Rock Constancy presenting
Aurelian Townshend, Virgil, Shakespeare, Fisher, Horace and King Charles I
Aurelian Townshend is one of those “minor” seventeenth-century poets with a wonderfully euphonic name and no lasting reputation. Unless you’ve spent a lot of time grubbing around in early modern manuscript miscellanies — where a few of his lyrics turn up quite often — you probably haven’t come across him before. His Wikipedia entry is entertainingly sketchy, and the proper Oxford Dictionary of National Biography one isn’t much better: we don’t know when he was born (though he was alive by 1583), or when he died (though he was still alive in 1649, and possibly into the early 1650s), or what he was doing for most of his life.
Preserved in one manuscript (Bodleian MS Malone 13) is an enigmatic and quite long love lyric beginning:
Though regions farr devided
And tedious tracts of tyme,
By my misfortune guided,
Make absence thought a cryme;
Though wee weare set a sunder
As farr, as East from West,
Love still would worke this wonder,
Thou shouldst be in my breast.1
In this poem, each of the seven stanzas ends with the poet’s ‘breast’. I picked up my copy of Townshend when I was packing books in London last week, and I was struck in particular by the second half of this poem, in which the poet describes his constancy — of love, despite their separation; and perhaps also of endurance in the face of other misfortunes. The poem hints repeatedly at more general disappointments and difficulties, of having ‘come down in the world’.2 Here is the fifth stanza:
See then my last lamenting
Upon a cliff I’le sitt,
Rock Constancy presenting
Till I grow part of itt;
My teares a quicksand feeding,
Wher on noe foote can rest,
My sighs a tempest breeding
About my stony breast.
There is something rather wayward about Townshend’s metaphors, which have a tendency to shift beneath your feet. Here the poet imagines himself sitting on a cliff, then actually becoming a rock. In a wonderfully dense line, that rock is also allegorized, like something out of Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘Rock Constancy presenting’.3 So he’s on a rock, but he is also like a rock (the rock of Constancy). The rock amid a storm (or a person upon a rock amid a storm) is a very common image of endurance, though in this poem the natural perils also seem to be produced by the poet himself, rather than those around him: ‘My teares a quicksand feeding, / Wher on noe foote can rest, / My sighs a tempest breeding / About my stony breast.’ The storm he must weather is somehow also himself. (We all know that feeling.)
In the late 1630s, the most familiar rock-in-a-storm simile was probably from the Aeneid, where we find the image twice, applied once to Latinus (king of the Latins and father of Lavinia) and once, with similar language, to Mezentius, an ally of Turnus, Aeneas’ rival for Lavinia, and also a father destined to lose his son (Lausus) at the hands of Aeneas. Here is Virgil’s simile of Latinus, futilely attempting to resist his people’s demands for war in Aeneid 7.586-90, the point at which the Aeneid turns from a version of the Odyssey to a version of the Iliad:
ille velut pelagi rupes immota resistit,
ut pelagi rupes magno veniente fragore,
quae sese multis circum latrantibus undis
mole tenet; scopuli nequiquam et spumea circum
saxa fremunt laterique inlisa refunditur alga.
Dryden gives us a rather compressed version of this image:
But, like a rock unmov'd, a rock that braves
The raging tempest and the rising waves—
Propp'd on himself he stands; his solid sides
Wash off the seaweeds, and the sounding tides—
Or, as Theodore C. Williams has it in his 1910 translation:
But like a sea-girt rock unmoved he stood;
like sea-girt rock when surge of waters o'er it sweeps,
or howling waves surround; it keeps
a ponderous front of power, though foaming cliffs
around it vainly roar; from its firm base the broken sea-weeds fall.4
Both Latinus and Mezentius are, ultimately, symbols of defeat: for Aeneas to win — and, eventually, for Rome to be founded — both Turnus and Lausus (and so many more) must be cut down, and Latinus’ daughter must marry Aeneas, not Turnus. Shakespeare conflates all these losses in an extraordinary speech given to Titus Andronicus at the moment at which he sees his daughter Lavinia, who has been raped and mutilated, her tongue and hands cut off to prevent her identifying the culprit.
Marcus Andronicus:
O, thus I found her [Lavinia], straying in the park,
Seeking to hide herself, as doth the deer
That hath received some unrecuring wound.
Titus Andronicus:
It was my deer; and he that wounded her
Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead:
For now I stand as one upon a rock,
Environed with a wilderness of sea,
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will in his brinish bowels swallow him.
(Titus Andronicus III.i.88-97)
Titus Andronicus is a remarkable play. Although it is usually discussed (rather tediously) in relation to Ovid, it is much more seriously an interrogation of the moral propriety of Virgil.5
Not long after Townshend (probably) wrote his poem, this image became synonymous not with Latinus, but with a contemporary king — Charles I himself. The Eikon Basilike, published immediately after the Charles’ execution in January 1649 and attributed to the king himself, was an enormous publishing success — certainly the single most widely read piece of royalist propaganda during the Civil War — and it included a famous and much-reproduced frontispiece:
Here we see Charles I in prayerful contemplation before his execution. If you look carefully at the top left of the image, you can see a crag amid a stormy sea, labelled immota triumphans (literally [a rock] triumphing unmoved) — a tag which both alludes to Virgil (ille velut pelagi rupes immota resistit, the first line of the passage quoted above) and reverses it: unlike the inevitably defeated Latinus and Mezentius, this rock is triumphans, triumphant. Charles’ fall — his execution — is recast as a victory.
In some editions, the image was accompanied by a bilingual epigram in the voice of the king which makes the allusion to Virgil even clearer:
Ac, velut undarum Fluctûs Ventique furorem
Irati Populi Rupes immota repello.
And as th’unmoved Rock outbraves
The boist’rous Windes and raging waves
So triumph I. And shine more bright
In sad Affliction’s darksom night.6
A few years later, Payne Fisher cannily combined the original military setting of the Virgilian passage with the royalist idea of triumph (rather than failure) in his 1652 panegyric of Cromwell, the Irenodia Gratulatoria, in which he describes Cromwell as a rock in the stormy Adriatic who super nimbos surgens immota triumphat (rising above the clouds triumphs, unmoved).7 Fisher had a kind of genius for reworking royalist propaganda for Cromwellian purposes.
Townshend’s image, then, was both highly conventional and vividly “live” in the mid-seventeenth century, bristling with a personal as well as political suggestiveness. But his ‘stony breast’, weathering the storm, is not after all where the poem ends: his rock is a cliff on the shore, offering either wreck or a safe harbour. In fact, the poem has two more stanzas to go, in which the poet changes direction yet again, offers a hint of reconciliation, and more than a hint of erotic invitation. Who could resist such seduction?
Those armes, wherin wide open
Loues fleete was wont to putt,
Shall layd acrosse betoken
That haven’s mouth is shutt.
Myne eyes noe light shall cherish
For shipps att sea distrest,
But darkeling let them perish
Or splitt against my breast.
Yet if I can discover
When thyne before itt rides,
To shew I was thy lover
I’le smooth my rugged sides,
And soe much better measure
Afford thee than the rest,
Thou shalt have noe displeasure
By knocking att my breast.
There’s something here of the latent eroticism of Horace Odes 1.11, the original carpe diem poem. Horace is telling Leuconoe not to attempt to predict the future, but instead to take now what pleasure she may (that is, we assume, with him). In the strange, central image of the poem, the sea tires itself out by its breaking upon cliffs which turn out to be pumicibus, made of pumice — as rocks go, notoriously soft and porous:
ut melius, quidquid erit, pati.
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum:8
Odes 1.11 is in a unique metre with a very long line. Something like this:
Better
When what comes, has become, calmly to bear it, such as we can, whether
Our cups count many winters, or only one more – or none. Ice
Storms sap seas on the cliffs, dredging and beaten, soaked into softening rock.9
In Horace, the storm at sea is associated with unrest, both political and romantic. Townshend’s restless, beautiful, imperfect poem seems, in the passion and pressure of its shifting metaphors, to anticipate the political turmoil that was to come. (Or had perhaps, if this poem is in fact from the early 1640s, already begun.) It has survived thanks to a single manuscript copy. As Townshend himself puts it:
But this is not the dyett
That doeth for glory strive;
Poore beauties seeke in quiet
To keepe one heart alive.
The quotations are from the edition of Townshend edited by E. K. Chambers and published by the Clarendon Press in 1912. There is a more recent edition of Townshend’s verse and masques, edited by Cedric C. Brown (Reading, 1983). This particular poem was printed for the first time by Chambers. Most of Townshend’s verse circulated only in manuscript during his lifetime. This was quite a common pattern for poets of the period.
Townshend was certainly poor and obscure by the end of his life, despite being well-connected as a young man, and, later on, having briefly taken over from Ben Jonson as masque-writer for the court in the early 1630s. Of course, many royalists found themselves in difficult financial as well as political circumstances during and after the civil war. There is some evidence that he may have gone into exile in France with Charles I in the mid-1640s. The date of this poem is unclear, though the manuscript in which it is found dates probably from the late 1630s or early 1640s.
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was first published in 1678. Allegorical verse of a political and/or religious type became particularly fashionable and popular in England in the troubled period of the mid-17th century.
The related, though slightly shorter simile applied to Mezentius is at Aeneid 10.693-6.
The imagery of the wounded deer at this point links Shakespeare’s Lavinia both to Dido, described in these terms earlier in the Aeneid, and to the deer belonging to Latinus which Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, accidentally kills in Aeneid 7, one of the ostensible causes of the war. Shakespeare also uses the image of the rock amid a storm in another of his Roman plays, where Coriolanus urges his son Martius to courage in battle: ‘that thou mayst prove / To shame unvulnerable, and stick i’ th’ wars / Like a great seamark standing every flaw / And saving those that eye thee.’ (Coriolanus V.iii.83-6)
There’s an interesting discrepancy here between the Latin, which (like the Aeneid 7 passage) emphasises the King’s constancy in the face of popular pressure, and the English, which suppresses the political element but adds a sentence emphasising his personal virtue.
Fisher, Irenodia Gratulatoria, sig. E2r-v. The simile is closely modelled on Virgil’s original, with elements derived from other intermediate imitations as well as the Eikon Basilike.
Pumice was also used in the ancient world to make things smooth (i.e. as an eraser or to remove hair). Lewis & Short cites this poem as its single example of the word meaning just ‘rock’ in general (rather than specifically soft or porous rock of some kind). But this is surely a great example of dictionary-derived nonsense.
Marvellous piece, thanks. I associate Townsend with T S Eliot's closing sentence in a review of an anthology, where he describes the range as from "the massive music of Donne to the faint, pleasing tinkle of Aurelian Townsend's 'Dialogue Betwixt Time and the Pilgrim'." That is the only poem of AT's I had read before, and I've always thought Eliot sold it short. It has a charm and quiet resonance beyond Donne! You bring out his qualities with erudition and subtlety.
The title grabbed me immediately. Irresistible. I adored the usage ‘present’ from first hearing it in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘this lanthorn doth the hornéd moon present..’ When and how did present become represent and lose all immediacy, I wonder? Thanks so much Victoria - rock symbols are incredibly potent of late. Stormy weather. Yes thanks for a brilliant overview of the subject and introduction to Aurelian Townshend who I didn’t know at all and must now read. I like his candour very much. I admit to an interesting mental harmonic - ROCK CONSTANCY PRESENTING and then Townshend had me right back with the Who’s Tommy and My Generation! Pete even spells himself Townshend!