[In this essay, White argues that Southwell's poetry develops feeling through reiteration and that his techniques are more in line with Baroque than Metaphysical style.]

One of the liveliest of the continuing discussions of seventeenth-century poetry concerns the nature of the Baroque. In a certain sense this discussion may even be said to have taken the place of the earlier discussion of the metaphysical. That there is a connection between the Baroque and the metaphysical, most critics would agree. But, in general, it may be said that we are more apt to think of the Baroque in terms of Continental literature and of the metaphysical in terms of English literature. And yet there unquestionably is a good deal of overlapping between the two styles, and students of the Baroque are rather likely to discover with M. M. Mahood a good deal of the Baroque in what we usually call the metaphysical,¹ and students of the metaphysical, like Frank J. Warnke, a good deal of the metaphysical in the Baroque.² It is this uncertainty, not only of terms descriptive of the core, but also of any verbal effort to come to grips with the receding shades of the periphery, that makes the discrimination so puzzling, particularly in the case of English writers.

Ever since Pierre Janelle published his study of Southwell as a writer in 1935, Robert Southwell has been recognized as a pioneer Baroque figure among the poets and prose writers of the late sixteenth century and a source of Baroque influence on the early seventeenth century. This is a quite reasonable emphasis because Southwell, more perhaps than any notable English poet of the last two decades of the sixteenth century, would seem to have been in the closest contact with the Baroque, and from the circumstances of his life, the likeliest to be hospitable to that influence. Not only was Southwell a Recusant who clung to the old religious order, but before he was fifteen he had gone abroad to receive his advanced schooling from the Jesuits, who were recognized as leaders in the Baroque movement. In their schools, first at Douai and then at Rome, the young Southwell could hardly avoid coming in contact with the works of the Continental Baroque writers. At the same time it must be remembered that the English College at Douai, where the young Southwell lived, was a very English institution. Many of the men teaching and guiding students there were like the founder, William Allen, Oxford graduates and even former teachers at Oxford.³ It should be remembered, too, that these were not fugitives who had shaken the dust of England off their feet; they were, rather, men who were either preparing to go back to England themselves or training their pupils to return with an appeal the effectiveness of which would certainly depend upon its acceptableness to the English mind. Moreover, as we know from our own recent experience, exiles can be very tenacious of their own distinctive tone and temper and orientation.

There is no question that Southwell did come in contact with the works of Italian writers like Valvasone and Tansillo, and that he was influenced by their style.⁴ To begin with, Southwell in his mature work had the basic Baroque orientation. Unlike many of the Christian stoics of the period Southwell believed in the creative value of passion; only, unlike many of the defenders of passion of his day, he was selective when it came to the objects and directions of passion—“Passions I allow, and loves I approve, onely I woulde wishe that men would alter their object and better their intent.”⁵ Clearly, he wished to use the resources of human feeling, as well as human imagination, to win the natural man to religious interest and concern. There is, of course, nothing exclusively Baroque in this. The young Herbert expressed much the same objective.⁶ But one may note in Southwell's work a certain deliberate effort not only to stimulate but also to develop feeling that is very different from Herbert's reserve. That rather operatic descant on themes of spiritual concern that one finds in poems of Southwell's like “Content and rich,” “Love's Gardyne Greife,” or “Christ's Bloody Sweate” is different from what one finds in Herbert. In Herbert, with all the warmth and intimacy of so many of his poems, one is conscious usually of an overmastering intellectual, if not logical, movement toward a goal of insight. One finds in Southwell the tendency to develop feeling, even to whip up feeling, that one usually associates with the Baroque; and one notes also a tendency to develop feeling by reiteration, reiteration sometimes little more than the multiplication of sense-apparent examples, sometimes an almost liturgical reiteration of the feeling itself. There is often enough, too, an atmosphere of extravagance that in its emotional and imaginative dwelling upon instances is very different from the extravagance of the sensationally discordant comparison that one finds in the metaphysical. And, finally, when one looks at the curious history of his work in England and its influence, there is no question that a factor in it is the freshness and novelty of what he had to offer. When one remembers that the publication of his work went on after his execution, and that that work continued to influence men who could not be suspected of the least sympathy for the cause for which he died, it is quite clear that in his work his contemporaries found not only something new but also something highly stimulating in its novelty.

Probably no work of Southwell's will be more widely regarded as representative of his Baroque genius than the prose Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares, published late in 1591, very close to the end of his career. The very choice of this subject would seem the epitome of the Baroque; for it is a commonplace that the penitent Magdalen, with her combination of past sensuality and present remorsefulness, was a favorite object of contemplation to the Counter Reformation. Southwell was undoubtedly familiar with the works in this area of Erasmo di Valvasone, Luigi Tansillo, and, above all, Torquato Tasso. The very opening of Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares establishes its image with the rhetorical formality of the Baroque, but at the same time with a certain directness and economy that is unusually austere for its mode: “Emongst other mourneful accidents of the passion of Christ, that love presenteth it selfe to my memory, with which the blessed Mary Magdelen loving our Lord more than her life, followed him in his journey to his death, attending uppon him when his Disciples fledde, and being more willing to die with him, then they to live without him.”⁷

There is no question, as we shall see in a moment, that many aspects of this work are Baroque. But it should never be forgotten that the penitent Magdalen had been a favorite theme of medieval and, indeed, of ancient devotion. Actually, this present work is a translation and an expansion of a work a good deal older than the Baroque period. Its source is a homily ascribed to Origen, which in its Latin version was published in London as late as the beginning of the sixteenth century, somewhere around 1504,⁸ and which was still being published about a hundred years later on the Continent.⁹ While, as Janelle points out, Southwell knew an Italian version of this work,¹⁰ it is also obvious that Southwell had access to the original Latin. Southwell's version of this well-known work is really an expansion of the original, an expansion made always with an eye to intensifying the emotional effect. Yet it is significant that while Southwell does not hesitate to underscore the emotional effect he wants, or even to add his own comment in order to intensify it, he also knows how to use the Origen homily to structure his own meditation with all its implied explorations.

Perhaps as Baroque a transformation as any is that in which Mary turned and saw the risen Jesus and did not know him. In the original Latin it runs as follows: “Dixit ei Jesus, Mulier quid ploras? et quem quæris? O desiderium animæ eius, cur interrogas eam, quid ploras, et quem quæris? Ipsa paulo ante coram oculis suis cum magno dolore cordis sui viderat spem suam suspendi in ligno: et tu nunc dicis, Quid ploras?”¹¹ This Southwell renders:

and therefore as hee seemeth unto thee so like a stranger, hee asketh this question of thee, O woman why weepest thou, whom seekest thou?

O desire of heart, and onely joy of her soule, why demandest thou why shee weepeth, or for whome she seeketh? But a while since she saw thee hir onely hope hanging on a tree, with thy head full of thornes, thy eies full of teares, thy eares full of blasphemies, thy mouth full of gall, thy whole person mangled and disfigured, and doest thou aske her why she weepeth?¹²

Yet even in this emotional expansion Southwell is at pains to keep something of the dramatic directness and the rather taut purposiveness of the original work. In other words, one element in Southwell's work is clearly the desire to carry on a devotional tradition now not so easily accessible to his countrymen at home in a fashion that he believed would appeal to the taste of the time. The response to his version makes it quite clear that, while not all his contemporaries in London would by any means approve of or respond to this treatment, enough did to make it very much worth the effort.

We should remember, too, that Southwell could compass both what we are accustomed to think of as Baroque splendor and also medieval homeliness. A good example of the splendor is a rather lengthy comment on Mary's mistaking of Christ for the gardener:

Thou thinkst not amisse though thy sight bee deceived. For as our first father, in the state of grace and innocency, was placed in the garden of pleasure, and the first office allotted him, was to be a Gardener: so the first man that ever was in glorie, appeareth first in a Garden, and presenteth himselfe in a gardeners likenes, that the beginnings of glorie, might resemble the entrance of innocencie and grace.¹³

On the other hand, nothing could be homelier than Southwell's argument with Mary as to whether somebody had stolen her Master's body:

Would any theefe thinkest thou have bin so religious, as to have stollen the body and left the clothes? yea, would he have beene so venturous, as to have staied the unshrowding of the corse, the well ordering of the sheets, and folding up the napkins? Thou knowest that mirrhe maketh linnen cleave as fast, as pitch or glue: and was a theefe at so much leisure, as to dissolve the mirrhe and uncloath the dead?¹⁴

This combination of homeliness and splendor, expressed always in highly dramatic terms, reminds us that however much influence Southwell may have had as a pioneer of the Baroque, he certainly had in him not a little of the Elizabethan, however far from most Elizabethan writers he may have strayed in his choice of an area for contemplation.

When one turns from a devotional work like this to what might be called a more strictly practical piece of writing, the full measure of the complexity of Southwell's relation to his day becomes apparent. In such works Southwell could write with a kind of Baroque splendor. There is a passage in An Epistle of Comfort which gives a classical description of the jeweled heaven of the Golden Legend, and yet even this culminates in the functionally simple: “Finallye, in the syghte of God we shall have the fulnesse of felicity.”¹⁵

For Southwell can always make his point with directness and even with a kind of matter-of-fact realism. Indeed, he is not above some of the characteristic controversial exchanges of the time as may be seen in the following highly ironic passage:

God be thancked, even our adversaryes them selves, are so fullye perswaded of our good behaviour, that if a man in companye be modest and grave in countenance, wordes or demeanor, if he use no swearing, foule or unseemelye speache, if he refuse to joyne in lewde companye, and dishonest actions, he is strayte suspected for a Papist: And on the other syde if there be anye ruffianlye, quarellous, foule spoken, and lewdlye conditioned, he is never mistrusted for a Papist, but taken for a very sound and undoubted Protestant.¹⁶

He can also on occasion write with great pithiness and even sharpness as in The Triumphs over Death: “Let God strippe you to the skinne, yea to the soule, so hee stay with you himselfe. … Thinke him enough for this world, that must be all your possession for a whole eternity.”¹⁷

This same directness and homely sharpness pervades a work like The Supplication to Queen Elizabeth, in which he makes a very detailed and lively presentation of the sufferings of his co-religionists. For instance, in his account of the misery which had resulted from the economic persecution of the Recusants he sums up the difficulties of the poor with compassionate indignation:

Yea and this Law hath bene so violently executed, that where poore Farmers and Husbandmen had but one Cow for themselves and many Children to live upon, that for their Recusancy hath bene taken from them. And where both Kine and Cattell were wanting, they have taken their Coverletts, sheetes, and blanquetts from their bedds, their victualls and poore provision from their howses, not sparing so much as the very glasse of their windowes, when they found nothing ells to serve their turnes withall.¹⁸

Even when Southwell indulges in a carefully balanced sentence, it is interesting that the repetition is often incremental so that the series moves with accelerating emphasis, as in the conclusion to his long inventory of the Recusants' sufferings, “that we are generally accounted men whom it is a credit to pursue, a disgrace to protect, a commodity to spoile, a gaine to torture, a glory to kill.”¹⁹

The same complexity that we have seen in Southwell's prose is characteristic, also, of his verse. Here we find not only suggestions of the Baroque achievement, but also at least one of the Baroque anticipations. It has been noted already, especially by Imbrie Buffum, that in some of the French poets of the seventeenth century with all the deepening classicism of the time²⁰ there is a curious foreshadowing of the romantic. In a poem like “A Vale of Teares,” which is seldom noticed in discussions of Southwell's work, there is something of this curious foreshadowing. The poet still keeps the medieval horror of wild mountain scenery, but there is also an unmistakable gusto in the energy with which he dwells upon some of the usually terrifying details. Of course, all of this is in the interest of expressing a spiritual idea. But there is something even more than a horrid fascination in the energy of lines like those which open the contemplation:

A Vale there is enwrapt with dreadful shades,
Which thicke of mourning pines shrouds from the sunne
Where hanging clifts yeld short and dumpish glades,
And snowie floods with broken streames doe runne,
Where eie-roame is from rocke to clowdie skie,
From thence to dales which stormie ruines shroud,
Then to the crushed waters frothie frie,
Which tumbleth from the tops where snowe is thow'd:
Where eares of other sound can have no choice,
But various blustring of the stubburne winde
In trees, in caves, in straits with divers noise,
Which now doth hisse, now howle, now roare by kinde:
Where waters wrastle with encountering stones,
That breake their streames and turne them into foame,
The hollow clouds full fraught with thundering groans,
With hideous thumps discharge their pregnant wombe.
And in the horror of this fearefull quier,
Consists the musicke of this dolefull place,
All pleasant birds their tunes from thence retire,
Where none but heavie notes have any grace.(21)

There is no mistaking the power of such a passage. And, although it may be paralleled in some of the French writers of the seventeenth century like Saint-Amant,²² it is rather different from what we usually associate with the Baroque. It is not romantic, but it is on the way to the romantic, and that at an increasingly unromantic time.

This complexity of tone is found in other better-known poems of Southwell's. For instance, in “The Burning Babe,” which it will be remembered Ben Jonson so much admired,²³ there is an interesting combination of an almost carol-like simplicity of tone with the intricate elaboration of the emblem. The poem begins with the greatest directness and immediacy:

As I in hoary Winter's night stood shiveringe in the snowe,
Surpris'd I was with sodayne heat, which made my hart to glowe;
And liftinge upp a fearefull eye to vewe what fire was nere,
A prety Babe all burninge bright, did in the ayre appeare.

But this simplicity and directness soon yield to the meticulous analysis of the emblem, as, for instance, where the Babe explains this extraordinary apparition:

My faultles brest the fornace is, the fuell woundinge thornes,
Love is the fire, and sighes the smoke, the ashes shame and scornes;
The fuell Justice layeth on, and Mercy blowes the coales,
The mettall in this fornace wrought are men's defilèd soules,
For which, as nowe on fire I am, to worke them to the good,
So will I melt into a bath to washe them in My bloode.

This emblematic explication yields to the atmosphere of the opening in the very dramatic conclusion of the poem:

With this He vanisht out of sight, and swiftly shroncke awaye,
And straight I callèd unto mynde that it was Christmas daye.(24)

But probably the best example of this complexity of genre in Southwell is to be seen in Saint Peters Complaint. This work may well be termed the masculine counterpart to Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares. For as Mary Magdalen had committed the distinctively feminine sin of abuse of her physical charms, so St. Peter had certainly been guilty of the supreme masculine weakness, a failure of courage.

The poem opens with a very striking, if not extreme, example of the “weeping” genre, but the “weeping” genre, it should be noted, carried out in highly emblematic terms with all the implications of a striking figure developed in considerable detail by the speaker, St. Peter:

Launche foorth my Soul into a maine of teares,
Full fraught with griefe the traffick of thy mind:
Torne sailes will serve, thoughtes rent with guilty feares:
Give care, the sterne: use sighes in lieu of wind:
Remorse, the Pilot: thy misdeede, the Carde:
Torment, thy Haven: Shipwracke, thy best reward.

The second stanza sustains the figure in its opening but drops it halfway through to come to the heart of the self-indictment:

Shun not the shelfe of most deserved shame:
Sticke in the sandes of agonizing dread:
Content thee to be stormes and billowes game:
Divorc'd from grace thy soule to pennance wed:
Fly not from forreine evils, fly from thy hart:
Worse than the worst of evils is that thou art.

The third stanza reveals the Baroque readiness to shift the figure, once its possibilities have been wrung out, to another in a strikingly different category. Here, too, although the figure is maintained, the whole handling becomes a little more remote, so that one thinks of some of the more general statements of the neoclassic type:

Give vent unto the vapours of thy brest,
That thicken in the brimmes of cloudie eies:
Where sinne was hatched, let teares now wash the nest:
Where life was lost, recover life with cries.
Thy trespasse foule: let not thy teares be few:
Baptize thy spotted soule in weeping dewe.

There is, also, the characteristic Baroque picking up of an incidental suggestion in the beginning of the fourth stanza:

Flie mournefull plaintes, the Ecchoes of my ruth;
Whose scretches in my fraighted conscience ring:(25)

Indeed, there is a very curious mixture of the rather general handling of a figure with a much more specific amplification, both carried pretty close to the extreme, in the opening of the eighth stanza:

All weeping eies resigne your teares to me:
A sea will scantly rince my ordurde soule:

Again, in the ninth stanza one comes pretty close to the poetry of statement of the classical movement:

I fear'd with life, to die; by death, to live:
I left my guide, now left, and leaving God.(26)

On the other hand, it must be remembered that all of this poem is, in a sense, a dramatic thing, that is, a penetration by the poet into the consciousness of another being. “The Complaint” is in itself, of course, an ancient genre, one of the classic types of medieval literature. But in Southwell's poem the analysis of consciousness goes beyond that of the usual medieval complaint, particularly with regard to the nuances of emotion. Yet, characteristically, the analysis of emotion, however dramatic in its penetration of the situation, is not dramatic as regards any endeavor to reveal the special consciousness of a particular man. For example, no effort is made to suggest the mental processes of a Galilean fisherman. One feels, rather, that for all the detail and even minutiae of emotional analysis, it is still the philosophically trained Southwell who speaks out in a passage like the fifteenth stanza:

Ah life, sweete drop, drownd in a sea of showers,
A flying good, posting to doubtfull end:
Still loosing monethes and yeeres to gaine new howers:
Faine, time to have, and spare, yet forst to spend.
Thy growth, decrease: a moment, all thou hast:
That gone, ere knowne: the rest: to come, or past.(27)

It is interesting that where, as above, it is a matter of approaching fate, there is something metaphysical in the compassion of the statement even though the development of the thought is smoother than the metaphysical usually is. One feels also something of the reflectiveness of the preacher, of a preacher, it is true, who has been very intimately concerned with the direction of individual souls, in the rather delicate psychological analysis of the thirty-fifth stanza:

Ah, coole remisses, vertues quartane fever,
Pyning of love, consumption of grace:
Old in the cradle, languor dying ever,
Soules willfull famine, sinnes soft stealing pace,
The undermyning evill of zealous thought,
Seeming to bring no harmes till all be brought.(28)

As for the overall development of the theme, one is not quite sure whether to call this a good example of medieval diffuseness or a warning of what may happen to meditation run wild, as the author of The Spiritual Exercises would certainly have judged it. Yet there is no mistaking the indirect and half-conscious tension that comes into the piece when Southwell begins to come more closely to grips with the development of the Gospel episode. This becomes apparent in the opening of the thirty-sixth stanza where the apostrophe to the maidservant who challenged Peter brings the poet into a more immediate relation to the historic episode.²⁹ There is much more of the sharpness of imaginative perception that we have come to expect of Southwell in stanza forty-two.³⁰ There is again the same indirect drama in the handling of the cock's crowing in stanza one hundred and seven. The combination here of what is almost colloquialism with a thoroughly sophisticated analysis of the meaning of the episode is characteristic of Southwell. There is something intricate, too, in the working out of the figure, something that might even be called tricky.

Yet there is no question that the handling of the episode is psychologically both thoroughly perceptive and firm in its reticulation. And this impression is quite clearly sustained by the two opening lines of the address to the cock: “O bird, the just rebuker of my crime, / The faithfull waker of my sleeping feares,” etc.³¹ Again, one need hardly say that this is a more sophisticated self-analysis than one would have expected of the historic fisherman. As for the climax of the episode, Peter's encounter with the glance from his Lord's eyes, there is no question that in both the magnitude of the expansion and its intricacy this is a thoroughly Baroque passage.

The eyes, stars, mirror, tears, flames cluster is, of course, a familiar example of Baroque technique. Among the major poets of English at least probably only Crashaw comes anywhere near Southwell in the extravagance of the development of that familiar complex. But Southwell easily exceeds even the author of “The Weeper.” The beginning is brief and simple enough, and even dramatic:

O sacred eyes, the springs of living light,
The earthly heavens, where Angels joy to dwell:
How could you deigne to view my deathfull plight,
Or let your heavenly beames looke on my hell?
But those unspotted eyes encountred mine,
As spotlesse Sunne doth on the dounghill shine.(32)

But the variety and the ingenuity of the comparisons that follow are encyclopedic:

Sweet volumes stoarde with learning fit for Saints,
Where blissfull quires imparadize their minds,
You flames devine that sparkle out your heats,
And kindle pleasing fires in mortall hearts:
You nectard Ambrose(33) of soule feeding meates;
You gracefull quivers of loves dearest darts;
These blazing comets, lightning flames of love,
Made me their warming influence to know:
O living mirrours, seeing Whom you shew,
Which equall shaddows worthes with shadowed things:
O Pooles of Hesebon, the bathes of grace,
Where happy spirits dyve in sweet desires:
O Sunnes, all but your selves in light excelling,
Whose presence, day, whose absence causeth night,
O gracious spheres, where love the Center is,
A native place for our selfe-loaden soules.(34)

As the poet moves from Kings at the beginning of the fifty-sixth stanza to Canticles at the beginning of the fifty-seventh, not even Crashaw can, I think, surpass the complexity of association involved in stanza fifty-seven:

O Turtle twins all bath'd in virgins milke,
Upon the margin of full flowing bankes:
Whose graceful plume surmountes the finest silke,
Whose sight enamoreth heavens most happy rankes,
Could I forsweare this heavenly paire of doves,
That cag'd in care for me were groning loves.(35)

And yet, in stanza fifty-eight the dramatic impulse reasserts itself, and the emotional contemplation of spiritual implications yields to the concentration of action in Exodus in a way that reminds one of the very objective reflections of the medieval complaints. Here the remembrance of scriptural action breaks sharply into the almost too passionate contemplation of the preceding stanzas:

Twice Moyses wand did strike the stubborne rocke,
Ere stony veynes would yeeld their cristall blood:(36)

But Southwell soon returns to the main theme of Peter's tears. This time, however, while he does invoke such Baroque commonplaces as the balm and myrrh-weeping Arabian trees, he ranges through Scripture, seeking out such great sinners as David, Adam, Cain, and Absalom.³⁷ All of these memories, of course, give Peter a chance to explore the darkness of his own crime, as in stanza seventy-five:

Faire Absalons fowle faults compar'de with mine,
Are brightest sands, to mud of Sodome Lakes.

Indeed, Peter even shudders at the thought of encountering the usually pitiful mother of Christ.³⁸

The rest of the poem proceeds with the contemplation not only of the magnitude of his fault, but also of its inescapable consequences. Even here, however, the development of the theme involves a still further expansion of the range of comparison. In the expanding associations of the Baroque he slips from the figure of Christ being templed in his thought to the corruption of the temple by the traders, and so through a variety of figures of mercantile exchange, to conclude at last:

Pleased with displeasing lot I seek no change,
I wealthiest am when richest in remorce;
To fetch my ware no seas nor lands I range,
For customers to buy I nothing force.
My home-bred goods at home are bought and sold,
And still in me the interest I hold.(39)

And yet only a stanza beyond this culmination of what one would have thought a comparatively prosy complex of associations comes suddenly one of the most dramatic stanzas in the entire poem:

At sorrowes dore I knockt, they crav'de my name;
I aunswered one, unworthy to be knowne:
What one, say they? one worthiest of blame.
But who? A wretch, not Gods, nor yet his owne.
A man? O no, a beast; much worse; what creature?
A rocke: how cald? the rocke of scandale, Peter.(40)

The complaint ends with comparative simplicity in the appeal to the old image of Lazarus at the rich man's gate. In the development of this Southwell is decidedly more metaphysical than Baroque, surrendering the lateral and at times even circular development of his imaginative contemplation for a straight logical progression. And in this idiom the poem ends:

Redeeme my lapse with raunsome of thy love,
Traverse th'inditement, rigorous dome suspend:
Let frailtie favour, sorrowes succour move:
Be thou thy selfe, though chaungling I offend.
Tender my suite, clense this defiled denne,
Cancell my debtes, sweete Jesu, say Amen!(41)

It is not easy to arrive at a final definition of Southwell as a poet. His artistry is more uneven in his verse than in his prose. It would be a mistake to say that he is less controlled because even the most extravagant proliferation of images does not in the end deflect him from his main objective. But it is probable that Southwell was more interested in expressing the fullness of what he had to say than in polishing to perfection each part of his statement. After all, his main business in life was not that of the man of letters. It was the English Mission, the conversion of his countrymen to what he held to be the one true faith. When one remembers how much of his short life was spent in prison, and even when he was at liberty, how many demands he faced as a leader in the religious underground, it seems reasonable to conclude that some at least of the unevenness of Southwell's work was due to sheer lack of time. That he could polish to perfection we have seen in some of the foregoing passages. But it was apparently not in his poetic nature to sacrifice an ingeniously contrived development of the possible implications of a figure even in the interest of directness and simplicity. Yet he certainly was never able long to wander away from his main path. In this sense one may say that even in his most Baroque luxuriance there is yet a good deal of the metaphysical sense of structure and the metaphysical preoccupation with meaning.

In this complexity Southwell foreshadows the later development of the Baroque in England. How far this is a matter of English temperament and of English milieu it would be hard to say. But even though Southwell spent so much of his life, especially of the intellectually formative years, outside of England in a setting that was certainly open to a variety of foreign influences, it still remains true that in his verse as in his prose there is a certain underlying firmness of purpose, a certain combination of homeliness, and at times sublimity that is very much in the contemporary English tradition. It is in this complexity that he is the real pioneer of the Baroque in England.

Notes

1. M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (London, 1950).

2. Frank J. Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry (New Haven, Conn., 1961).

3. Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr (London, 1956), pp. 17-18.

4. Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer (Clermont-Ferrand, 1935), pp. 189-90.

5. Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares (London: J. W. for G. C., 1591), sig. A3v.

6. The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), p. 206.

7. Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares, sig. B1.

8. Omelia Origenis de Beata Maria Magdalena (London: ad rogatum W. Menyman [1504?]).

9. Dialogismus sive Colloquium D. Mariæ Magdalenæ cum Christo Domino redivivo, Origeni hactenus adscripta homilia (n.p., n.d. [1604?]).

10. Janelle, op. cit., p. 184.

11. Dialogismus sive Colloquium D. Mariæ Magdalenæ, sig. B1.

12. Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares, sig. G3^v.

13. Ibid., sig. G6.

14. Ibid., sig. D8.

15. Robert Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort (Paris, n.d.; Doway, 1604), sigs. &5^v-7^v.

16. Ibid., sig. M5.

17. R[obert] S[outhwell], The Triumphs over Death (London: V. S. for John Busbie, 1595), sig. E1^v.

18. Robert Southwell, An Humble Supplication to Her Majestie, ed. R. C. Bald (Cambridge, 1953), p. 43.

19. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

20. Imbrie Buffum, Studies in the Baroque from Montaigne to Rotrou (New Haven, Conn., 1957), pp. 141 ff.

21. R[obert] S[outhwell], Moeniae, or, Certaine Excellent Poems and Spirituall Hymnes (London: Valentine Sims for John Busbie, 1595), sigs. E2^r-v.

22. Buffum, op. cit., p. 141 ff.

23. Ben Jonson, Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden 1619, ed. G. B. Harrison (London and New York, 1923), p. 9.

24. The Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1872), pp. 109-110.

25. [Robert Southwell,] Saint Peters Complaint, with Other Poemes (London: John Wolfe, 1595), sigs. A4^r-v.

26. Ibid., sig. B.

27. Ibid., sig. B1^v.

28. Ibid., sig. B4.

29. Ibid., sig. B4^v.

30. Ibid., sig. C1.

31. Ibid., sig. E1^v.

32. Ibid., sig. C1.

33. Ambries.

34. Saint Peters Complaint, sigs. C1-2^v.

35. Ibid., sig. C3.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., sigs. C4-D1.

38. Ibid., sigs. D1-2.

39. Ibid., sigs. D3-4^v.

40. Ibid., sig. D4^v.

41. Ibid., sig. E4^v.