Critic: Fred Inglis

Source: The Elizabethan Poets: The Making of English Poetry from Wyatt to Ben Jonson, Evans Brothers Ltd., 1969, pp. 127-56. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 17

[In the following essay, Inglis investigates Jonson's love, religious, and social poetry in relation to the facts of the poet's life.]

Given the eminence I ascribe to Jonson, it seems right that this [essay] should open with a brief biography. But the decision is not only a critical one; Jonson occupies a position of unusual historical importance, and since we lack so much of the biographical evidence for Shakespeare whose career would be important in similar ways, Jonson's life is one of the few of which we can describe enough to know what life was like for a full-time professional in the world of letters. For Jonson, like Shakespeare, lacked Sidney's advantages of birth and ignored the particular aspirations of Ralegh or Donne. After his early years he was a full-time writer, and he was fiercely proud of it and censorious of amateurs; he was neither a churchman nor a politician (which is not to say he neglects political and theological action). He is an early representative of spectacular success in a new social group--the independent writers, though his independence, which was vigorously temperamental as well as social, was qualified by patronage, censorship, and the powers of the aristocracy.

The success he won depended in his youth on access to social opportunity. One or two literary historians have made much of Jonson's origins as a bricklayer, and this may be misleading. His father, who died a month before Jonson's birth in 1572, was a clergyman; his stepfather was a master-bricklayer, and as a craft-master a man of some social standing. None the less it would seem that his concerns were strictly non-intellectual, for after Jonson had been sent (sponsored apparently by a family friend) to the great London grammar school at Westminster, his stepfather removed him shortly before he would have entered the sixth form to proceed to Oxford or Cambridge. The record of his life between leaving school and turning up in the London theatre in 1597 is rather blurred. He was briefly a soldier in the Flemish wars which lingered on through the last two decades of the century and which killed Sidney. No doubt he enlisted when he was hard up, but from his acquaintance Drummond's report and his own "Epigrams 107" and "108" he was a forthright, competent soldier. During the missing years he also married a wife whom he later left, crisply describing her to Drummond as 'a shrew, yet honest', and fathered the two children whose deaths, at six months and seven years, prompted the two finest short epitaphs in the language.

In 1598, after joining the famous manager Henslowe's company in London, Jonson arrived dramatically in the news: his play Every Man in His Humour won a striking success, and he was prosecuted for murder. The play was the first of a line of vivid, original and penetrating comedies, each (apart from the last two or three) remarkable for boisterous knockabout and also for moral stringency solidly there in the clear, penetrating light which the judgment of the plays sheds upon human affairs. We cannot consider the plays here, but it is important to say that, in all their exuberance and inventiveness of characterisation one never loses sight of their maker and his steadyscrutiny of moral behaviour. The tone of the plays and of the poems is extraordinarily consistent, and it is one which, while taking high delight in the peculiarities of the subject, is always poised to move easily into judgment. It is magisterial but never frosty. Jonson's moral judgments, which may be highly-coloured and angry, or may be coolly judicious, arise from his boundless vitality, his keen sense of actual living. It is not surprising that Dickens admired Jonson's plays so much, and the plays and the poems are an entity; the work is the man.

The man was often an uncomfortable person to have around. Innumerable figures in his plays lampoon lesser rivals of the time, and he attacks them not only for stupidity and incompetence, but also for brute ignorance of the classical texts Jonson learned at Westminster and in which he so fully saturated his intelligence throughout his working life. The great teacher, classicist and historian William Camden taught Jonson at Westminster and, as that moving brief tribute "To Camden" ("Epigram 14") makes clear, Camden remained teacher and friend to Jonson for many years. Jonson remade the tradition of the ancient classics in his own terms and with tremendous intensity; he made the breadth and variety of that tradition his own possession, and it grew with him according to the lineaments of his personality. So in his work a whole tradition--the great tradition of Christian humanism--utters through a distinctive and inimitable voice.

Just how broad and varied is the work we can only see if we read through the canon--plays, masques and poems, summarised and commented on during his last bedridden years between about 1630 and 1637 in his prose commonplace book, Timber, or Discoveries. The greatest comedies, Volpone (1606), The Alchemist (1612), The Silent Woman (1609) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), receive their acknowledgement as a part of literature; the extremely powerful political drama Sejanus (1605) is underrated and deserves more reading: the stately Court masques which Jonson provided for his admiring patron King James, all of which contain bold, rich and sometimes lovely poems, are scarcely read at all. Yet they are a large part of Jonson's work, and no adequate appraisal of his craftsmanship, as well as that part of him which enjoyed sumptuousness and splendour, is possible without at least a reading of the Masque of Beauty (1608) and The Golden Age Restored (1615-16). In spite of the extent of his work and widespread ignorance of so much of it, I would argue that one comes most definitely to the heart of his greatness in a close scrutiny of the poems, and that this opinion, as the conversations with Drummond and Timber imply, would have been Jonson's as well. The rest of the work is part of his plenitude and vitality, but if the case for the short poem is secure and if it does provide best for the poet's gifts, then Jonson's poems supply the essential evidence for the critic, the historian, and the human being.

Jonson's manifold humanity becomes explicit in the poems. In part this explicitness is merely anecdotal and, though of absorbing autobiographical interest, not really a part of our study. Thus, after his satire on the trendsetters and the swinging young charlatans-about-London The Poetaster was performed in 1601, the uproar which followed obliged him to publish a palliating prologue. But the prologue was as bluntly outspoken and independent as the play, and Jonson (as he well knew) appeased nobody. The same bluntness transpires after the flop of The New Inn in 1629 when he published the "Ode to Himself," fulminating bitterly upon the grossness of his critics and the persecution of his gifts. Time and again Jonson had to call upon his patrons for rescue from the embarrassment incurred by his own proper failure to mitigate censure of the stupid, arrogant or wicked. He spoke out without compromise, and made the payment demanded. There was probably an element of deliberate self-sacrifice in all this, as there must be in anyone who sets up as a candid, incorruptible moral critic, as there must be perhaps in any kind of lonely hero. And there is no doubt that Jonson was such a hero. The age which lacks its Ben Jonson, its Dr. Johnson, its Charles Dickens, its F. R. Leavis, has no conscience, and its moral sense atrophies.

But what matters to us is not the actual historical occasions, though these are fascinating, but the poems in which the history is grasped in terms of moral realities. These poems delineate the moral pattern latent within the accidents of his life, and construct from them a generalised coherence. In saying that, I do not mean that he falsified his life in the interests of an ideal order of experience, but that the details and the proper names in the poems don't finally matter. What matters is that the poems are rooted in a real life; the experience and the personality from which they grow are solid and deep, and in recognising this, we recognise the rare integrity which can so put the truth of the poems beyond question. Jonson's poems provide a case in which we know from the art what the man was like, and the qualities realised in the art are those of a remarkably strong man, generous and abundant in his life, not gifted in speculative dialectic nor a glittering wit, but direct, independent, loyal and plainspoken. Thus it is affirmative evidence which the context of the poems gives us. Jonson became the leader of a literary club, having long been the magnetic centre of literary London as it met in the intellectual public houses. The club called itself 'The Tribe of Ben' and the quality of the poems it provoked makes it clear how gaping a distance lies between it and (say) the intellectual gossip-mongers of colour-supplement London. 'The Tribe of Ben' counted fine poets like Carew, Godolphin and Herrick among its number, and among the rest some of the most penetrating intelligences of the time--Lord Falkland, William Cavendish, Sir Kenelm Digby. It met for food, drink, and talk at the feet of the master, and the terms of its relationships were such as to provide rich and large material for poetry. The human contact signalled in "An Epistle, Inviting a Friend to Supper" deserves cherishing. There seems no reason why such experience should not persist.

Jonson was the last of the great Elizabethans. He was the tradition to which the new poets turned, and his statements carried an oracular weight. The prose commonplaces in Timber and the notes Drummond made during Jonson's visit to his Scottish home near Edinburgh in 1618 (Jonson walked there and back, from London, and stopped, fairly enough, each way in Darlington to buy new boots) serve as commentary both to the historical context in which the poems were written, and to their literary intention. There is not space to quote extensively from Timber or the Conversations.... A handful of remarks must serve to represent their characteristic inflexion and the tips they offer as to how to read both Jonson's and any other poetry, and to indicate how Jonson himself went to work, and what were his points of reference. Drummond thinly notes that in the first place Jonson was 'jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth)' (Conversations 19). The closest work and arguing went with canary wine as much as did the parties in the Devil Inn and the theatres. One recollection is challenging:

his opinion of verses

    that he wrote all his first in prose, for so his

master Camden had learned him.

   That verses stood by sense without either

  colours or accent,

  which yet other times he denied.

                                                    (15)

It sorts well with what we can see in his poems that they should start out from prose beginnings--as Ezra Pound wrote, 'poetry should be at least as well written as prose'. The poems intend a statement, and the original force of that statement inherse first in its 'sense', and if in Jonson's case the distinctive 'accent' of his 'sense' is inseparable from the sense itself, yet his deliberate strength is first a matter of moral force so that 'colours', figures of speech and elegance of numbers are subordinate. It is consistent that Jonson felt 'couplets to be the bravest sort of verses especially when they are broken and that cross rhymes and stanzas ... were all forced' (I), and from this judgment is follows that 'Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging' (3) and that although 'he esteemeth John Donne the first poet in the world in some things' (7) 'Donne himself for not being understood would perish' (12). Jonson always intends clarity and the cutting away of ambiguity and obscurity from around the lines of the verse. The couplet makes for such hardness and precision, hence his preference (though Jonson, like most of his contemporaries, was a virtuoso in stanza forms).

There is only agreeable gossip value in pursuing Jonson's impenitent self-esteem--'That next himself only Fletcher and Chapman could make a masque' (3) and (accurately) 'he was better versed and knew more Greek and Latin than all the poets in England'. The last anecdotes ring with utter authenticity of his pigheaded bluntness and his robust independence, for 'he never esteemed of a man for the name of a Lord' (14):

Jones [Inigo, with whom Jonson collaborated in Court masques] having accused him for naming him behind his back a fool, he denied it; 'But', says he, 'I said he was one arrant knave and I avouch it'.

(17)

Being at the end of my Lord Salisbury's table with Inigo Jones and demanded by my lord why he was not glad, 'My Lord', said he, 'you promised I should dine with you, but I do not ...'

(13)

These last extracts do no more than endorse the tones of the more relevant literaryobservations we have seen. In turning to Timber, we find the same tones meditating far more serious issues. It is notable that in dozens of places Timber is a rewriting, idea for idea, of some of the great classical critics and theorists of literature, particularly as they were rephrased for the Renaissance by the critic Vives whose primers ran into dozens of editions and were certainly among the textbooks at Westminster School. But Timber is more than an annotation of Vives's theories: it is the redefinition of Vives in Jonson's cadences and with the weight of his experience behind the sentences. We do not need Drummond's reminder to know how close lay the rhythms of Jonson's verse and prose.

The quality of Timber cannot, I suppose, be fully judged without a reading of Vive's De Disciplinis (1531), a grand formulation of all that was best in classical humanism. But the matter opens again the question of Jonson's relation to his history, and the way the history and the man moved together. I quote Wallace Stevens's noble poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Clam" in the last chapter during an attempt to define our understanding of a particular poetic tradition, and the decisive choices we make in charting our tradition. The analysis I propose may apply to Jonson, in Timber and in many poems. The scrapbook of quotations is tightened and compacted beneath the conviction of the writer. Each reminiscence from Vives moves into the bone of Jonson's being; the teacher becomes the pupil, and the pupil surpasses the teacher in passion and intelligence. Thus continuity holds through. It is as though we read a gifted modern poet whose mind has sharply altered according to his response to a great modern critic. The whole business of 'influence' is much subtler than our crude use of the term allows. It is not a matter of 'agreement' with so-and-so; it is a matter of possession, after which 'agreement'--or disagreement--is redundant. Your sensibility has changed, while it is still your own. You borrow the vocabulary, the inflexions and gestures of another man, even, but they become yours, and filled with your identity. So in these splendid passages it is Jonson's voice we hear, and simultaneously that of the moral history of the language.

Early on he writes, 'A good life is a main argument'; it is in keeping that the metaphor for life comes from logic. A little later he proceeds:

A man should so deliver himself to the nature of the subject whereof he speaks, that his hearer may take knowledge of his discipline with some delight: and so apparel fair and good matter that the studious of elegancy be not defrauded; redeem arts from their rough and braky seats ... to a pure, open and flowery light, where they may take the eye and be taken by the hand.

There follows the famous passage applauded by Eliot (and, improbably, Swinburne) in which Jonson rehearses Vives's instruction to scrutinise but not worship the classics. "Truth lies open to all; it is no man's several. A gift of the verse here bequeathed to the prose is the habit of concise and incisive generalisation. And then, a fine and embattled stance struck for independence:

I am neither author, or fautor [patron] of any sect ... if I have anything right, I defend it as truth's, not mine ... it profits not me to have any man fence, or fight for me, to flourish, or take a side. Stand for truth, and 'tis enough.

It is the plainness, the forceful cadences which rescue this from platitude, and make it the writer's own. So, writing of acts of courtesy, he gives an aphorism roots in the tricks of his own London:

he that doth them merely for his own sake is like one that feeds his cattle to sell them: he hath his horse well-dressed for Smithfield.

Horsemeat was just as nasty then as now.

The passages that count most describe the right style for speech, in verse or prose; but these passages mingle easily with those on moral behaviour, and at times (as they should be) the remarks which describe how to live well cannot be separated from how to write well. And even where there is a distinction, good writing never fails to be commensurate with values.

Others, ... in composition are nothing, but what is rough and broken ... They would not have it run without rubs, as if that style were strong and manly that struck the ear with a kind of unevenness. These men err not by chance, but knowingly, and willingly....

Thus he admires one who 'never forced his language, nor went out of the highway of speaking,' one (and he might be describing himself) whose 'language was ... nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of the (sic) own graces. If we take this last, telling judgement and assimilate it to the following magnificent extract, we have a set of criteria against which to test Jonson and the finest English authors. Only masters pass.

The chief virtue of a style is perspicuity ... A strict and succinct style is that where you can take away nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest. The brief style is that which expresseth much in little ... The congruent and harmonious fitting of parts in a sentence hath almost the fastening and force of knitting, and connection: as in stones well squared, which will rise strong a great way without mortar.

THE POEMS

As with Shakespeare's sonnets, it is hard to forbear quoting from Timber, I have held over one memorable pair of aphorisms to open discussion of the poems. He writes:

Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee ... No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech.

I have spend some time describing the context of Jonson's work in order to recreate the remarkable force of the man and to suggest the points at which he felt his emotional and intellectual convictions as being at ease with the possibilities of the age. For his finest poems seem to me tothose which cherish and celebrate the most admirable parts of life, which make a statement about its richest sources, those which ensure continuity. Yet, as we have seen, Jonson was and is known for the harshness of his strictures upon contemporary life, for the blunt candour with which he spoke out against viciousness, malice and triviality, and in a few poems, for the traditional stoicism with which he put aside the claims of this world. In each case the language, as he asked, was true to the man, and the man was always amazingly true to his own sense of identity. The contradictions, as in all of us, were overcome as best he could; Jonson's finest poems meant that he reconciled the strong claims in him made by his classical traditions and by his immediate, vivid life in London. He brought to a full realisation a sense of history and a sense of the moment, and these issued in a statement to the future, in an offering made to posterity. And the statement is more than just a manifesto; it is the sum of a man's experience, deep, strong and engaged, which issues in the central parts of the work. Such an account would fit, I suppose, any great poet to whom we refer instinctively as a sure guide in charting our lives, but the example of Jonson is unusually pressing. He is himself so conscious of the poet's function, so determined that morality shall find its definitive utterance in poetry, and that the discovery, after strenuous exertion, shall come as a discovery of the right speech. It is this search and the consequent discoveries which concentrate his work. The job in hand is to find a kind of speech, a style in which to talk about ethical behaviour; it is the only honourable vocation for a man. Such a view of literature is as noble as it may be, and it belies as irrelevant the struggles of many subsequent poets to find subjects or forms. I do not wish to reduce the difficulties of being a poet, for they are many, but they may sometimes lie nearer home than some desperate endeavours suggest. Jonson saw the business as being explicitly moral and as so developing the powers of poetry that moral argument was sustained in the most deliberate and straight-forward manner possible--a manner in which richness, subtlety and power proceed from the intelligence of the poet and not from the accidents of language or subject.

Now there are poems of Jonson's which treat a specific and local subject, and I shall admire one of these in particular, "To Penshurst." It may be objected that there he had a subject to hand--fine and rooted living--which later poets are denied. But as the poem reveals, Jonson uses Penshurst as the actual approximation to an ideal of civilisation, and moves surely from personal to impersonal tribute, from description to celebration. In so far as we are heirs to the great humanist ideas of the Renaissance--as I believe we are, though the ideas have passed through the transfiguration of romantic socialism--then what "To Penshurst" offers us is not regret for lost ways of life, but an example of how to value life. The poet should speak out against what he hates, as Jonson does, but above that his duty is to lives and ways of life which he may define and celebrate. Jonson lives for us because he relishes the duty. In speaking of this material Jonson is primarily making his own life, and making his life was to do with planning his work. We therefore return to the central issue which is to discover the unalterable way to say what must be said. Thiscalls for a knowledge of the history of literature and ideas, for experience of the actualities of one's time, for a solid grasp on the relationships between ideas and action, and between action and a style of writing; it calls for a command of technical detail, since slight technical details record the distinctions in moral perception. It therefore calls for genius. Hidden in "A Celebration of Charis (I)" are ten lines of Jonson's which render the task he saw for himself, and which in their beauty overcome it:

Though I now write fifty years,

I have had, and have my peers:

Poets, though divine, are men;

Some have loved as old again.

And it is not always face,

Clothes or fortune gives the grace,

Or the feature, or the youth;

But the language and the truth,

With the ardour and the passion,

Gives the lover weight and fashion.

I shall treat Jonson's poems in three groups: first, the slighter poems he wrote according to more conventional tastes than his own but for which he is well known and a few of which are as beautiful as any of his contemporaries'; second, poems, sometimes 'occasional', sometimes without formal prompting, which treat ethical or religious themes; third, poems arising from particular social contacts, with friends, patrons, fellow poets, or enemies. Obviously, all kinds of other groupings are feasible; one could work through the various volumes of the complete poems: Epigrams, The Forest, The Underwood, and the ungathered poems (a part of the complete poems was published with Jonson's preparation in 1616; the remainder three years after his death, in 1640). One could take the various forms one by one: epigrams, odes, songs, epistles and so on. Or one could just consider the best. In the groupings I propose there are a very few poems I would like to discard, and a few which are flawed; Jonson's greatest poems emerge about equally from his moral reflections and from his social life, and as they are great, they transcend a particular occasion, shake off the 'appropriate' manner, and speak of major matters in Jonson's major style. The poems are brief and various; the range of their experience is wide and their wisdom is profound and assured; Jonson omits the further reaches of experience and the vertiginous glimpses of the unknown we find in Shakespeare; if he neglects numinous mystery, none the less he holds on to values and reality with the peculiar patience of genius. His metaphysics (and they are there) are not those of Donne, the dazzling casuist, the lavish, incredibly rapid dialectician. Jonson's mind is 'mere English', working for clarity, for the empiricism of the English spirit, for a sceptical accuracy. The poems in which he achieves what he wants are also warm and human--no one could dilute Jonson's humanity. They are among the greatest poems in our literature.

Love Poems

The smaller love lyrics do as well as all that has gone before. One might suggest that Jonson took the native style as his point of departure for love poems in which to rival the Petrarchans, except that he has gone a long way beyond the bluntness of Gascoigne. He has learned the graces and the flexibilities of Sidney, he can match Campion for mischief and sensuous delicacy. The famous 18th-century setting of "Drink to Me only with Thine Eyes" with its fat, lush melody, outrages all the poem's and forgetting (if we can) the tune, is to encounter an act of affectionate and ironically indulgent courtesy. Comparable virtues bring to life the famous love song "To Celia" from Volpone, inviting, in the manner of a score of other, of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Herrick's "To The Virgins," the lady to oblige him while youth is on her side.... [These] poems all derive from Catullus's Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, and we may grasp (even without knowing Latin) how Jonson even more than his contempor-aries was soaked in the ancient classics. This saturation, as Timber makes clear, means that the Latin issues not as stilted translation or as pedantry, but as a presence which informs the writing even when that writing is at its easiest and most idiomatic. Thus here the movement of the poem is unmistakably real and independent of sponsors; it is brisk and alert as it gives out the coolness of Jonson's persuasion:

Come my Celia, let us prove

While we may, the sports of love;

Time will not be ours for ever,

He, at length, our good will sever.

Spend not then his gifts in vain.

Suns that set may rise again,

But if once we lose this light,

'Tis with us, perpetual night.

Comparable but gentle and less licentious is another song "To Celia" in octosyllabic couplets. The previous one is ostensibly Volpone's; snatches of the next appear in Volpone, but as a whole it is independent. Again, the light playfulness is fully authentic. This is not a poem 'about' flirtation; it is the act of flirtation magically realised and, in the tone, placed and valued.

Kiss me sweet: the wary lover

Can your favours keep, and cover,

When the common courting jay

All your bounties will betray.

Kiss again: no creature comes.

Kiss, and score up wealthy sums

On my lips ...

Campion could not have bettered the amusement in Jonson's 'There you are!' when he wrote, 'Kiss again: ...' He enforces the pause by the colon--then, 'no creature comes'. So, in abandonment and relief after the next 'kiss', the line soars right over the line-ending to 'lips' in the next. The refinement of this chaste style never falters, and any collection of Jonson's pieces in this vein would be ample enough to rival most poets whose reputation rests on their Courtly Love poetry alone. We do not find the passionate momentum of Shakespeare's sonnets in Jonson's love poetry, and this is partly because those subjects which pressed most heavily upon his creative powers did not emerge as love poetry. The stormy pleading of the sonnets strikes no answering note in Jonson's poetry.

The love poems do not confine themselves to mischief. The whole sequence "A Celebration of Charis" contains within its subtle couplets the quick, deft changes from disconsolation to delight and back. And in the fourth poem of the sequence, there occurs a stanza which is a touch-stone for freshness and sharpness of imagery, speaking alike to Renaissance and Romantic criteria.

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

 Before rude hands have touched it?

Have you marked but the fall o' the snow

 Before the soil hath smutched it?

Have you felt the wool of the beaver?

            Or swansdown ever?

 Or have smelt the bud o' the briar?

            Or the nard in the fire?

 Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

The radiant images are allowed to do their work without emphasis, enhanced only by the light touch of 'bright', the contrast of 'smutched'; the sensuous delight gathers to an ecstasy in the breathless rhythms of the second half of the stanza. Yet this is not really characteristic Jonson. We do not, as we may even with such a minute stylist as George herbert, think in Jonson's connection of original or daring imagery. Of course, there is a command of the musical resources of the language.

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;

  Yet slower, yet; O faintly, gentle springs;

List to the heavy part the music bears,

  Woe weeps out her division when she sings.

The first line is utterly expert. The alliteration and the stresses are regularly struck yet so delayed and muted that they contribute only to the languour and loitering step of the line, and not at all to anything ponderous. The second line perfectly imitates the affected anguish of some fastidious conductor--'Yet slower, yet; O faintly, ...'--as it also creates a tiny diversion in the plaintive melody. The song is a verbal equivalent of Dowland's wonderful Lachrimae. The varieties of speech-contour exactly suit the curve of feeling; Jonson's stanza-forms are as versatile as all the madrigalists'.

All the same, I think it is fair to say that in thinking of Jonson as an Elizabethan lyricist, we turn first to poems, sometimes from the masques, sometimes from elsewhere, of which "The Hymn to Diana" is representative:

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,

Now the sun is laid to sleep,

Seated in thy silver chair

State in wonted manner keep:

  Hesperus entreats thy light,

  Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart,

And thy crystal shining quiver;

Give unto thy flying hart

Space to breathe, how short soever,

  Thou that mak'st a day of night,

  Goddess excellently bright.

This ritual liturgy belongs to the intricate stylisation of the masques, and it derives from the conventions of pastoral Petrarchanism and from Arcadia. The restraint and stateliness of this is Petrarchanism made public; Jonson catches exactly the hymnal simplicity needed for the procession which accompanies the queen. The profusion of Spenser is chastened; this language is at once silvered and ethereal and austerely controlled. Within the masque conventions, Jonson takes such writing with complete seriousness. His craftsmanship is impeccable. Yet it is not just Puritan to insist that in the end the convention is not serious, however professional the writer is about the writing. The chastity of the style is not won from writing this kind of thing, and however lovely it is, it is not as lovely as those poems of Campion's with more evident roots in the stuff of experience. These poems are part of Jonson's accomplishment, but he does not utter them from his depths.

One or two love poems come from the centre of the man. There is the famous "On My Picture Left in Scotland" which muses poignantly on his vanished physical charms and the failure of his verse to supplant the bright young Apollos. He glumly sees (though the total effect is more poised and deprecating than glum) that

           she cannot embrace,

My Mountain belly and my rocky face ...

Religious Poems

But in turning from the love poems to the second group I marked out, the group which deals with ethical or religious themes, we move in the best examples from delicately minor poetry to work of outright greatness. I shall begin with one of the best, the poem "To Heaven":

  Good and great God, can I not think of Thee,

  But it must, straight, my melancholy be?

  Is it interpreted in me disease,

  That, laden with my sins, I seek for ease?

O, be thou witness, that the reins dost know

  And hearts of all, if I be sad for show;

  And judge me after, if I dare pretend

  To aught but grace, or aim at other end.

  As thou art all, so be thou all to me,

First, midst, and last, converted One and Three;

  My faith, my hope, my love; and in this state,

  My judge, my witness, and my advocate.

  Where have I been this while exiled from thee?

  And whither rapt, now thou but stoop'st to me?

Dwell, dwell here still! O being everywhere,

 How can I doubt to find Thee ever here?

 I know my state, both full of shame and scorn,

 Conceived in sin, and unto labour born,

 Standing with fear, and must with horror fall,

And destined unto judgement, after all.

 I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground

 Upon my flesh to inflict another wound.

 Yet dare I not complain or wish for death

 With holy Paul, lest it be thought the breath

Of discontent; or that these prayers be

 For weariness of life, not love of thee.

(line 2. 'it must, straight, ...' i.e. onlookers think this. 1. 3. The onlookers 'interpret in (him) disease...' 1. 5. reins: seat of emotion in Elizabethan physiology)

The style of this is plain and direct, as it is also sinewy and felicitous. The informing principle of the poem is expository, and the one objection that may be brought against it is that the poem starts out from a sense of personal affront. Jonson declares himself wearied by those who always interpret his moments of contemplation as moments of private melancholy. It is an appeal to God for vindication and it thus involves a touch of pique which taints the nobility of feeling. This fault apart, the styles and the matter are firm. The couplet has never been better handled; where Pope is most impressive there is likewise a breathtaking facility which puts gravity like this out of reach. Jonson's couplets are like 'stones well squared': they present a polished and impressive surface--there is no break in the texture. Yet the rhythmic control is never slack or in repose; he adjusts the subdued variations to the precise expression of the feeling. Thus in the first line the slight alliteration throws heavy, impressive weight on three of the first four syllables. Elsewhere the placing of the caesura consolidates the meaning, as in the last line where the essential opposition and paradox of the poem is held in balance, or as in lines 17-20 where the regular placing of the caesuras allows quiet but powerful feeling to accumulate in the repetition and to release itself in the long curve of line 20, halted in the finality, 'after all'. The triple units of lines 10-12 render the intellectual concept of the Trinity with exactitude and passion; the mystery of Three-in-One becomes immediate in the triple movements of single lines. A small device borrowed from the Petrarchans, such as 'everywhere'/'ever here' in 15-16, rises above a device, and becomes the only way to express the omnipresence of God. The poem states Jonson's own position with his habitual firmness: in line 17, 'I know', in line 21, 'I feel'; the movement of the couplets is assured, the argument confident, the tone crisp, and braced. But for all the steadiness of Jonson's stance, one cannot doubt its attendant grace and humility. The quickening of stresses in line 15, 'Dwell, dwell here still!' though logical ('where have I been ...?') has the suddenness of rapturous terror. The moment is overcome, andthe poet returns to the meditative statement of the behaviour open to him. Jonson faces the temptation of 'weariness of life' ('dare I not complain'), understands it, and puts it by; he overcomes gracelessness, and he wins, by command of the available arguments and checking them against experience, a stoic composure. Stoicism is not the only courage; it isn't even Jonson's only kind, but it is an honourable attitude, and here he gives it unforgettable expression. He transcends the exclusive truculence of Ralegh, the violence of feeling in some poems of Donne. "To Heaven" takes its place alongside the poems about death like Donne's "Hymn to God the Father" and George Herbert's "Church-Monuments" as living documents one can turn to endlessly; they uphold the high calling of the human mind.

These poems, and Jonson's with them, speak with the voice of the poet, and their power derives from his intelligence and his moral perception in an experience best understood by meeting it as straightforwardly as possible. Consequently, there is in such poems scarcely any imagery; the poem is its own image, and metaphor could do relatively little to help it. Control of diction and rhythm absorbs the poet. Another of Jonson's on a similar topic as "To Heaven" may, at the risk of repetition, illustrate the matter further. In "To the World: A Farewell for a Gentlewoman, Virtuous and Noble" Jonson gives his speech to a mature and disenchanted intelligence, commenting on the traps of her experience. Once more, the development is ordered by exposition; the metaphors are conventional, and the unifying principle is, apart from the argument, the attitude and tone of the speaker. The stanza form is one of the simplest in English: octosyllabic quatrains rhyming abab, yet the poem is in spite of the clarity not simple. The ease of manner, the mature acceptance of disillusion and death, rest upon a reality of felt experience which informs the poem. The cost exacted by life for maturity of attitude has been paid in full. The methods of Lord Vaux, Gascoigne, and Ralegh are now entire, replete with wisdom, subtle, sensitive, and definite. The last eight lines must suffice to demonstrate what the poem does. The language is typically lucid, the movement firm, the placing of the rhymes sure and relevant. The speaker knows where her identity lies and where her omissions, and she likewise turns, as we all do, back to the place where she belongs in order to meet the demands of time. There is no compromise, no stridency, no desperation.

No, I do know that I was born

To age, misfortune, sickness, grief;

But I will bear these with that scorn

As shall not need thy false relief.

Nor for my peace will I go far,

As wanderers do, that still do roam,

But make my strengths, such as they are,

Here in my bosom, and at home.

Other poems in this manner which deserve extremely close reading include "The Mind of the Frontispiece to a Book" (first printed in Ralegh's The History of the World), the "Hymn to God the Father", the "Epode" 'Not to know vice at all ...,' and the faultless series of epitaphs. I shall close this brief examination of Jonson's religious poems by quoting the epitaph "On My First Son", though the other, intolerably poignant epitaph "On My First Daughter" is no less piercing, closing as it does with this couplet:

This grave partakes the fleshly birth--

Which cover lightly, gentle earth.

Perhaps this next epitaph is more moving simply because his son was seven years old when he died, and his daughter only six months.

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father, now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,

And, if no other misery, yet age!

Rest in soft peace; and, asked, say: Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry--

For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

Again, Jonson plays off the closed, trim form of the couplets against the rhythms of speech. This poem seeks more immediately than is usual with Jonson to reconcile a conflict--between the personal pain at the loss of his son, and the consolations of Christian doctrine: 'For why/Will man lament the state he should envy?' But man does, especially when he is a parent, and this poem records all the appropriate tenderness as well as the anguish. The poem is written in what Timber calls 'the concise style, which expresseth not enough, but leaves somewhat to be understood'; the phrase 'yet age!' is left for the reader to fill in; the question 'why will man lament?' is left unanswered: the poem finds it answerable. At the end, he can only turn upon the pain and vow to avoid such pain again by so disciplining himself as not to admit such love. It is a grim resolve. The composure won by this poem is won by repression and severity, and it is worth proposing that the resignation of poems like "To the World" and "To Heaven" is complemented in Jonson by a titanic generosity of spirit. He gave himself largely to the world, and was bruised so giving. The melancholy and the moroseness which he noted in himself (and parodied) came in those periods when he with drew from the world in order to comprehend its cruelties. In the finest poems, the exuberance and the austerity come together and issue in the wise disillusion we have seen, or, more finely yet, in the unsentimental warmth and humane gratitude of active celebration. It is to poems of this kind that I now turn.

Social Poems

These poems arise from a variety of occasions. There are tributes paid to patrons, epistles to friends prompted by all kinds of causes some of which we have to guess at, and there are the writings specifically presented to 'The Tribe of Ben' which in one sense foreshadow the civil and sociable environment of the 18th-century coffee house, but which surpass the milieu of Dryden by a livelier as more profound justification for what they did. Jonson's poems for The Tribe, like (say) Carew's excellent reproach to the master beginning "Tis true (dear Ben) ...', carry within them not only social graces and ceremonies which are more than courtly, but also a grasp on the serious values, the sanctions without which the graces are frivolous games. Such attitudes made full and--if the word is not irretrievably disgraced--democratic contact possible. A man met another man openly, gladly.

The opening document for this sort of contact is the epistle "Inviting a Friend to Supper." It does not involve the intimacy of other poems to The Tribe--that will come--but it sets the easy, courteous frame of reference within which intimacy is possible. The gregariousness of the friends was not possessive; it permitted the distance which, though not aloof, is necessary to individual delicacy of organisation. Jonson would have felt the force of Henry James's declaration that:

I believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour ...

To John Bailey, 11 November 1912

The paradox is that Jonson, who is so often like his Augustan namesake Dr. Johnson, drew so much nourishment both from his solitude and his companionships. A tense balance of the two electrified his element. In the invitation, however, we see only the ease of company. Only by implication can we divine that such ease is the product of knowing how to speak to people without chumminess or reserve. The speech is hard to hit. Like all difficult art, you perfect it only by a combination of genius and civilisation. You begin here:

Yet you shall have, to rectify your palate, An olive, capers, or some bitter salad Ushering the mutton; with a short-legged hen, If we can get her, full of eggs; and then Lemons, and wine for sauce ...

The food is not everything; there is the talk:

                Howsoe'er, my man

Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus,

Livy, or of some better book to us,

Of which we'll speak our minds, amidst our meat;

And I'll profess no verses to repeat ...

And there is the drink--'which most doth take my muse and me ... a pure cup of rich Canary wine'. But the evening will close, as it began, in comely moderation:

Nor shall our cups make any guilty men,

But at our parting, we will be as when

We innocently met.

It is not merely Horation or hedonistic good-living Jonson is offering as a present; it issomething tougher than a wine and food society. The something else is invoked in this next poem where in honouring a marriage and recovery from a dangerous wound (apparently after the bridegroom has won his wife from a rival by duelling), Jonson tenders moral advice to a headstrong friend. He uses an ode-form but as we now expect transposes the high style of an ode into a key more friendly and, here, direct:

High-spirited friend,

I send nor balms nor cor'sives to your wound,

  Your fate hath found

A gentler and more agile hand to tend

The cure of that which is but corporal,

And doubtful days (which were named critical)

 Have made their fairest flight,

 And now are out of sight.

Yet doth some wholesome physic for the mind

 Wrapped in this paper lie,

Which in the taking if you misapply,

               You are unkind.

 Your covetous hand,

Happy in that fair honour it hath gained,

 Must now be reined.

True valour doth her own renown command

In one full action; nor have you now more

To do, than be a husband of that store.

  Think but how dear you bought

  This same which you have caught,

Such thoughts will make you more in love with truth.

 'Tis wisdom, and that high,

 For men to use their fortune reverently,

              Even in youth.

It is beautifully judged. The high rhetorical form is used to give the syntax hesitation and delicacy. This is spoken straightly, but with all the gentleness, affection and understanding in the world. The reproachful close of each stanza prefigures Herbert both in its judicious firmness and its mild cadence. The strong imperatives--'Must', 'Think'--check with the shifts of the form; the respectful candour with which the large terms--'truth', 'wisdom', 'valour'--are offered precludes priggishness. The lady is never directly spoken of, but in giving the advice Jonson manages at the same time to exclude her from any blame, and pay her the timely compliments concealed in 'gentler and more agile hand' and the oblique (but not bashful) references in the second stanza. It is a marvellous poem, and if today we cannot write one like it, then I suggest it is not because the movement of history (or whatever) has broken the concept of friendship, but simply because we do not try. And without civilising poems of this sort, we have no final standard by which to test our behaviour.

The many ideals latent in this poem abound in the epistles to his friends. Yet it misrepresents and abuses Jonson to speak as though one were hunting through his work for latent ideals. Each successful poem makes the ideals, the values and sanctions of an adult personality and a rich civilisation actual and vivid in a particular situation. It is one of Jonson's gifts to do this with a rare explicitness; the poems emerge from the life he led. He adopts no 'masks', no special personae worn for the poem, and then discarded. These procedures have their uses, but they shadow the poet in the poem. Jonson tries always to come at his utmost consistency and integrity of spirit in each one of his 'social' poems. He speaks from his full sense of himself to whoever it may be who listens. This means, given his imperfections, that he may be over-assertive or self-righteous in unseemly ways--the "Ode to Himself" is an example of this tendency. It means, as in several of the epigrams on Court figures, that he may be wantonly obscene or brutal, though sometimes the brutality may be called for, as in the savage epigram "On Sir Voluptuous Beast," or that "On Gut":

Gut eats all day, and lechers all the night,

So all his meat he tasteth over twice;

And, striving so to double his delight,

He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice.

Thus in his belly can he change a sin,

Lust it comes out, that gluttony went in.

A useful exercise in reading Elizabethan poetry would be to ponder the evidence of a training in logic, grammar, and rhetoric in this epigram. The finest 'social' poems, or poems of friendship, speak out with the same trenchancy in admiration of indispensable virtues. These poems not only recommend the virtues, they animate them; so that in reading the poem we experience the qualities. It is an active affair. So in the "Epigram to Camden (14)," a little awkwardly perhaps, he pays tribute to Camden's exemplary union of classical and modern scholarship:

Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe

All that I am in arts, all that I know ...

Pardon free truth, and let thy modesty

Which conquers all, be once o'ercome by thee.

Many of thine this better could, than I,

But for their powers, accept my piety.

Jonson bore witness, as a matter of honour, to his masters; he paid his dues to his pieties--it is a lesson worth learning now when the factions of contemporary intellectuals plagiarise under cover of toadying. Each time, Jonson's epistles sound out bravely and directly. Thus to John Selden, acknowledging his book received,

I know to whom I write. Here, I am sure,

Though I am short, I cannot be obscure.

The long tribute to the patronage of Sir Edward Sackville strikes a slightly more deferential note, yet Jonson is still (as we would expect) brisk and manly. The lines carry themselves with an erect assurance, as of a man who knows his worth:

You cannot doubt but I, who freely know

This good from you, as freely will it owe;

And though my fortune humble me, to take

The smallest courtesies with thanks, I make

Yet choice from whom I take them; and would shame

To have such do me good, I durst not name;

They are the noblest benefits, and sink

Deepest in man, of which when he doth think,

The memory delights him more from whom

Than what he hath received. Gifts stink from some

They are so long a-coming, and so hard;

Where any deed is forced, the grace is marred.

The personal note and the impersonal chime together; once again, what in other hands would be platitudes, here quicken to the strength and unshakable integrity of the man who speaks them. And so it is that we know from the art--in its organised and self-conscious fullness--what we would have admired in Jonson the man, had we known him. One could multiply the evidence. There is the striking "Epitaph to Master Vincent Corbet" in which lightness and gravity of touch justly combine in order to give us the subject, Corbet, and Jonson's valuation of him at the same time. There is the well-known, little-read and generous memorial to Shakespeare ('To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name'). There is the handsome brevity of another poem to a patron, the epigram (76) on "Lucy, Countess of Bedford," which demands quotation, though the poem is densely woven and selection must mutilate it. He describes his ideal patroness, and in a polished turn at the last couplet finds that the Countess fits his model:

I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet,

Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride;

I meant each softest virtue there should meet,

Fit in that softer bosom to reside.

Only a learned and a manly soul

I purposed her; that should, with even powers,

The rock, the spindle, and the shears control

Of destiny, and spin her own free hours.

It would be pedantic to say these things again were it not that Jonson's greatness has been sold so short. Once more, in the absence of developed metaphors, it is the mastery of tone and rhythmic control which resolves the poem. The style is entire, powerful and sensitive. The repetitions of 'I meant' make it clear that Jonson wishes to set his own mark on the poem, but he judges his own place in it. And while the terms of approbation are completely his own, especially in these trenchant lines--

I meant to make her fair and free and wise,

Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great--

his eye remains steadily upon the subject and does not turn aside either into little ceremonies or into decoration. The relevance, the intellectual closeness of the poem form his compliment. To be fully intelligent is to make his bow.

The last two poems I wish to discuss in this (roughly speaking) social group are the famous address "To Penshurst," family seat of Sidney's brother and a centre of civilised discussion and thought, and the "Elegy" beginning 'Though beauty be the mark of praise'. "To Penshurst" is 102 lines in length, it is closely modelled upon a Latin poem by Martial, and Jonson as in most of the celebratory epistles writes in couplets. The poem represents one of the peaks of Renaissance civilisation; the author, a product of the finest kinds of classical and Elizabethan training, himself a sturdily original temperament as well as a mighty intelligence, pays homage to a kind of living which embodies the richest potentialities of human contact and co-operation. Necessarily, the art of living in "To Penshurst" is not 'democratic' as we would know it. But the poem cannot be treated in class terms at all. We are ourselves too quick to call conscientiously anxious clich�s to mind when the word 'class' crops up; this poem realises for us the mutual ceremonies and sanctions of a coherent way of life, and if no local pattern of living could be the same today, yet the values implicit in what Jonson's steadfast affection and straightness of judgment make alive to us are still alive and recognisable in their different forms. I certainly have no wish to resurrect the kind of aristocratic hauteur and reckless riding to hounds of which W. B. Yeats so much regretted the loss. But Jonson's poem gives us--as a matter of felt life--a more robust, less socially specific code of behaviour, though the poem handles the stuff of a housewife's life with engaging familiarity. We move (in feeling and in action) with the firm cadences of Jonson's voice and attitudes as he speaks to the life he enjoys. We participate in a sort of ritual, a festivity; we pay our homage, with wit, gentleness, and dignity to forms of human decency and kindness. Why should we not write like this today?

And if the high-swol'n Medway fail thy dish,

Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,

Fat, aged carps, that run into thy net.

And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,

As loth the second draught or cast to stay,

Officiously, at first themselves betray.

Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land,

Before the fisher, or into his hand.

Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,

Fresh as the art and new as are the hours.

The early cherry, with the later plum,

Fig, grape and quince, each in his time does come:

The blushing apricot and woolly peach

Hang on thy walls that every child may reach.

It is a grand vision, gently hyperbolic (about the fish) but rich with a sense of cultivated and deliberate plenty. The landscape is not only fertile, it is serene and ordered by human reason, humanprovidence and affection. There is no brutality--

And though thy walls be of the country stone,

They're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan,

There's none that dwells about them, wish them down;

But all come in, the farmer and the clown ...

One attractive and reliable measure of Jonson's gift as a poet is the way in which here, as in "Inviting a Friend to Supper," as, indeed, in Volpone or The Alchemist, he can use tasty, juicy food to express moral realities. Here the food is all goodness and giving. The poem fills with a sense of place, of wholesome and rooted living in a way of life which takes in farming, sport, marriage, and family love. Such a sense, as we find it here, in places in Pope, in Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Lawrence, is a keen and abiding mark of the Englishness of English literature. It is worth noting that Wordsworth knew "To Penshurst" by heart; I think it among the greatest of Nature poems, for its terms of reference take in so much more than the individual. The last two couplets, in their beautiful seriousness and irresistible precision of judgments--the old, censorious Jonson flashes out--come to rest upon a verb. The present indicative 'dwells' summarises the argument, and extends the poem onwards into time. It is fair to call such a faith in continuity, religious.

Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee

With other edifices, when they see

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,

May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.

The last poem, though smaller in scope, is flawless. The odd line in "To Penshurst" lumbers a little; the "Elegy" is brief, succinct and springy. It takes what it needs from the song tradition, and what it needs from Jonson's own grave cast of mind, and his training in classical economy and the native style. A study of this poem should illuminate all I have proposed about the making of English poetry.

Though beauty be the mark of praise,

And yours of whom I sing be such

As not the world can praise too much,

Yet is't your virtue now I raise.

A virtue like alloy, so gone

Throughout your form, as though that move,

And draw, and conquer all men's love,

This subjects you to love of one,

Wherein you triumph yet; because

'Tis of your self, and that you use

The noblest freedom, not to choose

Against or faith, or honour's laws.

But who should less expect from you,

In whom alone love lives again?

By whom he is restored to men,

And kept, and bred, and brought up true.

His falling temples you have reared,

The withered garlands ta'en away;

His altars kept from the decay

That envy wished and nature feared.

And on them burn so chaste a flame

With so much loyalty's expense,

As Love, to acquit such excellence,

Is gone himself into your name.

And you are he: the deity

To whom all lovers are designed,

That would their better objects find:

Among which faithful troop am I.

Who as an offering at your shrine,

Have sung this hymn, and here entreat

One spark of your diviner heat

To light upon a love of mine.

Which if it kindle not, but scant

Appear, and that to shortest view,

Yet give me leave to adore in you

What I, in her, am grieved to want.

The poem praises a friend, but explicitly sets aside the courtly convention; it is a poem about friendship, not about love, and it therefore avoids the temptations of mannerism and clich�. Yet he praises the friend's capacity to love and therefore can appropriately borrow the Petrarchan metaphors, especially the metaphorical deification, without sounding absurd. He honours the friend for her integrity in love at a time when love is become disreputable, and this integrity he catches and holds in the fragile, haunting rhythms of the fifth stanza. He perfectly justifies the stylised wardrobe by the fragile step of the movement, at delicate contrast with the stronger gallantry of the third stanza. But there is more than gallantry here: there is the power and fullness of a poet in absolute command of his theme. There is the richness and extraordinary subtlety of organisation available only to a poet of refinement as well as genius. There is the unimpeded voice of a great intelligence speaking on a serious subject with all the skill at his disposal. The language is naked, the argument true, the development impeccable, and the poem should move all of us, in so far as we are human beings and not sentimentalists, and move us in heart and mind alike. Such poetry nurtures and cherishes the human spirit, and gives it significance to live by; it fulfils a moral and literary tradition. It abides the intervening centuries, and it holds up now. The style and the man are one.

Source: Fred Inglis, "Jonson the Master: Stones Well Squared," in The Elizabethan Poets: The Making of English Poetry from Wyatt to Ben Jonson, Evans Brothers Ltd., 1969, pp. 127-56. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 17.