By a daisy, whose leaves spread, Or a shady bush or tree, She could more infuse in me Than all nature's beauties can In some other wiser man.' 'The praises of poetry,' says Charles Lamb, 'have been often sung in ancient and in modern times; strange powers have been ascribed to it of influence over animate and inanimate auditors; its force over fascinated crowds has been acknowledged; but, before Wither, no one ever celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the strength which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, and that too after death, was all which hitherto the poets had promised themselves from their art. It seems to have been left to Wither to discover that poetry was a present possession, as well as a rich reversion; and that the Muse had promise of both lives, of this and of that which was to come.' Wither's darling measure,' in which the fourth eclogue of The Shepherd's Hunting and the greater part of The Mistress of Philarete are written, has been sometimes spoken of by critics as octosyllabic verse, which plainly it is not. It is the seven-syllabled trochaic couplet, which Shakespeare lightly laughed at as the 'butter-woman's rank to market,' and which, as used at a later date by Ambrose Philips, roused Henry Carey (he who lived a life free from reproach, and hanged himself, October the 4th, 1743') to parody it and add a new adjective to our English vocabulary in calling it Namby-Pamby. Wither himself seems to anticipate some cavilling at it, for he says 'If the verse here used be Pedants shall not tie my strains To our antique poets' vaines.' Doubtless it is a form of verse that readily runs into doggerel, and the fatal facility of its flow tends to the production to a maximum of gingling sound with a minimum of sense. But in the hands of masters like Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Wither, and Milton it has proved itself an instrument of considerable compass, and they have drawn from it not only strains of 'linked sweetness long drawn out,' but notes of deeper harmony and power. In a note to the essay already quoted, Lamb cites the following lines from The Shepherd's Hunting— 'If thy birth doth bravely tower, As she makes wing she gets power; Yet the higher she doth soar, She's affronted still the more, Till she to the high'st hath past, Then she rests with fame at last,' and, remarking that 'a long line is a line we are long repeating,' he asks what Alexandrine could express 'labour slowly but strongly surmounting difficulty' as it is done in the second of these lines? Again, he says, in more sweeping terms, 'What metre could go beyond these, from Philarete?' 'Her true beauty leaves behind Of more sweetness than all art And too strong to be suppress'd. In 1618 appeared The Motto, written, he says, by of recreation after his liberation from the Marshal way sea. It is a long poem (some two thousand lines) in the heroic couplet, and is divided into three sections corresponding to the three divisions of the motto, Nec habeo, Nec curo, Nec careo. It is in form a continuous self-eulogy, yet, as has been more than once remarked, it is singularly free from any offensive or distasteful egotism. The reason of this is supplied by Wither himself in his preface to The Motto. My intent was,' he says, 'to draw the true picture of mine own heart; that my friends who knew me outwardly might have some representation of my inside also. And that, if they liked the form of it, they might (wherein they were defective) fashion their own minds thereunto. But my principal intention was, by recording those thoughts, to confirm mine own resolution; and to prevent such alterations as time and infirmities may work upon me.' That is to say, he had no intention of holding up a likeness of himself for all men to admire and imitate, but of painting the picture of a man such as he fain would have himself to be. And, being endowed with a pure and healthy mind, his ideal is a high and noble one. Regarding The Motto as a work of art, we may, in spite of an occasional fine passage, adopt his own words. 'The language,' he says, 'is but indifferent: for I affected matter more than words. The method is none at all: for I was loath to make a business of a recreation.' In 1619 appeared Fidelia, an elegiac epistle of fortyfour pages from a forsaken fair one to her inconstant lover. The lady, without any feigning, pours out her own love with all the ardour of an Eloisa and something of the plain-spokenness of a Juliet. There are some fine touches in the poem, but though Wither seems to have been a master in the art of love, we have a shrewd suspicion that there is too strong a tincture of the masculine element in Fidelia's philtre. Fair Virtue, though written some time before, did not see the light until 1622, and even then was published anonymously, because Wither had some, though perfectly groundless, fears that it would damage the credit of more serious work which he then had in hand. It was entitled Fair Virtue; or, The Mistress of Philarete, written by Himself; and in a preface the publisher says that he has entreated the author to explain his meaning in certain obscure passages, and to set down to what good purpose the poem would serve. All he could get from him was, however, that the first would take away the employment of his interpreters, and the second would be well enough found out by all such as had honest understandings. The reader is designedly left in doubt whether the poet is merely celebrating the charms of his own mistress, or laying his votive offering at the shrine of Virtue herself. The introductory epistle favours the latter view. 'On this glass of thy perfection, If that any women pry, This thy picture therefore show I For the more make love to thee I am no Italian lover That would mew thee in a jail; But thy beauty I discover English-like without a veil. If thou mayst be won away, Win and wear thee, he that may.' In another passage, however, he distinctly states that he is painting no imaginary portrait, but that a real love for a real lady is the fount and inspiration of his song. For if I had never seen Clouted cream and bread and cheese.' |