Robert Southwell, poet and martyr; was born at Horsham, St. Faith’s, Norfolk, about 1562; and hanged at Tyburn, Feb. 22, 1595. He was educated at Paris, Douay, Tournay, and Rome; received into the Society of Jesus, Oct. 17, 1578, when not yet seventeen; ordained, 1584, and made prefect of the English college at Rome; sent as a missionary to England, 1586; chaplain to the Countess of Arundel; betrayed to the government, 1592, imprisoned for three years in the Tower, found guilty of “constructive treason,” and executed. According to Cecil, he, though “thirteen times most cruelly tortured, cannot be induced to confess any thing, not even the color of the horse whereon, on a certain day, he rode, lest” thereby his friends might fall into the same trouble. His poems were published shortly after his death, and a complete edition appeared 1856, edited by W. B. Turnbull. Some of them, since then widely copied, are of a very high order, and no less philosophic than Christian.
Personal
Excelling in the art of helping and gaining souls, being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceedingly winning.
Robert Southwel was born in this County, as Pitseus affirmeth, who, although often mistaken in his locality, may be believed herein, as professing himself familiarly acquainted with him at Rome. But the matter is not much where he was born; seeing, though cried up by men of his own profession for his many Books in Verse and Prose, he was reputed a dangerous enemy by the State, for which he was imprisoned, and executed, March the 3d, 1595.
Southwell appears to have been a man of a most gentle disposition, and his poetry was long held in high esteem among his co-religionists, associated as it was with the memory of a man to murder whom at Tyburn was as horrible as it would have been to have treated Cowper, or Kirke White, or Robert Burns after the same manner, because they happened to be Protestants. The execution of Southwell was, besides this, a political blunder. He was no conspirator against the State, and consequently was made a martyr to his faith.
St. Peter’s Complaint
Never must be forgotten “St. Peter’s Complaint” and those other serious poems, said to be father Southwell’s; the English whereof, as it is most proper, so the sharpness and light of wit is very rare in them.
Southwell’s poetry wears a deep tinge of gloom, which seems to presage a catastrophe too usual to have been unexpected.
His longest poem is “Saint Peter’s Complaint,” and is strongly religious, though often its strength is at the expense of its verse. It is generally harsh in its construction, and lacks the sweet flow and the noble ring which frequently marks the efforts of contemporary poets. It is direct; full of a fierce energy which is out of keeping with the character of the Apostle whose complaint it professes to be. It is finely exaggerated, and deals in hyperbole to an extraordinary extent. Perhaps the occasion justifies this.
Perhaps its chief fault is that the pauses are so measured with the lines as to make every line almost a sentence, the effect of which is a considerable degree of monotony.
His poems show a true poetic power. They show a rich and fertile fancy, with an abundant store of effective expression at its service. He inclines to sententiousness; but his sentences are no mere prose edicts, as is so often the case with writers of that sort; they are bright and coloured with the light and the hues of a vivid imagination. In imagery, indeed, he is singularly opulent. In this respect “St. Peter’s Complaint” reminds one curiously of the almost exactly contemporary poem, Shakespeare’s “Lucrece.” There is a like inexhaustibleness of illustrative resource. He delights to heap up metaphor on metaphor…. It is undoubtedly the work of a mind of no ordinary copiousness and force, often embarrassed by its own riches, and so expending them with a prodigal carelessness. Thus Southwell’s defects spring not from poverty, but from imperfectly managed wealth; or, to use a different image, the flowers are overcrowded in his garden, and the blaze of colour is excessive. Still, flowers they are. Like many another Elizabethan, he was wanting in art; his genius ran riot.
General
That Southwell was hanged; yet so he had written that piece of his, the “Burning Babe,” he would have been content to destroy many of his.
Both the poetry and the prose of Southwell possess the most decided merit; the former, which is almost entirely restricted to moral and religious subjects, flows in a vein of great harmony, perspicuity, and elegance, and breathes a fascination resulting from the subject and the pathetic mode of treating it which fixes and deeply interests the reader.
His verses are ingenious, simpler in style than was common in his time—distinguished here by homely picturesqueness, and there by solemn moralising. A shade of deep but serene and unrepining sadness, connected partly with his position and partly with his foreseen destiny, (his larger works were written in prison,) rests on the most of his poems.
Southwell, it seems, was the founder of the modern English style of religious poetry; his influence and example are evident in the work of Crashaw, or of Donne, or of Herbert, or Waller, or any of those whose devout lyrics were admired in later times.
He shows in his poetry great simplicity and elegance of thought, and still greater purity of language. He has been compared in some of his pieces to Goldsmith, and the comparison seems not unjust. There is in both the same naturalness of sentiment, the same propriety of expression, and the same ease and harmony of versification; while there is a force and compactness of thought, with occasional quaintness not often found in the more modern poet.
He paraphrases David, putting into his mouth such punning conceits as “fears are my feres,” and in his “Saint Peter’s Complaint” makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit’s poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that which is used in the tough fabric of martyrs.
The hastiest reader will come on “thinking” and “feeling” that are as musical as Apollo’s lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally) is throughout of the “pure well of English undefiled.” When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, their élan, their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener’s flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the “dew of the morning.” His smiles—for he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o’ mouth—are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood.
To the readers of poetry for its merely sensuous qualities of flowing measure, attractive imagery, and brilliant description, the poems of Southwell possess but few attractions. Their subjects are all religious, or, at least, serious; and, in reading him, we must totally forget the traditional pagan poet pictured to us as crowned with flowers, and holding in hand an overflowing anacreontic cup. Serious, indeed, his poems might well be, for they were all composed during the intervals of thirteen bodily rackings in a gloomy prison that opened only upon the scaffold. And yet we look in vain among them for expressions of the reproaches or repining such a fate might well engender, and we search with but scant result for record or trace of his own sufferings in the lines traced with fingers yet bent and smarting with the rack. The vanity of all earthly things, the trials of life, the folly and wickedness of the world, the uncertainty of life, and the consolations and glories of religion, are the constantly returning subjects of his productions, and, however treated, they always reflect the benignity and elevation of the poet’s character.
They are marked by quaint figures, much beauty of language, and purity of sentiment; and as they were chiefly composed in prison, they breathe a tone of quiet, lofty resignation.
Southwell did not think much of poetry as an art; but this fault was not uncommon among the Elizabethan poets. His richness of expression is unbounded, unhusbanded. Nature, as nature, had no message for him. Nature was God’s footstool; of the myriad voices, of the myriad phases in earth and heaven, he took no note for themselves. The rose and the lily were for him in their best place before the tabernacle, and the breath of the new-mown fields was less sweet to him than the incense that wreathed the pillars of a church. Rhythm and rhyme were fetters to his thought rather than helps to it. Verse in his hands was the nearest earthly approach to that divine expression which the seraphs have; it was powerless to hold the fervor of a heart that burned with desire for union with our Lord.
The first really fine child-poem in our literature is Southwell’s “Burning Babe.” Its exquisitely pure feeling, and the mystic light and heat of the language, render the poem so impressive that it can be learnt off by heart in two or three readings. Occurring so early in the present collection, the “Burning Babe” really shows us the point from which both the literature and the art of modern times had to start, in their treatment of the child—the glorification of young Jesus.
Whose vivid and emotional canzonets and hymns had introduced a new element into English literature, an element not to be taken up again until nearly twenty years after his death at Tyburn, but from that time onward to be carried on and up till it culminated in the raptures of Crashaw.
By modern critics Southwell’s poetry has been rarely underrated. James Russell Lowell stands almost alone in pronouncing “St. Peter’s Complaint” to be a drawl of thirty pages of maudlin repentance. A genuinely poetic vein is latent beneath all the religious sentimentalism which at times obscures the literary merit of Southwell’s verse. As in his prose, his exuberant fancy, too, finds frequent expression in extravagant conceits, which suggest the influence of Marino and other Italian writers of pietistic verse. But many poems, like the “Burning Babe,” which won Ben Jonson’s admiration, are as notable for the simplicity of their language as for the sincerity of their sentiment, and take rank with the most touching examples of sacred poetry.
