Herbert's worst poem (plus several good ones)

On epigrams

For the second August post, here’s a piece I wrote last year about epigrams, beginning with what is probably George Herbert’s worst extant poem (sorry George!). If you are interested in early modern epigram and the glimpse of manuscript work in this post, you might also enjoy my piece on what is (possibly) one of John Donne’s missing Latin epigrams.

I was struck the other day by a well-read poet and critic who asked on Twitter whether Yeats was the last major writer of epigrams. He felt that he very rarely read contemporary epigrams, whereas I feel that I read poems best described as epigrams — in both English and French — quite frequently. As well as the handful of examples I quote at the end of this piece, I think also of Gillian Allnutt, in my view probably the best living British poet, whose poetry I’ve discussed in relation to that of the French poet Pierre Chappuis here and as an example of a kind of surrealism here. In the last few weeks I’ve also been reading the French poet Gérard Bocholier, many of whose poems also seem to me best described as epigrams. Do epigrams seem more “alive” to me as a poetic form because I am defining them differently (more broadly, perhaps, or in a way more influenced by early modern practice), or am I just reading different things? What do you think — can you think of many contemporary poets who can turn a good epigram?

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By far the most popular Latin verse form in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was the epigram: topical, polemical, moralising, scriptural, mnemonic, obscene or just clever and funny. Easy to memorise, copy out, pass around; they were often composed extempore (or sort of) — there’s a famous epigrammatic exchange attributed to Queen Elizabeth I and King Philip of Spain, in which he suggests England should convert back to Catholicism and she says (roughly) “fat chance”. Another one you find often in manuscript miscellanies is an early eighteenth-century exchange between Alexander Pope and the impressive Elizabeth (or Elisa) Carter.

In the British Library there’s a letter from 1623 in which Joseph Mead in Cambridge, writing to his friend Sir Martin Stuteville, describes how the University Orator (then the poet George Herbert) had been put to produce a topical Latin epigram, to be read before the king at dinner during a royal visit.¹ According to Mead, one Dr Richardson — not Herbert himself — brought in the poem during the meal and Bishop Neale read it; meanwhile our correspondent has a quick crane over the bishop’s shoulder and commits the first couplet to memory to pass on the next day to Sir Martin in one of his regular letters. (He wrote a follow-up letter a few days later with the second half of the poem.)

Dum petit Infantem Princeps, Grantámque Iacobus,

     Quisnam horum maior sit, dubitatur, amor.

Vincit more suo Noster: nam millibus Infans

     Non tot abest, quot nos Regis ab ingenio.

Or, in Herbert’s own English version:

While Prince to Spain, and King to Cambridge goes,

The question is, whose love the greater shows:

Ours (like himself) o’ercomes; for his wit’s more

Remote from ours, than Spain from Britain’s shore.

The Latin aenigma, or riddle poem, which alludes perhaps rather tactlessly to Prince Charles’ disastrous escapade to Spain to court the Infanta, is not his best work: in fact it’s about as strained as Herbert’s Latin verse, most of which is excellent, ever gets. But Mead’s account of the episode gives us a real glimpse of the orality of Latin literary culture at the time. (And the reassurance that even the greatest poets are sometimes just OK.)

But Latin epigrams could get you into real trouble. Andrew Melville, a giant of the Scottish Reformation, though pushing 60, found himself thrown into the Tower for several years for one of his.

The Tower of London - no longer the dread of epigrammatists.

Melville was a prodigious producer of polemical and invective Latin verse — his poem on the Gunpowder Plotters is particularly impressive — and this is a much better little poem than Herbert’s, even if we find it’s aggression and implicit misogyny unappealing:

Cur stant clausi Anglis libri duo regia in ara,

     Lumina caeca duo, pollubra sicca suo?

Num sensum cultumque Dei tenet Anglia clausum,

     Lumine caeca suo, sorde sepulta sua?

Romano an ritu dum regalem instruit aram,

     Purpuream pingit relligiosa lupam?

Why stand there on the Royal Altar hie 

Two closed books, blind lights, two basins drie?

Doth England hold God’s mind and worship close,

Blind of her sight, and buried in her dross?

Doth she, with Chapel put in Romish dress,

The purple whore religiously express?

²

Melville wrote the poem in outrage after witnessing what he considered to be an excessively Catholic style of worship at Hampton Court Chapel, during which the altar was adorned — entirely unnecessarily, in his view — with two closed books (clausi libri), two empty bowls or chalices (pollubra sicca) and two unlit candles (lumina caeca). The phrase lumina caeca, though, is neatly both evocative and ambiguous: lumina regularly means ‘eyes’ (rather than just ‘lights’) in Latin, and caeca can mean both ‘blind’ and more generally ‘dim’, ‘subdued’ or ‘invisible’. In Melville’s highly memorable reworking of the first couplet in the second, the closed books become the cultum Dei . . . clausum, divine worship itself, now closed off, inaccessible to the English because of their king’s flirtation with high churchmanship. The unlit candles become the blinded eyes of personified England herself (a feminine noun in Latin), the unfilled vessels an emblem of her uncleanliness, and the whole thing is topped off with a coventional, but here very effectively deployed, allusion to the Biblical whore of Babylon (regularly at this period used by Protestants to indicate the Catholic church). The poem is full of reptition and alliteration to make it as pithy and memorable as possible, and the large number of copies in contemporary notebooks and miscellanies attest to its efficacy, even though at his trial Melville claimed his original poem was stolen and misquoted, and never intended for circulation.³

Epigram seems a lot less central to verse culture (such as it is) today than it was in early modernity: we certainly don’t generally commission the things for public events, and it’s hard to imagine being imprisoned for writing one. All the same, a good epigram still has a very particular pleasure to it, a clickety crunch of satisfaction at something put so well, and a quotability too — that’s the mark I think of the genuine epigram, that you find yourself quoting it annoyingly at appropriate (or even inappropriate) moments. If a poet cares at all about his or her poetry being memorised and, as it were, used in everyday life, epigrams are a good investment.

Most modern epigrams are (as indeed many early modern ones were too) sharp summaries of typical experiences, like these two very different examples on the theme of hopeless love:

Robert Graves

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher

Swept off his tall hat to the squire’s own daughter,

So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly

Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Wendy Cope

I think I’m in love with A. E. Housman

Which puts me in a worse than usual fix.

No woman ever stood a chance with Housman —

And he’s been dead since 1936.

But modern(ish) epigrams can still pack a polemical punch as well. A four-liner on the First World War by Wendy Cope's beloved, A. E. Housman himself, remains one of my favourite war poems:

Here dead lie we because we did not choose          

To live and shame the land from which we sprung. 

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;          

But young men think it is, and we were young.

Here are a few more recent(ish) English epigrams; these are all ones I do find myself quoting annoyingly at fairly regular intervals, if only to myself. (And, in true manuscript miscellany style, a couple of the poems on this page I couldn’t find online so have written out from memory — apologies to any poets traduced as a result.)

Adrian Mitchell

When I am sad and weary

When I think all hope has gone

When I walk along High Holborn

I think of you with nothing on.

Walking down High Holborn. Photo by Kevin Grieve on Unsplash

Fleur Adcock (I always think of this as ‘In the garden’, but I just checked and it’s actually called ‘Comment’)

The four-year-old believes he likes

vermouth; the cat eats cheese;

and you and I, though scarcely more

convincingly than these,

walk in the gardens, hand in hand,

beneath the summer trees.

And finally Vikram Seth:

All you who sleep tonight 

Far from the ones you love, 

No hand to left or right 

And emptiness above - 

Know that you aren't alone 

The whole world shares your tears, 

Some for two nights or one, 

And some for all their years.

Do you have a favourite modern epigram? Let me know!

1

This is British Library Harley MS 389, fol. 298v, dated 15th March 1622/3. The poem was published later that year and copies are also found in several other manuscripts. I discuss Latin epigram culture at greater length in Chapters 6 and 7 of my recent book.

2. This rather good translation is probably eighteenth-century. It appears in several nineteenth century sources about Melville, but I have not seen it in any of the seventeenth-century manuscripts containing the Latin epigram.

3. On the other hand, once imprisoned, he seems to have spent almost his entire time composing more rude Latin poems, so we may not entirely believe him.