SOURCE: Woodman, Thomas. “Poems on Several Occasions III: ‘A Hymn to Contentment,’ ‘A Night Piece on Death,’ and ‘The Hermit.’” In Thomas Parnell, 67-85. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1934.

[In the following essay, Woodman discusses Parnell's three most famous pieces and argues that although they have many aspects to them, he wrote them, most of all, with a Christian purpose in mind.]

Pope ends his selection of Parnell's poems with “A Night Piece on Death,” “A Hymn to Contentment,” and “The Hermit.” All three have a Christian seriousness and solemnity of tone, and it was appropriate, in Pope's view, that the volume should rise to this height. They later became Parnell's most famous and influential poems, and they have been praised as innovative, especially imaginative, and even as preromantic works. In each, however, I shall argue, Christian purposes are primary, and the sentiment that later poets and readers found so attractive was largely derived from these Christian purposes rather than cultivated for its own sake.

“A HYMN TO CONTENTMENT”

“A Hymn to Contentment” has an obvious place in the long tradition of the search for the Summum Bonum or Highest Good, which stems back to Plato. Horace's extraordinarily influential poems on the theme of the “happy man” had been given a Christian form by the seventeenth-century Polish Jesuit poet Cassimire Sarbiewski. A similar reworking of the tradition by Cardinal Bona has been seen as a direct source of Parnell's poem. But there were likely in fact to have been various English intermediaries, both translations of Cassimire and original poems like George Herbert's “Peace.” Particularly close to Parnell in their rendition of the theme are two poems both called “Content” by the minor seventeenth-century poets Joseph Beaumont and Robert Fletcher. Lady Winchelsea's “Petition for an absolute Retreat” is also similar in theme and approach.

It is clear from its publishing history that the “Hymn” was written before Pope's intimacy with Parnell began. This means that it is likely to have been one of the earliest written poems to be included in Pope's selection. Various poems omitted by Pope are on the same theme, “On Happiness in this Life,” for example, first published in the Posthumous Poems. This however, is insistently personal and inclined to melodrama in its tone—“And I moan upon the naked plain”—as well as to absurd apostrophes like “Return my senses” (A, 208). Parnell's “Hymn” is more obviously Horatian and far more controlled. Yet its conclusion has the same ideal of the vocation to the life of an inspired biblical poet of praise as in the apprentice poems:

Might I thus my soul employ,
With sense of gratitude and joy!
Rais'd as ancient prophets were,
In heavenly vision, praise and prayer.

(A, [The Poetical Works of Thomas Parnell. Edited by George Aitken. Aldine Edition. London: Bell 1894.] 99)

Furthermore, it borders in places on the same naiveté of tone:

All of these and all I see,
Should be sung, and sung by me.

(A, 99)

The poem is obviously thus a transitional one in Parnell's development. It first appeared in Steele's Poetical Miscellanies, and the influence of Addison and Steele's attempt to unite religion with politeness is apparent. Its relative stylishness and polished finish differentiate it from Parnell's other poems on the topic and made it acceptable to Pope.

Parnell begins with a beautiful apostrophe to Contentment and Peace of Mind:

Lovely, lasting peace of mind!
Sweet delight of human kind!
Heavenly-born, and bred on high,
To crown the favourites of the sky
With more of happiness below,
Than victors in a triumph know!
Whither, O whither art thou fled,
To lay thy meek, contented head!

(A, 97)

He has gracefully blended together a variety of traditional ideas and phrases here. A similar apostrophe to peace is found as early as Barnaby Barnes's “Ah sweet content, where is thy mild abode?” Behind the whole idea are echoes of the Canticles, and there is similar phrasing in one of Francis Quarles's paraphrases of Job. Line seven is borrowed directly from Herbert's “The Search.” The phrasing also recalls Lady Winchelsea's “Inquiry after Peace” and “To the Echo” and Nahum Tate's “The Search,” and John Hughes had begun a paraphrase of Horace's Ode 2. 16 in 1679 with an apostrophe to “Indulgent Quiet.”

In accordance with the tradition Parnell next runs through the different sources of false happiness, like avarice and ambition. He also rejects the pleasures of a melancholy like that described in Milton's “Il Penseroso” and seems to agree with John Evelyn's arguments about the dangers of rural solitude:

The silent heart which grief assails,
Treads soft and lonesome o'er the vales,
Sees daisies open, rivers run,
And seeks, as I have vainly done,
Amusing thought; but learns to know
That solitude's the nurse of woe.

(A, 97-98)

Parnell's support for what might be regarded as the more Augustan side in the debate about rural solitude and his emphasis on the futility of the pleasures of nature without God should in themselves have been sufficient to differentiate him from Wordsworthian or other romantic ideas, despite the claims of later critics. We notice too that in this poem he begins with the generalizing statements and only then moves to the personal comment, “As I have vainly done.”

Parnell also stresses the inadequacy of the scientific and in particular the astronomical search for truth. Vergil's famous lines in the Georgics about the blissful contemplation of the heavens and the search for the causes of things had been taken up by Newton's followers. The influence of Newton's work both strengthened and altered the traditional attitudes toward finding God in nature. The great scientist was seen as having established the presence of natural laws in the universe that proved the existence of a benign and ordering Creator. The whole emphasis of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century theology in Britain was on these natural scientific proofs of God, concentrated especially in the works of the so-called “physico-theologians.”

Though a Newtonian and physico-theological emphasis can be found later in the poem, Parnell is careful at this point to emphasize in the most orthodox terms that the study of nature in itself avails nothing:

To range the circuit of the sky,
Converse with stars above, and know
All nature in its forms below;
The rest it seeks, in seeking dies,
And doubts at last, for knowledge, rise.

(A, 99)

Instead he presents the need for God's grace, symbolized in the appearance of “the grace” Contentment in the poem. Indeed, because this apparition is the precise symbol of the theological truth Parnell wishes to convey, it is more impressive than most of his other uses of angelic or allegorical visitants. It occurs halfway through the poem, not at the beginning as in “Piety,” and the yearning quest for Contentment has prepared us for it. The tone is one of evocative understatement, not baroque elaboration and splendor:

The branches whisper as they wav'd:
It seem'd as all the quiet place
Confess'd the presence of the Grace.

(A, 98)

What Contentment urges is ascetic self-control. The passions have to be purified before God and nature can be enjoyed, and this is the root of contentment. Parnell is writing here within the mystical traditions that regard the way of purgation as the necessary prelude to the ways of illumination and union. In this respect, certainly, the poem is more seventeenth-century in its outlook than most other contemporary poems on similar themes. It rejects the enjoyment of nature, rural retirement, the pleasures of melancholy, and the aspirations of science inasmuch as they do not depend on God's grace.

With the presence of grace, however, and prepared by ascetic purgation, the poet can reach true contentment, a kind of spiritual ecstasy, “Pleas'd and bless'd with God alone.” Moreover, this sense of God will also lead, as with Henry Vaughan and Andrew Marvell, to a renewal of joy in nature:

The while the gardens take my sight
With all the colours of delight;
While silver waters glide along,
To please my ear, and court my song;
I'll lift my voice, and tune my string,
And thee, great source of nature, sing.

(A, 99)

As in Lady Winchelsea's work, Parnell's octosyllabic couplet here preserves something of a seventeenth-century religious lyricism about nature.

The emphasis on God as the “great source of nature,” however, has more of the tone of the new century, and connections with Addison's influential Newtonian hymn “The Spacious Firmament on high” have been noted. Addison had written that the heavens “Their great original proclaim.” It is in this respect accurate to say that the poem could only have been written after Newton and that it reveals a physico-theological nature enthusiasm. As in Addison's “Hymn,” the beauties of nature proclaim God, but since there is no longer any belief in the old tradition of the music of the spheres, they “speak their maker as they can.” The poet's role in praising God thus becomes crucial, since nature is in this sense silent and wants and asks “the tongue of man.” But if there are obvious interconnections between the survivals of seventeenth-century lyricism, Newtonian attitudes, and the later romanticism, it is nevertheless absurd to attribute romantic attitudes as such to Parnell and to his age-old emphasis on the need for Christian asceticism, which is much more scrupulously affirmed than in the work of most of his contemporaries.

“A NIGHT PIECE ON DEATH”

Like the “Hymn,” “A Night Piece on Death” and “The Hermit” also seem to stem from the period when Addison was the dominant influence on Parnell. In that they reveal fewer traces of naiveté these poems should probably be dated slightly later than the “Hymn” itself, however, and they would surely have appeared along with it in Steele's Poetical Miscellanies if they had been written by that time. Their Christian piety is far from tepid but, like Addison's, it has a public, rhetorical, and demonstrative quality. From a purely literary point of view the controls on Parnell's early fervor are an unmitigated improvement. In their polish and neatness of structure, their link between Christianity and the avoidance of impolite excess, and their concern for order all three poems express a specifically neoclassical form of Christian sentiment. They are all richly representative of their period, despite the exaggerated claims that have been made for their originality and preromantic qualities.

Such claims have above all been made for “A Night Piece.” H. H. Clark, for example, wrote that Parnell “restored melancholy to literature”; P. van Tieghem argued that the “romantic” elements in “A Night Piece” were essentially an innovation; and H. G. de Maar declared that the “Night Piece” was the “first ‘Churchyard’ poem of the eighteenth century.” All this appears to be based on a misunderstanding of Parnell's purposes. The innovative aspect of the poem have been much exaggerated. In a scholarly study of the concept of melancholy Amy L. Reed made the point that “I found to my surprise that the more closely I inspected ‘romantic beginnings’ such as, for instance, Parnell's ‘Night Piece on Death,’ the more readily they resolved themselves into elements thoroughly familiar to readers of the preceding century. …”

It is certainly true that Parnell's poem is profoundly eclectic, and it is impossible to determine the exact degree of influence that the different traditions exercised on it. In a broad sense Parnell is using and contributing to the whole Christian and classical tradition of the “memento mori” or reminder of the inevitability of death and the idea that “The fear of death confounds me,” as the Office for the Dead puts it. This emphasis is checked within the poem by the stronger Christian tradition of the hope of resurrection and hence by the sense of “Death, where is thy sting?” and Donne's assertion, “Death, thou shalt die!”

In more specifically literary terms there were several well-established traditions of meditation on death. In one way, for example, Parnell continues the genre of midnight meditations on death that stemmed ultimately from Macrobius's commentary on Cicero's “Dream of Scipio.” William Drummond of Hawthornden wrote an influential prose piece in this tradition called “A Midnight Trance” (later revived as “The Cypresse Grove”). Henry Vaughan also wrote the prose “Man in Darkness; or a Discourse on Death.” Edward Arwaker's pastoral poem “The Birth-Night” of 1705 seems to be a poetic version of some aspects of this tradition. In its night emphasis this tradition blended with other literary night descriptions, and the influence of Milton's “Il Penseroso” is above all apparent. As Louis Martz has shown in The Poetry of Meditation, a more general tradition of poetic meditations on death also existed, which was especially developed among the metaphysical poets. In The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism J. W. Draper surveys the elaborate tradition of gloomy and melodramatic puritan elegies, which often described churchyards and churchyard scenes in detail. He adduces no concrete evidence that this tradition consciously influenced Parnell, but it is likely to have been a background presence.

The “memento mori” and funeral elegy motifs blended easily in seventeenth-century poetry with reminiscences of Jacobean tragedy. Specific graveyard allusions occur, as in Thomas Flatman's “A Doomsday Thought”: “Go to the dull churchyard and see / Those hillocks of mortalitie,” or Nahum Tate's “Melancholy”: “Through Charnel Houses then I'm led / Those gloomy mansions of the dead.”

As Draper shows, however, the optimistic Christian view of death was the basic Anglican tradition, both in verse and in prose, throughout the seventeenth century. Even the metaphysical poets, famous for what has been called their “metaphysical shudder” about death, more commonly ask “Death, where is thy sting?” and stress the resurrection. The poem called “Death” by the minor seventeenth-century poet William Hammond is a typical example of an ecstatic account of heavenly bliss. In the early eighteenth century John Pomfret's “A Prospect of Death” similarly emphasizes the hope of resurrection, as does the high Anglican Bishop Ken's “Preparations for Death.”

Meanwhile, prose works on the four last things, death, judgment, heaven, and hell continued to be very popular. One of the best sellers, Dr. Sherlock's Practical Discourse Concerning Death, was highly influential during the period before Parnell wrote his “Night Piece,” and it continues the tradition of Christian cheerfulness about death, the ultimate emphasis of Parnell's poem. Sherlock's work was much approved of by the Spectator writers. Religious melancholy as such is condemned in numbers 494, 497, and 513. Addison himself is the most influential exponent in the period of a hopeful and cheerful Christianity. All these different traditions and strands, some biblical or liturgical, some literary and some popular, are fused in the harmonious octosyllabic meter and polished finish of “A Night Piece.”

The poem begins with a picture of the solitary poet “by the blue taper's trembling light.” As is often the case with Parnell, the first few lines are a tissue of conventions and literary reminiscences. Parnell presents himself as an “Il Penseroso” figure, studying the philosophers with his “lamp at midnight hour.” The “trembling light” of his taper is a literary commonplace, found in Donne's “The Apparition,” for example, as well as a traditional emblem of man's life, so easily snuffed out by death. In Marvell's Last Instructions to a Painter, as in Shakespeare's Richard III, the blue light itself suggests the presence of ghosts. The actual phrasing of Parnell's lines is a close echo of William Congreve's “To a Candle: Elegy.”

In a version of the old theme of experience versus authority as well as of the “memento mori” tradition the poet rejects the sages for the true wisdom to be found in the graveyard. After a fine description of the night sky and the actual graveyard scene the poet expresses the conventional sentiment evoked by the sight of the graves: “Time was, like thee they life possest / And time shall be, that thou shalt rest” (A, 94). He then gives an account of the different classes of graves, those of the poor, those of the “middle race of mortals,” and those of the rich and great. At this stage, halfway through the poem and in the midst of the churchyard, the atmosphere is at its most ominous, the moon fades, and the poet has a vision of the shades rising, “All slow and wan and wrapp'd with shrouds.”

Everything has now been prepared for the appearance of Death himself at this climactic moment of tension:

Now from yon black and funeral yew,
That bathes the charnel-house with dew,
Methinks I hear a voice begin;
(Ye ravens, cease your croaking din,
Ye tolling clocks, no time resound
O'er the long lake and midnight ground!)
It sends a peal of hollow groans
Thus speaking from among the bones.

(A, 95)

Clearly Parnell intends to frighten his readers at this point. The forceful reminder of death and its terrors is part of his Christian purposes. The melodramatic apparatus is a complex drawn from a wide range of possible antecedents, Isaiah, Vergil, Shakespeare, and various seventeenth-century predecessors among others. But these terrors are evoked only so that they may be calmed. In a remarkable stroke of wit, in which Parnell was partly anticipated by William Drummond of Hawthornden, the spokesman for the consolation is made the figure of Death himself.

Parnell's poem can thus certainly not be accused of the “emotionally-tinged religious attitudinising” of his successors. What Death says is crucial to the poem and ignored by most commentators. The extravagant gloom that later writers like Robert Blair take up, as well as all the trappings of man's paraphernalia of death, are criticized within the poem by Death himself:

Fools! if you less provok'd your fears
No more my spectre form appears.

The horrors of death are really the creation of man:

When men my scythe and darts supply,
How great a king of fears am I!
They view me like the last of things;
They make, and then they dread my stings.

For the Christian, death need hold no fears:

Death's but a path that must be trod,
If man would ever pass to God.

(A, 95)

The poem, in other words, is turning ironically back on itself, and its author, in a sense, criticizes the trappings of his own “graveyard poetry.” Death himself rebukes all this melodrama by the criteria of polite moderation, recommending a gentlemanly Christian cheerfulness like Addison's. Those in the period and later who class Parnell with Edward Young and James Hervey and Robert Blair have failed to see what is going on. Far from being a preromantic poem, the “Night Piece” criticizes excessive emotion about death as being both impolite and unchristian.

The brief controversy about the meter is also relevant here. Goldsmith, reflecting a later and heavier Augustanism, complained that the poem was not in the heroic couplet and that octosyllabics were “very improper for the solemnity of the subject.” In fact, Parnell uses the meter with an impressive “Il Penseroso” solemnity in the first half of the poem, but there is also a lightness and speed at times compared to the heroic couplet in its heavier moods and certainly compared to the uncontrolled blank verse extravagance of Blair's The Grave. This brisker quality is particularly to be remarked upon toward the end of Death's speech. It is one major factor contributing to the brevity and control of the whole poem.

In comparison with Blair and indeed with Parnell's own longer biblical sublime poems “A Night Piece” provides yet more evidence of Parnell's new sense of restraint and of structure. The Christian consolation is skillfully prepared. The order behind all is suggested in anticipation through the beautifully ordered peace of the night sky.

How deep yon azure dyes the sky,
Where orbs of gold unnumber'd lie,
While through their ranks in silver pride,
The nether crescent seems to glide.

(A, 93)

It is only the fears and pomps of man that disturb this order. For the Christian the disturbance is not final. The poem in fact moves superbly from real and symbolic darkness to the daylight of the resurrection:

See the glad scene unfolding wide,
Clap the glad wing, and tower away,
And mingle with the blaze of day.

(A, 96)

Like all of Parnell's best work “A Night Piece” is a poem of inspired conventionalism. Different traditional elements are smoothly blended and given the stamp of an individual re-creation and realization. The poem carefully keeps the fear of death in check and indeed criticizes it by Christian criteria at the close. As Professor Fairchild says, Parnell's sentiment has not been divorced from his genuine grasp of Christian truths. However, the polished and harmonious expression that he gave to even the subordinate elements in his scheme meant that the cruder impulses that lay in the background of the poem were also helped to pass into the mainstream of respectable literary tradition. Some of these became attractive to successors less firmly rooted in Christian devotionalism, who put them in the forefront of their own work. “A Night Piece on Death” became a very influential poem, as we shall see, though later poets radically altered its proportions and significance.

“THE HERMIT”

“The Hermit” has a theme of portentous importance. It constitutes a miniature theodicy, a justification of the ways of God to men and a consideration of the whole problem of evil. In its elements of what H. N. Fairchild calls its “Whiggish didacticism” it could obviously have been the subject of one of the overelaborate sublime poems that Pope did not include. Parnell has retained his interest in religious moralizing. Here, however, the moral is presented through the medium of a neat yet suspenseful narrative, and the more primitive elements in the sources of the tale are made elegantly acceptable to an eighteenth-century audience in ways Pope obviously approved of.

Some of the techniques Parnell uses in order to achieve these effects are analyzed in an excellent article on the analogues and sources of Parnell's poem by A. P. Hudson. The hermit story in its basic form was used by an interesting range of writers. It appears, for example, in the Gesta Romanorum (“Deeds of the Romans,” ca. 1326), which was translated into English in 1703, and in the Divine Dialogues of the Cambridge Platonist, Dr. Henry More (1614-1687). It was also readily available in James Howell's Letters and Sir Percy Herbert's Certaine Conceptions (1652). According to Hudson, More's version is likely to have been the immediate source. He indicates that even compared with this version already refined from the crudity of the basic form the advantages are all on the side of Parnell.

Another background to “The Hermit” is the whole question of the theodicy or justification of the ways of God. Parnell's great early mentor, William King, Archbishop of Dublin, was the author of a major theological study of the topic, De Origine Mali (“Of the Origin of Evil,” 1702). Pope's interest in the matter is, of course, evident in his Essay on Man. More important, probably, as immediate influences on “The Hermit” are several theodicies on a more popular level, sometimes incorporating narratives, to be found in the Spectator: no. 483, 13 September 1712, for example, by Addison. no. 237, 1 December 1711, either by Addison or by John Hughes, is another discussion of the topic, which is especially close to Parnell's theme:

From hence it is, that the Reason of the Inquisitive has so long been exercised with Difficulties, in accounting for the promiscuous Distribution of Good and Evil to the Virtuous and the wicked in this world. From hence come all these Pathetical Complaints of so many Tragical Events, which happen to the Wise and the Good, and of such surprising Prosperity, which is often the Lot of the Guilty and the Foolish; that Reason is sometimes puzzled, and at a loss what to pronounce upon so mysterious a Dispensation.

The essay ends with a brief tale from a Jewish tradition about Moses, which is very similar to “The Hermit.” From a high mountain Moses watches a series of events. A soldier drops a purse of gold, which is picked up by a young boy. The boy leaves, and then an old man comes to the place. Not believing the old man's protestations, the soldier kills him. Moses is horrified, but God vindicates His providence and His justice by revealing to him that the old man was the murderer of the boy's father.

Parnell's poem begins with a description of the peaceful and solitary life of the hermit. Only the briefest external trappings, borrowed, it seems, from Spenser and Milton (The Fairie Queene, 1.1.305, for example, and “Il Penseroso,” line 169), are sketched in, and the romanticizing of the life of retirement is slight. It is the religious note that is primary:

Far in a wild, unknown to public view,
From youth to age a reverend hermit grew;
The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell,
His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well,
His goods a glass to measure human breath,
The books of wisdom, and the spade of death.
Remote from man, with God he passed the days,
Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.

(A, 100, 224)

The peace is disturbed by a doubt which one day crosses the hermit's mind about the reality of God's providence. His ignorance of the world from actual experience is total. He resolves to leave his cell and explore the world looking for a solution:

To clear this doubt, to know the world by sight,
To find if books, or swains, report it right,
(For yet by swains alone the world he knew) …

(A, 100)

This last line has been criticized for an inconsistency. In Boswell's words, “as the Hermit's notions of the world were formed from the reports both of books and swains, he could not justly be said to know by swains alone.” Johnson agrees that there is a contradiction, but there have been various attempts at an explanation. Some scholars have said, for example, that the word “alone” in the second line has no reference back to books but means swains as distinguished from all other persons. On the whole the attempts at justification remain unconvincing.

In the aftermath of the first day of what is represented as the hermit's pilgrimage for truth he meets a good-looking young man and they agree to travel together. At night they seek shelter in a palace where they are lavishly entertained. After their departure the next morning the hermit is horrified to find that the young man has stolen a golden goblet from the host. On the second day a storm drives them to seek shelter from a churlish miser. The young man, much to the hermit's surprise, presents the miser with the stolen cup. On the third day they obtain lodging in the house of a man who appears to live in accordance with the golden mean and who is the epitome of hospitality. In the morning before they depart the young man strangles the only child of their host. The horrified hermit seeks to flee his companion, but does not succeed. On their way the young man also drowns one of the host's servants, who was acting as a guide. The old man's rage can now no longer be contained, but before he can say anything the young man is revealed before the hermit's eyes as a heavenly angel. He then explains the providential significance of all that has occurred. The loss of the golden cup has converted the first host from his vain ostentation, while its gift to the miser has shown him how heaven will reward him for even a little kindness on his part. The child was killed because the last host doted so much on him that it took him away from God, and so “God to save the father took the son” (A, 108). The servant who was drowned was false to his master and had intended to steal his treasure that night. After this explanation the angel ascends, and the hermit, his doubts about God's providence now completely resolved, returns to his “life of piety and peace” (A, 109).

As this summary makes clear, the poem raises philosophical and theological issues that it cannot entirely solve, and a certain crudity is built into the very structure of the old story that Parnell borrowed. Nevertheless, what he makes of it is remarkable. His poem is both polished and suspenseful. The shock of the scene in which the youth strangles the infant is intensified by the description of the idyllically peaceful family life that precedes. The description of the young man is itself skillful. His angelic identity is concealed from the reader in the interests of suspense and a dramatic dénouement. His beauty predisposes the hermit in his favor, makes the shock of his murderous behavior greater in contrast, and yet also makes the revelation of his supernatural quality more credible. The increase of suspense compared with Parnell's sources is not, however, simply in the interests of writing a good story. It relates to the theological purposes of the poem also, making the reader share the hermit's doubts and the satisfaction of their unraveling. Parnell's desire for polish and elegance is more than a mere eighteenth-century fashion too. It makes its own contribution to the theological import of the poem, as we shall see.

Overall, Parnell achieves a good balance between narrative and reflection, action and description. Setting and atmosphere are, as A. P. Hudson says, “just what they should be, no more and no less. There is in them just enough of restraint to keep them from being too romantic for a moral tale, and just enough of color and feeling to humanize the story.”

It is noteworthy that Parnell softens the harshness of the source material in places. He makes the angel say, for example, that the death of the infant appeared to the family to be from natural causes rather than from visible external violence. As Hudson also points out, in almost all the other versions the angel's motive for giving the miser the expensive cup is a cruel one. In Henry More's Divine Dialogues, for example, the angel gives it “as a plague and a scourge to the harsh inhospitable man that he might fall into intemperance.” Parnell's version is refined and touched with eighteenth-century sentiment:

With him I left the cup to teach his mind
That heaven can bless if mortals can be kind,
Conscious of wanting worth, he views the bowl
And feels compassion touch his grateful soul.

(A, 108)

Parnell's diction in “The Hermit” is pure in Donald Davie's sense, with many monosyllabic words, but given substance by “turns” and by a real precision of wording:

Slow creaking turns the door with jealous care,
And half he welcomes in the shivering pair …

(A, 103)

This precision is more than purely verbal. The polished simplicity of the style has a moral dimension. It enacts the avoidance of extremes that is part of the poem's moral message, the excess of passion like the father's for the child the angel kills, or the extravagant ostentation of the spendthrift's “vain flourish of expensive ease.” The degrees of excess are conveyed through the verbal exactness:

And all is more than hospitably good.
…
Rich luscious wine a golden goblet grac'd,
Which the kind master forc'd the guests to taste.

(A, 102)

Parnell also shows restraint in the use of baroque and sublime diction. The description of the angel comes from Cowley's description of Gabriel in the Davideis, but it is tactfully reserved till the final revelation, when the “form ethereal bursts upon his sight, / And moves in all the majesty of light.”

A clear and elegant symmetry is central to the style of “The Hermit,” and it is created primarily by the formality of the couplet:

Thus stands an aged elm in ivy bound,
Thus youthful ivy clasps an elm around.

(A, 101)

Such symmetry is also central to the poem's structure as a whole. The hermit is pious and faithful, then doubting, then pious again; he leaves his cell at the beginning and returns at the end; the youth seems godly at first, then morally monstrous, then again more godly than he at first appeared; the hosts behave in a way that seems to deserve a certain reward, apparently receive the opposite, and then are shown to have received their deserts all the time.

The elegant descriptions of nature contribute markedly to this effect of symmetry. The whole story is put in a polite eighteenth-century context, and Parnell uses the technical vocabulary of the landscape gardening of the period:

At length 'tis morn, and at the dawn of day
Along the wide canals the zephyrs play.
Fresh o'er the gay parterres the breezes creep …

(A, 102)

(“Parterres” are ornamental slopes and the word “canals” also means a landscape-gardening feature at this time.) The descriptions of the time of day serve to underline the rhythm of the action. They also relate to the formal and moral pattern of the poem, not only to create a pleasing aesthetic object, but also to point out God's providential patterning of the whole universe, the poem's theme. These formal descriptions serve to indicate the way God arranges nature for man's benefit. A helpful perspective on this aspect of “The Hermit” is provided by a passage from “The Gift of Poetry: Moses,” where Parnell emphasizes how God cares for man, the animals, and the whole of nature through the cycles of day and night and of the seasons. He talks of the birds who: “… by Gods appointment in their nest / With green surrounded, lie secure of rest,” and of man, who:

… next succeeding, from the sweet repose
Of downy beds, to work appointed goes.
When first the Morning sees the rising Sun,
He sees their labours both at once begun;
And Night returning with its starry train,
Perceives their labours done at once again.
O! Manifold in works supremely wise,
How well thy gracious store the world supplies!
How all thy creatures on thy goodness call,
And that bestows a due support for all!
…
Thus, as you've seen th' effect reveal the cause,
Is Nature's ruler known in Nature's laws.

(C, [Works of the English Poets. Edited by Alexander Chalmers. Vol. 9. London: C. Whittingham, 1810.] 384-85)

This passage is dependent on the Psalms, especially Psalm 104, and on Tertullian and Boethius as well as Milton; Newton's influence is also apparent in the stress on “Nature's laws.”

The same kind of effect in small is intended in the nature descriptions in “The Hermit.” There is a stress on the providential purpose of the cycle:

Now sunk the sun, the closing hour of day
Came onward, mantled o'er with sober gray;
Nature in silence bid the world repose …

(A, 101)

The continuation of this cycle of labor and renewal is emphasized throughout the whole poem: “At length the world, renew'd by calm repose, / Was strong for toil, the dappled morn arose” (A, 105). The strong sense of the pattern of dawn and evening, good weather and bad, is intended to suggest that the alternations of the action from good to bad and back again are also natural, and must be accepted as part of a providential rhythm making for man's good.

Pope unfortunately cut a simile describing the young man's revelation of himself as an angel that would have underlined this connection between natural description and theme. It is intended to remind the reader of the earlier storm after which the sun appeared, and it helps to unify the whole poem:

So when the sun his dazzling splendour shrouds,
Yet just begins to break the veiling clouds;
A bright effulgence at the first is seen,
But shorn of beams, and with a mist between
Soon the full glory bursts upon the sight
And moves in all the majesty of light.

(A, 226)

A connection is made between the ordered symmetry of the poem and God's ordered universe. Parnell's ordered style here ultimately has a metaphysical dimension. These lines refer back to the literal storm followed by sunshine, but they are also semi-allegorical. The sun behind the clouds suggests God's hidden providence. The angel revealed in brightness like the sun breaking through clouds thus becomes the manifestation of this providence in its fullness. Near the beginning of the poem is an image of nature calmly reflected in a lake but then disturbed by the hermit's doubts, as if a stone had been thrown in the water, so that “glimmering fragments of a broken sun, / Banks, trees, and skies in thick disorder run” (A, 100). Here too the sun is an image of cosmic order and disorder, and it is the disturbance that causes God to send “an angel down to calm thy mind” (A, 107).

Parnell's poem is therefore evidently in a sense a celebration of the status quo. The angel's actions really serve to vindicate the present order in partially correcting it. The hermit is wrong to question the distribution of wealth: “And why should such, within himself he cried, / Lock the lost wealth a thousand want beside?” (A, 104) This is a characteristically eighteenth-century theodicy (ultimately stoic or Neoplatonic in origin), not the basic biblical view that there is injustice in the present order, which deeply offends God, and that He will come to set it right in the end. Parnell's aspirations toward the sublime in the earlier poetry have turned into an eighteenth-century celebration of God's order. The bare and primitive narrative in the sources has become something of elegant formality, with a touch of fashionable sentiment.

Yet Parnell's movement toward polish does not prevent his Christianity from retaining a certain solidity. He wins Professor Fairchild's approval for not letting the sentiment with which his doctrines are presented swamp them completely. It is, in fact, his sense of God's ordered providence that he is most successful in conveying, not the intimate religious emotion that was obviously real enough in itself to him. Something of the latter quality survives, however, into the later work, to blend attractively with the new control. His self-image is not that of a worldly man-about-town like Matthew Prior, but rather of a Christian gentleman like Addison, truly pious, but moderate and polite too, careful to avoid both enthusiasm and too direct a didactic mode. It is clear that Parnell develops toward this approach through mixing in the politest circles.

Some later poems seem to involve no more than a stylish expression of conventional morals. In others like “The Hermit” or “An Allegory on Man” the moral intention is obviously more genuine, and the increase in brevity and control and stylishness certainly helps it to be more effectively expressed. It is the way Parnell manages to retain a certain emotional freshness and Christian sincerity from his earlier writings and yet combine it with a beautifully polished conventionalism, and even with wit and irony, that gives his poetry it characteristic attractiveness. The great improvement in his work, despite an inevitable narrowing of range, can hardly be denied, and it is clear that there were real advantages in the polite mode for a minor poet of genuine talents.