16 Cavalier Poetry

Mr. Subhadeep Kumar

About the Module:

This module provides an overview of Cavalier poetry. The cavalier poets worked during the reign of King Charles I (1600-1649). This was a tumultuous period in English history, when the nation was sharply polarized between the supporters of the king (commonly known as Cavaliers) and that of the king’s parliament (Roundheads). The discord eventually led to a bloody civil war (1642 – 1651), the execution of the king, finally ending with the victory of the parliamentary party.

Description of the Term:

The term ‘cavalier’ originates from the same etymological root as chivalry and cavalry, i.e. ‘Cheval’, the French word for ‘Horse’. Originally it designated a mounted horseman. It signified an elevated social position as commoners were barred to take up commanding position in Cavalry regiments of the king. However during the period under consideration the term was more often used derogatorily against the supporters of the king, who were perceived to be haughty, arrogant and squanderers of taxpayers’ money.

‘Cavalier’ poets, is thus more descriptive of these poets’ political affiliations than any stylistic feature or topical preoccupation of these poets’ writings. Most of the Cavalier poets came from the ranks of nobility and had kindred interest with the upkeep of Divine Right of absolute monarchy. There is one notable exception – Robert Herrick, who did not come from the nobility and was a clergyman by profession.

The General Social Context and the Public Culture of the Time:

Politically these were fractious times. As religious and philosophical discords spilled onto the streets and led to a civil war, the printed word too became a site of contestation. Puritans generally expressed their bitterness through parody of popular medieval catechisms. In their ‘calumnies’ which were printed cheap and in lot, their favorite target were the cavaliers. For the puritans, the cavaliers personified all that is ungodly with the present state of England. Sons of rich men with assured lineage and finances, making sleight of the church, the will of the common people and of course public money. They wrote lampoons and allegories, where the most hated statements, damnables and vices were put in the mouth of cavaliers. There were subtler lampoons too, with just a touch of misogyny – like the mock petition – The City Dames Petition in the behalfe of the long afflicted, but well affected cavaliers (1647) – Certain wives of London tradesmen sign a letter begging the king and parliament to stop the war. The document explains that the good women—true descendants of the Wife of Bath, Maid Emlyn and Jill of Brainford—who mind their husbands’ shops, sorely miss not only the custom, but, also, the courtship of those gallant exquisites whose breath was “as sweet as amber” and whose essences made the womens’ establishments as “fragrant as the spring’s first flowers.” The royalist party met their opponents with the same weapons. Cavaliers prided themselves on their mastery of wordcraft, and replied in lyric. Even amid the bitterness of defeat, the cavalier gaiety lives in these lyrics, like in The Parliaments Letanie (1647), supplications to avoid such afflictions as usurers, parliamentary government and Oliver Cromwell are offered up in rollicking verses suggestive of a drinking song.

Features of Cavalier Poetry:

If any abiding stylistic feature of the Cavalier poets needs to be identified, these poets concentrated on formal perfection, of rhyme, of meter and cadence. They looked up to Classical Latin poets of ancient Rome like Virgil, Catullus, Lucan, Marshall and tried to emulate their craft, not just stylistically but even thematically. They were young aristocrats who prided themselves on their grasp of Latin or anything ancient Roman. They were privileged enough to access formal higher education at a time when too few could afford it. King Charles I was known more for his love of exuberance – flaunting of the latest renaissance fads from Italy than statesmanship and he patronized poets and artists who provided him with the art that he liked. For a king parched for the latest innovations from renaissance Italy and its Classicism, the Cavalier poets’ works seemed more authentically Classicist than the renditions on contemporary English stage or for that matter any other attempts at classicism arriving via Italia.

In matters of theme they moved away from issues of religion, philosophy or political morality which were common concerns of 16th century English poetry and concentrated on ‘simpler’ joys of life, like pleasures of conjugal love, country life and comfort food – joys which overtaxed, overworked ‘simpler’ folks of the time could ill afford.

English Lyric Poetry before Cavaliers:

The great masters of English lyric poetry before 17th century were Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Thomas Wyatt. The Victorian Pre-Raphaelite poet Swinburne had indeed discerned growth and continuity of English lyric poetry from the Elizabethan masters “through a whole chain of constellations till it culminates in the crowning star of Herrick.” However even though the unity of the English lyrical tradition down the ages is undeniable, we do see a certain change in form and temper as we pass from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. The Petrarchan influence, with its ideals of chivalry and ethereal love which made itself felt, not only in the sonnet sequences, but, also, in the song-books and miscellany lyrics, of the Elizabethan age, loses much of its potency in the Caroline age (the reign of King Charls I). It began to be replaced with the more direct and worldly charms of the Classical lyric. In the Elizabethan and the subsequent Jacobean era (the reign of King James I), the dramatic lyric, thanks to the pastoralism of Shakespeare’s songs, had, in the main resisted the influence of the Italian art lyric and had remained true to the principles of old English folk songs. But after the withdrawal of Shakespeare from the stage in the Jacobean era, the classical lyric as attuned by Ben Johnson becomes supreme.

Tribe of Ben:

The doyen of the Jacobean (reign of King James I, 1603-1625) and the early Caroline era was Ben Jonson. A towering literary figure, excelling in poetry, satire, acting and playwright; during his lifetime he was considered equal in genius to Shakespeare. Jonson was a literary dictator, and his influence, during the declining years of his life, upon the circle of poets, dramatists and others who gathered about him in the Apollo chamber of the Devil tavern, at Temple Bar, was paramount. It is apparent in the lyrics of the dramas and masques of the Jacobean age. The later dramatic songs of Heywood and Fletcher, and those of Ford and Shirley, almost without exception, have a classical ring in them, which brings them very near to the manner of Jonson, and removes them far away from the “wood notes wild” of Shakespearean lyrics. As we shall see presently, it is everywhere apparent in the lyrics of Herrick and Carew, and its presence is likewise felt in those of Cartwright, Randolph and Waller. We recognise it in the orderly structure and finished grace of their lyrics, and in the substitution of the language of courtly gallantry, which Jonson had caught from the masters of Roman lyric, for the language of prostrate adoration, which dominates the English variety of Petrarchan school of poetry, evident in the works of Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney or Edmund Spenser.

The Cavalier poets self-identified as the ‘Tribe of Ben’, indicating their homage and loyalty to Jonson’s art in spite of their opposing, in fact antagonistic political conviction. While the Cavalier poets were ardent royalists, Ben Jonson was a marked dissident who was show caused number of times for subtle satirical takes on royal policy and on one occasion served a brief sentence of imprisonment. Nevertheless the Cavalier poets flocked with Ben Jonson.

The Work of Cavalier Poets:

Robert Herrick: (1591-1674) Several critics had discerned an unmistakable vein of romanticism in Herrick and a kinship with the rustic melodists of English folk-song. Nonetheless, he is also one of the most classical of English lyrists. His classicism derives, through Ben Jonson, from the great masters of Latin lyric—Catullus and Horace. Herrick’s lyric range is vast, and extends from the simple folk-song to the Horatian ode or the Catullian epithalamy.

Herrick’s classicism extends far beyond the scope of direct indebtedness to individual Greek or Roman authors. The atmosphere of his verses may be that of the London tavern or the Devonshire village, but, often enough, we find, mingled with all this, the atmosphere of a remote Roman world, clinging tenaciously to its faith in faun-habited woods, its genii of field and flood, or its household Lares and Penates. More than once, too, we are made to feel that there was more of the Roman flamen than the Christian priest in Herrick, and, even in his Christian Militant, we discern more of Roman stoicism than of the Sermon on the Mount. Herrick, despite his Noble Numbers, is one of the most pagan of English poets, and he cannot refrain from introducing references to Roman priest craft even where, as in his lines, To the reverend Shade of his religious Father, his mood is one of profound seriousness. And, whereas most of the English poets of the renascence age were content with borrowing ideas or imagery from the ancient world, jealously preserving, at the same time, their independence of mind and their status as Tudor or Stewart Englishmen, Herrick could be satisfied with nothing less than a full absorption in the festive life of Rome.

His allegiance to the ancient world is likewise manifest in his poetic art. The Spenserian tradition, with its Italian grace and slow-moving cadences, made no appeal to him. Herrick’s lyrics have an accent of spontaneity, but there is abundant evidence that he was a careful and deliberate artist who rigorously practiced the labour of the file. The lines entitled His Request to Julia indicate very clearly how fastidious was his artistic consciousness:

Julia, if I chance to die

Ere I print my poetry,

I most humbly thee desire

To commit it to the fire.

Better ’t were my book were dead,

Than to live not perfected.

In his lighter lyrics, the language is simple and even homely; but, in his more sustained odes, and  in  verses  like  the  following,  it  acquires  imaginative  power,  and  becomes  rich  in metaphor:

Alas! for me, that I have lost

E’en all almost;

Sunk is my sight, set is my sun,

And all the loom of life undone:

The staff, the elm, the prop, the sheltering wall

Whereon my vine did crawl,

Now, now blown down; needs must the old stock fall.

The above quotation will also serve to illustrate Herrick’s wonderful command of meter. The first half of the seventeenth century was a time of great metric freedom, when poets wrought wonderful melodies through their skillful handling of iambic or trochaic lines of varying length, and through the deft interlacing of their rimes. He has left us whole poems—for example, His Departure Hence—in which the verses consist of a single accent, and others in which a verse of four accents is followed by one of two accents; while, in such poems as his Ode for Ben Jonson, or To Primroses filled with Morning Dew, his craftsmanship in the structure of his rhythms, the use of enjambment and the spacing of his rimes calls for the highest praise:

Why do ye weep, sweet babes? can tears

Speak grief in you,

Who were but born

Just as the modest morn

Teem’d her refreshing dew?

Alas! you have not known that shower

That mars a flower,

Nor felt the unkind

Breath of a blasting wind;

Nor are ye worn with years,

Or warp’d as we,

Who think it strange to see

Such pretty flowers, like to orphans young,

To speak by tears before ye have a tongue

In a few of his poems, he employs the heroic couplet, and a comparison of his early poems in this measure with those of a later period will show that he shared in the movement of the age towards the Augustan measures of Dryden and Pope. However, it is important to remember that Herrick is much more than just a cavalier poet, and that his pen called into being melodies for which the typical cavalier lyrists—Carew and Suckling – recked little or nothing. Indeed these compositions might have found attentive ears among the contemporaries of Marlowe, Breton and Shakespeare. It is true that he was no Petrarchan, and held in small esteem that union of chivalrous sentiment and Platonic idealism which went to the making of the great English sonnet sequences in the last decade of the sixteenth century; but, while he followed his master, Ben Jonson, in drawing his inspiration from the classical lyrists of Greece and Rome rather than from those of the Italian renascence, he, nevertheless, entered into that heritage of song which had come down from the homelier strains of the Elizabethan song-books and miscellanies, and was ever ready to attune his lyre to the music of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Campion.

If Herrick enters into the spirit of the idyllic song of Elizabethan days, he has also an ear for that which was still more remote from the sophisticated tastes of cavalier lyrists—the folk-song of the cornfield or the chimney corner. In spite of his love of birds and flowers and other amenities of country life, Herrick can scarcely be called a great nature poet. He rarely attempts to paint a well-ordered landscape, with foreground and background, but prefers to concentrate his thoughts upon one object in the picture to the exclusion of everything else.

Richard Lovelace: (1617-1657) came from the landed aristocracy, of a family with distinguished military and legal accomplishments in service of the crown. In 1631, Lovelace was sworn in as a ‘Gentleman Wayter Extraordinary’ to King Charles I, an honorary position for which one paid a fee. As a fanatic royalist, who took part in the ‘Bishops’ wars’ and various acts of Cavalier high handedness he was imprisoned twice during the course of the English Civil War. His best writings like To Althea, From Prison or the Lucasta series were produced during the periods of incarceration.

In his lifetime he wrote more than 300 poems beside dramas, of which 2 survive – one comedy Scholars, which he wrote as a student while in Oxford and The Soldier written in the aftermath of the Bishops’ War debacle. Among all his fellow Cavaliers, Lovelace might be the most political of poets. Even in his love poems the conflict between love and honor appears to be one of the main themes. In his most famous love poem Lucasta he consistently returns to this idea of faithfulness to his lover, Lucasta, versus the faithfulness he is required to show for his country. In this poem, love and honor seem to go hand in hand since, as the last couplet states –

…..this inconstancy is such

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honor more.

The narrator has to first fulfill his duty to his country before he can be with Lucasta especially since, if he did not honor this first commitment, he would feel too much shame to be able to be with Lucasta. The way the poem is presented seems to be like Lovelace is convincing himself while he is convincing Lucasta that he needs to go to war since he constantly goes back and forth between the divide of love for his country versus Lucasta, and duty to his country versus Lucasta. He seems to resolve upon the fact that his duty to his country outweighs his duty to Lucasta, and his commitment to his country came before his commitment to Lucasta, so he decides to honor it. The irony in this is that in order to honor his commitment to his country or be faithful to it, he will have to be unfaithful to Lucasta since he is leaving her for war. In virtue of his associations, he belongs to the school of cavalier lyrists, whose foremost representatives are Carew and Suckling; but his songs to Lucasta owe little or nothing to Jonson or the lyrists of antiquity. His affected conceits are, perhaps, those of his own age but the chivalrous temper of his songs, and the worship which he pays to her whose beauty enthralls him, are very like what we meet with in Petrarch and in the renascence sonneteers that followed Petrarch’s example.

Thomas Carew (1595-c.1645) was of noble lineage. He was educated at Oxford and later tried to get into Law, worked as secretary to a number of English diplomats, in whose train he travelled to Europe multiple times before gaining court appointment as the ‘server’ or the‘taster ordinary’ to King Charles I in 1628. It was at this time he met Ben Johnson and the ageing John Donne, the leading luminaries of the Carolingian court. As with other Cavalier poets he was tremendously influenced by Johnson and soon came to be identified as one among the ‘sons of Ben’. However, Carew might be the most Donnian among all the Cavalier poets. In 1633 his first Masque Coelum Britanicum, was acted in the banqueting hall at Whitehall palace – a gesture indicative of royal patronage. It was printed in 1634.

Carew’s poems are sensuous lyrics. They open to us, in the poet’s own phrase, “a mine of rich and pregnant fancy.” His metrical style was influenced by Jonson and his imagery by Donne, but Carew had a lucidity and directness of lyrical utterance unknown to the metaphysical John Donne.

Carew has long been recognized as a notable figure in English literary history. His earliest critics—chiefly other poets—evidently knew his work from the many manuscripts that circulated. Among many others, two of the most celebrated writers of the age, Sir John Suckling and William Davenant, paid tribute to Carew, playfully admiring his poetic craftsmanship. Carew’s reputation, however, experienced a slow but steady decline during the second half of the seventeenth century. Despite some interest in Carew in subsequent years, not until the twentieth century did critics offer a reexamination of Carew’s place in English literary history. F. R. Leavis wrote in 1936: “Carew, it seems to me, has claims to more distinction than he is commonly accorded; more than he is accorded by the bracket that, in common acceptance, links him with Lovelace and Suckling.” More recently, Carew’s place among the Cavalier poets has been examined, as have his poetic affinities with Ben Jonson and John Donne; A Rapture has been scrutinized as both biography and fantasy; the funerary poetry has been studied as a subgenre; evidence of Carew’s views concerning political hierarchy has been found in hisoccasional verse; and love and courtship have been probed as themes in the Celia poems. By the end of the twentieth century, Carew has been recognized as an important poet representative of his time and a master lyricist. According to Edmund Gosse, “Carew’s poems, at their best, are brilliant lyrics of the purely sensuous order.”

Carew’s Poemsis a collection of lyrics, songs, pastorals, poetic dialogues, elegies, addresses, and occasional poems. Most of the pieces are fairly short—the longest, A Rapture is 166 lines, and well over half are under 50 lines. The subjects are various: a number of poems treat love, lovemaking, and feminine beauty. Several of the poems, including An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne are memorial tributes; others, notably To Saxham, celebrate country-house life; and a few record such events as the successful production of a play (To my worthy Friend, M. D’Avenant, upon his Excellent Play, The Iust Italian) or the marriage of friends (On the Marriage of T. K. and C. C. the Morning Stormie). Many of the songs and love poems are addressed to the still-unidentified Celia, a woman who was evidently Carew’s lover for years. The poems to Celia treat the urgency of courtship, making much of the carpe diem theme. Others commend Celia through simile, conceit, and cliché. The physical pleasures of love are likewise celebrated: A Rapture graphically documents a sexual encounter through analogy, euphemism, and paradox, while Loves Courtship responds to the early passing of virginity. A number of Carew’s poems are concerned with the nature of poetry itself. His elegy on John Donne has been praised as both a masterpiece of criticism and a remarkably perceptive analysis of the metaphysical qualities of Donne’s literary work. Among Carew’s occasional, public verse are his addresses to ladies of fashion, commendations of the nobility, and laments for the passing of friends or public figures, such as Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.

John Suckling (1609-1641) “Easy, natural Suckling” has won for himself, since the days of the restoration and Congreve’s Millamant, an assured place in the bead-roll of English poets as the typical cavalier lyrist, the arch-representative of Pope’s “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease” light-hearted songs of courtly gallantry. He characterized the Cavalier gaiet to the hilt. He discovered the card game ‘cribbage’ – an inveterate card player who reportedly won more than 2000 pounds in games, equivalent to 14 million pound in today’s term, only to squander the entirety and die pennyless as an exile wanted for treason in Paris.

Suckling’s literary fame is now chiefly bound up with his lyrics, some of the most delightful of which first found a place in his dramas. For the most part, they are song-lyrics, and were set to music by Henry Lawes. As a lyric poet, he stands somewhat apart from Herrick and Carew in the fact that he owed little to Ben Jonson: the restraint, classical colour and fastidious workmanship of Jonson made little appeal to Suckling, who censured Carew for “the trouble and pain” expended on his verses, and declared that “a laureate muse should be easy and free.” Like Carew he too could not avoid the influence of the metaphysical poet John Donne. Though he had little of Donne’s intellectuality, but he follows him in the war which he waged upon the unreality and lovelorn fancies of the Petrarchian school of lyrists; while the audacious bravura of such songs as Out upon it! I have loved or Why so pale and wan, fair lover, in which he derides constancy in love and boastfully displays an unpledged heart, is directly caught from Donne’s Go and catch a falling star and Now thou hast loved me one whole day.

It is his ingenuous wit, and gaiety, which added to his charm as a song-writer. To these high qualities must, also, be added his deft control and movement of verse; extraordinarily careless as his poems sometimes are, his best songs have the rare seventeenth century quality of tunefulness and the perfect accord of theme and rhythm –

O, that I were all soul, that I might prove

For you as fit a love

As you are for an angel, for, I know,

None but pure spirits are fit loves for you.

You are all ethereal, there’s in you no dross,

Nor any part that’s gross.

Your coarsest part is like a curious lawn,

The vestal relics for a covering drawn.

Your other parts, part of the purest fire

That e’er Heaven did inspire,

Makes every thought that is refined by it

A quintessence of goodness and of wit.

Suckling, sometimes, has been harshly judged by critics as a mere reveler of court, who substituted licentious lyrics in spirit and in metric structure for the perceived need for decorum in love poetry. But such an estimate of the man is one-sided and even false, depending more on anecdotes about the poets’ personal life than his craft.

Other poets associated with the Cavalier tradition include Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Aurelian Townshend, William Cartwright, Thomas Randolph, William Habington, Sir Richard Fanshawe, Edmund Waller, and James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose. However most of these writers’ ouvre is not substantial to be considered as full-fledged practicing poets.

With the defeat of the Cavalier party in the Civil war, the gaiety of the Carolingian court folded for good. Their stylistic prowess and unabashedly classist themes were derided as too affected and socially irrelevant. Indeed the Puritans considered it morally harmful and against the democratic spirit of the new commonwealth. The Cavalier oeuvre had to wait for later 19th and 20th century scholarly reevaluation for restitution in the canon.

References

• Broadview Anthology of Literature: The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century. Canada: Broadview Press. 2006.
• Clayton, Thomas (Spring 1974). “The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton by Earl Miner”. Renaissance Quarterly. 27 (1)
• Larsen, Erik (Spring 1972). “Van Dyck’s English Period and Cavalier Poetry”. Art Journal. 31 (3)
• Post, Jonathan (Routledge 1999) English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century The Jacobean Era Archived October 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine