On the level of the tenor, however, it is a tough plea for moral and spiritual honesty. In a state of gracelessness we accuse outward forces of irresponsible evil and fail to see the evil within us. The poem is replete with wisdom and feeling; it handles traditional metaphysics with grace, wit and seriousness, and masters the problems they present both of expression and understanding.

Major poetry is presumably that in which a poet confronts the central problems of existence. We are disinclined to call major, poetry which is not ample, which fails to exhibit many-sideness and variety. This attitude may be a sentimental one, for it enables us to turn away from a chilling vision (such as Baudelaire's, or Swift's, or Greville's) and to hold the poet deficient because he omits so much. In some cases—Flaubert is an example—the charge may be just, but not in Greville's. The free play of a distinguished and civilized intelligence is always apparent; the attitudes are flexible and just, but never predictable. But finally, Greville's strength resides in the coherence of his vision. It is likely that the adjectives I have used to describe this vision offer themselves with too great facility—“grim”, “awful”, “splendid”. The vision is tragic and ineffable, and any attempt to extrapolate it from the poems will only result in damage to ourselves and to the poetry. A tragic vision, I take it, is one in which the evil of existence is faced, the delights are justly valued, and the response to both is courageous enough to accept the fact of death. Such a philosophy meets the demand that it hold up “though the world end tomorrow”. The poems of Greville's which fulfil this are scattered through Caelica, though they predominate after number “68.” They are too little known and too little valued.