Carpe Diem!: The Cavalier Poets

Today we look at the love children of John Donne and Ben Jonson, a group of monarchist soldiers during the English Civil War.  Collectively known as the Cavalier Poets, they are numerous.  We'll look at some representative poems today by Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and the ill-fated and unfortunately named Sir John Suckling.

Additional music:
"Consort for Brass" by Kevin MacLeod
"La Violetta" by Claudio Monteverdi; perf. The Boston Camerata, dir. Joel Cohen
"In Town Tonight" by Reginald Dixon; perf. Eric Coates

Transcript

Welcome, bookworms and litterbugs, to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.  Thank you so much for joining me.  Make sure you like, follow, and subscribe so you never miss a minute of the sterling work done here on the interweb’s best underground Brit Lit podcast.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to share with you a pet peeve: student essays that begin with a definition ripped wholesale from a dictionary.  I feel an actual existential angst, a deep groaning at the heart of my being, a thorough re-examination of the choices I’ve made in my life when I pick up a student’s paper and the first three words are: “According to Webster’s.”  Argh!  We know how to use a dictionary – if we don’t understand a word, we’ll look it up!  And usually it’s a word that is only new to the student, but in rather common parlance among the educated.  

I know, I know.  They’re young writers – learning the craft.  A blank screen is intimidating, void and meaningless.  They’re grasping for access.  They’ll get there with patient guidance.

I mention this merely because today’s episode opens with a definition.  According to Webster’s, the word “cavalier” means:

noun: a gentleman trained in arms and horsemanship; a mounted soldier; an adherent of Charles I of England; a lady's escort or dancing partner; 

adjective: marked by or given to offhand and often disdainful dismissal of important matters; of or relating to the party of Charles I of England in his struggles with the Puritans and Parliament; of or relating to the English Cavalier poets of the mid-17th century.

The word first pops up in English in the 1580s or so and derives from the Latin caballarius, meaning “horseman.”  From this we get words like cheval, cavalry, and chivalry.  I’m sure most of you know what cavalier means and aren’t laughing as much as I’d like at the crude irony of my complaining about using definitions and then using one.  Seemed like comedy gold at the time.  Anyway, I do bring it up because today’s episode – about a group of writers in the mid-17th century now called the Cavalier Poets – will draw on all of the definitions quoted above: courtly gentlemen, mounted aristocrats fighting in defense of the Caroline monarchy, who wrote light verse of a particularly frilly type.  I’ve heard rumors that one wag says they’re called Cavalier poets because their poetry is simple enough to be written while you fall off a horse.  I cannot trace the source of this mordancy.

But before we look at some of their representative verse, perhaps I should fill in a thumbnail history of what used to be called the English Civil War, but is now often referred to as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.  Some historians see these as synonymous, others that the civil war was part of the larger three kingdoms war.  I’m going to stick with the term “Civil War” because I reckon that’s the one most listeners will recognize and, besides, I’m a grumpy, intransigent dinosaur.  The Royalist faction came to be called the Cavaliers, as opposed to the Parliamentary faction called the Roundheads – a pejorative due to their short haircuts.  I’ll be doing a Subcast episode on the writing attendant to these conflicts soon, but for now, here’s a brief rundown:

It’s the 1640s. King Charles I has succeeded his father James on the throne and runs things just as you expect a spoiled fop would – he can be petulant and self-indulgent, since God has granted him absolute power, and he spends money like a first-round NFL draft pick with a serious coke problem. Parliament, dominated as it is by Puritans, has had enough of Charles’ reckless extravagance and haughty attitude.

Predictably, the crisis starts over money and religion. Charles is perpetually cash-strapped from his lavish tastes and Parliament acts the stern parent by withholding the checkbook.   Charles decides to bypass Parliament and introduces “Ship Money,” a tax traditionally only used in wartime and only on coastal towns, but Charles thinks, “In for a penny . . . ” and taxes everyone, everywhere. History is replete with examples illustrating the popularity of capricious taxation.

And let’s not forget the God-bothering dimension. Charles pushes for high-church Anglicanism, which the Puritans think is the light beer version of Catholicism. They worry that the king's religious revanchism will take England back to the dark days before Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Scotland’s got a say in this too – the Scots are ready to riot if Charles even tries to introduce the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Which, naturally, he does.  History is replete with examples illustrating the popularity of religious imposition.

This tension explodes into war in 1642. It’s King vs. Parliament. Cavaliers vs. Roundheads. The war rages across three separate conflicts. The Royalists start strong, but Parliament, with the organizational skills of Oliver Cromwell, gradually gains the upper hand. Cromwell forms the New Model Army – disciplined, trained, and perhaps a little too eager to win.

By 1649, that Roundhead pluckiness pulls through. Charles is captured, tried for treason, and – in a historic first – executed in front of his people. England becomes a republic under Cromwell, who, though he dethrones a king, quickly sets himself up as “Lord Protector” and rules in a style that feels suspiciously like, well, a monarchy with less fabulous clothes.

After a brief experiment with republicanism, England restores the monarchy in 1660 with Charles II, but the whole affair fundamentally shifts the balance of power. Monarchy is more chastened, less absolute.  Parliament is in the ascendancy, and by 1689 will establish a constitutional monarchy.

So, as you can see, the poets we’ll look at today come from a very particular social and political faction, and as Western history has played out over the centuries, a faction not in favor with the advocates of the Enlightenment style liberal democracy that characterizes our own time.  Critic Geoffrey Walton, in an essay on the Cavalier Poets, grumbles that our society “encompasses a cult of dreariness” and that “personal elegance and courteous behavior seem not to be conspicuously fashionable.”  And I thought I was a grumpy dinosaur!  Granted, he is writing in the throes of last century’s counterculture during which a pointed lack of hygiene marked the hippie as liberated from the constraints of decent-smelling society, but I do think he overshoots the mark.  We are as obsessed with fashionable clothing and behavior as any affluent society.  We’ve merely replaced the past’s aristocratic culture with our own celebrity-and-influencer culture.  But, so far as our “aristos” spring from democratic soil, Walton’s point that the world presented by the Cavaliers is quite foreign to our own feels valid.

Theirs seems to us a somewhat closed world in which a good life – really the only philosophical exploration these writers undertake – defined by individual freedom and pleasure, companionship with like-minded people, and a conservative nostalgia – is the purpose of human existence.  We may detect a strain of privileged hedonism in their outlook.  

But while they may have preferred light verse about flowers, drinking, and sex, these poets were not unlearned.  Indeed, an ostentatious indulgence in classical allusion is one of the more obvious hallmarks of their style.  The Cavalier poets shared the twin influences of John Donne and his metaphysical poetry and Ben Jonson’s moralism.  Indeed, many of today’s writers belonged to a club called the “Sons of Ben” which would meet at various London taverns to preen and debate and drink. Walton says, “Cavalier poetry presents a surprising mixture of elegance and sophistication with naivety and schoolboy obscenity.”  

Let’s begin with perhaps the most well-known Cavalier poem.  It was always quite a crowd-pleaser, but it became part of popular culture – and has remained so for decades – following the 1989 film Dead Poets’ Society, which uses the poem as its thesis.  It’s called “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” and it’s by Robert Herrick:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
   The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
   And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
   When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
   Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
   And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
   You may forever tarry.

Loyal listeners may remember that we looked at Herrick’s poem “The Hag” for one of our Halloween Subcast episodes.  “To the Virgins,” though, is one of many poems from the era to invoke the “carpe diem” theme.  Usually translated, as in Dead Poets’ Society, as “seize the day,” carpe diem comes from Book I of Roman poet Horace’s Odes.  It’s number 11, by the way, and the key phrase is probably better translated “pluck the day,” because Horace is creating a winemaking metaphor, but the upshot is the same: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.  Pluck the day, trusting as little as possible to the future.  So, go live life!  Be present!  Go sky-diving, Rocky Mountain climbing, spend 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu!  Live in the now!

This is the message that dominates today’s advertising and guidance counselors’ offices.  It is the wisdom of our age because it essentially means to us: consume!  Herrick’s version seems a perfectly pleasant exhortation to virgins, who have not yet fully experienced life, to rush out and pluck rosebuds (lovers, yeah?) while they are young and beautiful.  Who will want your flowers when they’re old and wilted?  OK, a bit sexist – ‘cause nobody here thinks he’s talking to young inexperienced men, right?  Wouldn’t matter anyway – male virgins would be in their parents’ basement playing whatever the 17th century equivalent to video games was.  Right, so leans a little too much on a woman’s worth residing in her looks, but then the whole vibe here is of breathless rapture – all worth resides in beauty and sensual pleasure.  Here is a celebration of the transitory, the ephemeral, the superficial.  We’ve no time for depth and reflection: the sun’s a-setting!

Herrick hits these themes again in “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.”  “Maying,” by the by, is celebrating May Day – the rebirth of spring – by dancing and gathering flowers.  Fertility ritual stuff.  I’ll only quote the last stanza here because it’s a somewhat longer poem and well, you’ll get the point:

Come, let us go, while we are in our prime;

And take the harmless folly of the time.

                  We shall grow old apace, and die

                  Before we know our liberty.

                  Our life is short; and our dayes run

                  As fast away as do's the Sunne:

And as a vapour, or a drop of raine

Once lost, can ne'r be found again:

                  So when or you or I are made

                  A fable, song, or fleeting shade;

                  All love, all liking, all delight

                  Lies drown'd with us in endless night.

Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;

Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a Maying.

Here, “liberty” is almost defined as “harmless folly.”  Herrick offers a more interesting stanza form in Corinna than in To the Virgins, alternating pentameter couplets with tetrameter quatrains, and the earlier stanzas are strewn with allusions to Titan and Flora and Aurora.  Some of the rhymes offer quite interesting juxtapositions: prime and time, decaying and a-Maying.  I wonder about die and liberty, though.  Maybe in original pronunciation they were a more perfect rhyme, but now we would certainly read them as two different sounds, as half-rhyme, which provides a provocative contrast between death and freedom.

Thomas Carew – looks like ka-ROO but pronounced Cary – gives us a thoughtful variation on the carpe diem trope in a poem called variously “He that Loves a Rosy Cheek” or “Disdain Returned.”  I learned it under the former title, so perhaps that has influenced my reading.  We’ll see.  Here’s the poem:

He that loves a rosy cheek,

Or a coral lip admires,

Or from star-like eyes doth seek

Fuel to maintain his fires;

As old Time makes these decay,

So his flames must waste away.

But a smooth and steadfast mind,

Gentle thoughts and calm desires,

Hearts with equal love combin'd,

Kindle never-dying fires.

Where these are not, I despise

Lovely cheeks, or lips, or eyes.

No tears, Celia, now shall win

My resolv'd heart to return;

I have search'd thy soul within,

And find nought, but pride, and scorn;

I have learn'd thy arts, and now

Can disdain as much as thou.

Some power, in my revenge, convey

That love to her I cast away.

The poem opens as an admonition against the frivolity of the “carpe diem” lover.  One whose tastes are as superficial as fleeting beauty must be superficial and fleeting as well.  I hear slight echoes of Shakespeare’s satirical Sonnet 130 and can’t help but think Carew had it in mind.  The second stanza reminds me of John Donne and his “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” with its emphasis on spiritual and emotional bonds over the mere temptations of physical beauty.  The Cavaliers in general were very much influenced by Donne and many penned elegies for the dear doctor.  Carew’s final stanza, though, seems almost bilious, condemning Celia’s scornful pride, but then ambivalent, for he begs that some power carry his love to her despite his repudiation.  This one’s got a little more complexity going on.

He offers another counterpoint in a poem called “The Spring”:

Now that the winter’s gone, the earth hath lost

Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost

Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream

Upon the silver lake or crystal stream;

But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,

And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth

To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree

The drowsy cuckoo, and the humble-bee.

Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring

In triumph to the world the youthful Spring.

The valleys, hills, and woods in rich array

Welcome the coming of the long’d-for May.

Now all things smile, only my love doth lour;

Nor hath the scalding noonday sun the power

To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold

Her heart congeal’d, and makes her pity cold.

The ox, which lately did for shelter fly

Into the stall, doth now securely lie

In open fields; and love no more is made

By the fireside, but in the cooler shade

Amyntas now doth with his Chloris sleep

Under a sycamore, and all things keep

Time with the season; only she doth carry

June in her eyes, in her heart January.

In this pastoral in the reverdie tradition (that is, re-greening: poems about the return of spring) a lonely speaker regards Chloris, a spring goddess, reclining in the shade of a sycamore with her shepherd-lover Amyntas.  The speaker feels even more lovelorn in this environment of bursting fertility and lushness.  This guy is not going a-Maying; he’s not gathering any rosebuds.  I wonder if he takes some little comfort in Chloris’ deception: the June in her eyes, the January in her heart?

The Cavalier poet par excellence – Richard Lovelace – addresses a poem to Chloris as well.  It’s called “Love Made in the First Age.” It’s an almost elegiac poem, lamenting the passing of that first golden age when women . . . uh . . . never said no.  Free love, baby!  No rules!  Let’s go to Woodstock, man!  

Thrice happy was that golden age,

When complement was constru'd rage,

And fine words in the center hid;

When cursed NO stain'd no maid's blisse,

And all discourse was summ'd in YES,

And nought forbad, but to forbid.

The poem goes on to catalog all the groovy things you could eat and do in the good old days: young men could “indifferently. . . crop a flower, and a maidenhead.”  Courteous of Mr. Lovelace to gloss that complex metaphor for us.  These indifferent lads could eat cherries, roses, plums – Lovelace doesn’t gloss these, but perhaps he reckons you get the gist – and can drink “wine from the bunch, milk from the nipple.”  In this world there is no power, no restrictions, even sex is chaste.  No deception, all innocence.  I really do think of this poem as almost a proto-manifesto for 1960s counterculture at its most earnest and idealistic; the idea that shame and guilt are imposed by society upon natural innocence has a sad sort of naivety to it.

And as I said in passing, Lovelace may be the epitome of the Cavalier poet.  Dashing and handsome, he personified the sprezzatura of the ideal courtier-poet, much like Sir Philip Sidney before him.  He can produce a powerful and lush eroticism while maintaining an insouciance and poise.  His most anthologized poem is certainly “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,

         That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

         To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,

         The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace

         A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such

         As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Dear) so much,

         Lov’d I not Honour more.

In three fleeting quatrains, a cavalier (no doubt) remonstrates with his lover Lucasta for putting herself above his honor.  He calls the military enemy his “new mistress,” thus confusedly reckoning his abandonment of Lucasta as the honorable thing to do.  He explicitly says he will be more faithful to his sword, horse, and shield and that she should adore his inconstancy because he could not love her as much as he does if he didn’t love honor more.  Quintessential Cavalier poem: luxurious, masculinist, and casual.

His “To Althea, from Prison,” written during his stay at the Gatehouse Prison for advocating against a recent law that cut clergy off from the exercise of political authority, again dwells upon the speaker’s fortitude in suffering for the king, and the paradoxical nature of liberty in honor despite physical imprisonment.  The “enlarged winds,” tippling fish, and birds (or gods, depending on the version) frolicing in the air do not know such liberty as the imprisoned man of honor:

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,

Nor Iron bars a Cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an Hermitage.

If I have freedom in my Love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone that soar above,

Enjoy such Liberty.

Stirring stuff, I imagine.  The kind of stuff that requires the crescendo of swelling orchestra strings as the speaker stands in his cell, bestrides his dungeon, arms akimbo as he stares into an imagined horizon.  Maybe I’m too cynical about aristocratic honor to be inspired by such sentiments.  I hardly believe that any peasant foot-soldier can afford to scribble rhymes celebrating the captaincy of his soul.  Too busy getting run down by charging cavaliers.

Let’s wrap up with a couple of items from Sir John Suckling, whose name I am still immature enough to giggle at occasionally.  Here is “A Soldier,” and it’s as good a representative sample of the Cavalier outlook as any of the poems we’ve read through today:

I am a man of war and might,

And know thus much, that I can fight,

Whether I am i’th’ wrong or right, devoutly.

No woman under heaven I fear,

New Oaths I can exactly swear,

And forty Healths my brain will bear most stoutly.

I cannot speak, but I can do

As much as any of our crew;

And if you doubt it, some of you may prove me.

I dare be bold thus much to say,

If that my bullets do but play,

You would be hurt so night and day, Yet love me.

It’s easy to see in this poem a performance of the bluster and bravado of the cavalier persona.  It’s aggressive and combative.  If other poets of this school, like Carew, show their debt to John Donne, I think Suckling definitely owes Ben Jonson some props.  Because I can’t help thinking that Suckling’s kind of taking the mickey here.  It feels too cavalier, too “Hurrah, boys, and over the top!  Last one in Mrs. Cromwell’s bedchamber’s a rotten egg!”  One can read a schoolboy’s naughty subtext in it: drinking, and seduction, and ejaculation.  But as it draws the comparison between martial and sexual conquests, it explicitly mocks the honor and integrity of the latter (that is, the false oaths the speaker swears to get the woman horizontal) and so, if consistent, must at least question the honor of the former, that so insisted upon by Lovelace.

If we look at Suckling’s most famous poem – again, the name varies: “Constancy” or “The Constant Lover” – I think we’re more apt to accept Suckling’s ability to store his tongue securely in his cheek:

Out upon it, I have lov’d

Three whole days together;

And am like to love three more,

If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings,

Ere he shall discover

In the whole wide world again

Such a constant lover.

But the spite on’t is, no praise

Is due at all to me;

Love with me had made no stays,

Had it any been but she.

Had it any been but she,

And that very face,

There had been at least ere this

A dozen dozen in her place.

The irony here is as subtle as a neon sledgehammer to the danglies.  Of course, these three days have been the longest love affair of this man’s life, so he’s some credibility.  But again, Suckling mocks the idea of constancy, fidelity, even . . . loyalty?  It’s worth noting that Suckling was accused of treason in 1641, following which he fled England and may very well have taken his own life in 1642.  I realize that I am implying an egregious leap of reasoning here, but in so insular a community as the Cavaliers were, the relentless insistence upon the values that define the community, like the swelling violins in a Puritanical dungeon, amplify and intensify.  The absence of a counterbalancing perspective makes religious groups more prone to fanaticism, makes political groups more vulnerable to radicalism.  I’m sure we all know a perfectly pleasant man who becomes a laddish lout when out with the guys.  There’s almost a need to prove our purity, the strength of our commitment, to ensure our worthiness to the group.  I read Suckling’s poems – perhaps perfectly idiosyncratically: I know nothing about his intentions or his beliefs or anything – but I see his work as at once the ridiculous extreme of the Cavalier persona and its plausibly deniable critic.

There are so many other writers I could have looked at today: there’s James Shirley, who gave us our most recent Halloween poem, and Edmund Waller.  Abraham Crowley, who some consider the greatest heir of Dr. Donne.  Richard Crashaw.  Henry Vaughn.  It’s well worth reading around a bit.  You’ll see subtle differences between them and the poetry, if not ponderous, is not taxing – pleasant and often light.  But, on the other hand, so much of their poetry is in a similar vein which, in a format like a podcast, would just come across to the listener as redundant.  So, I opted for a few key notions: elegance, luxury, courtesy, insouciance, honor, and masculinity.  That should give a broad framework for your individual explorations should you care to do so.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Classic English Literature Podcast.  If you have, please let your friends and family know about it.  I’d like to have as many people join us as possible.  The more the merrier, as they say.  Remember to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss any episodes and don’t forget the “support the show” button if you value the work here enough to help support it.  Thanks for all you do and, until next time, carpe diem!