Before I really became interested in poetry, I had a thing about nature study in general, and snails in particular. The smallest British snail is called punctum pygmaeum, and if you magnify them significantly they look like this:
Punctum pygmaeum is Latin for ‘a very small point', ‘a tiny full-stop’ and these snails are really very little: the adult shells measure about 1.5mm across. In soil or leaf litter, where they are typically found, they are almost invisible. In Latin, punctum can also mean ‘the mark’ as in ‘hit the mark’: as Horace says about writing poetry, omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, ‘he who mixes the useful and the sweet, hits the mark perfectly’. I want to write today about a seventeenth-century Latin poet who certainly hit the mark, and whose vision of everything we know — all that is human — shrinking to a mere point in the presence of the divine is probably the most memorable punctum in all of Latin verse.
I mentioned Casimir Sarbiewski (properly Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, 1595-1640) briefly in my last post, and a few readers asked to hear more.1 Sarbiewski was a Polish Jesuit whose baroque Latin verse was enormously popular in the seventeenth-century, and especially in England. Sarbiewski is without doubt one of those early modern Latin authors whom every early modernist, and anyone with an appetite for Latin verse, ought to have read: not only because he is so good, and was so enormously influential, but also because he is a perfect example of a kind of literature to which there is no real short-cut. Once you’ve read Sarbiewski (or one of a handful of similar baroque Latin poets), a whole panoply of vernacular poetry of the period comes into focus: but none of those imitators, at least in English, are really anything much like reading Sarbiewski in Latin, just because Latin lyric of this sort is so formally and structurally different from anything in English. Similarly, if you’ve read Horace’s Odes, you will be able to guess at something of the precision, control and surprising juxtaposition of Sarbiewski’s Latin, and you’ll be comfortable with his metres: but in almost every other way, it’s hard to imagine verse much more different than most of Horace.
Sarbiewski wrote quite a range of types of Latin verse, including political panegyric and a large quantity of epigrams. He was best-loved in England, however, for his religious lyric, modelled formally upon Horace but shaped by scripture, especially the Psalms and the Song of Songs. One of the most widely admired of these poems is his Odes 2.5, a dazzling imagination of spiritual ascent. This is how it begins, followed by a (fairly literal) early seventeenth-century translation by Hils:
Humana linquo: tollite praepetemNubesque ventique. Ut mihi deviiMontes resedere! ut volantiRegna procul populosque vastusSubegit aër! Iam radiantiaDelubra divûm, iam mihi regiaeTurres recessere, et relictae inExiguum tenuantur urbes:Totasque, qua se cumque ferunt vagae,Despecto gentes. O lacrimabilisIncerta fortunae! O fluentumPrincipia interitusque rerum!
(1–12)
Lift me up quickly on your wings,Ye Clouds, and Winds; I leave all earthly things.
How Devious Hills give way to mee!And the vast ayre brings under, as I fly,
Kingdomes and populous states! see howThe Glyst’ring Temples of the Gods doe bow;
The glorious Tow’rs of Princes, andForsaken townes, shrunke into nothing, stand:
And as I downward looke, I spyWhole Nations every where all scattred lye.
Oh the sad change that Fortune brings!The rise and fall of transitory things!
This poem in particular — and Sarbiewski’s ecstatic religious lyric in general — was imitated almost obsessively in England from around 1630 onwards: a particularly fascinating commonplace book in Cambridge from the mid-1630s records his impact almost in ‘real time’, as the unknown compiler — probably a student or fellow — adds cross-references and quotations to Sarbiewski under almost every existing heading. One of the most striking features of Sarbiewski’s impact is that his popularity was by no means confined to fellow Roman Catholics, or even to what we’d think of today as ‘high Church’ Anglicans: he was almost equally influential upon strongly Protestant and even dissenter readers. I’ve written a few times about the extensive evidence for his influence upon Andrew Marvell.2 The young Isaac Watts, a convinced dissenter and the founder of English hymnody, trod (as Ben Jonson would put it) everywhere in Sarbiewski’s snow, admitting as much in the preface to his 1706 Horae Lyricae (a fascinating essay in its own right), in which he invokes:
the Practise of the two best Lyric Writers, Horace and Casimire [Sarbiewski]: And tho’ the Authority of the first be more Venerable, yet if in some Instances I prefer the latter, I pray the Criticks to forgive me.3
Abraham Cowley, too, was strongly influenced by Sarbiewski; indeed, his ode ‘The Extasie’, first published among the ‘Pindarique Odes’ of his 1656 Poems, is in large part an (unacknowledged) loose translation of Sarbiewski’s Odes 2.5. Cowley’s poem begins:
I Leave Mortality, and things below;I have no time in Complements to waste,Farewel to’ye all in haste,For I am call’d to go.A Whirlwind bears up my dull Feet,Th’officious Clouds beneath them meet.And (Lo!) I mount, and (Lo!)
How small the biggest Parts of Earths proud Tittle show!
Particularly concerned at this point to demonstrate his Protestant credentials, Cowley splices a description of the ascent of Elijah into a frame derived from Sarbiewski, but returns to Sarbiewski’s Latin lyric for his sixth stanza:
Where am I now? Angels and God is here;An unexhausted Ocean of delightSwallows my senses quite,And drowns all What, or How, or Where.Not Paul, who first did thither pass,And this great Worlds Columbus was,The tyrannous pleasure could express.Oh ’tis too much for Man! but let it nere be less.
This corresponds to the final eight lines of the Latin poem, though Sarbiewski’s ecstasy is more purely abstract: Cowley has added the reference to Paul and Columbus, and removed from the original Sarbiewski’s remarkable closing reference to himself: Haurite anhelantem, & perenni / Sarbivium glomerate fluctu (something like ‘Draw up Sarbivius, gasping for breath [or with longing], and enfold him in the eternal waters’).
Suoque semper terra minor globoIamiamque cerni difficilis suumVanescit in punctum? ô refusumNuminis Oeanum! Ô carentemMortalitatis portubus insulam!O clausa nullis marginibus freta!Haurite anhelantem, & perenniSarbivium glomerate fluctu.
As he climbs higher and higher, the earth itself becomes smaller and smaller until it suum / vanescit in punctum, appears to vanish into its own ‘point’, into invisible smallness, something as tiny and missable as our smallest snail in a handful of leaf litter. This is pretty unforgettable Latin and it is extremely hard to translate Sarbiewski’s particular combination of rhetorical precision and emotional overwhelm. One of my favourite attempts, though very far from a close translation, is Watts’ own early poem ‘God Incomprehensible’, written in irregular Pindarics of the Cowleian kind:
IFar in the Heav’ns my God retires,My God, the point of my Desires,And hides his Lovely Face;When he descends within my ViewHe charms my Reason to pursue,But leaves it tir’d and fainting in th’unequal Chase.IIOr if I reach unusual height,Till near his Presence brought;There Floods of Glory check my Flight,Cramp the bold Pinions of my WitAnd all untune my Thought;Plung’d in a Sea of Light I roll,Where Wisdom, Justice, Mercy Shines;Infinite Rays in Crossing LinesBeat thick Confusion on my Sight, and overwhelm my Soul.(lines 1-15)
Watts’ poem is very good, and its indebtedness to Sarbiewski is obvious, but all the same it is quite different. Whereas Sarbiewski’s Latin is dense with allusions to other Latin texts, Watts here works in echoes of his own English literary tradition. The long last line of each stanza, for instance, recalls the distinctive music of Milton’s ‘Nativity Ode’, written in pentameters, but with a hexameter line closing each stanza. The first example of this in Watts’ poem — ‘But leaves it tir’d and fainting in the unequal Chase’ — also alludes to the end of Richard Crashaw’s beautiful ‘Answer for Hope’: ‘True Hope’s a glorious Huntress, and her chase, - / The God of Nature in the Field of Grace!’.4
Isaac Watts was a major poet who should be much better known.5 If he is mentioned at all today, it is as a writer of hymns (many of which are still sung) and, by association, as a master of simplicity and restraint in diction and verse style: almost the opposite of Sarbiewski’s high baroque. But a careful reading of Watts’ early verse shows how a famous hymn like ‘There is a land of pure delight’ has roots in Jesuit Latin. Watts wrote poems and hymns on this theme — the yearning for heaven — throughout his life, but one of the earliest, ‘Breathing towards the Heavenly Country’, is, as a headnote in the 1706 edition points out, a version of Sarbiewski Odes 1.19:
Urit me patriae decor,Urit conspicuis peruigil ignibusStellati tholus aetheris;Et lunae tenerum lumen, & aureisFixae lampades atriis.O noctis choreas, & teretem sequiIuratae thyasum faces!(1-7)
The glory of my native land [heaven] scorches me: unwavering in the brightness of its fires the dome of heaven with all its stars consumes me: and the soft light of the moon, and torches fixed in its golden halls. O the meteors who have vowed to follow the circling steps of the night and light the smooth procession of its dance!
Or as Watts has it:
The Beauty of my Native LandImmortal Love inspires;I burn, I burn with strong Desires,And sigh and wait the high Command.There glides the Moon her shining Way,And shoots my Heart thro’ with a Silver Ray;Upward my Heart aspires:A thousand Lamps of Golden LightHung high in vaulted Azure charm my Sight,And wink and becken with their Amorous Fires.
This is a long way, formally as well as tonally, from ‘There is a land of pure delight’: in his mature poetry, Watts distilled the religious passion of Crashaw, Cowley and Sarbiewski back into a disciplined and impersonal form, suitable for congregational singing. But the longing with which he so successfully imbued that form derived from the baroque Latin poetics of his youth:
There is a land of pure delightWhere saints immortal reign;Eternal day excludes the night,And pleasures banish pain.There everlasting spring abidesAnd never fading flowers:Death, like a narrow sea, dividesThis heav’nly land from ours[. . .]Could we but climb where Moses stoodAnd view the landscape o’erNot Jordan’s streams nor death’s cold floodShould fright us from this shore.
For a more detailed and scholarly discussion of Sarbiewski’s influence on English poetry, see especially Chapter 6 (‘Religious and Devotional Epigram and Lyric’) of my Literary History of Latin & English Poetry (CUP, 2022).
For instance in an article on the dating of Marvell’s poem ‘Hortus’, which is strongly influenced by his reading of Sarbiewski.
Isaac Watts, Horae Lyricae (1706), sig. A6v.
Crashaw’s ‘Answer’ is a reply to Cowley’s ‘On Hope’, to which it corresponds stanza by stanza. They are quite often printed together, with each of Cowley’s verses followed immediately by Crashaw’s reply, as here.
The best discussions of Watts I’ve read are by Donald Davie, in various books and essays. If anyone is aware of other good essays, I’d love to know.