SOURCE: Wasserman, Earl R. “Denham: Cooper's Hill.” In The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems, pp. 45-88. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959.

[In the following essay, Wasserman uses the idea of concordia discors to analyze Coopers Hill, arguing that the politics of Denham's day were an overriding concern of the descriptive, thematic, and symbolic aspects of the poem.]

I

Although it has long been a staple of criticism that whatever is good in Pope's Windsor Forest is to be found in its lively descriptions of the natural scene, a parallel critical tradition claims, as one of its exponents puts it, that the poem fails in its intent to be descriptive because it is “too conventional and formal”—it must be read as primarily an exercise in style. On the contrary, another critic has told us, “Not description, but rather ‘reflections upon life and political institutions’ … constituted Pope's real aim.” Whatever the reason may be, the controlling purpose of the poem has always seemed indeterminate.

Is the balance of interest to be tipped to the side of the georgic and technical features? or to the side of the reflective and thematic? At best there has only been some agreement that it is mainly a loco-descriptive poem with digressions of a moral and didactic kind: a member of that composite species of verse which, according to Dr. Johnson's recipe, has for its subject “some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation.” Then, too, the problem of unity has been compounded by the general acceptance of Pope's account of the history of composition as also an analysis of the structure: the first part, “which relates to the country,” he informs us, was written about 1704; and the conclusion, celebrating the Tory Peace of Utrecht, in 1712. It has usually been taken, therefore, not only as alternately descriptive and moral, but also as a piece of joinery, a georgic with an appended bit of political opportunism that might better be read as an independent poem. The work, says George Sherburn, “falls into fragments and does not make a unit.”

Certainly there are good external reasons for believing that, except for the topical conclusion, the poem is mainly an exercise in descriptive verse. As a youth aspiring to Virgilian greatness, Pope might well be expected to try his wings in the supposedly “pure poetry” of pastorals and georgics (although Virgil's poems, as Pope well knew, are hardly mere descriptions) before risking the treacherous heights of the epic. Moreover, Pope himself set the pattern for subsequent interpretations of Windsor Forest—and all other loco-descriptive poems—by his own analysis of Denham's Cooper's Hill, which obviously was his model here: throughout Denham's piece “the descriptions of places and images raised by the poet are still tending to some hint, or leading into some reflection upon moral life or political institution, much in the same manner as the real sight of such scenes and prospects is apt to give the mind a composed turn, and incline it to thoughts and contemplations that have a relation to the object.”¹ If this is accepted as an adequate account of the poem, then it is to be presumed that Windsor Forest is also a compilation of descriptions having no further purpose than to be effective as descriptions and to slide at various points into associated reflections having only local and independent significance. When, in his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope summarized his poetic career by saying that “not in Fancy's Maze he wander'd long, / But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song,” he has seemed to sanction the interpretation of both his Pastorals and Windsor Forest as fanciful rather than thematic; and by claiming, moreover, that in these poems “pure Description held the place of Sense” he has seemed to set up a positive barrier against any reading of his georgic in terms of meaning. Subsequently Joseph Warton was to fix the main course of criticism by deciding that Windsor Forest is indeed descriptive—and then objecting that the descriptions are so little particularized as to be applicable to almost any scene. The absorbing preoccupation of Warton and the succeeding age with descriptive poetry then tended to locate the poem in that genre, despite the obvious resistance offered by the poem itself.

But we have come to see that the Rape of the Lock, which Pope first composed shortly before the publication of Windsor Forest, shows him capable at that time of creating one of the most complexly integrated poems of the language; and we have learned to recognize that the large additions to that poem, made shortly after the publication of Windsor Forest, have only intensified, not destroyed, its organic wholeness. It seems justifiable, therefore, at least to doubt that Pope's georgic, no matter when its parts were composed, is as disordered and fragmented as the critical tradition has assumed—and perhaps to suspect that it is less innocent of “Sense” than its author later claimed.

Since, however, Pope clearly modeled his poem on Denham's, even adopting many of its large structural features, it would be well to determine first the unity and purpose of Cooper's Hill without regard to Pope's observations on it. For it may be that his analysis, by which we have also judged Windsor Forest, does not correspond to the poem or even his actual conception of it, but is only a valiant effort to define with the narrowly limited critical terminology available to him.

II

Although it is a historical fact that Denham's poem fathered a long line of loco-descriptive poems, the sins visited upon the offspring had their origin elsewhere than in their sire. One need only place Cooper's Hill in its own temporal setting, the troubled days of 1642, to sense that it is probably thematic throughout and that the primary function of its descriptive elements is to create a realizable and meaningful structure for the political concept being poetically formulated.² They are the linguistic terms whose implied syntactical relations make possible a self-containing embodiment of the concept; but the reference value of those terms is to be found in the events and ideas of England in 1642.

Denham himself succeeded in defining rather precisely for us the relation we are to find between the descriptive and thematic strands by postulating that the poem arises from a contest between his eye and his thoughts. Although he intends to describe the scene he surveys, his “Fancy” is more boundless than his eye (12); and yet the flight of his mental fancy is aided by his physical elevation at the top of Cooper's Hill—“By taking wing from thy auspicious height” (10)—as though his fancy were a bird winging through space. Eye and thought contract space with equal swiftness (13). He would continue his meditations if he could, but his “wandring eye” betrays his “fixt thoughts” (112), and it is all one whether he is raised in body or in thought (1642 version). Briefly, he moves from one scene to another by “untrac't ways, and aery paths” (11), for thought and vision contest with each other for possession of the scene until it becomes symbolic. The contest between eye and fancy is the struggle of each simultaneously to grasp the same subject matter through its own mode of perception, as thing and as meaning; and only the faculty psychology of his day prevents Denham from identifying the two acts. Moreover, Denham insists in his opening lines that, in his conception, poetry is the act of transforming the physical world into values and meanings by way of metaphor, for if he can succeed in making poetry of his experiences at Cooper's Hill, the hill will become Parnassus for him (7-8). The object becomes a meaning through poetry; and poetic meaning derives only from the play of thought on things. Correspondingly, total poetic success must lie in the transformation of all the other topographical features in the poem into metaphoric relevance.

Even the opening lines of the poem require us to recognize that the poet has taken a firm political position in addition to his physical one, and that from the political position he will survey a thematic scene. The analogue to the fact that Parnassus is wherever the poet succeeds in creating poetry is, we are told, the fact that the court is wherever the king may be: “as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court” (5). What is being denied is the inherent virtue of any particular place: Parnassus is not a place having the inherent power to inspire poetry in whoever may visit it, despite the ancient myth; the power lies in the poet, not outside him, and a Parnassus comes into being as a place wherever this power acts. In 1642, when the poem first appeared, men were seriously contemplating the thesis that the king owes his power to his election by the people. In mid-1642, moreover, Charles had removed from London to York and was enticing members of Parliament to join him. Parliament—the “high Court of Parliament”—insistently demanded his return to London in order that the parliamentary monarchy might function;³ declared “the King's resolve to adjourn the next term of Parliament from Westminster to York, to be illegal”; and, after fining the members “now at Yorke attending on his Majestie,” condemned them and those who had advised Charles to absent himself as “enemies to the peace of this Kingdome.” The royal power, like the poetic power, Denham is saying, is not inherent in a place, but in a person. The source of government resides in the king alone, and wherever he governs, whether at Westminster or York, there is the place of Parliament, which is his own creation, just as Parnassus is the poet's.

Or consider the description of Windsor Hill that has so distressed some of the literalist critics: since the hill is the site of the monarch's palace,

When Natures hand this ground did thus advance,
‘Twas guided by a wiser power than Chance;
Mark't out for such a use, as if 'twere meant
T'invite the builder, and his choice prevent.
Nor can we call it choice, when what we chuse,
Folly, or blindness only could refuse.

(53-58)

As a naturalistic explanation, of course the lines seem unjustifiable exaggeration. But if poetry can make Cooper's Hill a Parnassus, and if Charles's presence localizes Parliament, poetry transforms Windsor Hill into meaning by identifying it with the King; the theme of the lines, therefore, is both the hill and Charles. In considering Dryden's epistle we have already examined the complicated seventeenth-century debate over the sources of royal prerogative, and it is this subject that Denham is exploring with his metaphor. At a moment when a large number of the populace were insisting that the king is their own creation, to make or unmake, Denham is taking a position on the relation of divine anointment to popular appointment: the king is designated by “a wiser power than Chance,” and popular election symbolized by the coronation, though real in itself, is predetermined by God. Denham's is the basic royalist conception of divine right: “the Coronation of the King is only a Declaration to the people that God hath given them a King; Outward Unctions, and Solemnities used at coronations, are but only Ceremonies, which confer no power to the King, For it was his from the Lord.”⁴ Only “Folly, or blindness”—indeed, only sin—could fail to choose (if we can “call it choice”) as God has clearly designated.

So bold a stand by the poet on some of the most momentous issues of the day vividly suggests that the reader is consistently being called to look to the immediate affairs of state in the words that will follow. True, the reference to the place of Parliament appears casually as the subordinate part of a metaphor, and the poet's immediate subject at the opening is the nature of poetry, a subject that is extended into a discussion of the fancy. However, the subordinate but parallel relation of politics to poetry in those lines becomes a relationship of parallel coequality shortly thereafter: St. Paul's is secure while Waller sings of it in a poem on its restoration, and it is equally “Preserv'd from ruine by the best of Kings” (23-24). And now that the political theme has been raised to the surface and brought into a kind of identity with poetry, it takes over the further control of the poem.

The entire first half of the poem is now devoted to description and imaginative interpretation of three elevations that the poet views from his position on Cooper's Hill: St. Paul's Hill (14-38); the hill of Windsor Castle (39-110); and St. Anne's Hill with the ruins of Chertsey Abbey (111-56). It is almost explicit, however, that Denham is contemplating these not merely as discrete external objects but as coherently organized symbols generated by the friendly struggle between eye and mind. St. Paul's is significant to him not merely because the church-topped hill is a topographical feature to be painted with words but mainly because the “sacred pile,” the cathedral church of the capital, had recently been “Preserv'd from ruine by the best of Kings” and now will stand secure despite “sword, or time, or fire”—or, he adds, “zeal more fierce than they” (21-24). By 1642 the fires of religious conflict had grown to white heat, and it is most unlikely that any poem of the moment touching on religious or civil affairs could fail to reflect the contemporary situation. Commons had, to mention only a few examples of its zeal, already meditated upon the Root and Branch Bill and the Bishops' Bill, which would have completely reconstituted the Church; the Puritan leader was already known as King Pym; and Charles, late in 1641, had felt the urgency to remind London of the recent “tumults and disorders” in the city and to pledge himself publicly to “maintaining and protecting the true Protestant religion, according as it hath been established in my two famous predecessors' times … and this I will do, if need be, to the hazard of my life and all that is dear to me.”⁵ Consequently, in focusing upon St. Paul's Cathedral, recently restored from decay by the efforts of Charles and of Archbishop Laud, the leader of the extreme Anglican group, Denham was calling attention to palpable evidence of the King's benevolent determination to preserve “the true Protestant religion” in the face of Puritan extremism and the impending civil wars. Charles had built against the ravages of sword, time, and fire, but the greatest threat against what he was preserving by his symbolic act was zeal, which threatened the entire Establishment.

On the other hand, Benedictine Chertsey Abbey, at the other edge of the poetic canvas, is now only a few crumbling walls, having been demolished by Henry VIII in “devotions name” (126). It is, therefore, the antithesis of St. Paul's and memorializes the vicious destruction of religion by the crown. By this sharp contrast of the restored cathedral and the ancient ruins, Denham is assuring that Charles, unlike Henry, is no religious hypocrite who crushes a religion after writing in its defense, but is sincere and unwavering in his Anglicanism and is determined to reform religion, not pull it down: “may no such storm / Fall on our times, where ruine must reform” (115-16), as Charles has reformed the ruins of St. Paul's to symbolize his reformation of the crumbling Anglican faith. The complex overtones of the contrasting symbols become evident when one recalls that the Puritans, now assuming Henry's former role, were demanding a complete leveling of church government and ritual and were accusing Charles and the Laudian party of Popery, the religion Henry had destroyed. There is gradually emerging, then, a kind of chiastic arrangement of thought that may well be an index to the structure and meaning of the poem. Charles has preserved the Church against popular destructive zeal while being accused of Popery; formerly it was the monarch, Henry, who had occupied the role now being played by the populace, and the result had been the ruined abbey that sharply contrasts with the newly refurbished St. Paul's. Moreover, this chiastic structure is further shaped by the facts that, like the current disorders among the populace, Henry's crime is also attributed to “Zeal” (153), a mere word with which civilization excuses its most barbarous acts, and that the zeal of both Henry and the present public is the product of their “luxury” (33, 124).

Between these topographical symbols of the benevolent and the tyrannical, sincere and hypocritical, altruistic and selfish management of religion, placed as though to allow the monarch to make his choice of either, stands the royal hill of Windsor. Wearing a “Crown of such Majestick towrs” (59), it is the natural correlative of the monarch.⁶ But it is also more, for its very form is symbolic of the ideal king: Windsor hill is “an easie and unforc't ascent” (42), a “gentle height” (49). It is being implied, therefore, that the royal hill is Nature's manifestation of that harmony-through-opposition that the age continued to accept as the heart of the cosmic scheme.

The doctrine of concordia discors is at least as ancient as Pythagoras and Heraclitus, and had a remarkably vital history thereafter.⁷ It is to be found in Plato, Empedocles, Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Plutarch, Ovid, Manilius, Quintilian, Nichomachus of Genasa, and Plotinus, among many others.⁸ It recurs frequently among the Church fathers and spread widely in the Renaissance and thereafter. Very early the Pythagorean theory of the musical and celestial harmony of discords was assimilated into the doctrine; and even the Empedoclean thesis that friendship and hostility control the universe was almost regularly interpreted as identical with the doctrine of concordia discors.⁹ For Heraclitus, as for others, the doctrine explained the design of the cosmos: “Existing things are brought into harmony by the clash of opposing currents. … All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream.”¹⁰ One of the most charmingly blunt accounts of concordia discors appears in a couplet of the seventeenth-century John Norden: “Without a discord can no concord be, / Concord is when contrary things agree.”¹¹ Since this was accepted as the cosmic principle, it was eventually sought everywhere in the microcosm—in the ways of man and society. Perhaps one of the most explicit transfers of the doctrine to the political order appears in a passage from Cicero preserved in St. Augustine's City of God (II, 21):

As, among the different sounds which proceed from lyres, flutes, and the human voice, there must be maintained a certain harmony which a cultivated ear cannot endure to hear disturbed or jarring, but which may be elicited in full and absolute concord by the modulation even of voices very unlike one another; so, where reason is allowed to modulate the diverse elements of the state, there is obtained a perfect concord from the upper, lower, and middle classes as from various sounds; and what musicians call harmony in singing, is concord in matters of state, which is the strictest bond and best security of any republic, and which by no ingenuity can be retained where justice has become extinct.¹²

This it was that came to be the cosmic rationale for England's parliamentary monarchy and the model for the ideal attributes of the king of such a mixed state: the political harmony arising from the conflict of monarch and populace is but an imitation of the cosmic harmony produced by the clash of the opposing elements. For example, one of Halifax' maxims of state directly draws on the analogy between the cosmic and political harmony-through-discord. Just as Ovid had said that all generation results from the discordant concord of fire and water (Metamorphoses, I, 430-33), so Halifax wrote that “Power and Liberty are like Heat and Moisture; where they are well mixt, every thing prospers; where they are single, they are destructive.” And for this reason he gloried in

… our blessed Constitution, in which Dominion and Liberty are so well reconciled: it giveth to the Prince the glorious Power of commanding Freemen, and to Subjects, the satisfaction of seeing the Power so lodged, as that their Liberties are secure. … our Laws make a distinction between Vasselage and Obedience; between a devouring Prerogative, and a licentious ungovernable Freedom. … Our Government is in a just proportion, no unnatural swelling either of Power or Liberty.¹³

Even the Puritan Pym felt it not inconsistent with his political position to argue a variant of this same thesis.¹⁴ And shortly after the Restoration, Davenant expected Charles II to imitate the ways of God by directing the warring factions into a political harmony:

You keep with prudent arts of watchful care
Divided Sects from a conjunctive War;
And when unfriendly Zeal from Zeal dissents,
Look on it like the War of Elements;
And, God-like, an harmonious World create
Out of the various discords of your State.(15)

Bishop Atterbury, then, was later merely repeating the common theme when he described England's political constitution as “nicely poiz'd between the Extremes of too much Liberty, and too much Power; the several Parts of it having a proper Check upon each other; By the means of which they are all restrain'd, or soon reduced, within their due Bounds.” The very susceptibility of such a system to “Concussions within,” he added, is ideal, for this “Disorder … raises that Ferment which is necessary to bring all right again.”¹⁶

In the ambience of this doctrine of concordia discors Denham's poem has its meaningful existence; and it quickly urges the reader to see that from this concept it will draw its poetic vitality. For Nature's design, expressed by the structure of Windsor Hill, now permeates the political world that the hill symbolizes; and the harmony of tensions in Nature becomes both the symbol of the perfect balance of oppositions in the monarch and the proof of its necessity. Because the hill is an elevation and yet a gentle ascent, a perfect harmony of conflicting height and breadth, it corresponds to the fact that in its castle dwell Charles and his Queen, “Mars” and “Venus,” who represent strength and beauty living in harmonious accord, not despite, but as a consequence of their antithetical attributes (39-40).¹⁷

Superficially considered, the reference to Charles and Henrietta Maria as Mars and Venus might well seem only deference to a panegyric convention: how better to praise the royal pair than to call the King martial and the Queen the goddess of beauty? But the perfect correspondence of this conjunction of opposites, Mars and Venus, to the already observable theme of concordia discors suggests that the mythological reference is integral to the poem, echoing as it does the union of the opposing dimensions of Windsor Hill and the chiastic relationship we have already noted between St. Paul's and Chertsey Abbey. How completely concordia discors as a mode of conception pervades the reference can be seen in the very structure of the parenthesis:

… (where Mars with Venus dwells,
Beauty with strength). …

The sense and the grammatical forms of the two clauses are the same, each occupies a hemistich, and both appear in the same couplet. Yet, they appear in opposite halves of different lines and differ in metrical length, although taken together they would constitute a complete heroic line. Moreover, although they are parallel, even almost redundant in meaning, the order of terms (Mars, Venus) is inverted in the second line (Beauty, strength), even to the extent of substituting for the monosyllable “Mars” the trochee “Beauty” and for the trochee “Venus” the monosyllable “strength.” The passage, then, not only specifies a harmonious union of contraries; it is itself a verbal enactment of the theme, producing poetic harmony out of a complex system of similar opposites. For if concordia discors is the order of the universe, it must also be the source of harmony in man's arts.¹⁸

But the perfect fusion here of expression and concept is not merely the product of Denham's artistic contrivance. Rather, expression and concept are so contained in each other as to imply a single all-controlling mode of thought because this particular mythological reference is itself deeply rooted in the history of concordia discors. The myth of Mars and Venus had long been the traditional allegory for the theme because the offspring of their union was said to be the goddess Harmonia.¹⁹ In his life of Pelopidas, for example, Plutarch saw in the myth the principle of civic order: the Thebans did well, he wrote, to make Harmony, the daughter of Mars and Venus, their tutelar deity, since where force and courage (Mars) are joined with gracefulness and winning behavior (Venus) a harmony ensues that combines all the elements of society in perfect consonance and order. In his treatise on Isis and Osiris he interpreted the birth of Harmonia from Venus and Mars as a symbolic expression of all the ancient dualisms, Heraclitean, Empedoclean, and Pythagorean: harmony is the balance of the creative and destructive powers. And similarly the unknown author of De Vita et Poesi Homeri found in the myth the whole Empedoclean doctrine of the cosmic order born of the clash of opposing elements.²⁰

By reconciling perpendicular directions, then, the hill invites both “A pleasure, and a reverence from the sight” (46), corresponding to the harmonious beauty-strength of the royal pair. For the perfect marriage, even as Dr. Johnson was to define it in his remoteness from the tradition, is a “concordia discors, that suitable disagreement which is always necessary to intellectual harmony,”²¹ although the intellectual factor is an especially Johnsonian addition. But even the individual elements of this ideal concordia discors at Windsor are independently a harmony of differences. The hill, being a “gentle height,” not only symbolizes the union of Venus and Mars, but is also an “Embleme” of the King, in whose face one sees “meekness, heightned with Majestick Grace” (47-48) or (the earlier version added) “friend-like sweetnesse, and a King-like aw,” gentle kindness and royal severity, mingled majesty and love.²² That is, the King, even apart from his union with his Venus, is that harmony of power and liberty that makes England's parliamentary monarchy the true cosmic form of government. Shortly thereafter Denham again describes the perfect king in terms of the harmony of contraries, piety, or saintliness, now being substituted for the corresponding “friend-like sweetnesse” and martial prowess for “King-like aw.” By virtue of his rank, the King is chief of the Knights of the Garter, whose patron is the soldier-martyr St. George; indeed, Charles does not need the emblem of the Garter, since, uniting contraries, he “is himself the Souldier and the Saint,” and in choosing St. George as patron of the Order, Edward III (motivated by “love / Or victory” [83-84], corresponding to the Venus-Mars reference) had prophetically chosen a type of Charles, the perfect union of saintliness and military might (101-10). As soldier and saint, Charles belongs both to the world and to heaven, just as it has seemed uncertain whether St. Paul's is the earth reaching towards heaven (“a proud / Aspiring mountain,” [17-18]) or heaven descended to earth (“descending cloud”). As God's vicar, as soldier-saint, the King, like St. Paul's, is indifferently “a part of Earth, or sky” (16).²³ Through the same set of emblems Denham then extends the significance of Charles so that, as the concordance of clashing religion and war, he becomes a world monarch, the archetype of monarchy. The blue garter surrounding the insignia of the Order, he claims, symbolizes the sea surrounding England, recently again annexed as part of England's domain; but since these seas extend to “the Worlds extreamest ends,” they bound not only England but also the “Endless” world (105-108). The extension is inevitable, not only because England is a microcosm of the world, but also because, concordia discors being the law of the entire cosmos, its perfect manifestation in Charles justifies his role as universal sovereign.

The hill of Windsor, then, which gave rise to these successive and complex modes of concordia discors, is certainly not merely a topographical feature, nor merely a convenient arbitrary metaphor; it is the symbol inherent in the concept because it is Nature's physical expression of her divine formula for harmony and consequently expresses the fusion of popular freedom and sovereign authority essential for political order. “The whole world is kept in order by discord,” wrote Owen Felltham; “and every part of it is but a more particular composed jar. … it makes greatly for the Maker's glory, that such an admirable harmony should be produced out of such an infinite discord. The world is both a perpetual war and a wedding.”²⁴

III

But if with this interpretation of Windsor Hill as symbolic of the politico-cosmic harmony arising from the proper tension of strength and beauty, war and religion, severity and kindness—or, inclusively, the King's combined regard for his own majesty and gentle concern for his people, and his saint-like determination to preserve the saving grace of religion even if he must do so with a soldier's arms—if with this we now return to the other two hills at the extreme edges of Denham's landscape, we find it has been an oversimplification to define them as symbolizing merely good and bad royal managements of religion.

For in viewing St. Paul's hill Denham has seen not only the rebuilt cathedral but also the tumultuous city of the populace at the base of the hill, a thick cloud of busyness (25-28). The zealous Londoners rush about, “Some to undo, and some to be undone” (32), toiling (according to the 1642 version) “to prevent imaginarie wants” and yet only feeding their “disease.” This was the excessive acquisitiveness that caused the Londoners to protest Charles's tax levies and demand economic assistance; this the destructive zeal that led them to insist upon violent church reform. The earlier version, being directed more immediately to the political events, adds: “afraid to be secure” and “sicke of being well,” “Some study plots, and some those plots t'undoe, / Others to make 'em, and undoe 'em too.” In this extravagant and pointless commercial and religious energy of the citizenry, Denham was prophetic enough to foresee the civil wars: looking down upon this “thicker cloud / Of business” in the city, he is like those who

… rais'd in body, or in thought
Above the Earth, or the Ayres middle Vault,
Behold how winds, and stormes, and Meteors grow,
How clouds condense to raine, congeale to snow,
And see the Thunder form'd, before it teare
The ayre. …

(1642)

This, too, is more than metaphoric, for, with precise knowledge of the prevailing meteorology, Denham is describing the disordered clash of the elements. Since the harmony of the physical world results from the concordant opposition of the unlike four elements, the disorders formed in “middle air” result from opposition alone, without harmony. “Meteors” were known as the product of discordant strife among the elements; and in describing the “Thunder” (i.e. thunderbolt) as tearing the air, Denham was alluding to what was considered the most disruptive and destructive force in the war of the elements. The human correlative of this storm is the Londoners' running “with like hast, though several ways” (31). The crime of the citizenry, then, is not merely economic or religious or civil; it is a sin against the cosmic harmony. And therefore the gathering storm likened to the populace is, Denham insists, no mere metaphor; it is “to him who rightly things esteems, / No other in effect than what it seems” (29-30), for the clash in the heavens and the strife in the state are truly one.²⁵

Just as the meteor metaphor represents discord without a controlling concord—chaotic energy alone—so the poet also attributes to the populace excesses resulting from the absence of any limiting opposition to its single energy; and in this sense the populace is quite unlike Charles, in whom each quality is balanced by its contending opposite. Even unopposed good, in terms of the dialectic of concordia discors, becomes evil through excess and thereby destroys itself, just as in the state too much power becomes tyranny, too much liberty chaos. Correspondingly, the populace is motivated by an unopposed greed, since the crown is symbolically represented in this tableau only by Charles's benevolent restoration of St. Paul's. The unchecked citizenry, therefore, only increases its desires by increasing its stores, and “feedes only the disease”; it causes itself to be “afraid to be secure,” “sicke of being well,” and “Blinded with light” (1642). It seeks its peace in tumult, its “heaven in hell.” For when an appetite is not brought into concordant clash with a contrary force it paradoxically both grows to its own excess and in this act destroys itself by becoming its own opposite; and the appropriate metaphor for this endlessly circular and pointless mutability through excess is the rivers which grow until they are “lost in Seas” and then are reconveyed by secret veins, “there to be lost again” (35-36).

The populace therefore sins on both sides of concordia discors: as a forming storm it is a disconsonant strife; in another sense it is a single force that, through the absence of any contention to moderate it into a harmony, rushes to its two destructive extremes, excess and extinction. Consequently, not only is there chaotically undirected and therefore contradictory energy (“with like hast, though several ways, they run / Some to undo, and some to be undone,” [31-32]); there is also an excessive energy that, by its excess, destroys itself (others study to make plots and “undoe 'em too” [1642]). Yet even worse than these disorders, the public has also mistaken irreconcilable and therefore mutually destructive extremes for a concordia discors, wishing to have both “luxury, and wealth” (33). But these only falsely seem to be like authority and liberty, which, by contending, moderate each other and preserve both. Instead, they are sheer contradictions, not reconcilable differences; they are “like war and peace” and therefore “Are each the others ruine, and increase” (33-34), just as excessive desire for security creates a fear which destroys the security and just as excessive quest for wealth results in an increase of desires, which then destroys the wealth.²⁶ As Ben Jonson expressed this dialectical extension of the doctrine of concordia discors,

What though all concord's borne of contraries?
So many follies will confusion prove,
And like a sort of jarring instruments,
All out of tune: because (indeed) we see
There is not that analogie, twixt discords,
As between things but merely opposite.(27)

The entire first tableau, therefore, consists of a symbol of the monarch's benevolent restoration and preservation of religion and, at the base of that symbol, a people zealously acquiring a chaotic and unbalanced power. Both a religious and an economic factor are involved, as indeed they were in the conflict between Charles and his people. Inversely, the ruin of Chertsey is attributed to Henry's tyrannical “rage,” a chaos-making force like the modern Londoner's busyness, and to Henry's desire to feed his “Luxury,” the analogue of which is the present overacquisitiveness of the Londoners. And just as the religious disorder in the shadow of St. Paul's has been attributed to the material appetite of the citizenry, not to a sincere religious impulse, so having assigned the destruction of Chertsey Abbey to Henry's desire for luxury, the poet adds that “this Act, to varnish o're the shame / Of sacriledge, must bear devotions name” (125-26). Both the scene at St. Paul's and that at Chertsey, then, represent the failure of a concordia discors between monarch and populace, between religion and wealth; but the relationships within the two scenes are inverted. For just as there is no possible harmony between Charles's gentle religious benevolence and the extravagant worldly energy of the populace, so there was no harmony between Henry's tyrannical acquisitiveness and the religious lethargy of his people, since

Then did Religion in a lazy Cell,
In empty, airy contemplations dwell;
And like the block, unmoved lay. …

(135-37)

Moreover, the present public sin against concordia discors in allowing unrestrained wealth to run to its two contradictory extremes, luxury and poverty, had previously been committed by Henry. Having “spent the Treasures of his Crown,” he condemned public wealth as luxury and so destroyed public wealth to feed his own luxury (123-24). The consequence is that at every point Henry, like the present citizenry, rushed to extremes that deny each other. He wished his bold crime to be understood a “real, or at least a seeming good” (128). He did not fear to do ill, but feared “the Name” (129); and, not being restrained by the opposing force of conscience, he wished fame, which of course is directly contradicted by his infamous deeds (130). But the most precise similarity between Henry and the seventeenth-century populace results from his treatment of religion. Because it was Henry's character to fly to mutually destructive limits, he wrote an attack on Luther in defense of Catholicism and then abolished the Catholic church in England. Therefore, just as the excessiveness of the populace was defined by the fact that luxury and wealth are “each the others ruine, and increase” (34), so Henry's is defined by the fact that “he the Church at once protects, & spoils” (131).²⁸

At St. Paul's, then, violent public greed, masquerading as religious zeal, is too powerful for reconciliation with the mere religious benevolence of the crown—the King appears as only saint, not soldier; at St. Anne's, violent royal greed, masquerading as religious solicitude, was too powerful for the religious lethargy of the people—Henry was the soldier, not the saint. But between the two stands Windsor, home of the Order of the Garter, in whose patron, St. George, is reconciled the rivalry of soldier and saint. In him, and consequently in Charles, power and religion are united in the harmony of oppositions. The three hills, therefore, are symbolic of three kinds of kingship—it is significant that the first is “Crown'd with that sacred pile” (15), that Windsor, like Cybele, wears “A Crown of such Majestick towrs” (59), and that St. Anne's was once with “A Chappel crown'd” (114). And each of these kingships is defined in terms of the different relations of sovereign and populace, religion and activity. The central hill, Windsor, being the residence of Charles, is the perfect harmonious balance and interaction of the two powers, and there the natural and political ideals coincide. The other two hills, described in terms of the immediately pertinent religious and economic dissensions, illustrate the dangerous and unnatural imbalance of royal solicitude and popular zeal on the one hand, and of royal tyranny and public apathy on the other. The first may be read as the precarious imbalance of the moment—if Charles does not exercise greater force, or if the public does not moderate its zeal. The last is a historic warning to Charles not to crush the public and a reminder to the rebellious public of its past fate, but a fate that the benevolent Charles will not initiate. And the central tableau symbolizes the perfect concordia discors in the crown that requires only a corresponding but inverse perfection in the populace to form the ideal mixed monarchy.

IV

Having established his topographical dialectic, Denham can now make his plea for religious, and hence political, stability. “Whats past,” symbolized by Chertsey, strikes in him “anger, shame” (157-58); “whats too near,” too immediately threatening, symbolized by St. Paul's and the turbulent city below, fear. Since the immediate fault lies with the citizenry, he now makes his plea to them: is there no “temperate Region” between the “Frigid” zone of Henry's day and the “Torrid” of the present (139-40)? The metaphor originates in the frequent seventeenth-century correlation of England's mixed monarchy with her supposed climate, as we have already observed in Dryden; it is only a climatic extension of the assumption that the via media produced by the harmony of discord is the great cosmic principle, reconciling in its elemental form heat and cold. Having called attention to the fact that Henry's sin was a self-destructive excess, and having at the beginning of the poem analyzed the present self-destructive excesses of the modern Londoners, Denham now relates the two by demonstrating that, in the absence of concordia discors, the circularity of time converts an unchecked excess into its opposite. What is taking place at St. Paul's is the inverse of what once took place at St. Anne's because only through concordia discors can man counteract the vicissitudes of time. In turning the tables on Henry's tyranny, the English public has turned the tables upon itself. If religion in Henry's day was lethargic, it has reached its other extreme, excessive zeal; and the appropriate topos for the political extremism arising from uncontrolled dissatisfaction is Aesop's fable of the frogs and their king, the traditional fable of a people whose persistent discontent was rewarded first with an inert king and then with one who devoured them (137-38). In waking from Renaissance passivity the public is now “restless in a worse extream,” and in curing itself of lethargy has aroused in itself a fever due to the heat of the tropics (“Calenture”), just as its search for wealth only increases its desires (141-44). If the fault of the Catholic church, denying that free reason may have knowledge of religious truth, was its “empty, airy contemplations,” the religious knowledge of the laity under the Protestant dispensation has advanced to such extravagant bounds as “to make us wish for ignorance” and grope in the dark rather than be “led by a false guide to erre by day” (145-48).²⁹ Outside the stability of concordia discors there is only the dread vicissitude in which the Renaissance saw the return to chaos and dissolution.

Wishing for a mean between past lethargy and present restlessness, and finding harmonious balance only in the monarch—not in his necessary counterpart, the people—Denham now glances down at the Thames threading its way through the scene. None of the three hills and their buildings had fully represented the perfect state, since two had expressed the two extreme modes of imbalance and the third the proper tension in only one of the state's two contending elements. But in the Thames, which skirts all these points and in that sense partakes of them all, Denham found his symbol for the harmoniously ordered state. In contrast to the citizens' zealous toil that only increases “with their stores, / Their vast desires” and in contrast to Henry's tyrannical “Luxury, or Lust,” the Thames, symbolic of the ideal state, spreads its wealth along its shores and “Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants,” thereby preventing the possibility of unchecked excess (185). It “Cities in deserts, woods in Cities plants” (186) and, consequently, performs Nature's ideal art of creating contraries and harmonizing them. True and beneficial wealth, that is, is the product of neither the avaricious energy of the populace nor the tyrannical acquisitiveness of the king, but results naturally from the concordant and continuously dynamic workings of all the opposing factors of the state. Unlike Henry and the modern Londoners, the perfectly ordered state counterchecks and balances her energies to prevent them from becoming self-destructive enormities: the Thames not only finds wealth where it is and gives it where it is needed but also “First loves to do” and then counterchecks this impulse by loving “the Good he does” (178); and, like a bird, the river “hatches plenty” but does not then destroy what it has created “with too fond a stay” (170-72). If the symbol for a single unrestrained energy is the impetuous river caught in the endless circle of being “lost in Seas,” then reconveyed by secret veins, “there to be lost again” (35-36), the symbol of concordia discors is the harmoniously reciprocal activity of the Thames.

The most specific formulation of the Thames as the image of the concordia discors of the total state appears in the famous description first added in 1655:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.

(189-92)

Denham, of course, is reinforcing his main theme by praying that, as poet, he might fulfill Nature's law by reflecting esthetically the harmonious oppositions expressed physically by the perfect river; and in pleading that this become his own artistic pattern, he is giving earnest that he has accepted it as the universal principle. But to accept it as the cosmic-esthetic pattern is also to accept it as the political theme, since it is the “great example.”³⁰ Even were it not clear that Denham's esthetic principles imply political ones, he now removes all possibility of doubt by extending the symbolism of the river into an explicit statement of the doctrine of concordia discors in its fullest cosmic terms. The previous scenes and their incomplete embodiment of the governing law have gradually and dramatically led to the full revelation of the cosmic principle as the poet moves his glance from the three hills to the river that encompasses all of them. The Thames is the perfect concordance of contraries, the poet writes, because it is the favorite work of Nature, who, delighting in “strange varieties” (198), knows that “the harmony of things, / As well as that of sounds, from discords springs” (203-204).

In view of the obviously political statements of the previous part of the poem, the effect of the present inclusive cosmological doctrine is to imply the necessity of a political harmony of discord, since now Nature reveals that this is her mode of creation and action. In as much as all “Form, order, beauty” in the universe have risen from discord (206), clearly civil harmony, being subsumed under the cosmic order, must come about in the same fashion, or not at all. Indeed, in asserting that when Nature unites such “huge extreams” as “the steep horrid roughness of the Wood” and “the gentle calmness of the flood,” “Wonder from thence results, from thence delight” (209-12), Denham is echoing his earlier description of Windsor hill, the “Embleme” of its mighty master, as inviting by its “easie and unforc't ascent” a “pleasure, and a reverence from the sight” (46). The “wonder” and “delight” evoked by Nature's harmonious confusion correspond to the authority and liberty that must blend in the natural government, and to the “King-like aw” and “friend-like sweetnesse” expressed by Charles. Just as physical extremes are here brought together as expressive of Nature's law, so the earlier oppositions of scenic elements had been symbolic of the working of that law at the political level.

Unfortunately for the artistry of the poem, at this point there is an abrupt and apparently unmotivated redefinition of the images. Suddenly we are presented with an enlarged scene consisting of mountains, plain, and river; and the river no longer symbolizes the total harmonious state but assumes the role of only one of its factors. The stream is “so transparent, pure, and clear” that had the “self-enamour'd” Narcissus looked into it he would not have been deceived by seeing in it his own image (213-16); contrarily, the mountain is forced to hide his “proud head” among the clouds and frowns on the “gentle stream, which calmly flows, / While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat” (217-21). For the moment, therefore, stream and mountain have become populace and political leaders. The citizenry are being urged to gentleness, calm, and—through the Narcissus myth—humility so that they will not, “self-enamour'd,” be deceived by finding in the state only their own reflections, only the means to satisfy their self-love. The political leaders, on the other hand, are necessarily forced to suffer the buffets of the storm because of their position of authority: it is “The common fate of all that's high or great” (222).³¹ It is, we recall, only when the “steep horrid roughness of the Wood / Strives with the gentle calmness of the flood” that Nature produces order.

But now, with another unmotivated substitution of image values, the river becomes neither the total state nor the populace alone but the fruitful consequences of the concordant clash of all the factors of the state: it “wealth and beauty gives” (226). And mountain and plain have reverted to their metaphoric sense at the beginning of the poem as monarch and populace, corresponding to St. Paul's hill and the city at its base. The total state has become the conjunction of all the symbolic topographical features of Windsor Forest: the majestic mountain which must, in its cloudy obscurity, receive the brunt of the civil storms and frowns authoritatively on the scene below; the Thames, now symbolizing the commercial wealth produced by the well-ordered state; and the spacious plain of the populace between the two. Instead of the “thicker cloud of business” like a brewing storm at the base of St. Paul's, the populace is now the calm plain “Between the mountain and the stream embrac't: / Which shade and shelter from the Hill derives, / While the kind river wealth and beauty gives” (223-26). On the surface the result of the description is the ideally ordered variety of Nature; in symbolic terms it is the ideally ordered mixed state:

And in the mixture of all these appears
Variety, which all the rest indears.

(227-28)

V

The long account of the stag hunt that follows this presentation of the perfect mixed monarchy probably does satisfy to some degree Pope's definition of the poem as descriptions leading into reflections upon moral life or political institutions, for here in the 1668 version description often appears to hold the place of sense. Among other things, the 88 lines that make up the description (235-322) are devoted to small details and are disproportionate in length, being approximately a quarter of the poem. But it is significant that the original version is only half as long (46 lines) and that there far fewer minor descriptive details appear. Most important, within those 46 lines the poet pauses on three occasions, as he also does in the later version, to compare the stag's fate with human fall from greatness, so that these comparisons occupy the bulk of the passage.

Now, to an audience of 1642 the great and overriding example of the fall from political eminence must have been the Earl of Strafford, who had long guided Charles's policies, whose removal had been essential to Pym's plan to weaken the King's authority, whose trial had occupied almost all the attention of Parliament, and who had been executed for treason in May 1641. On Strafford's fate had seemed to hang the fate of Charles, and this had been no secret to the populace. The one factor that seems most to militate against this interpretation of the hunt is the poet's statement that Charles undertook the hunt “when great affairs / Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares” (241-42), for he could hardly have meant that the execution was a pastime for Charles. But this difficulty is removed if we do not try to allegorize the entire description. We can perfectly well read it as primarily an account of the hunt. The description, then, is not a vehicle for a system of political allusions but quite the reverse: the political references enter by way of tightly integrated similarities to features of the hunt. We might well say that by a kind of irony Denham is suggesting that the stag hunt can be experienced more vividly and meaningfully as a stag hunt if one keeps in mind the recent tragedy of Strafford. And in this manner the casualness of Charles's attitude as Denham describes it is an effective dramatic means of persuading the reader that, although the Parliamentarians wished to make Charles's power depend upon the outcome of Strafford's trial, the execution of Strafford barely impinged on the status of the royal prerogative.

On the other hand, the description never allows the reader to overlook the fact that the hunt has a parallel in the world of human affairs and more particularly in the realm of political power. The stag is described as leader of “that noble heard” (237) because the stag is the royal beast; and correspondingly, Strafford had been the leading figure in Charles's court and the formulator of his policies. Most telling are Denham's likening the stag to “a declining States-man” (273) and his finding in the stag's antlers an emblem of “how soon / Great things are made, but sooner are undone” (239-40), for nothing on the political stage of the period had been more dramatic than the sudden unmaking of England's leading statesman and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who had been hunted by the Parliamentarians and abandoned by the Court party and the House of Lords: “left forlorn / To his friends pity, and pursuers scorn” (273-74).³²

The otherwise disturbing and inexplicable description of the stag's voluntary death now becomes intelligible if it is related to Strafford's actions:

And as a Hero, whom his baser foes
In troops surround, now these assails, now those,
Though prodigal of life, disdains to die
By common hands; but if he can descry
Some nobler foes approach, to him he calls,
And begs his Fate, and then contented falls.
So when the King a mortal shaft lets fly
From his unerring hand, then glad to dy,
Proud of the wound, to it resigns his bloud. …

(313-21)

The passage has always been thought an undue hyperbole because of the stag's quite unnatural self-sacrifice; but the details do rather closely correspond to the facts of Strafford's last days, and it is notable that the description of the stag's death is entered into only by way of a similitude to the death of a hero. Strafford had expected support from the House of Lords and from the Straffordians in Commons, “his friends, among the baser herd, / Where he so lately was obey'd, and fear'd” (269-70), only to find that “the herd, unkindly wise, / Or chases him from thence, or from him flies” (271-72). There is no doubt that many of his supporters in Commons, especially the sheriffs and justices of the peace, absented themselves from the trial lest they be prosecuted later. At first, thinking the cry only a “false Alarm” (255) and then “Resolv'd 'tis better to avoyd, than meet / His danger” (1642 version),³³ Strafford first trusted to safety in Ireland, but then chose to abandon the protection of his army and present his own defense before Parliament in person, “resolv'd to bear / All their assaults, since 'tis in vain to fear” (291-92). The force of these “enraged Hounds” he could repel and “wounds returns for wounds” (311-12), but “alas, they thirst for bloud” (306). With dramatic success Strafford fought off each of Pym's charges against him, disdaining “to die / By common hands” (315-16). Indeed, Pym, far more eager to destroy Strafford than prove treason, was forced by near-failure to change his legal tactics by having Commons pass a bill of attainder, which merely decreed Strafford's treason, instead of proving it. Finally, when the bill was passed by both Commons and Lords, Strafford called to a “nobler” foe and begged “his Fate” (317-18), for he wrote Charles in a letter that was published and widely circulated in 1641:

… to set your Majesty's conscience at Liberty, I do most humbly beseech your Majesty, for prevention of evils, which may happen by your refusal,—to pass this Bill, and by this means to remove (praised be to God) I cannot say this accursed (but I confess, this unfortunate) thing forth of the way towards that blessed agreement, which God, I trust, shall ever establish between you and your subjects. … To a willing man there is no injury done. … to you I can give the life of this world with all the cheerfulness imaginable in the just acknowledgment of your exceeding favours.

With Strafford “glad to dy” and “Proud of the wound” (320-21), Charles, by signing the bill of attainder, let fly the “mortal shaft” (319).

Such an interpretation of the stag hunt is in accord with the equivocal attitude Denham adopted in his poem “On the Earl of Strafford's Tryal and Death.” There Strafford is called both the “enimy and martire of the state, / Our nations glory and our nations hate.” Denham neither admits Strafford's guilt nor condemns his execution, for to do either would be to admit the justness of Pym's party and the error of Charles. In alluding to the Earl in Cooper's Hill, Denham apparently intended both to call attention to the most climactic episode in the recent contest between Charles and Parliament and also to gloss over its political significance by making no evaluation of it. In effect he is saying that Charles can solve such problems, and they are no cause for unsettling the state; at least, the execution of Strafford, authorized by Charles, was a far “more Innocent, and happy chase” than King John's hunting down “liberty” (323-25).

Artistically considered, what is especially bothersome about the description of the hunt in the later version is that it constitutes so large a fraction of the poem. By its disproportion it seems to upset the structure and the sustained political reading of the poem. It would appear, therefore, that by 1655, when the execution of Strafford had lost much of its pointed political significance in the public mind, Denham chose, at the expense of structure, to blur the political reference by greatly multiplying the purely descriptive features of the chase. And yet in the preface to the 1655 version the unknown editor, insisting that the 88-line passage was the author's original version, described it as “that excellent Allegory of the Royall Stag.”

Incidentally, it is quite possibly significant, in view of the space Denham devotes to the symbolism of the Order of the Garter, that in September 1640, in an extraordinary and memorably impressive ceremony, Charles entered Strafford into the Order and that ultimately, like St. George, Strafford also became both “Souldier and Martyr.” It is even more likely that there is considerable significance in the fact that Strafford professed precisely the political doctrine embodied in Denham's poem, even to the degree of recognizing its relation to cosmic harmony. In his final and summarizing speech in his own defense before the Lords, Strafford had declared:

I have ever admired the wisdom of our ancestors, who have so fixed the pillars of this Monarchy that each of them keeps due measure and proportion with other, and have so handsomely tied up the nerves and sinews of the State that the straining of one may bring damage and sorrow to the whole economy. The prerogative of the Crown and the propriety of the subject have such mutual relations that this took protection from that, that foundation and nourishment from this: and, as on the lute, if anything be too high or too low wound up, you have lost the harmony, so here the excess of a prerogative is oppression, of a pretended liberty in the subject disorder and anarchy. … I ever did inculcate this:—The happiness of a kingdom consists in just poise of the King's prerogative and the subject's liberty, and that things should never be well till these went hand in hand together. … I have and shall ever aim at a fair but bounded liberty, remembering always that I am a freeman, but a subject; that I have a right, but under a Monarch.³⁴

VI

In the framework of the descriptive pattern the effect of Charles's stag hunt has been to bring the eye to Runnymede, which the poet actually sees from his post on Cooper's Hill and where, in his fancy, Charles concludes his chase. In the thematic structure, the fact that the hunt ends at Runnymede permits a political contrast between the reign of John and that of Charles, just as the array of hills had permitted a contrast between Charles's benevolence and the selfish tyranny of Henry. In John's day, at this scene of the signing of Magna Charta,

Fair liberty pursu'd, and meant a Prey
To lawless power, here turn'd, and stood at bay.

(325-26)

Now in the selfsame place Charles, the benevolent king, pursues not liberty, but “a more Innocent, and happy chase” (323). Many of Charles's subjects certainly would have been inclined to evaluate the destruction of Strafford as another Runnymede, another occasion when a tyrannical king was forced to bow to the power of the people and return their rights. But clearly it is Denham's purpose in juxtaposing the two hunts to contrast them: Charles is far from a latter-day John, and the Strafford affair is a trivial, almost negligible episode.

Moreover, the signing of the charter at Runnymede had ever after represented to the English the guarantee of a harmoniously balanced state, for on this occasion the tyrant had yielded up his excessive powers that his subjects might have their rights and liberties. Charles's chase therefore reaches its successful end at precisely the point where “Tyrant and slave” had long since been transformed into “King and Subject,” both moving “to the same Center” (331-33). By placing Charles's innocent actions against the background of Runnymede, Denham can assure the anxious populace that true political concordia discors is no longer a goal to be fought for, but an accomplished fact, a living principle already inherent in the scene, and a reality that need only be accepted, since Magna Charta requires only that “Kings give liberty, and Subjects love” (334). And hence, directing his attention to the flood of contemporary pamphlets in which with infinite legal, political, and theological learning men were determining their right to take up arms against the king,³⁵ the poet can warn that

… armed subjects can have no pretence
Against their Princes, but their just defence,
And whether then, or no, I leave to them
To justifie, who else themselves condemne.
Yet might the fact be just, if we may guesse
The justnesse of an action from successe.

(1642)

Since the events behind the meeting at Runnymede were strikingly similar to those provoking the present discontent—a clamor for legal liberties, relief from economic oppression, and reform of the church—the full implication of Denham's historical montage which places a carefree Charles on the scene of John's defeat is that, no matter how justified the rebellion against John, no latter-day Magna Charta is needed, no Root and Branch Petition, no Grand Remonstrance; and no Runnymede, no civil war.

But Denham is vividly aware that the political concordia discors that is the theme of his poem is necessarily a precarious balance—and that this is its virtue. No lethargic stasis, it is instead the only system permitting dynamic action without chaos. Harmony, Denham had written, springs from discords; in the mutual resistance of the elements “All that we have, and that we are, subsists”; and wonder and delight result from a union through strife. It is for this reason especially that Denham presents Charles to us in the drama of the stag hunt. Had he been content to leave him in Windsor Castle, he would have pictured only a static harmony of government. But the stag hunt becomes symbolic of the king's proper activity because, like the river, which is also the symbol of a dynamic harmony of oppositions, it is a continuous but controlled energy, unlike the discordant and chaotic clash that had once taken place at Runnymede. The first half of the poem, given over to the symbolism of the three hills—static images—is, then, concerned with the form of government; but the final half, devoted to the Thames and the stag hunt—dynamic symbols—presents government as motion, or activity, the end of the poem even placing that activity in the dynamically evolving context of history. Since the mixed monarchy is a persistent energy, it follows that this energy must always tend to pull the system into an imbalance; and English political history, Denham adds, is a succession of such imbalances. The present situation, already symbolized by the royal restoration of St. Paul's and the feverish greed of the populace at the foot of the hill, has occurred whenever

The Subjects arm'd, the more their Princes gave,
Th' advantage only took the more to crave.
Till Kings by giving, give themselves away,
And even that power, that should deny, betray.

(337-40)

On the other hand, the situation symbolized by Chertsey Abbey has occurred whenever “Kings, by grasping more than they could hold, / First made their Subjects by oppression bold” (343-44). The result has always been a tendency of government to oscillate between the poles of the harmony of discord, for thereupon

… popular sway, by forcing Kings to give
More than was fit for Subjects to receive,
Ran to the same extreams; and one excess
Made both, by striving to be greater, less.

(345-48)

The rhetorical function of the poem, we have already seen, is as much to caution Charles both against tyranny and against too benevolently yielding up his royal prerogative to the demands of Parliament, lest the public assume all power, as it is to caution the populace against excessive demands lest they drive the monarch to tyranny.³⁶ But the purpose of the account of Runnymede has already been to show that harmonious tension is a political fact in England, no matter how, within limits, populace and king may act. It is a reality inherent in the scene and independent of the two factors of the state—so long as they do not move outside the range of their powers and rights, and thereby destroy the very system itself. Therefore Denham now returns to the image of the river in its earlier sense as symbolizing the concordia discors which is the pattern of the true state. The image is now especially appropriate, not only because it had some currency as a symbol of the state,³⁷ but also because, being a continuous flow, an everchanging sameness, it expresses the dynamic stability inherent in the system of harmonious discord. “All things,” said Heraclitus, “come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a river.”³⁸ As a symbol of the concurrence of authority and liberty effected by Magna Charta, the river, precisely because of this energetic harmony, can tolerate occasional imbalance, since it is its own system of checks and balances:

When a calm River rais'd with sudden rains,
Or Snows dissolv'd, oreflows th' adjoyning Plains,
The Husbandmen with high-rais'd banks secure
Their greedy hopes, and this he can endure.

(349-52; italics mine)

Because it is a concordant discord the Thames, we recall, is “Strong, without rage” (192); and because there was no opposing power to check Henry's extravagant energy it became a “rage” (119). But because the river when led into a new channel is outside the area of possible checks and balances, the very effort to subdue its power only drives it to even greater excess, just as tyranny causes both itself and popular liberty to run “to the same extremes.” Therefore, not “Strong, without rage,” but “Stronger, and fiercer by restraint” (357) the river grows, and, knowing “no bound” (358), will inundate the land.

VII

What has emerged from these complex workings of the poem is an intricate dialectic of concordia discors that at the same time is a complete commentary on government. Harmoniously competitive government can come about only in such a mixed form as England's parliamentary monarchy, whose structure has been symbolically elaborated in the description of Windsor, and whose activities are represented in the description of the Thames. Its basic form is the wedding of two contending factors, but one can also detect the harmonious tension of such a government by observing that no one power runs to excess and that therefore it must be held in check by some assumed opposition. Such an ideal system risks destruction if there is only a discord of forces without a controlling concord, as in the present disorders; or if the two forces are not of equal strength, as in the scenes at St. Paul's and Chertsey; or if, through the absence of contention, any one force, like Henry's self-consuming luxury, grows to excess and thereby introduces endless mutability by becoming its anti-self; or if two irreconcilable and contradictory forces, such as war and peace, or luxury and wealth, are mistaken for a true concordia discors. Should any or all of these disorders increase, the whole system of harmony through tension is destroyed, and outside that system of mixed government the efforts to countercheck one force merely urge it to even greater extremes until all is chaos. Then, in Shakespeare's classic formulation of the idea,

… hark! what discord follows; each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe.

Such, Denham is warning, is the irremediable deluge the future threatens.

It is in terms of this analysis of the poem's dialectic that we can best understand why Cooper's Hill became a monument in the development of the heroic couplet and why its prosody was an irresistible challenge to eighteenth-century critics. For in dramatically engaging his cosmic doctrine in the verse form, Denham gave a functional significance both to the harmoniously balanced couplet that became the neoclassic ideal and to variants of that basic form. He was not the first, of course, to use the hemistich as the unit or to exploit the rhetorical possibilities of parallelism, antithesis, and inversion in the heroic couplet. But he was the first to employ these figures with consistent functionalism so that, by allowing them to structure his mode of expression, he was able not merely to express but to assume and entertain that particular cosmic harmony that they logically imply. By shaping his word order and prosody in the complex patterns of harmonious opposition he not merely illustrated or gave earnest of the doctrine of concordia discors but made it the inherent condition of his subtler language and the law of the reality in which the poem acts as a communicative statement.

Throughout much of the poem the couplet form is rather characterless, spreading itself out into a large variety of structures; but at the crucial points in the thematic development all its potentialities are suddenly summoned to make it completely organic to the meaning it carries. The balanced and patterned couplets therefore result not from an independent concern for an ideal versification regardless of meaning, as is often said, but from the need of realizing the doctrine of concordia discors in the very language, as we have already seen in the analysis of the reference to Mars and Venus. When the theme of harmony of opposites demands it, the line pattern suddenly falls into corresponding shape: “A friend-like sweetnesse, and a King-like aw”; “Betwixt their Frigid, and our Torrid Zone”; “First loves to do, then loves the Good he does”; “Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants”; “Cities in deserts, woods in Cities plants”; “While driness moysture, coldness heat resists”; “When Kings give liberty, and Subjects love”; etc.

The richest and most complex instance of this structural pattern of balanced oppositions is, of course, the famous couplet that excited so much admiration in the following century:

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.

(191-92)

In developing here the symbolism of the river as the natural and esthetic harmony of contrarieties Denham has incorporated this doctrine in the very structure, logic, rhetoric, syntax, and melody of the lines. Superficially there appears to be mere balance, each hemistich and each line weighed against the other. However, although the first line appears to contain only a repetition of a single verbal pattern, the first hemistich alone truly states a concordia discors: depth and clarity are not contradictions that cancel out each other, and yet they are contraries. Their co-presence, therefore, is the harmonious resolution of opposing forces. On the other hand, the second hemistich, although it approximately repeats the verbal pattern of the first, is wholly different in logical mode; for it defines a concordia discors, not by balancing discordant features, but by the collateral technique of defining gentleness as not so excessively gentle as to be dull, and it consequently implies the presence of some factor contrary to gentleness and yet not destructive of it. Therefore, the hemistichs are antithetical in logical strategy and yet express the same doctrine and are nearly identical in verbal structure. They are, that is, a perfect linguistic expression of the theme of concordia discors, for they not only assert it but do so in a linguistic organization which embodies it. A special syntactical order has been created within the normal organization of language so that it may adequately express its special meaning immediately, rather than through the mediation of the organizational assumptions in normal discourse.

The second line of the couplet also parallels the first by connecting two attributes in each of the balanced hemistichs: “deep,” “clear” and “gentle,” “dull” balance “strong,” “rage” and “ore-flowing,” “full.” And the two lines are alike even in their balancing single terms except in the second hemistichs, where each introduces a compound term: “not dull,” “ore-flowing.” Yet the two lines differ in the mode of conjunction, “yet” being replaced by “without.” Unlike the first line, the second defines concordia discors in both hemistichs in the manner of the second half of the first line: that is, by denying excess to a single attribute. In this manner both hemistichs of the second line are alike, as they are nearly alike in grammatical structure; but in word order they are chiastic, and the inverted halves oppose each other in an otherwise identical pattern, the opposition being reinforced by the juxtaposition of the noun “rage” with the gerund “ore-flowing.” Moreover, although the two lines seem parallel, there is a complex transverse relation between them in their harmonious contention. The gentleness described in the second half of the first line is at the opposite extreme from the strength described in the first half of the second; what is denied is that the energy in gentleness diminishes into dullness and that the power in strength expands into rage. Similarly the depth referred to in the first half of the first line is the inverse of the fullness referred to in the last half of the second, just as “gentle” and “strong” are at the two ends of the same scale. Moreover, the depth and fullness have to do with the form or substance of the river, and the gentleness and strength with its motion. In other words, in a kind of anticipation of Hobbesian materialism, Denham has defined the river (and therefore the cosmic pattern) in terms of its matter and motion, just as the first half of the poem, developed around the static symbols of the hills, has to do with the structure of the state, and the last half, developed around the dynamic symbols of the river, has to do with its energy, or motion.

Even the prosody of the couplet enacts the harmonizing of oppositions. For example, although the first line seems divided into two parallel hemistichs, and each hemistich is divided by a secondary caesura into two equal parts (“Though deep” and “yet clear”; “though gentle” and “yet not dull”), each unit in the first hemistich is made up of two syllables, and each unit in the second is made up of three; and this system of differences within similarities is supported by the opposition of the masculine secondary caesura within the first hemistich (“Though deep”) and the feminine secondary caesura within the second (“Though gentle”). Moreover, when we consider the two lines as a unit we find that the apparent parallelism of “Though deep, yet clear” and “Strong without rage” nevertheless involves a metrical opposition in the substitution of a trochee (“Strong with”) for the iamb (“Though deep”); and although the two lines are in many ways parallel, the secondary caesurae of the first line are precisely medial with respect to each hemistich (“Though deep, / / yet clear; though gentle, / / yet not dull”), but in the second line, although in precisely balanced positions with respect to the total line, the secondary caesurae are at the opposite ends of each hemistich (“Strong / / without rage; without ore-flowing / / full”).

This key couplet is Denham's norm for engaging meaningfully in the structure of his lines the theme of harmony through strife and its various permutations. For example, since this structure of parallelism, antithesis, and inversion is also the thematic norm, it can present with ironic effect false harmonizings of oppositions, as in the line “Some to undo, and some to be undone” (32), where the verbal parallelism of the hemistichs merely brings together acts that pointlessly destroy each other. Since the normative use of such parallelism in the poem is to express a true concordia discors, the irony here is that a contradiction is masquerading as concordant conflict.

Perhaps the most complex ironic parallelism of this type appears in Denham's statement that Henry VIII wrote a defense of Catholicism and later destroyed the Catholic Church:

Their Charity destroys, their Faith defends.

(134)

The two deeds are given the prosodic and rhetorical appearance of harmony, the parallelism being made even sharper by the alliteration; and the opposition of sense between the alliterated “destroys” and “defends” superficially seems a conflict that shapes itself into a harmony. Further, by inverting the actual chronological order of the events, Denham has seemed to make them congruent despite their opposition. In the most obvious sense the line asserts that Henry, inconsistently, first defended Catholicism in a treatise for which the Pope rewarded him with the title Fidei Defensor, and then attached the estates and revenues of the monasteries so that they could no longer serve as charitable institutions, each event cancelling out the other. But the line may also be read in its present chronological order, for Henry claimed that by the very act of destroying the corruption of the monasteries he was preserving the true Catholic Church; and he retained the title of Defender of the Faith after the break with Rome. The order of events that Henry would have insisted on is an ironic inversion of the actual order of his acts against the Catholic Church. Moreover, Denham has already made it clear that although Henry pretended that in destroying the resources with which the monasteries charitably aided the poor he was attacking the “Luxury, or Lust” of the Church, his real intent was “to feed his own” (124). Consequently in destroying the Church's charity Henry had also destroyed his own charity, since he was yielding to the opposing vice of lust; and therefore, though pretending to defend the faith, he had really lost his own religion. Meanwhile, Henry's destruction of Church charities to feed his own “Luxury” sharply points back to the charity of Charles, the Christian king and mirror of St. George, the soldier-saint, in restoring St. Paul's.

But in the most general sense of the line, Henry both defended one of the three theological virtues, Faith, and destroyed another, Charity. And “the greatest of these is charity.” “And though I have all faith,” said St. Paul, “so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” Henry's deeds, the consequences of which are memorialized by the ruins atop St. Anne's Hill, were, then, a further and deeper contradiction, for he could not defend one of the theological virtues if he had destroyed the one on which the others are founded. Moreover, if he had truly defended Faith he would himself have engaged in Charity, in the sense of Christian love, rather than alms, and could not have destroyed it; but Denham has already deliberately labeled Henry's crime as “Luxury, or Lust,” that very one of the seven deadly sins which is the direct antithesis of the theological virtue of Charity.

Since the couplet structure of the poem and its thematic content are so perfectly united, a striking violation of the prosodic and rhetorical norm also enacts a disruption of the perfect order. For example, in the line “While luxury, and wealth, like war and peace” (33) the neat balances of the hemistichs and the units within the hemistichs create a sense of opposing forces contained in order. But luxury and wealth, unlike liberty and sovereignty, we have already observed, are not true oppositions, but negatives of each other and, like war and peace, cannot coexist but must be mutually destructive. That the line is only a false-seeming concordia discors which, through the verbal structure, has lulled us into a momentary sense of order becomes dramatic through the effect of the abnormally delayed caesura in the second line of the couplet and the consequent impression that structure has got out of hand: “Are each the others ruine, / / and increase” (34). Correspondingly, after the ironically balanced line of oppositions, “And free from Conscience, is a slave to Fame” (130), Denham offers a line that enacts the consequent disorder of imbalance: “Thus he the Church at once protects, / / & spoils” (131). Perhaps the most intricate of these structural maneuverings is Denham's use of both the balanced and unbalanced forms to engage the contrast of harmony and chaos. When both conflicting political entities, king and subject, “to the same Center move” (333), then of course the true harmony of contention arises; and the parallelism of the hemistichs is the expression of that harmony: “[Then] Kings give liberty, and Subjects love” (334). But some lines later the poet considers the contrary situation, when popular rights and royal power cause each other to become excessive. Then, instead of moving “to the same Center,” they run “to the same extreams” (347); and correspondingly the accompanying line of the couplet, instead of being neatly balanced, is shattered into chaotic fragments:

… and one excess
Made both, / / by striving to be greater, / / less.(39)

(347-48)

There is, of course, nothing inherently chaotic in the line, and it probably could be read with a hearty muscular flourish; it is chaotic only in violating the special design of things that Denham's poetic syntactics have shaped into the world of his poem.

Notes

1. Translation of the Iliad, iii, 169 n.

2. That the poem is to be read in the context of its political circumstances has been recently proposed by Rufus Putney, “The View from Cooper's Hill,” University of Colorado Studies (Studies in Language and Literature, no. 6, 1957), pp. 13-22.

   The differences between the 1642 and 1668 versions are very numerous (a version published in 1655 is approximately that of 1668). See The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore H. Banks (New Haven, 1928). The existence of the two main versions makes the problem of analysis especially complex. On the one hand, if the poem is topical, the 1642 version is more closely related to the situation it deals with; on the other, it is the later version that has been known and that exerted its influence on Pope and others. I have tried to skirt the dilemma by making the later version my basic text and using the earlier version wherever it is especially helpful in clarifying the meaning of the poem.

3. See C. H. McIlwain, The High Court of Parliament (New Haven, 1934), chap. 3. The term “court” was regularly used for “Parliament” in the seventeenth century. James I, for example, defined Parliament as “nothing else but the head Court of the King and his vassals” (Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in Political Works, ed. C. H. McIlwain [Cambridge, Mass., 1918], p. 62).

4. Scutum Regale (1660), p. 231.

5. The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, ed. S. R. Gardiner (Oxford, 1906), pp. 201-202.

6. It is also likely that in comparing Windsor to Atlas (52) Denham had reference to the emblematic tradition reported by Alexander Ross (Mystagogus Poeticus [third ed., 1653], p. 37): “A King is the Atlas of his Commonwealth, both for strength and greatness.”

7. The richest account of the concept is to be found in Leo Spitzer's “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony,” Traditio, 2 (1944), 409-64, 3 (1945), 307-64; a number of Mediaeval and Renaissance presentations of the theme have been collected by Rosamond Tuve, “A Mediaeval Commonplace in Spenser's Cosmology,” SP, 30 (1933), 133-47; and there are helpful references in Maynard Mack's edition of Pope's Essay on Man (Twickenham ed., [1950], iii, i). Professor Mack has been admirably perceptive in recognizing the importance of the idea for Pope. But there is great need of a comprehensive study of the idea in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, since it is one of the great controlling patterns of thought and of literature in this period. Perhaps the fullest application of the doctrine is to be found in the De la Vicissitude ou Variété des Choses en l'Univers (Paris, 1584) of Louis Le Roy, who expresses his central theme in this manner: “En telle manière est la terre, et toute autre chose en l'Univers, tempérée, et conservée par contraires et dissemblances. Ce n'est donc sans cause, que nature appète tant les contraires, faisant d'eux toute décense et beauté, non de semblables” (p. 10). Le Roy's treatise was translated by Robert Ashley as Of the Interchangeable Course or Variety of Things in the Whole World (1594), and part of it was twisted into English verse by John Norden in his Vicissitudo Rerum (1600).

   Among other relevant documents are the commentaries on the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus and on Ecclesiastes (e.g., Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes [1621]); L. Daneau, The Wonderfull Workmanship of the World (1578), chap. 44; Francis Thynne, Emblemes and Epigrames (1600), emblem entitled “Unitinge of Contraries make sound Judgement”; La Primaudaye, The French Academy (1602), pp. 18, 703; Ben Jonson, Hymenaei; Sir William Alexander, The Alexandrean Tragedy, v, i; Shaftesbury, “The Moralists,” in Characteristics, ii, 22.

   Further references will appear in the course of this and the next chapter. While this book was in press Edgar Wind published his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1958), a fascinating study of the iconology of concordia discors and of the ideas behind it. The present chapters are the poorer for my not having had access to Professor Wind's volume earlier.

8. It is also the basic principle of the pseudo-Aristotelian De Mundo and the De Mundo of Apuleius.

9. See, e.g., Pico della Mirandola's commentary on Benivieni's sonnet, in Thomas Stanley, History of Philosophy (1656), part 5, p. 101. For a compilation of early interpretations of the doctrine see Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), where it is a central principle in Cudworth's philosophy.

10. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ix, 7-8 (trans. R. D. Hicks; Loeb Classical Library).

11. The Labyrinth of Mans Life (1614).

12. See also Juan de Solorzano Pereyra, Emblemata regio-politica (Madrid, 1651), emblem 48 (“Casura nisi Invicem Obstarent”), where the doctrine of concordia discors is very extensively applied to the structure and management of the state.

    Edward Forset analyzed political concordia discors by way of analogy with the concord of contrarieties in the microcosm man: “For as in the bodie naturall, if the Wisdome of the Creator had not composed into a concord the contrarieties of the first Elements, it had (as still sticking in the confusion of the first Chaos) never attained the strength, beautie & order, which we now admire: So in the civill bodie, if prudent policie by advised tempering of the disparitie of the people, should not conjoyne them to a well agreeing consent, how could any hope be conceived, but that the difference of poore and rich, vulgar & noble, ignorant and learned, fearfull and valiant, industrious and such as take their ease, must needs by their opposite qualities, not onely deface the dignitie, but also subvert the stabilitie of the state” (A Comparative Discourse of the Bodie Natural and Politique [1606], p. 38).

    See also Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (1606), where it is argued by analogy with cosmic concord and the “well tuned discord” of music that “of the very discord of the magistrates among themselves ariseth an agreeing welfare of all” (p. 498).

13. Complete Works of George Savile, ed. Walter Raleigh (Oxford, 1912), pp. 180, 62.

14. The Speech or Declaration of John Pym (1642).

15. Works (1673), p. 264.

16. Sermons and Discourses (fifth ed., 1740), i, 264-65.

17. As John Norden had written in order to prove that even “The Heavens have their movings contrarie, / But equally disposed, uphold the rest”:

    Milde Venus as a meane, is placed neere
    Unto fell Mars, to counterchecke his ire.

    (Vicissitudo Rerum, stanza 89)

18. As would be expected, the idea of the harmony of discords was everywhere applied to theories of music; see, for example, Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650). For its application to theories of painting, especially with respect to chiaroscuro, see Frederick Hard, “EK's Reference to Painting,” ELH, 7 (1940), 121; and H. V. S. Ogden, “Principles of Variety and Contrast in Seventeenth-Century Aesthetics,” JHI, 10 (1949), 159. But it was understood that beauty in all its forms consists of the harmony of contraries; see, e.g., Pico della Mirandola, Opera (Basle, 1601), ii, 634.

19. Hyginus, vi, 148; Hesiod, Theogony, 937, 975; Lactantius on Statius' Thebaid, i, 288; Lactantius, Divine Institutes, i, xvii; Eustathius on Homer's Iliad, xxi, 416. See further, Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939), pp. 163-64. Alexander Ross (Mystagogus Poeticus) explained that Harmonia was born of Mars and Venus because “the two chief props of a kingdome are Mars and Venus, warre and propagation, and these two live in harmony and order.” In his commentary on Benivieni's sonnet (trans. by Thomas Stanley in his History of Philosophy) Pico supported the claim that beauty is “the union of contraries, a friendly enmity, a disagreeing concord” and “cannot subsist without contrariety” by the myth of Mars and Venus: “she curbs and moderates him, this temperament allaies the strife betwixt these contraries. And in Astrologie, Venus is plac'd next Mars, to check his destructive influence” (i, v).

20. In Plutarchi Opera, ed. Dübner (Paris, 1876), v, 127.

21. Rambler 167. Cp. Dryden, “To the Duchess on her Return from Scotland,” 44: “Discord, that makes the harmony of hearts.”

22. The miraculous paradox that the king joins the contraries, severity and kindness, or majesty and love, derives from the fact that he is viceroy to God, who unites His justice and mercy. Compare Jonson's praise of James I: “The contraries which time till now / Nor fate knew where to join, or how, / Are Majesty and Love” (Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly).

    In the 1642 version the Queen is also described in paradoxically antithetical terms to reveal that she also is a perfect harmony: in her pregnancy—that is, in her perfection as woman—she is “proud, yet seems to make that pride her shame,” and the poet, following the convention of comparing the lady's beauties with features of the landscape, compares her womb to the gentle height of Windsor Hill, just as he had compared the King's countenance to it.

23. The 1642 version comes closer to the traditional concept of man as a compound of heaven and earth: Charles has “That fortitude which made him [St. George] famous here, / That heavenly piety, which Saints him there.”

24. Resolve 41.

25. Cp. Norden, Vicissitudo Rerum:

    The Starres that wander, and that fix'd remaine,
    Do cause in ayre great changes, Cold and Heate,
    Windes, Thunder, Tempests, and great gusts of Raine,
    And their Aspects and Oppositions met,
              Some strange presages of Euents beget,
                        Of Warre, of Death, of Famine, Drought, and Pest,
                        Yet nought befalles, but by supernall hest.

26. Clearly, Denham is alluding to the popular proverb that described the endlessly circular mutability created by excess: “Warre bringeth ruine, ruine bringeth povertie, povertie procureth peace, and peace in time increaseth riches, riches causeth stateliness, stateliness increaseth envie, envie in the end procureth deadly mallice, mortall mallice proclaimeth open warre and battaile” (Thomas Fenne, Fennes Frutes [1590], quoted by Paul A. Jorgensen, “Views of War in Elizabethan England,” JHI, 12 [1952], 478). For an extensive history of the proverb, see Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. Guthkelch and Smith, pp. 217-18 n.

27. Cynthias Revels, V, v, 9-14.

28. In the earlier version Henry's violation of concordia discors was somewhat more vividly expressed. According to a long tradition of statesmanship, princes should reconcile in themselves the rival pursuits of arms and letters, and the prince's union of sword and pen was a persistent theme in the emblem books (see R. J. Clements, “Pen and Sword in Renaissance Emblem Literature,” MLQ, 5 [1944], 131-41; and “Princes and Literature,” MLQ, 16 [1955], 114-23). In translating Henry's actions into this theme, Denham underscored the mere antagonism of these two pursuits in Henry and hence his failure to bring them into a necessary harmony:

    While for the church his learned pen disputes,
    His much more learned sword his pen confutes.

    In the later version Denham sacrificed the irony of this violation of concordia discors for a pun on the word “stiles” (132).

29. In his sceptical Progress of Learning Denham again traced the leap of religious knowledge from the extreme of lethargy to excessive and therefore self-destructive learning (“'Twas no false Heraldry, when madness drew / Her pedigree from those, who too much knew”).

30. Certainly Charles Montague read the famous lines as expressive of a political doctrine, for he borrowed from them in his poem “On the Death of … Charles II,” calling the Thames the “pleasing emblem” of Charles's reign because its channel is “strong and easy, deep and clear” and because that river caused no “arbitrary inundations.”

31. In the 1642 version Denham clearly directed his attack equally against both populace and the political leaders, since it is obvious throughout the poem that he felt both groups were running not “to the same Center” but “to the same extreams.” Therefore he not only accused the river-populace of being “self-enamour'd” but also attacked the tyranny of the nobles:

    And as our surly supercilious Lords,
    Bigge in their frownes, and haughty in their words,
    Looke downe on those, whose humble fruitfull paine
    Their proud, and barren greatnesse must susteine:
    So lookes the Hill upon the streame. …

    Like many others at the moment, Waller also was inclined to attach blame to the King's ministers and courtiers, rather than to the King (see his speech to the House of Commons, 22 April 1640). See also, below, the discussion of Denham's treatment of Strafford.

32. For Denham's comparison elsewhere of the fallen leader and the slain stag, see his lines on the execution of Charles in his “Elegie upon the Death of the Lord Hastings”: “But as the Leader of the Herd fell first, / A Sacrifice to quench the raging thirst / Of inflam'd Vengeance for past Crimes: so none / But this white fatted Youngling could atone …” (27-30).

33. Cp. lines 259-64 of the 1668 version.

34. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1640-41, pp. 542-43.

35. See, e.g., Henry Ferne, The Resolving of Conscience (1642) and his Reply to Several Treatises, about Subjects Taking up Arms Against the King, in Pretended Defence of Religion and Liberty (1643); Dudley Digges, The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects Taking up Arms against their Soveraigne in any Case soever (1643).

36. The 1642 version ends rather lamely but with perfectly clear indication of Denham's rhetorical purpose:

    Therefore their boundlesse power tell Princes draw
    Within the Channell, and the shores of Law,
    And may that Law, which teaches Kings to sway
    Their Scepters, teach their Subjects to obey.

37. See, e.g., the dedicatory poem in Argumentum Anti-Normannicum (1682) and Dryden, “To my Honor'd Kinsman, John Driden,” 171-79. In Latin literature the overflowing of a river was often the portent of civil disorders; for example, Horace, Odes, i, ii, and Virgil, Georgics, i, 481-83. Cp. Bacon, “Of Vicissitude”: “… when a state grows to an over-power, it is like a great flood, that will be sure to overflow.”

38. Dr. Johnson was also to use the river as a symbol of concordia discors (Rambler 167).

39. Cp. also: “Till Kings by giving, / / give themselves away, And even that power, / / that should deny, / / betray.” (339-40)