[In the following essay, Rower explains that, while Prior's early poems are typical of the Restoration, his later lyrics addressed to Cloe feature an enlarged context in which he achieves previously unattained levels of characterization and realism.]

There is no love poetry of the English Augustan Age quite like Matthew Prior's. With the possible exception of Swift, whose Cadenus and Vanessa and birthday poems to Stella¹ are not totally unlike Prior's love poems in their subtle delineations of a relationship between a man and a woman, Prior alone, of all his contemporaries, went beyond the trivial limits established for the genre of amorous lyric in the Restoration. Perhaps the only other nondramatic writing of the earlier part of the eighteenth century that gives a comparable sense of realistic relationships between emotionally involved people may be found, not in imaginative literature at all, but in such private correspondence as, for example, Swift's Journal to Stella,² Richard Steele's hurried notes to "Dear Prue,"³ or Prior's own letters to Elizabeth Singer.⁴ For the special quality of Prior's mature love poetry is that, in spite of its nymphs and shepherds, Cupids and lyres, it suggests the complex interaction characteristic of human beings conducting their affairs in the real world.

Prior's earliest love poems belong to that slightest of genres, the Restoration love lyric. The writers of Restoration lyrics restricted themselves to materials, topics, and styles that were remarkably uniform and superficial. The action of their poems is commonly set in a vague Arcadian landscape, where lovers participate in the traditional stage business of the literary pastoral: tending (or more often neglecting) sheep, plucking lyres, gathering nosegays, and reclining under trees. The themes are the timeless, commonplace ones of nonplatonic love: carpe diem, absent love, constant and inconstant love, love requited and unrequited. Under the conventional, even obligatory, aegis of Cupid and Venus, swains and shepherdesses meet, attempt conquests, vow, quarrel, part, praise, complain, and often, die. Prior's early lyrics capture very well indeed the fluent elegance of the Restoration mode, but they are virtually indistinguishable from scores of poems by such authors as Dryden, Dorset, Etherege, Congreve, and Rochester, to name only some of them.⁵

Sometime after 1703, however, Prior replaced the Celias, Morellas, Delias, Phillises, Leonoras, and Dorindas, and all the other undifferentiated nymphs to whom he addressed his early love songs, with one charming girl named Cloe. Cloe became the sole literary mistress of the rest of his career, the subject and recipient of more than a score of poems written over the next fifteen years. With her permanent installation profound changes take place in Prior's love poems. Because the thematic stress of the Restoration love song focuses on the rhetorical skills of the "singer," its swains and shepherdesses require virtually no characterization at all. In a lament, the lover must only be melodiously heartbroken, the nymph only beautiful and obdurate. In one of the very best of Prior's early poems, "While Blooming Youth," the speaker is simply eager and tender, his girl merely "Celia" and reluctant.⁶ The characters are interchangeable with all the others in conventional seduction poems. But as the same lover continues to celebrate the same nymph in Prior's later songs, both become more individualized. The poems to Cloe, although ostensibly concerned with much the same topics as those of the tradition from which they develop, come to focus on the personalities of the particular couple whose relationship they describe. Through this change of focus, Cloe and her lover become deeply characterized, and the poems themselves embrace a range of themes and attitudes quite beyond the scope of the Restoration lyric. The Cloe poems employ the whole spectrum of Restoration materials and styles: the song stanzas, the themes and conventions, the artificial diction, the pastoral and mythological machinery; they have the same urbane, casual air, the same offhand tone that never insists on itself. But while the Restoration lyric is quite literally and completely defined by these elements (the lovers in a Restoration song are, in effect, on the inside and can see no farther than the edge of their limited Arcadian landscape), the Cloe poems include the same elements within a larger context. Cloe and her lover play in pastoral settings, but they know that their real lives lie outside it. The result is that the Cloe poems achieve and utilize a realism that the Restoration lyric never attained.

Although the Cloe poems taken all together make up a single informal sequence, they fall into two distinct groups. The earlier group, published in 1709 in Prior's first collection of Poems on Several Occasions, includes "An Ode" ("The Merchant, to secure …"), "To Cloe Weeping," "To Mr. Howard," the prologue to "Henry and Emma," and the first five of seven poems concerning Cloe's relationship with Cupid and Venus. The later group, collected with the earlier in the second Poems on Several Occasions (1718), contains two more Cupid and Cloe poems, "A Lover's Anger," and a set of eight poems that tell the story of Cloe's jealousy of a younger rival. In the earlier poems Cloe's primary role is the traditional one of the lady who is celebrated; she exists to be addressed by the speaker whose poems, much like those of Sidney's Astrophel, express his personality, his sensibilities and attitudes. These earlier poems are songs of courtship in which the poet says those timeless, conventional things designed to capture a woman's heart: that she is divinely beautiful; that, of course, he loves her dearly, that she is the whole inspiration of his art; that she exerts tremendous power, not only over the hearts of men, but over nature itself, for when she weeps, the world weeps in sympathy (I. 270-71). In short, Cloe is a poet's mistress par excellence. She gets no chance to reply to her lover's praises, but her acceptance of all the conventions is implied in the poet's freedom to pile hyperbole upon outrageous hyperbole. The whole sequence of Cloe poems concerns itself constantly with the ambiguity of the division between the natural and the artificial; and since it is a real ambiguity, a real confusion, for the lover as well as for his nymph, it never does get resolved.

The first Cloe poem, "The Merchant to Secure," is directly concerned with this problem of distinguishing nature and art. It opens with an explanation of the lover's employment of the traditional device of safeguarding the identity of the beloved lady by pretending to woo a different woman:

The Merchant, to secure his Treasure,
Conveys it in a borrow'd Name:
EUPHELIA serves to grace my Measure;
But CLOE is my real Flame.
[I. 259. 1-4]

The speaker really loves Cloe, but he has borrowed Euphelia so that no one will know—Euphelia is a softer, more "poetic" name anyway, one that better graces at least an iambic measure. There seems to be no problem here; the speaker is giving away a trade secret, and, in fact, is betraying Cloe, but his account is quite straightforward.

But in describing an occasion on which he has followed this practice, he reveals his own difficulty with the device. He, Cloe, and Euphelia had all obviously been seated in Euphelia's closet:

My softest Verse, my darling Lyre
Upon EUPHELIA'S Toylet lay;
When CLOE noted her Desire,
That I should sing, that I should play.

My Lyre I tune, my Voice I raise;
But with my Numbers mix my Sighs:
And whilst I sing EUPHELIA'S Praise,
I fix my Soul on CLOE'S Eyes.

Fair CLOE blush'd: EUPHELIA frown'd:
I sung and gaz'd: I play'd and trembl'd:
And VENUS to the LOVES around
Remark'd, how ill We all dissembl'd.
[11. 5-16]

On the one hand, the poem celebrates the triumph of real emotion over artificiality. Not all the stage properties of theconvention, the pastoral names, the classical instrument, the conventional deities (painted on the walls and ceiling, perhaps)⁷ can keep out real passion. If it is conventional enough to sigh while singing—and it is certainly artificial literally to sing—neither Cloe nor Euphelia should want to be seen blushing or frowning under the circumstances. But they cannot help themselves, any more than the speaker can keep from trembling: true emotion will reveal itself. The player cannot remain uninvolved in the game that he arranges, and as soon as he is involved, it is not really a game any longer.

At the same time, however, the speaker has demonstrated his nonchalant skill in manipulating the conventions of situation, character, and amorous accessories. He has used all the ingredients in the mixture but has subversively declined to follow the directions on the label. He establishes the artificiality of the mode at the very beginning, and when he seems to be most powerless to prevent life from dominating art, he employs as the spokeswoman of reality as artificial a creation as the tradition owns. He makes the real work against the artificial in such a way as to confound the distinction between truth and fiction, sincerity and dissembling. By the end, there is theoretically no way of telling what is art and what nature at all.

The problem of distinguishing the real from the artificial moves into the background in the series of poems in which the lover does not appear in the action, and Cloe is the companion of Cupid. Uninvolved himself, the lover is able to retain better control over the fiction. The topic of all but one of the Cupid and Cloe poems⁸ is the whimsical apotheosis of Cloe. In plot each is a little joke constructed for one of two endings: either that Cloe's eyes are more potent than Cupid's darts, or that her beauty makes her indistinguishable from Venus. In "Love Disarm'd" (I. 271-72) Cupid is trapped in the "Heav'n" of Cloe's breast and is forced to give up his arrows. He becomes a harmless pet (like Lesbia's sparrow) while Cloe "gives Grief, or Pleasure; spares, or kills" (1. 50) in his place. Even though Cupid, in "Cupid and Ganymede" (I. 272-74), loses all his darts at dice, he knows that the supply is easily replenished with "keener Shafts from CLOE'S Eye" (1. 71). In "Mercury and Cupid" (I. 442-43), when Mercury delivers Jove's command that Cupid surrender his quiver, he is frightened away by Cupid's threat to shoot Jove with a bolt from Cloe's eye. In "Cupid Mistaken" (I. 276-77), Cupid shoots his own mother thinking she is Cloe, while Venus, in "Venus Mistaken" (I. 277), believes a portrait of Cloe to be of herself. Cloe's divine beauty confuses Apollo too. In "Cloe Hunting" (I. 278) he thinks that the nymph is his sister, the virgin goddess Cynthia.

Obviously, the poet could hardly have chosen more conventional material for these poems. The deification of the mistress, the wounding shafts from her eyes, the ubiquitous Cupid and Venus, had all been commonplaces long before Prior's time. It is no wonder that Samuel Johnson, feeling justifiably that the machinery of classical mythology and the conventions of amorous praise were all worn out, and failing to discern the particular uses to which Prior adapted these cliches, thought the poems despicable, dictated neither by nature or by passion, lacking gallantry and tenderness.⁹

Such charges, however, are irrelevant to the poems, which transcend the banality of their elements by focusing on the delicate whimsy of their setting and on the game Cloe is made to play in it. The poems celebrate the activities of Cloe's private life, the one she leads apart from her mortal, ironic lover whose presence would shatter the small, delicate universe that he has created for her. She is depicted as a powerful deity from a summery, erotic world. As Cupid tells Apollo in "Cloe Hunting":

… in This Nymph, My Friend, My Sister know:
She draws My Arrows, and She bends My Bow:
Fair THAMES She Haunts, and ev'ry neighb'ring Grove
Sacred to soft Recess, and gentle Love.
[11. 13-16]

To assign such a role to Cloe is literally to flatter her extravagantly and conventionally. In context, however, the poems turn out to be elaborate tongue-in-cheek teasings of the nymph. Her companions are much diminished. Cupid is a captivating urchin with no more sense of responsibility than a puppy; Venus has consummate beauty but absolutely no dignity at all. The variety of love belonging to such deities is treated as something only comic and sensual, and the world of such love is shown to be charming, decorative, and tiny. This world is located in that no-place that is the traditional setting for love poetry in the Augustan age. And unlike so much love poetry of any age, where the passage of time is brandished like a whip, time has no function in the earlier Cloe poems either. The implication there is that the poet cares, however ironically, only about courting his mistress; it would not matter if the courtship lasted forever. However much she is teased in them, the earlier poems protect Cloe by giving her a world in which no one is more important than she and in which she is immortal.

The later Cloe poems, those written between 1709 and 1718, continue Prior's comedy of the ingenuous nymph and her worldly lover and his satire on the amorous pastoral, but they do so with substantially greater power than the earlier ones. Through three intimately related shifts, in time scale, setting, and mode of action, thelate poems are able to express wider range of emotional nuance, with greater verisimilitude of tone and subtler implications of theme than had the earlier poems. In the late poems, the presence of the amorous pastoral becomes incidental. Its materials are used, but they are much less the focal point. The pastoral love poem is present in the late Cloe poems because it is on the minds of the characters who inhabit the poems: a lover who happens to be an ironist and a poet, and his mistress, who happens to have conventional notions about how a love affair should work. The subject of the late poems is the relationship between the two protagonists.

The late poems, moreover, are firmly located in a world of time and space. In them, the lover is still pretending to court Cloe, but the courtship becomes one that is appropriate to an established, in fact, rather cozily settled, love affair, rather than to the pursuit of a still unyielding lady. The couple are past the stage of wooing, the stage at which the Restoration lyric, as well as most love poetry, always remains. The later Cloe and her lover are quite aware of the passing of time, not only of the progress of their lifetimes but of the time that slips by as afternoons are dawdled away while the world goes about its business. And even where their scenery is most pastoral, the late Cloe poems always make explicit the connection to the realistic, everyday world of streets and houses and rooms. The very settings of the late poems call the pastoral ideal into question.

The themes of the later Cloe poems are organized around a series of conflicts between the artificial world of amorous tradition, for which Cloe is the innocent advocate, and the real world of time, which her lover constantly invokes. It is a conflict, as the lover says, "betwixt Nature and Art," ("A Better Answer," I. 451. 1. 14) but also between fidelity and fickleness, beauty and decay, security and desertion, youth and age. Cloe longs for the artificial, since only within its orientation does she feel secure and valuable. She always argues from its viewpoint. Her lover, on the other hand, insists that she acknowledge the world of time. He says not that time will pass, the traditional threat of the carpe diem poet, but that quite a lot has passed already, that her youth and beauty—and consequently her powers over him—are threatened by decay. The threat of the loss of youth and the power to please and command, of mortality itself, is handled lightly; and at the end of the sequence, the lover takes pains to assure his mistress that it was all a literary joke, that in reality he loves her faithfully. But his evocation of mortality is strong, and its claim for attention gives the late Cloe poems overtones of sadness. They continuously explore the delicate, tantalizing relationship between the controllable realm of fiction and the world of ordinary mortal existence, which is subject to no one's ideal impositions. In this set of tensions, between tenderness and cruelty, between thesubversively ironic expressed in the same gesture as the benevolently affirming, between the artificial and the real, the love poems of Prior's mature years acquire their particular, inimitable strength and charm.

The general situation of the late Cloe poems is one in which the lover speaks through the mask of a conventional poet-swain who, in turn, sings the praises of an ideal pastoral mistress named Cloe. The "real" Cloe associates herself with the pastoral Cloe; and the sequence of poems explores the possibilities of the disparity between the impossible fictitious shepherdess and the real girl who thinks that her lover and the swain are one.

Cloe's allegiance to the pastoral mode and the nature of her lover's allegiance to her are the subjects of the first two poems, "A Lover's Anger" (I. 441) and "On Beauty. A Riddle" (I. 444-45). "A Lover's Anger" starts out as a nonpastoral account of an incident that occurred one day when the poet's mistress had kept him waiting for two hours:

As CLOE came into the Room t'other Day,
I peevish began; Where so long cou'd You stay?
In your Life-time You never regarded your Hour:
You promis'd at Two; and (pray look Child) 'tis Four.
A Lady's Watch needs neither Figures nor Wheels:
'Tis enough, that 'tis loaded with Baubles and Seals.
A Temper so heedless no Mortal can bear—
Thus far I went on with a resolute Air.
[11. 1-8]

This is not, of course, the pastoral swain who is speaking; such a setting and action belong to the mundane world. The couple meet in a room on a specific occasion, "t'other Day" at four o'clock, rather than in a glade at some undeterminable time. Peevishness is not an acceptable emotion in a swain, and the anapaestic couplet is perhaps the least suitable in the world for a shepherd's complaint. The speaker's stance, in short, is completely unpastoral. One does not assail a shepherdess, as he does Cloe, for lacking an adult's sense of responsibility. It annoys him that women wear watches, the symbol of a world where appointments are important, merely as an item of feminine adornment. But just as he is working up to a good general indictment of her character ("a Temper so heedless …"), Cloe self-righteously cuts him off:

Lord bless Me! said She; let a Body but speak:
Here's an ugly hard Rose-Bud fall'n into my Neck:.
It has hurt Me, and vext Me to such a Degree—
See here; for You never believe Me; pray see,
On the left Side my Breast what a Mark it has made.
So saying, her Bosom She careless display'd.
That Seat of Delight I with Wonder survey'd;
And forgot ev'ry Word I design'd to have said.
[11. 9-16]

Cloe inhabits two worlds simultaneously in "A Lover's Anger." Her diction is homely and unliterary, but her excuse is absolutely pastoral: she gives an explanation that is appropriate to one mode of existence in another, apparently inappropriate, one. Only in an Arcadian world, where the time of day is rarely an issue (but where one would not wear a watch decorated with seals), can nymphs be injured by falling rosebuds. At the same time, there is a witty, ambiguous hint of female tactics, appropriate to both worlds, in Cloe's "careless" (1. 14) displaying of her breasts. The lover's attitude toward Cloe and the situation is quite complex. He speaks peevishly at first (1. 2), but in chiding her with only an "Air" of resolution (1. 8), he suggests that he was not really angry. He forgets what he had intended to say primarily because of her sexual attractiveness; yet her pastoral masquerade is obviously an equal source of delight to him. Cloe makes the pastoral world accessible to the lover, and as a couple, they make the two worlds almost completely dissolve into one.

The implicit lovers' game played in "A Lover's Anger" gives way in the next poem to an explicit one. In "On Beauty" the lover sets Cloe a riddle which she must answer or "forfeit … One precious Kiss." Cloe has no trouble guessing the answer, for the lover gives her with whimsical thoroughness almost a score of easy clues.

Beauty is

… the first Off-spring of the Graces;
Bears diff rent Forms in diff rent Places;
Acknowledg'd fine, where-e'er beheld;
Yet fancy'd finer, when conceal'd.
'Twas FLORA'S Wealth, and CIRCE'S Charm;
PANDORA'S BOX of Good and Harm:
'Twas MAR'S Wish, ENDYMION'S Dream;
APPELLES' Draught, and OVID'S Theme.
[11. 3-10]

The speaker alludes to the amorous involvements of Theseus, Paris, Jason, Mark Antony, Tarquin, Alexander, Hercules, and Apollo, ending his list with three instances of Jove's infatuation with mortal women (11. 11-34).

When, at this point, Cloe smiles and says that the answer is easy to guess, her lover goes on to apply the lesson to himself. For this same beauty, he says,

…I leave,
Whate'er the World thinks Wise or Grave,
Ambition, Business, Friendship, News,
My useful Books, and serious Muse.
For THIS I willingly decline
The Mirth of Feasts, and Joys of Wine;
And chuse to sit and talk with Thee,
(As Thy great Orders may decree)
Of Cocks and Bulls, of Flutes and Fiddles,
Of Idle Tales, and foolish Riddles.
[11. 39-48]

"On Beauty" is, of course, partly a gallant compliment to Cloe: she is as beautiful, implies her lover, as the famous temptresses of classical history and myth. But for the first time, the lover also unequivocally states what his other poems imply: that in terms of this world, paying homage to Cloe is an act of trifling, of amusement. His attentions to Cloe, in person and in verse, are distractions from his role as man of the world and serious poet. He is very willing to trifle and is totally charmed with her. Nonetheless, his devotion to her is thoroughly self-conscious.

"On Beauty" is the first poem in a sequence of eight concerning Cloe's distress over the literary treatment that she receives in her lover's verse. After "On Beauty" come four poems (I. 445-48) that make Cloe fear that the poet has become interested in another woman because he thinks that Cloe is aging. The poet praises Cloe in "The Question, to Lisetta," but in the next poem, "Lisetta's Reply," Lisetta claims that the poet's homage to Cloe unsuccessfully disguises his real interest in herself. In "The Garland" Cloe is depicted as tearfully discovering that beauty and life are transitory things; in "The Lady who offers her Looking-Glass to Venus" an unnamed woman admits that her beauty has faded. In the sixth poem, "Cloe Jealous" (I. 448-49), Cloe who hasread all five and thinks that they indicate the true state of her lover's feelings toward her, comments on the situation. In the last two poems of the sequence, "Anwer to Cloe Jealous" and "A Better Answer" (I. 450-51), the poet replies to Cloe's complaint.

In "On Beauty" Cloe and her poet-lover remain firmly located in the real world, but beginning with "The Question, to Lisetta," the lover joins the nymph in the vales of Arcady, only to threaten her with a rival. "The Question, to Lisetta" and "Lisetta's Reply" make up the two halves of a pastoral dialogue. A swain addresses to Lisetta a series of rhetorical questions about his good fortune in possessing Cloe, who is beautiful, just, attentive, appreciative of his poetic skills, sympathetic, and grateful, and very possibly not very much like the "real" Cloe, the Cloe who speaks in "Cloe Jealous," at all. In the last two lines of the poem, the swain summarizes and pauses for a reply:

In Love am I not fully blest?
LISETTA, pr'ythee tell the rest.
[11. 12-13]

Lisetta's answer is rather surprising. Cloe may love the swain perfectly, she replies, but his song to her is false; his actions show that Lisetta is, in fact, the one for whom he yearns:

… When You and She to Day
Far into the Wood did stray,
And I happen'd to pass by;
Which way did You cast your Eye?
But when your Cares to Her You sing,
Yet dare not tell Her whence they spring;
Does it not more afflict your Heart,
That in those Cares She bears a Part?
When you the Flow'rs for CLOE twine,
Why do You to Her Garland join
The meanest Bud that falls from Mine?
[11. 3-13]

Lisetta cruelly implies that Cloe is now, in effect, the "Euphelia" of the very first Cloe poem, "The Merchant to Secure"; that is, the poet now sings Cloe's praise, but fixes his thoughts on Lisetta. "Simplest of Swains!" she concludes,

            the World may see,
Whom CLOE loves, and Who loves Me.
[II. 14-15]

As will be seen, Cloe herself takes the obvious hint from the Lisetta poems and combines it with what she thinks the next poems imply. In "The Garland," the swain and Cloe play at poetic philosophizing. He gives her, one morning, a garland made of the loveliest flowers that grow in literary landscapes:

The Pride of ev'ry Grove I chose,
The Violet sweet, and Lilly fair,
The dappl'd Pink, and blushing Rose,
To deck my charming CLOE'S Hair.
[Il. 1-4]

Cloe wears the wreath on her brow all through the day, gracing it so sweetly that "ev'ry Nymph and Shepherd" are moved to say that the flowers look more beautiful in her hair than "glowing in their Native Bed" (11. 9-12). By nightfall, however, the blossoms have withered, and Cloe weeps to discover this. Her swain knows very well what is troubling her, but dissembling his knowledge, he asks her the reason for her tears. With a sigh and a smile, the "lovely Moralist" points to the garland:

See! Friend, in some few fleeting Hours,
See yonder, what a Change is made.
[11. 27-28]

Then, in faultless quatrains, she mournfully speaks with epigrammatic preciseness:

Ah Me! the blooming Pride of MAY,
And That of Beauty are but One:
At Mom Both flourish bright and gay,
Both fade at Evening, pale, and gone.

At Dawn poor STELLA danc'd and sung;
The am'rous Youth around Her bow'd:
At Night her fatal Knell was rung;
I saw, and kiss'd Her in her Shrowd.

Such as She is, who dy'd to Day;
Such I, alas! may be to Morrow:
Go, DAMON, bid Thy Muse display
The Justice of thy CLOE'S Sorrow.
[11. 29-40]

"The Lady who offers her Looking-Glass to Venus" is a woman's farewell to youth, a final prayer to the goddess she has served as priestess. It is only a quatrain in length:

VENUS, take my Votive Glass:
Since I am not what I was;
What from this Day I shall be,
VENUS, let Me never see.

The lady cannot serve Venus any longer because the image of the goddess that she has worshipped—the reflection of her own face in her mirror—has decayed; she is no longer fit for the rites of love. Her looking-glass is a poignant offering. She would rather not see herself once youth and beauty have fled.

There is obviously no consistency of characterization throughout these first five poems. The shepherd named "Damon" in "The Garland" feels very differently about his mistress than does the swain who is perhaps secretly in love with Lisetta. The "Cloe" who guesses the riddle is not necessarily the same as the "Cloe" who has a rival, or the one who sees the garland as an emblem. However, in "Cloe Jealous" the nymph shows that she has assumed that all the Cloes, as well as the woman who gives up her looking glass, are intended to refer to her. The poem opens with Cloe in tears, and sulkily refusing to tell her lover what has caused them:

i

Forbear to ask Me, why I weep;
Vext CLOE to her Shepherd said:
Tis for my Two poor stragling Sheep
Perhaps, or for my Squirrel dead.
[11. 1-4]

But immediately, in a long, distressed apophasis, she reveals everything:

ii

For mind I what You late have writ?
Your subtle Questions, and Replies;
Emblems, to teach a Female Wit
The Ways, where changing CUPID flies.

iii

Your Riddle, purpos'd to rehearse
The general Pow'r that Beauty has:
But why did no peculiar Verse
Describe one Charm of CLOE'S Face?

iv

The Glass, which was at VENUS' Shrine,
With such Mysterious Sorrow laid:
The Garland (and You call it Mine)
Which show'd how Youth and Beauty fade.

Cloe is not, of course, unjustified in assuming that she is the woman portrayed in the first five poems. In her fear, she assembles the inferences into a threatening syllogism: the poet has loved her because of her beauty; her beauty has faded with the passing of time; therefore the poet now loves someone else. Her vulnerability is reflected by the turbulent mixture of emotions with which she reacts to this deduction: bruised pride, fear, chagrin, a sense of outraged rectitude. Her pride would prompt her to remain silent or to pretend indifference, but she cannot resist enumerating every item in her bill of grievances, to make the extent of her heartsickness absolutely clear to her lover, in order to excite in him as much solicitude or remorse as possible.

In other words, jealousy is quite explicitly not the sole basis of Cloe's distress in "Cloe Jealous." The poem records the nymph's response to the intrusion of the real world onto her consciousness. Time and age are making themselves known in the pastoral world of truth and love that her lover's "dubious Verse" had commemorated and sustained. Her complaint challenges what is in effect the irrelevance in real life of the idea that she will outlive time through her lover's poetry; what he will learn from her tombstone is that her death will have refuted his whole poetic universe. Two realities are in conflict. For Cloe, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" no longer; she is unwilling to continue to suspend disbelief.

Although the poet does not cease teasing Cloe in his two answers to her, both poems show that he is deeply disturbed by her repudiation of the fictional world that he had created. In "Answer to Cloe Jealous, in the same Stile. The Author sick" he addresses her in the pose of a dying swain:

III

From Jealousy's tormenting Strife
For ever by Thy Bosom free'd:
That nothing may disturb Thy Life,
Content I hasten to the Dead.

IV

Yet when some better-fated Youth
Shall with his am'rous Parly move Thee;
Reflect One Moment on His Truth,
Who dying Thus, persists to love Thee.

The subtitle shows what his gambit is. He answers Cloe "in the same Stile" as her complaint, but while affirming that he loves her, he refuses to consider the issue of her decay. Instead, he invents his own decay and insists that all her disquiet comes from jealousy, a pretense that ignores, of course, much of the substance of Cloe's reaction in the preceding poem.

Likewise, in "A Better Answer" the poet continues to beg the question even while pretending to take it up:

I

Dear Cloe, how blubber'd is that pretty Face?
Thy Cheek all on Fire, and Thy Hair all uncurl'd:
Pr'ythee quit this Caprice; and (as Old FALSTAF says)
Let us e'en talk a little like Folks of This World.

VI

So when I am weary'd with wand'ring all Day;
To Thee my Delight in the Evening I come:
No Matther what Beauties I saw in my Way:
They were but my Visits; but Thou art my Home.

VII

Then finish, Dear CLOE, this Pastoral War;
And let us like HORACE and LYDIA agree:
For Thou art a Girl as much brighter than Her,
As He was a Poet sublimer than Me.

This is a better answer in that it seeks to reestablish the poetic world that Cloe had felt was so threatened. The poet attempts to do so by gently chiding her naivete, by suggesting that they talk in adult, realistic terms, "like Folks of This World," about the problems that she has raised, but by converting her real questions into something more controllable. The "prosy" anapaestic meter, colloquial diction, and half-bullying downrightness of "A Better Answer" are part of the speaker's attempt to restore himself and Cloe to the secure domestic world from which they started. By his insisting that the game is over, and by acknowledging that he has been speaking fiction all along but is telling the truth now, the poet claims a final repudiation of the pretending and masquerading of love poetry, of the artifice that has miscarried.

But, of course, there can be no relinquishing of art. Although "A Better Answer" does not sound very much like a conventional love poem (even though it is very loving), it is still a poemw—a work of artifice. In "The Merchant, to Secure," the lyre-strumming lover could not keep real love outside his self-conscious affangement of amorous conventions. Now, in the very last of the Cloe poems, the lover has no way of avoiding art even as he pretends to use none. He explains the very distinction between nature and art through an extended simile that uses the god of poets, Apollo himself. And while the poem presumably serves to dry Cloe's tears, its very bluffness reassuring her that the "Pastoral War" is over, the poet has not ceased to play games with her. The reference to Horace and Lydia in the last stanza alludes to Horace's "reconciliation ode" (Odes, III. 9), in which the Roman poet demonstrates that the disenchanted Lydia's objections to reunion are no more than defensive talk. Lydia declares herself gladly and unconditionally willing to redevote herself to the poet provided only that he offers to take her back. Unless Cloe knew her Horace, which does not seem very likely, she would not have discovered in this last, affectionate compliment to her that though she may have forced him to change his rhetorical stance, her lover's heart and sense of whimsy were practically the same.

The Cloe poems are impressive examples of Prior's talent for depicting with warmth and understanding the intimate, somewhat childish, but central concers of ordinary people. If passion is a praiseworthy element of love poetry, in none of his love poems does Prior depict strong passion. Yet, as Maynard Mack has pointed out, none of the elaborate fooling of the Cloe poems quite obscures an affection that is "as clear-sighted as it is deeply human."¹⁰ But even beyond this, they place over against the ideals through which life expresses some of its hopes for itself—ideals of pastoral innocence and true love—the emotional subterfuges and rationalizations through which people try to reconcile themselves to their sense of their own finiteness and impotence.

Notes

¹The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), II, 686-714, 720ff. "Cadenus and Vanessa" (1713) may be indebted to Prior's "Cupid and Cloe" poems for its handling of mythological characters.

² Ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948).

³The Correspondence of Richard Steele, ed. Rae Blanchard (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 189ff.

⁴ For substantial extracts from the letters see H. Bunker Wright, "Matthew Prior and Elizabeth Singer," Philological Quarterly, 24 (1945), 71-82.

⁵ There is, unfortunately, no space in this study to characterize in detail either the Restoration amorous lyric or Prior's contributions to it. Good selections of lyrics may be found in Restoration Verse, ed. William Kerr (London: Macmillan, 1930) and in the more recent Penguin Book of Restoration Verse, ed. Harold Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Informative accounts of many of the features of the Restoration lyric are contained in the introduction to the latter volume and in John Harold Wilson, The Court Wits of the Restoration (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 85-108. For Prior's own work in the genre see H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, eds., The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), I, 104-106, 110-12, 183, 196, 197-99, 700-15. (For the dating of this last group of lyrics, see Commentary on "Stephonnetta Why," [Works, II, 1034].)

⁶Works, I, 119-42. Quotes are from 2nd ed. 1971 Oxford Univ. Press.

⁷ As suggested by Mark Van Doren, Introduction to Poetry (New York: The Dryden Press, 1951), pp. 17-18.

⁸ "The Dove" (1717), Works, I, 432-37. In this poem, which marks the transition between the earlier and later Cloe poems, Cloe is the victim of Cupid's mischievousness, and the action is set in London, although a highly stylized one.

⁹Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), II, 202.

¹⁰ "Matthew Prior: et Multa Prior Arte …," Sewanee Review, 68(1960), 171.