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Two Baroque Devotional Poets: La Ceppéde and Alabaster

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SOURCE: Donaldson-Evans, Lance K. “Two Baroque Devotional Poets: La Ceppéde and Alabaster.” Comparative Literature Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1975): 21-31.

[In the following essay, Donaldson-Evans compares Alabaster's sonnets to those of the French poet La Ceppéde in order to suggest similarities in devotional poetry across Europe.]

The rediscovery and ensuing re-evaluation of the devotional poetry of the baroque period has been one of the literary phenomena of the twentieth century. It is as though literary critics and readers alike have felt an intellectual and emotional kinship with the political, religious, and social upheavals which shook Europe after the Renaissance. In spite of L. P. Hartley's observation that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,”1 one is tempted to speculate that the twentieth-century reader has seen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a prefiguration of the turmoil of his own era and that he has found solace in the attempts of the devotional poets to come to grips with a world apparently gone awry. Whatever the explanation may be, devotional poetry has been the object of much critical attention in our time so that many poets whose work had been all but forgotten, have now found their rightful place in the official canon of European literature.

In England, the Metaphysical poets have received close scrutiny with the happy result that the works of Donne, Crashaw, Herbert and many others have been resurrected. Interest in the literary baroque, inspired in part by the rediscovery of the English Metaphysicals, has led to the realisation that similar poetic tendencies exist in other European literatures, and so in France, Jean de Sponde, Jean de La Ceppède, and Jean-Baptiste Chassignet have all come into prominence after three centuries of neglect. They are now seen as the most gifted of a large group of poets, whose work bears striking resemblances to that of the English devotional poets. Similar poetic constellations have been rediscovered in Germany, Holland, Italy, and Spain and each national literature now enjoys its own corpus of critical material devoted to its baroque religious poetry. What is surprising, however, is that very few attempts have been made to cross the national literary boundaries and compare devotional poetry from country to country. Of course, parallels have been suggested. Alan Boase, for example, the “inventor” (in the Renaissance sense) of Sponde, has referred to this poet (somewhat unfairly) as “une sorte de Donne manqué.”2 However, the only major attempts to go further in this domain have been made by Odette de Mourgues and Frank J. Warnke.3 Unfortunately, the excellent works of both these critics are regrettably brief (given the scope of the subject) and their preliminary explorations have been pursued only too rarely by other scholars. It is high time to remedy this situation and to begin to investigate more fully the similarities between devotional poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries throughout Europe.

With this aim in view, I would like to set side by side, for purposes of comparison and contrast, the work of two fairly recently “rehabilitated” poets, one French, the other English: Jean de La Ceppède and William Alabaster. La Ceppède, born in Marseilles around 1548 is, by some twenty years, the senior of Alabaster (born 1567-8)4 and led a considerably more tranquil life than the English poet, in spite of the fact that he was a contemporary of the bloody French Wars of Religion. Alabaster's career was marked by his conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism and by subsequent reconversions which, predictably, involved him in a great deal of secular and religious strife, led to imprisonment, and cloak-and-dagger journeys in England and on the Continent, all of which did not prevent him from living until 1640. La Ceppède, a magistrate who spent most of his life in the Aix-Marseilles region, was born a Catholic and remained one. His only problem in the context of the religious wars (at least as far as we know) was a brush with the radical Ligue (he was always a devoted royalist) in 1589, which forced him to flee Aix for a number of years before resuming his magisterial functions in 1594. He died in 1623.

Alabaster's religious verse was written around 15975 but not published in his lifetime. La Ceppède saw the publication of all his works, beginning in 1594 with the Imitation des Pseaumes de la Penitence de David, a paraphrase in French of the penitential psalms6 together with twelve devotional sonnets which were to provide a nucleus for his later Théorèmes. A second edition of the Imitation, dated 1612, was attached to his magnum opus, the Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de notre Redemption (1613), a series of 300 sonnets with extensive notes and prose commentary by the author retracing the last hours of Christ's life. A continuation of the Théorèmes,7 dealing with the events between the entombment of Christ and Pentecost, appeared in 1622.

Although the devotional poetry of La Ceppède is considerably more extensive (520 sonnets plus his paraphrases of the psalms and several other religious poems) than that of Alabaster (77 sonnets and two other sonnets of doubtful origin), both bear the clear imprint of what Louis Martz8 has called the meditative tradition. The works of both poets show unmistakable traces of the techniques of formal meditation which Martz has so skilfully analyzed. The influence of the Spiritual Exercises and the numerous other treatises of meditation spawned by the devotia moderna is omnipresent, so that the individual poems are often at once formal meditations by the poets themselves and rhetorical exercises in the art of persuasion, whose purpose is to encourage the reader to emulate the meditation performed by the poet or his persona. This is not to say that each individual poem displays the tripartite structure of the traditional Ignatian meditation: composition of place, reflection, and resolve (corresponding to the actions of the imagination aided by the senses, of the intellect as it analyzes what has been presented to the mind's eye by the imagination, and of the will which enflames the heart to take whatever resolves have been suggested by the intellect). The partly epic structure of the Théorèmes, which is a vehicle for the narrative of the events of the last hours of Christ's life, usually precludes this possibility, so that while certain poems do represent a complete meditation, most often the exercise of the three powers of the soul is spread over several poems. In La Ceppède's case, then, we must take Jean Rousset's lead9 and speak of meditative clusters rather than individual meditations. Alabaster's sonnets are much more traditional in that they are, for the most part, self-contained units dealing with various aspects of the life of Christ and the Christian experience, brought together by their common theme but rarely connected in narrative or even in canzoniere-like fashion, as are La Ceppède's poems. The major exception to this tendency is found in the eleven sonnets which begin Story and Gardner's edition of Alabaster's Divine Meditations and which the editors have subtitled “The Portrait of Christ's Death.” Although Alabaster does devote a number of sonnets to the Incarnation (unlike La Ceppède), it is significant that both poets begin their works with portraits of Christ's death and begin at precisely the same point in the Gospel narrative, immediately after the Last Supper.

While each poet chooses to meditate on a different aspect of Christ's drama, both present him at the outset of his Passion within the framework of a military metaphor. La Ceppède immediately gives his Christ epic stature as he introduces him in the first sonnet with an evocation of the Aeneid: “Je chante les amours, les armes, la victoire / Du Ciel. …”10 (“I sing of the loves, the arms and the victory of Heaven. …”). In the following sonnet, La Ceppède describes his protagonist as “Cet Alcide non feint de l'horloge eternele / Oit l'heure qui fatale au combat l'appeloit. …”11 (“This true Alcide hears the hour struck by the clock of eternity, which, as his destiny decreed, was summoning him to the fray.”) Alabaster's opening lines do not evoke the heroes of antiquity and yet the picture of Christ-the-warrior is no less skillfully painted in the introductory lines of his first two sonnets:

          The night, the starless night of passion,
From heaven began, on heaven beneath to fall
When Christ did sound the onset martial.
A sacred hymn, upon his foes to run. …

(“Sonnet I,” 1-4)

          What meaneth this, that Christ an hymn did sing,
An hymn triumphant for an happy fight,
As if his enemies were put to flight
When yet he was not come within the ring?
So giantlike did this victorious king
Exult to run the race he had in sight. …

(“Sonnet II,” 1-6)

Each poet then goes on to describe Christ's crossing of the Brook of Cedron and each attaches symbolic significance to this event. Both have recourse to biblical typology, Alabaster implicitly, La Ceppède explicitly, as they draw the parallel between this New Testament crossing of the brook and David's crossing of the same water in the Old Testament:12

          Over the brook of Cedron Christ is gone,
To entertain the combat with his death
Where David fled beforetime void of breath,
To scape the treacheries of Absolom. …

(“Sonnet III,” 1-4)

          Comme David predit, il passe le Cedron:
Mais non pas comme luy pour gauchir l'escadron
De ses haineux, mais bien pour aider leur poursuite …

(I, I, iv)

          (As David predicted, he crosses Cedron
Not, like David, to flee the host of his enemies
But to assist their pursuit of him. …)

Both poets then interpret the crossing of the brook allegorically and, in sonnets “three” and “four,” Alabaster uses it as a symbolic expression of his own spiritual dilemma and as the basis for a moving colloquy. For him, the brook becomes the symbol of the world, which washes away our resolution and threatens to drown us. We should follow Christ's example and go beyond it, but this is not possible without divine aid:

          Leave we, O leave we then this miry flood,
Friends, pleasures, and unfaithful good.
Now we are up, now down, but cannot stand,
We sink, we reel, Jesu stretch forth thy hand.

(“Sonnet III,” 11-14)

For La Ceppède, the brook is also invested with a symbolic meaning, but at this juncture in his narrative, the whole focus of his attention is on Christ and it is only later that the personal element of the colloquy will make its appearance:

Et ce torrent qu'il passe est le commencement
Des flots injurieux, dont l'obscure entresuite
Le fait crier à Dieu par son vieux truchement.

(I, I, iv, 12-14)

(And this torrent he crosses is the beginning
Of the waves of humiliation, whose dark mysterious sequel
Makes him cry out to God through the mouth of his Old Testament prophet.)

For La Ceppède, each step of Christ's last journey is a fulfilment of the Old Testament, so that every detail of the Gospel is polysemic. Thus, in his notes, he refers us to Psalm 69, verse 1 (“Save me O Lord, for the waters threaten my life”) to illustrate how Christ's life sheds new light on the Scriptures (hence his use of the adjective “obscure”) and how his every action is charged with religious meaning. It is only at the end of sonnet “five” that the meditative aspect of the epic appears:

          O voyage, ô village, ô jardin, ô montaigne
Si devot maintenant le Sauveur j'accompaigne
Permetés qu'à ce coup je gouste vostre fruit.

(I, I, v, 12-14)

                    (O journey, o village, o garden, o mountain,
If I now devoutly accompany the Saviour
Allow me to taste of your fruit at this moment.)

and it is only in the last tercet of sonnet “eight” that we find a fully developed colloquy:

          Mon Roy puisque pour moy vous courez au trespas
Faites que vostre grace à ce coup m'encourage,
Et me donne pouvoir de talonner vos pas.

(I, I, viii)

          (My King, since for me you now run to your death,
Let your grace now encourage me
And give me the power to follow in your footsteps.)

Because of their tendency to be isolated units rather than links in a poetic chain, Alabaster's sonnets have more concision, are more tightly structured and perhaps, because of the nature of the English sonnet, make more use of word play and conceits than La Ceppède's works. This is particularly true when Alabaster uses a rhyme scheme which terminates the sonnet with a rhyming couplet (this is never found in a regular French sonnet, where the rhyme scheme of the sestet is either CCDEED or CCDEDE). A case in point is sonnet “twenty-two,” in which Alabaster, in dealing with Christ's descent into Hell, plays on contrasting verbs of motion (to ascend and to descend) in order to show how Christ's going down to Hell enables the sinner to go up to Heaven, provided that he, like Christ, first accomplishes a descent into his own soul and a death unto himself. This sonnet is also an interesting example of an individual poetic meditation, with the variation that the colloquy is contained in the first tercet, while the closing tercet contains an intellectual and rhetorical exercise on the Christian paradox that the only way up to Heaven is to go down to Hell and death:

          Sink down, my soul, into the lowest cell,
Into the anguish of thy sins descend,
There think how Christ for thee his blood did spend,
And afterward went down as low as hell.
Rise up, my soul, as high as God doth dwell,
Unto the hope of heaven, and there expend
How Christ did from the gates of hell ascend,
In height of glory which no thought can tell.
Descend in patience with him to die,
Ascend in confidence with him to reign,
And upwards, downwards by humility.
Since man fell upwards, down by Satan's train,
Look for no fairer way unto thy crown,
Than that that Christ went up by going down.

(“Sonnet XXII”)

Because of the structure of his work, La Ceppède does not deal with Christ's descent into Hell and subsequent resurrection until the second part of his Théorèmes. When he does treat this subject, there are some interesting parallels with Alabaster's sonnet. Christ's descent to Hell is individualized and applied to the poet's own soul. However, whereas in Alabaster's sonnet the poet's soul imitates Christ by descending to and then rising from the hell of sin, in La Ceppède's poem the soul itself is the centre of the metaphor and itself becomes Hell waiting patiently for the visit of Christ to release it from the bondage of sin and death. La Ceppède's poem is a prayer to Christ rather than an apostrophe to the soul. By concentrating on the descent of Christ into Hell, it avoids the artificial and somewhat laboured juxtaposition of up/down we find in the English poem and, in place of a paradoxical and strained conceit, it closes with a paraphrase of scripture:

          Fay mon Sauveur descente en l'Enfer de mon ame:
Mon ame est un Enfer tout noir d'aveuglement
Que l'aceré trenchant de cent remors entame,
Que sept traistres Demons traictent journellement.
D'un seul point mon Enfer, le nom d'Enfer dement
(Dissemblable à l'Enfer de l'eternelle flame)
C'est qu'on n'espere plus en l'eternel tourment:
Et dans le mien j'espere, et ta grace reclame.
          Descends donc par ta grace, ô Christ dans mon Enfer:
Fay moy de ces demons desormais triompher,
Pour te suivre là haut, fay qu'icy je patisse.
          Fay que j'aille tousjours mes crimes souspirant,
Et fay qu'en mon esprit je craigne ta Justice.
“Car le salut consiste à craindre en esperant”.

(II, I, xiv)

          (Descend, o my Lord into the Hell of my soul:
My soul is a hell black with the blindness of sin.
Pierced by the hundreds of sharp blades of remorse,
Which seven treacherous demons torture every day.
          In one thing alone does my Hell belie the name of Hell
(In this it differs from the Hell of eternal flames)
In the eternal suffering of the other Hell there is no more hope
Whereas in my Hell I do hope and call for your grace.
          So descend by thy grace, O Christ into my Hell:
Give me henceforth the power to triumph over these demons
So that I may follow thee on high let me suffer here below.
          Let me be constantly a-sighing for my crimes
And let me fear thy justice in my spirit.
“For salvation consists in fearing in hope”.)

Perhaps the most striking examples of the two poets' common inspiration and similarity of approach are encountered when each concentrates his poetic skill on what Alabaster calls “The Ensigns of Christ's Crucifying.” When both poets treat this part of Christ's drama, the crown of thorns placed in mockery on his head becomes the symbol for man's revolt against God and of man's transformation of the Garden of Paradise into the thorny wilderness of Fallen Creation. The contrast between the bounteousness of Eden and the barrenness of the world after the Fall serves as the starting point for both poets. Alabaster:

          The earth, which in delicious Paradise
Did bud forth man like cedars stately tall,
From barren womb accursed by the Fall
Doth thrust forth man as thorns in armed wise,
Darting the points of sin against the skies.

(“Sonnet XXVI,” 1-5)

La Ceppède:

          O Pere dont jadis les mains industrieuses
Cette vigne ont planté, voy comme au lieu du fruict
Qu'elle deut rapporter, ingrate elle produit
Pour couronner ton fils des ronces épineuses.
          Ces Epines estoient les peines crimineuses
Des revoltes de l'homme au Paradis seduit:
Et ce Christ qui sa coulpe, et ses peines détruict
Ces épines arrose, et les rend fructueuses.

(I, II, lxiv)

          (O Father whose industrious hands did once
This vine plant, see how instead of the fruit
It was to bear, thankless it produced
To crown thy son, thorny brambles.
          These thorns were the criminal penalties
Of man's revolts when he was led astray in Paradise
And this Christ who destroys man's guilt and penalties
Waters these thorns [with his blood] and makes them bear fruit.)

Here, it is Alabaster who is the more expansive, for in the tercets of his sonnet he develops the theme of Christ-as-gardener who makes the thorns fruitful, a subject La Ceppède deals with in the second part of the octet quoted above:

          For with the purple tincture of his blood,
Which out the furrows of his brows did rain,
He hath transformed us thorns from baser wood,
To raise our nature and odious strain,
That we, who with our thorny sins did wound him,
Hereafter should with roseal virtues crown him.

(“Sonnet XXVI,” 9-14)

Once again, Alabaster's conclusion is in the form of a play on a paradox, in this case that while our thorns (that is, both the crown and our sins) wound Christ, he, by virtue of the redemptive power of his blood, can transform the crown of thorns into a laurel of rosy virtues.

La Ceppède, on the other hand, ever interested in biblical typology, seeks another example of the association of thorns with redemption, so that Christ's crown of thorns not only evokes the Garden of Eden and Man's Fall, but also Moses, the deliverer of the Jews and a prefiguration of Christ the Redeemer:

          Pour delivrer Juda le Pere descendant
D'épines entouré dans un halier ardant
Fit l'effort merveilleux de sa forte puissance.
          Et le Fils descendant du sejour paternel,
Bruslant dans cet halier d'un amour eternel,
Fait l'épineux effort de nostre délivrance.

(I, II, lxiv)

          (To deliver Judah the Father came down
And surrounded by thorns appeared in a burning bush
As a miraculous demonstration of his mighty power.
          And the Son descending from his Father's home
Burning in this bush of thorns with eternal love
Takes on the thorny task of our deliverance.)

It is interesting that neither poet can resist the pun on the word “thorny” (“épineux”), so that Alabaster talks of thorny sins while La Ceppède uses “épineux effort.” However, this is not mere verbal pyrotechnics on their part, but reflects the prevalent Renaissance belief that such word-play was not simply gratuitous, but a revelation of hidden truth.

The contemplation of the reed held by Christ during his trial evokes similar emotions in both poets. Each one alludes to the tradition that the reed had the power to stun or to entrance snakes. For Alabaster, the reed is also an instrument which shepherds use to delight their flocks with music. Christ, with reed in hand, becomes, in a somewhat contrived riddle, both the joy of his flock and the foe of serpents, which are natural enemies of sheep and symbolic of Man's sin:

          Conceive a Lamb that should a kingdom weigh,
And judge what sceptre such a prince might bear;
Now turn your thoughts and see Christ sitting here,
Who in his hand a waving reed doth sway.
Conceive how diverse natures should obey
Under one prince, and both be awed with fear,
Serpents and sheep, if they united were,
And judge what sceptre should the kingdom stay.
If nature's penman hath defined right,
A serpent is amazed with a reed,
And shepherds with the same their flocks delight;
Now turn your thoughts and see both these agreed:
Christ's sheep do draw heaven's comfort from his breath,
But serpents from the same receive their death.

(“Sonnet XXVII”)

La Ceppède evokes the miraculous property of the reed, but characteristically sees in it the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy that Christ shall crush the serpent of Eden:

          Nature n'a rien fait qu'on doive mépriser.
Sa moindre petite oeuvre est encor' fructueuse
Elle a mis au Roseau la vertu merveilleuse
De pouvoir des Serpens les testes écrazer.
          Mocqueurs, ce vieux Serpent qui vous a fait ozer
Moquer de ce grand Roy la dextre glorieuse,
Par ce vile Roseau, vous faict prophetizer
Qu'il en écrazera sa teste sourcilleuse.

(I, II, lxvi)

                    (Nature has created nothing which is to be despised.
Its tiniest work is ever fruitful.
She has given the reed the miraculous power
Of being able to crush the heads of serpents.
          O mockers, the serpent of old who has given you the audacity
To mock the glorious right hand of this great king
By this lowly reed, makes you prophesy
That he will crush Satan's proud and supercilious head.)

However, La Ceppède sees yet another symbol here and finds in the Old Testament that the Gentiles are referred to by Ezekiel (chapter 29, verse 6) as a reed, so that it now symbolises not only Christ's victory over Satan but also the universality of the redemption this victory brings:

          Mais, ô Christ, ce Roseau que tu prens en ta main,
N'est-il pas bien encor le Symbole germain
De ce vile Gentil que ton Royaume embrasse?
          (But O Christ, this reed which you take in your hand
Is it not also the symbol
Of the lowly Gentile your kingdom includes?)

And this figure takes on yet another connotation, as in an interesting prefiguration of Pascal, La Ceppède pictures the frailness of man as a reed blown about in the wind:

          Suis-je pas ce Roseau, qui te couste si cher,
Qu'or l'un, or' l'autre vent de ce monde terrasse,
Si tant soit peu ta main se lasche à me lascher?
          (Am I not this reed which costs thee so dear
Which is blown over by every wind of this world
If thy hand should ever so lightly loosen its grasp on me.)

La Ceppède's constant search for hidden meaning in the events and props of Christ's Passion and his perpetual seeking for secret “figures” in the Old Testament, add a density and an epic stature to his Théorèmes which are absent from Alabaster's poems. The latter is too fond of conceits and of playing verbally with the great paradoxes of Christianity. He is a much more successful poet when he manages to keep his proclivity for such linguistic gymnastics in check.

The few examples of Alabaster's and La Ceppède's verse we have had space to examine here are interesting in many respects. It is perhaps not unexpected to find certain similarities in poetry dealing with a common subject, and yet the similarities between the inspiration, imagery, and treatment of the common material obviously go much deeper than just fortuitous likeness. Although there are, understandably, many differences which give to each poet his individuality and originality, it is obvious that both are drawing from the same font of devotional inspiration and are looking at their subject in much the same way. While the meditative tradition is not the only factor to be considered, its imprint is unmistakable, as is the influence of the post-Renaissance devotional revival. It is apparent that we are dealing with a literary phenomenon that has repercussions throughout Europe, a phenomenon that needs to be studied from the broadest possible perspective. The relationships and differences between individual poets and groups of poets need to be explored in a much more thorough fashion that has been possible in this short introduction to the similarities between two poets. It is only in this way that we will be able to do justice to the unparalleled revival of devotional poetry which occurred in the Europe of the Baroque era and only when we have more precisely charted the scope of this revival will we be able to determine the full significance of this literary phenomenon.

Notes

  1. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between.

  2. Jean de Sponde, Poésies, ed. F. Ruchon and A. Boase (Geneva, 1949), p. 140.

  3. Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford, 1953). Frank J. Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry (New Haven and London, 1972). We should also mention the unpublished dissertation of Albert J. Divver, “Seventeenth-Century English and French Devotional Poetry” (Michigan, 1972).

  4. Biographical details and the texts quoted from Alabaster's work are taken from The Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. G. M. Story and Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1959).

  5. See Story and Gardner, op. cit. p. xxxi.

  6. See Michel Jeanneret, Poésie et tradition biblique au XVIè siècle (Paris, 1969).

  7. Jean de La Ceppède, Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de notre rédemption (Geneva: Droz, 1966).

  8. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven and London, 1954).

  9. See the “Introduction” to the Droz edition of the Théorèmes, op. cit.

  10. Théorèmes, Part I, Book I, sonnet i, 1-2.

  11. Théorèmes, Part I, Book I, sonnet ii, 3-4.

  12. Kings 1.15.14-23.

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