T S Eliot and Christianity

Links to some excellent online material on the crucial subject (for students of Eliot) of T S Eliot and Christianity. Arranged, very roughly, in order of complexity:

Barry Spurr, T S Eliot's Extraordinary Journey of Faith

Barry Spurr, Suffering Prayer: T S Eliot, his Poetry and his Christianity

Barry Spurr, 'O dark dark dark they all go into the dark: the via negativa in the poetry of T S Eliot'

Lindsay Sarin, Full Circle: T S Eliot's Quest for Spiritual Fulfillment (Honours Thesis)

Florida Gulf Coast University page on Journey of the Magi

Vincent B Leitch, T S Eliot's Poetry of Religious Desolation

Dissertation on Eliot and Religion by Janet MKC (?)

Philip Yancey, T S Eliot's Christian society: Still Relevant Today?

Barry Spurr's findings are treated at full length in his book Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T S Eliot and Christianity


See also earlier blogs on T S Eliot, especially 'Ash Wednesday'.

Milton's Epic Similes

This is a figure of speech particularly appropriate to epic poetry. Homer uses them extensively (they are sometimes called 'Homeric similes'), Virgil elaborated them further, and Virgil was subsequently the model for epic poetry in Western Europe. In English verse we find extended similes in Spenser's Faerie Queene (and allegory is itself a kind of ongoing simile), and they are brought to a peak of sustained sophistication by Milton. Epic similes appear throughout Paradise Lost and though each needs to be considered separately we can venture the following general remarks about them:

• Because epic similes demand careful attention they slow down our reading; and by their nature they freeze the narrative. This helps to achieve the stately pace appropriate to the gravity of epic.
• Epic similes usually describe actions rather than objects. Thus individual movements and gestures are given great emphasis and significance, again contributing to a solemn, ceremonial tone.
• They are a baroque ornamental device, which extends the range of imagery vastly beyond the immediate setting of the narrative.
• Epic similes are virtuosic, demonstrating the learning and imagination of the writer and appealing to the educated reader (indeed, they are an important part of the education of the reader: this is a traditional relation fo reader to text that we need to rememebr whenever we put ourselves in the position of analyst).
• Epic similes relate to action, character and theme by amplifying significant aspects of what they describe. For example, Satan in Hell is like a sea monster not just because he is big, but also because he is destructive. By comparing events in the immediate narrative to later history Milton also collapses chronology and implies the universal relevance of his subject matter.

Here is a discussion of the epic simile at work in a passage from Book III (lines 430-441).

Here walked the Fiend at large in spacious field.
As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey
To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids
On hills where flocks are fed, flies toward the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany wagons light:
So on this windy sea of land, the Fiend
Walked up and down alone bent on his prey ...

As we know, a simile compares a to b. So we may begin by asking, what is being compared to what here? With an epic simile, we should look for an action rather than a thing. The action being described here is walked (line 1 of passage) - this is known as the control, or tenor of the simile. The action walked is compared to the journey of the vulture, which is the vehicle.

Characteristically, the action in the simile is extended, becoming a mini-narrative concentrically enfolded by the episode and the larger narrative schemes beyond: the vulture starts in a rugged, hostile place (Imaus) and leaves this place with little food ('scarce of prey') to seek prey in the more fertile lands of India; but on the way he comes to the barren Chinese desert. Each detail of this 'story' is a precisely chosen point of comparison, as we can see by thinking of it like this:

Vehicle: Tenor
Vulture is a bird of prey: Satan is destructive, a predatory enemy of man.
Vulture (V) is looking for prey: Satan (S) is actively seeking out man to corrupt him.
V starts in Imaus (hostile): S starts in Hell.
V bound in by Tartary (Siberia): S's Inferno -'Tartarus' means 'infernal region' in classical epic.
V scents its prey from a great distance (17th c. belief): Satan's evil intelligence leads him to man.
V flies: S has flown to earth
V wants to gorge lambs and kids: S wants to corrupt innocence (lamb symbolic of purity, Christ)
V seeks a mild, fertile place: S seeks Eden
V lands midway in the desert: S has arrived in a wilderness on his way to Eden.
Chinese desert is 'sea on land', the confusion of elements: Satan brings confusion to earth.

Each detail in the simile goes beyond visual vividness to tell us something about Satan. In the course of the epic simile, the physical world reveals its property as an infinite store of symbols, pointing us to the inner meaning of the cosmos. There is still another level of meaning achieved through the use of allusion (echoing another text). Walked seems a surprisingly everyday verb to build the whole simile on, but its force is greatly increased if we reflect on the reference to Job I.7:

And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down on it.

The first temptation of man is thus linked to the Old Testament testing of Job: by extension, Adam and Job are Everyman, in continual danger from his restless, roving enemy. There is a further possible allusion in the reference to Tartarus: it was Genghis Khan who broke Tartary's bounds to lead his destructive hordes westwards.

The pedagogical function of the lines depends for its efficacy on the pleasurable exercise it gives the reader's imagination: we have been taken on an exhilarating inner journey through the landscapes of Tartary, India and China (and, as with any epic simile, there is the demand to hold the story in our minds while we read the simile, and then return to it). Intellectually, the passage has taken us into areas such as the bible, history, higher learning and popular belief. The ornamental surface carries an abstract thematic depth.

Renaissance Religious Drama

English drama in the Renaissance turned from the sacred to the secular. Over the sixteenth century, medieval religious plays gave way to the worldly subject matter of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. This shift is marked by continuity as much as departure, however, and Renaissance drama frequently adopts ideas from late medieval theatre. Under pressures which made the production of religious plays all but impossible, Renaissance dramatists transformed some of the traditional character types and situations of native drama into new secular versions, and thus appealed to an audience whose imagination had been formed by the old mysteries, saint plays and moralities.

Mystery Plays

Before the Reformation, practically all plays in England were explicitly religious. Dramatic performances were overseen by the Church, and their function was to celebrate Christian festivals and instruct audiences about the scriptures and church teachings. The great mystery cycles told the story of Christian history from Creation to Doomsday, the central element of which is man’s relation to God – from the Fall from Grace, to Redemption through the sacrifice of Christ, and finally the attainment of Salvation by repentance and atonement. The mystery plays were performed by amateurs in public spaces in the towns after which the various cycles are named – most famously Chester, York, Wakefield, and Coventry. Having perhaps reached their height in the fourteenth centuries, the mystery cycles continued into the sixteenth century and were still being performed into the life of Shakespeare. But their influence was fading, and the various forces ranged against them makes their eventual extinction seemed inevitable.

These forces were primarily political. When in 1533 Henry VIII broke with Rome and had himself proclaimed supreme governor of the Church in England, plays fell under the jurisdiction of the monarch, not the Pope. Now that religious ideas were politically highly sensitive, it was safer for dramatists to turn to other forms, such as classically based plays. With their close associations with Rome, the mystery plays were naturally objects of suspicion for the authorities. Their colour, festivity and exuberance was at odds with the strand of Protestantism which exhorted the faithful to look beyond the pleasures of the world and contemplate their own imminent mortality, while the story of salvation they told could not be reconciled with the Calvinist creed of predestination. Indeed, the fact that mystery cycles continued to be performed for some decades after the break with Rome is testament to their popularity. In the reign of Elizabeth I, anti-Catholic feelings grew: the activities of the Spanish inquisition in the 1560s, the Catholic rebellion in the north of 1569, the formal excommunication of Elizabeth by the Pope (1570), the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre (1572) and the formation of the Catholic League (1585) with the express pupose of extinguishing Protestantism in England all fostered a violent anti-Catholic feeling and led to the end of the mystery plays. The Chester cycle ended in 1574 (interestingly, the Mayor was summoned before the Privy Council in 1575 to explain why an illegal performance had been permitted, and pleaded that the citizens had demanded it), York and Wakefield in 1576 and Coventry in 1581.

Besides these changes in the political and religious climate, certain cultural shifts may also have made the mystery plays anomalous. Originally, performances of these dramatisations of the scriptures may well have been more formal and stylised, recognisably linked to the solemn enactment of the liturgy in church. With the rise of humanism and naturalism, however, this formalism and sanctity was eroded by more robust and irreverent characterisation of wicked or minor characters: hence Noah’s wife, the three shepherds before they behold Christ, Cain and Herod all arise as naturally expressive, human types. Such characterisation was incompatible with the more abstract presentation of holiness, and so God and Christ ceased to appear in the dramas, which were perhaps becoming an occasion for popular mirth and festivity rather than a pious contemplation of the great mysteries. This worldliness was echoed in staging which responded to public desire for a gorgeous pageant: individual plays were usually financed by particular guilds, who no doubt competed with each other to put on the most colourful show. Ironically, it is these elements of the mysteries, arguably at odds with their original purpose, which were the most influential on later drama: Shakespeare’s Shylock is recognisably based on the lively devils of earlier mysteries; the provision of an enjoyable spectacle was taken up by the London companies, for whom the wardrobe was the single greatest expenditure. The popularity of the morality play, satisfying a taste for drama as polemic, also contributed to the demise of biblical drama. Finally, the dominance of the professional London-based companies over taste and repertoire can only have hastened the demise of the provincial, amateur theatre represented by the mysteries.

Morality Plays

Like the mysteries, morality plays instructed their mainly illiterate audience through theatrical entertainment. But while mystery and miracle plays dramatize stories from the Bible and the lives of the saints, morality plays deal with the struggle between vices and virtues for the soul of man – a drama of internal spiritual struggle known as psychomachia. In this way conceptual issues could be made concrete and memorable. Moralities are essentially dramatized sermons, and their characters are personified abstractions representing such things as Charity, Pride, Wealth, Death, Humility and so forth. Their stories are not related to any specific days in the Church calendar, and  could thus be performed at any time. As in the mystery and miracle dramas, performers were often amateurs from the guilds, playing to popular audiences in yards, guildhalls and other extempore settings.

About thirty morality plays survive. From the fifteenth century among the best known are The Castle of Perseverance (c.1415), in which the soul is a castle besieged by the forces of the devil, Mankind and Everyman (c.1495). The genre continued into the sixteenth century, often taking on clear political resonances. In Skelton’s Magnifycence (c.1515) ‘a prince of great might’ (Magnificence) dismisses Measure and is led astray by Vices (including Counterfeit Countenance and Cloaked Collusion), before being rescued and returned to greatness by Charity, Good Hope and Perseverance. The play is a clear satirical attack on Cardinal Wolsey and his lavish spending habits. John Bale’s King Johan (1539) took the morality form even further by having named characters: his protagonist is the historical King John, who struggles to save Widow England and her son blind Commonalty from Sedition and the Roman Catholic Church. John is beset by Vices who are also personally identified: Usurped Power (the Pope), Sedition (Archbishop Stephen Langton), and Private Wealth (Cardinal Pandolpho). A parallel is intended with Henry VIII’s own contest with the Papacy. Unattractive propaganda though it is,  King Johan is the first play to make use of themes from English history, and thus represents a link between medieval abstract moralities and the later history plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

In the court of Henry VIII the morality play effectively merges with the Interlude. Examples of ‘moral interludes’ include the anonymous Hickscorner (c.1513) and Wever’s Lusty Juventus (c.1510). Moral interludes include individuals as well as allegorical types among the characters, and depict the Vices in increasingly comic terms: Pride, Gluttony and Self-Love are characterised as clowns and buffoons. The rise of the Vice to star performer is attested in other ways: while morality plays usually involve a lot of doubling of parts, the Vice was played by only one actor, who would be the most accomplished player. The actor playing the Vice also collected money from spectators at halls and innyards: it was his performance that drew in the crowds and the money. Unsurprisingly, it is the figure of the Vice whonis most readily recognisable in later Renaissance drama: examples are the servant Miles, who rides on the devil’s back in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), the main character the Jew Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c.1589) and Wagenr in Dr Faustus (c.1588). The latter play also shows the influence of the old moralities in the debates of the Good and Bad Angels and the presentation of the seven deadly sins. Various Shakespearean characters can also be traced back to the anarchic morality Vice: Hal refers to Falstaff as ‘that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity’ (1 Henry IV, 2.5.413); Richard III declares ‘Thus, like the formal vice Iniquity, / I moralize two meanings in one word’ (3.1.82); and Hamlet refers to his uncle Claudius as ‘a vice of kings’ (3.4.88). In Shakespeare echoes of the morality vice range from the childlike Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Othello’s tormentor, the villainous Iago and to the scheming and vengeful Edmund in King Lear. In such characters Shakespeare picks up on and develops possibilities latent in the simple morality dramas: the contending feelings of attraction and repulsion that the Vice induces in us, the mixture villains can present of attractive qualities (cleverness, observation, humour, realism) with depraved moral intentions, and the spectrum of human wrongdoing, from playful mischief  to utter malevolence.

Besides the figure of the Vice, combining laughter with literally devilish action, morality plays influenced later Renaissance drama in other ways.  They establish the idea of psychomachia as the central action. From Marlowe’s Faustus to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet, it is this dramatic conflict within the main character that is the focus of the drama. Morality plays and interludes also incorporate topical material concerning government and social order as subjects for drama. Hamlet’s description of players as ‘the abstract [summing-up] and brief chronicles of the time’ (2.2.481) could be used of earlier plays such as Skelton’s that used the morality form as a device to comment on contemporary matters. The earlier dramas also employed stage conventions that lived on in the scenes and gestures of later works. Powerful scenarios such as that of Edgar, disguised as the beggar Poor Tom, leading his blinded father Gloucester in King Lear must have awakened memories of personifications of Mankind and the virtuous agents that seek to help him in distress. Some scenes, such as the knocking at the door of the castle in Macbeth after Duncan’s murder look even further back: in this case, there is a clear allusion to the mystery plays showing the Harrowing of Hell – the scene in which Christ after his crucifixion visits hell with St Michael to save the souls of those in purgatory, terrifying the devils within.

Protestant Drama

Some writers in the earlier part of our period used the form of medieval religious dramas as a vehicle for Protestant propaganda. John Bale (1495-1563), an ex-Carmelite monk turned zealous Protestant, wrote several plays (all c.1538-40) violently attacking Catholicism. God’s Promises is a Protestant mystery cycle, comprising seven scenes in which biblical figures obtain a renewal of the covenant from God. The flavour of Three Laws is suggested by stage directions stipulating that Sodomy should appear dressed as a monk, Ambition as a bishop, and Hypocrisy as a Greyfriar. King Johan energetically cheers on Henry VIII’s battle with the papacy. These works found little official favour, however, and on the fall of his patron Thomas Cromwell, Bale was forced to flee the country. Religious polemic on stage was perceived as dangerous: it threatened to undermine the control of religious thought by the authorities, and could moreover lead to public affray. Such presumably were the motives behind the 1543 Act banning ‘interpretations of Scripture ... contrary to the doctrine set forth, or to be set forth, by the King’s Majesty.’ In the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553) the state turned more decisively to Calvinist Protestantism and the influence of this theology can be found in some plays. Jacob and Esau (c.1557), possibly by Nicholas Udall, clearly presents the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. In the Prologue we are told that ‘Jacob was chosen and Esau reprobate’ and Isaac says in prayer to God: ‘Of thy iustice, whom it pleaseth thee, thou doest reiect, / Of thy mercy, whom [it] pleaseth thee, thou doest electe’ (ll.1473-4). Scholars have debated how closely the theology of the play conforms to Calvinism, but the general presence of the central idea is clear, as it is in A new enterlude ... of the life and repentaunce of Marie Magdalene (printed 1566) by Lewis Wager. In this Protestant adaptation of the Catholic saint play, Mary Magdalene is saved despite her depraved past because she is elect. The utter despair of discovering that the route to salvation is closed is dramatized in The Conflict of Conscience (c.1580) by Nathaniel Woodes, in which the hero Philologus realizes that he is not elect. Theological differences over the doctrine of predestination can be found in the texts of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (both of these appeared after his death, and incorporate material clearly added later, so neither is a secure guide to the first performance): in the A Text (1604) the Good Angel says ‘Never too late, if Faustus can repent’. In Calvinist terms, the reprobate, or unelected, is unable to repent because God witholds the grace needed for this – Claudius’s inability to repent although he wishes to (Hamlet, 3.3.36-72) may similarly indicate his predestined damnation. The B Text of Faustus (1616) changes ‘can repent’ to ‘will repent’, with the implication  that repentance lies in the will of Faustus: his faith rests with him and is not predetermined.

Doctor Faustus (c.1588) was the last overtly religious play to appear on the Renaissance stage. Acting companies and their managers must have felt that treatment of doctrine was simply too dangerous for the public stage. The Old Testament, in particular the Apocrypha, provided safely uncontroversial material for some plays (Thomas Garter, Godly Susannah (1568); George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bathsheba (1594)), and the histories of Josephus furnished the source for Lady Elizabeth Carew’s Mariana, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613). But religious drama effectively disappeared from the stage. Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) is a closet drama, intended for private reading, not public performance.  But the absence of religious subject matter should not lead us into supposing that religious preoccupations disappeared from the theatrical imagination. Clearly they did not: damnation, repentance and the old Catholic concept of purgatory are openly referred to in Macbeth and Hamlet, the battles of vice and virtue are played out in Jonson’s Volpone and The Alchemist, doting idolatry is transmuted into comedy in A Midsumer Night’s Dream, Puritans are satirized, and the inner life of moral decision and spiritual feeling is an essential element of Renaissance drama. While doctrine and dogma cannot be explicitly mentioned in these plays, they unmistakably present to us the spectacle of man as a religious animal.

Renaissance Political Philosophy

Renaissance art and literature often shows a deep interest in politics, the arrangement of human society. Many of Shakespeare's plays, for example, investigate ways of managing and mismanaging states, and the consequences of decisions made at the top. This is most obviously the case with the History Plays, but it is also at the centre of the tragedies (King Lear begins with the disastrously bad idea of fragmenting a state) and even a romance like The Tempest, where the island setting works as a commentary on the ordering of a commonwealth and the duties of a ruler. The note below on political philosophies in the early modern period may, I hope, give a helpful idea of the main ideas in circulation.

 

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of the modern state. The general model was that of authoritarian monarchies ruling over extended territories, protected by permanent armies. These armies had to be funded from taxes, which in turn necessitated a central bureaucracy. This arrangement in turn required some theoretical justification, which was provided by writings on forms of government, which we would now call political philosophy. In the Tudor period, some of these were in the medieval tradition of Advice to Princes: the deeds of great men of the past were held up as case studies, and princes were encouraged to practise the Christian virtues of  Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence and Justice. In addition were the princely virtues of liberality, magnificence, clemency, honour and the keeping of good faith. In English the Mirror for Magistrates (first published 1559), a collection initially of nineteen English poems by various hands, had this purpose: the falls of great men of the past are held up for examination (typically, these leaders are ghosts examining themselves in a mirror) so that present-day magistrates can learn from the errors of their forebears.  Plutarch’s Lives, in the 1579 translation of Sir Thomas North (1535-c.1601), similarly used biography as a way of inculcating moral awareness, especially in those of positions of power.

Narratives with a moral purpose did not, though, study the workings of the state as a whole. Interest in this subject was induced by the real changes in political organisation of the time, and by the study of ancient texts. For Italian humanists such as Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) and Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), the writings of the ancients provided a model of how the public realm might be organised. These writings might take the form of treatises, like Plato’s Republic and Laws, which theorised about the organisation of the realm, or histories like Livy’s, which described states in action. Underlying the ‘civic humanism’ which applied ancient writings to present political realities was a powerful belief in the capacities of human will and reason. Through these, man can improve his condition; by the right exercise of reason, humans can amend imperfections such as injustice and inequality, and strive for a perfect polity in this life. Like the medieval books of advice to princes, the humanist belief in a better future modelled on the wisdom of antiquity posited humans as perfectible creatures, designed to use reason to serve their higher needs and capable of moral improvement. Plato, Aristotle, and St Thomas all hold that the good functioning of the state depends on the virtues of governors and citizens: to be virtuous is to be honest, sincere, just and pious; and man, as a rational creature, can be educated to put the general good before his own. Such sentiments perhaps found their purest expression in the genre of the utopia. Their idealism was countered, however, by the realism of the two most important theorists of politics of the sixteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Jean Bodin (1530-1596).

Machiavelli’s short book The Prince (1513) had a powerful and lasting impact. It was written in exile, as the author, an experienced diplomat who had served at the courts of France and Rome, had been deposed from his post in the Chancellery of Florence in 1512. Machiavelli contemplated the birth of the modern state - the word replaces res publica in the first page of The Prince – which had left the Italian peninsula behind. Power lay with the big nation states such as France and Spain (and, increasingly, England) while Italy (which was not a nation state until the nineteenth century) was a conglomeration of fundamentally weak small states, squabbled over by the larger powers of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Although immersed in humanist culture, with a deep knowledge of Cicero, Boethius, Seneca and Livy, Machiavelli did not share the Humanist faith in the innate goodness of man, which will ensure the eventual triumph of virtue. For him, experience shows that a ruler following moral precepts, such as those espoused in books of Advice to Princes, would only achieve disaster. In The Prince, Machiavelli sets out to answer the question: what is the best way to organize a cohesive and permanent state, and thereby best ensure for its citizens some degree of liberty and security? The task of the book is to provide a practical answer to this question, not a theoretical ideal one in the tradition of Plato.

In Machiavelli’s project, experience is to be taken as the guide. A knowledge of history and attentive observation of human affairs are fundamental necessities, and reflection on them will yield reliable maxims. One such reflection is that man is not a rational creature, designed to do good and live well. Experience tells us that man is perfidious: he can be wicked and envious, and the best response to that is not to attempt to reform him by an idealist education but to manage him appropriately and form the state on the realistic basis of how humans actually are, not how we would like them to be. Machiavelli’s doctrine of the reason of state holds that all means necessary must be employed to establish a powerful state in the collective interest; since humans are essentially selfish, they will pursue their own needs rather than the general wellbeing, and so must be compelled, by whatever means, to do the right thing. In the course of pursuing the greater good building the commonweal, the Prince is justified in doing wrong, including acts of violence and terror. For Machiavelli, virtù is not an abstract list of moral principles but the excellence particular to the ruler - that is, his success in achieving the intended goal. Hence the doctrine that ‘the end justifies the means’.

The type of state that will best ensure the collective good is a secondary concern. In The Prince Machiavelli argues for a principality. In the Discourses on Livy (1513), he praises the Roman republic (a republic being a commonwealth where power is distributed and not invested in one single leader). The overriding concern is the primacy of the collective over the individual good. A good republic makes the power of the state superior to that of factions; its leader - whose individual power will be limited by the constitution - will strengthen the state, for example through laws imposing conformity on the multitude: religion can explicitly be used for this end. A republic can draw on the best elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy to achieve the best possible balance between nobility and the people. In both The Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli refuses to idealize human nature. His aim is to find the best possible system of government on the basis of what we know humans to be like. His method of obtaining general precepts from observation has led to him being considered the founder of politics as an empirical science. The Prince was not published in England until 1640, but it was well known to writers before that. In several sixteenth-century writings, ‘Machiavel’ is the diabolical bogeyman ‘old Nick’: this is the figure we see in the character of Lorenzo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and as the Prologue to Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.  These characterisations owe much to French anti-Florentine propaganda, and to post-Reformation hostility to Italian states in England itself. They certainly do not indicate a general refutation in England of Machiavelli’s picture of human nature, which must have been confirmed by ordinary experience. A Machiavellian concern with the real behaviour of flawed humans in distant and recent history can be seen in works like Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and Tamburlaine, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and Jonson’s Sejanus. Bacon wrote: ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do and not what they ought to do’ (Anatomy of Learning (1605), II.xxii.9).

As we have seen, Machiavelli drew on history as the best introduction to politics, a method he continued in his history of Florence (1525). The same approach was taken by the French writer Jean Bodin (1530-1596), in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Understanding of History, 1566). Like Machiavelli, Bodin was concerned with real events rather than ideal concepts: in this book his interests include the effects of geography on different peoples, the way a state functions as an institution, and how international relations may be influenced by economic factors. Bodin’s interest in inflation gives him some claim to be the founder of the science of political economy. His most sustained study of statecraft is the Six Livres de la République (1576), published ten years later in an extended Latin version.  This work is an extended justification of absolutism. It was based on the observation of the bloody conflict between the Huguenots (French Protestants) and the Catholic League, which had caused appalling misery to the French people. Bodin saw the monarch as a necessary balancing figure, beyond parties and sects: absolutism was the best defence against anarchy and civil strife, and the security it brought was the precondition for tolerance, an ideal which Bodin promoted. Just as a family needs a paterfamilias, Bodin argued, a state naturally requires a supreme authority: this sovereignty, however, is a concept, not a person. It is ‘the supreme power over citizens and subjects, not limited by the law’ (I.8), since it is itself the law-maker. Sovereignty might lie with the person of the monarch, but it can equally well lie with an assembly: its chief responsibilities are to create judges, legislate and declare war; it is inalienable and indivisible, though it can delegate certain executive functions. How sovereignty is to be acquired, and whether power gained through violence itself legitimises the governing authority remain obscure points. But the main message of the work, in contrast to certain elements of Platonic philosophy and the utopian communism described by More, is that absolute power is the most natural defence of civil peace.

It will be noted that neither Machiavelli nor Bodin were arguing for anything resembling democracy. Such suffrage as existed, such as in the Republican government of Florence in the fifteenth century, was inevitably controlled by a few powerful families such as the Medici. The argument that the forceful exercise of power by the sovereign over the whole state was the best available form of government is echoed in the numerous books on government of the period. Many of these are in Latin, such as John Case’s Sphaera Civitatis (1588), a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics which recommends the perfect monarch as the ideal form of government. In English, Part I of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) accepts that society is a hierarchical pyramid, with a single ruler at the top. Monarchy is described as the most natural and best form of government, and its divine sanction is clearly shown in the Bible. In the seventeenth century, absolutism was once again recommended by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1648). The natural state of things is one of ‘war of all against all’ as individuals struggle to meet their basic needs. Life in this natural state is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (xiii). In order to live as a community, individuals need to give authority to a sovereign authority, preferably a monarch. This is the beginnings of social contract theory: individuals resign many of their freedoms to an authority, which in turn protects them as a collective body. Social contract theory was further developed by John Locke (1632-1704) in Two Treatises on Government (1690), and, later, by Rousseau.

Political ideas are particularly liable to be diminished by summary: to reduce Machiavelli to the quote ‘the end justifies the means’ or Hobbes to ‘nature is red in tooth and claw’ is to turn a rich and organic process of thought into a single glib formulation. The books of Machiavelli, Elyot and Hobbes all reward study not as background to literature but as literary texts in themselves, making subtle and expressive use of language through the stylistic and logical devices of rhetoric and logical argument. In texts more usually studied in literature courses, the forms of government and their flaws are a frequent theme: Shakespeare’s Roman plays investigate and dramatise the use, misuse and varied distribution of power. They certainly do not advocate popular rule, whatever the vices of rulers: a classless and democratic society was unthinkable as a practical option, except in the fantastic world of utopias, and we should beware of hopefully making the values of Renaissance texts correspond to our own. It can be helpful to remember that the Renaissance was haunted by the threat of civil war: the Wars of the Roses – described in Samuel Daniel’s long poem The Civil Wars (1609), among other works - were not a distant memory in England; and the Thirty Years war and wars of religion in France of the sixteenth century were a reminder of the calamities ensuing on the absence of a central authority. Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays paint a vivid picture of the miseries of internecine struggle: ‘No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood’ (H41, I.i., 5-6). In his epic Pharsalia, on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, the Roman poet Lucan (39-65 AD) inspired numerous seventeenth-century writers, and Hobbes’s advocacy of absolutism was a response to the travails of England’s own civil wars. While Milton’s defence of regicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649) seems to have had little influence beyond the Commonwealth period, a lasting strand of republican thought has been traced in England by the scholar David Norbrook.  Political ideas were in any event central to literary activity in the Renaissance; and politically intended critical enquiries, such as those pursued by cultural materialism remind us that the poetic and the political are inseparable.

Further Reading
Machiavelli, The Prince
Andrew Edward, Jean Bodin on Sovereignty, Republics of Letters

Mikael Hornqvist, 'Renaissance Political Philosophy', from The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (2011).

David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). Quentin Skinner: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1978). Vol1, The Renaissance; Vol 2, The Age of Reformation. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 1981).

Milton's Punctuation

If there were a competition for the driest blogpost title, this would be a contender. Yet there is a particular interest in the punctuation of literary texts, an interest aroused in me by graduate studies (many years ago) in paleography and the editing of medieval texts - Oxford's solid philological tradition - and by a subsequent reading of Malcolm Parkes's Pause and Effect and John Lennard's The Poetry Handbook, which pays detailed attention to this rather esoteric aspect of poetic craft (Lennard studied with Parkes at some stage, I think).

Punctuation matters. Careful writers - perhaps you and I on a good day - choose punctuation marks with the same care as they choose words. Broadly speaking these marks work in three ways - visually, aurally and logically. For example, the colon (1) helps us to see the segments of a sentence or period on the page, (2) creates an emphatic pause which we hear, and (3) suggests some logical connection between what precedes and follows it, thus guiding our understanding of the sense of a passage.

Too often, printers and editors alter authorial punctuation. But when we can be sure we are seeing the original (or at any rate, something roughly contemporary with the original, and thus conforming to many of the same conventions), it will repay our critical attention. Below I discuss the part punctuation plays in some lines from Milton. Familiar terms are used in the following ways, with bold and italics distinguishing where the same word is used to indicate the graphic mark or a sequence of text.

A colon (plural cola) indicates the mark :
A colon (plural cola) indicates everything written between cola, ie the segment of text which terminates in this mark (or a full stop).

A semi-colon (pl semi-cola) indicates the mark ;
A semi-colon (pl semi-cola) indicates the texts terminating in the mark ; or, again, with a terminal stop.

Similarly, a comma is the mark, and a comma (pl commata) refers to the words enclosed by commas.

A sentence is a grammatical statement with, normatively, a subject and verb which makes independent sense. It does not necessarily end with a full stop (though it normally terminates in one o the marks including a stop (?!;:.).

A period is a complete line of thought, which may contain several grammatical sentences, and which ends in a full stop (still called a 'period' in American English, recalling the earlier rhetorical tradition which Milton and others worked within).

An early modern writer like Milton typically composes not primarily in sentences, but in periods. To get a feel for this, we have to extend our view beyond the sentence, which is generally taught as the largest grammatical unit today. A rough equivalent to a Miltonic period would be the paragraph, a  gathering of sentences to make a cohesive larger statement. Another analogy is to see the punctuation marks as the joints of a limb, articulating the various members and holding them together to form a greater whole.

Simply to get our eye in, we can have a look at the 'joints' of a representative portion of text, Paradise Lost, Book X, lines 312-24. Text and notes are from the Dartmouth hypertext edition:

Now had they brought the work by wondrous Art
Pontifical, a ridge of pendent Rock
Over the vext Abyss, following the track
Of Satan, to the self same place where hee [ 315 ]
First lighted from his Wing, and landed safe
From out of Chaos to the out side bare
Of this round World: with Pinns of Adamant
And Chains they made all fast, too fast they made
And durable; and now in little space [ 320 ]
The confines met of Empyrean Heav'n
And of this World, and on the left hand Hell
With long reach interpos'd; three sev'ral wayes
In sight, to each of these three places led.

Stripped down eccentrically to punctuation marks only, this passage becomes ,,,,:  ,;,;. The period is composed of two cola, around the pivotal colon (line 318). The first colon has four commas (none of them, we note, at the end of a line, the medial placement creating a series of cross-rhythms) and thus five grammatical commata. The second colon comprises three semi-cola. The first two semi-cola have two commata each. Without commas, the main structure is clearly : ; ; . The limb of the period is in two halves, and the second half has two smaller joints (the semi-cola) holding it together. The whole period resembles the classical period of four cola. A further analogy is the renaissance altarpiece,  which is composed of various leaves (typically a diptych or triptych, but often with further sections), making a single work composed of distinct images - as foreign to prevailing conceptions of the artwork as Milton's periods are to those of the modern notion of sentence / statement.

Now we have identified the joints (or leaves), we are in a better position to follow the current of thought. Let us consider a longer period, also from Paradise Lost (the opening of Book IX).


First Colon

NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest
With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast, permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblam'd:

This is the first colon, ending midway through line 5, where the colon acts as a brake against the metrical momentum. It provides a link to the preceding book, referring to the scene we have just left: the poet tells us he will move on from the happy scene of man talking amicably with angels. There are five commata, the first two embracing the subject, and each of the last three giving an image of a particular action: used to sit ... partake ... permitting. These are non-finite verbal forms (two infinitives and a participle), suggesting the timeless, unhurried nature of such discourse.  The colon is placed to create a pause for reflection, significantly pointing the key word unblam'd, which summarises man's lost innocence.

Second Colon

I now must change [ 5 ]
Those Notes to Tragic; foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,
And disobedience:

The second colon explains why there can be 'No more' of this pleasant theme. It is made up of two semi-cola. The first of these announces the change of subject; the second unpacks the full sense of the key word Tragic and takes us to the momentous word disobedience (the negative prefix echoing unblam'd at the conclusion of the previous colon). The four commata list, with cumulative force, the crimes of man (distrust, breach disloyal, revolt, disobedience): these stark nouns offer a tonal contrast to the actions described in the first colon. We notice, too, the semantic aptness of breach / Disloyal being visually prised apart by a line break, a graphic representation of the rift between God and man.

Third Colon

On the part of Heav'n
Now alienated, distance and distaste,
Anger and just rebuke, and judgement giv'n, [ 10 ]
That brought into this World a world of woe,
Sinne and her shadow Death, and Miserie
Deaths Harbinger:

The second colon explained the first, and anatomised the elements of man's revolt. It moved us on from a timeless then to an equally verbless Now. The relation between colon 2 and colon 3 is that of cause and effect, as we learn of heaven's response to man's fall and the subsequent introduction of sin and death into the terrestrial sphere.

Fourth Colon

Sad task, yet argument
Not less but more Heroic then the wrauth
Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu'd [ 15 ]
Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous'd,
Or Neptun's ire or Juno's, that so long
Perplex'd the Greek and Cytherea's Son;
If answerable style I can obtaine [ 20 ]
Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes
Her nightly visitation unimplor'd,
And dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires
Easie my unpremeditated Verse:

Now that the subject matter of the Fall has been outlined, the fourth colon reflects on it as suitable matter for epic verse. What is a heroic subject? The link between Milton's work and ancient epic is the theme of vengeance and retribution by the mighty (and indeed almighty). This colon digresses into an ostentatiously erudite riff on this subject, the commata unfolding descriptive ornamentations as the poet's mind explores the theme. The first semi-colon declares that the Fall is not less but more heroic than Achilles' combat with Hector in Homer's Iliad. The next semi-colon offers further classical examples of the theme of divine 'ire' and 'rage' in retribution. The entire colon subdivides into a tricolon, a group of three, with the third semi-colon being the longest, attaining a climactic force as it describes the nightly visitations to the poet by the Muse. The subject of the whole colon is thus the superiority of Milton's poem to ancient epic: his work, we learn, has a loftier theme, and is directly divinely inspired without human interference. But we note here that even as Milton laments man's pride in challenging a higher authority, he himself asserts his own will against the literary authority of classical poetry. At the same time, the reference to the actions of classical narratives seems a diversionary tactic, taking our view away from the total lack of memorable dramatic action in the story of fall and punishment in the Christian narrative he has outlined. The classically composed period is, we might feel, holding together a passage of thought vexed by paradox, tonal contrast, a sense of the mismatch between matter and manner in the Christian epic itself. We are given a chance to rest as the colon falls at the end of a largely iambic line.

Fifth Colon

Since first this Subject for Heroic Song [ 25 ]
Pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late;
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument
Heroic deem'd, chief maistrie to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights [ 30 ]
In Battels feign'd; the better fortitude
Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon'd Shields,
Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds; [ 35 ]
Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgious Knights
At Joust and Torneament; then marshal'd Feast
Serv'd up in Hall with Sewers, and Seneshals;
The skill of Artifice or Office mean,
Not that which justly gives Heroic name [ 40 ]
To Person or to Poem.

The fifth and final colon completes the claim for the Fall as an heroic theme by contrasting it with other epic narrative verse. Where the fourth colon dealt with ancient epic, the fifth describes more recent works. They are obsessed with boring battles, nostalgic ideas of chivalry ('tinsel Trappings'), and don't explore more interesting kinds of courage such as that of the martyrs. This great colon has no fewer than six semi-cola as Milton warms to his theme of the inferiority of everyone else's poetry to his own, in good puritanical fashion clearly showing an appetite for the kind of literary pleasures he deprecates.  The important concept word 'Heroic' appears near the end to tie the fourth and fifth cola together.

It is perhaps worth repeating the observation that Milton usually places the heavy punctuation marks not at the ends of lines but in the middle. The shape and syntax of the period creates its own rhythm on top of, and against, the vestigial iambic metre. This plays a large part in giving Milton's verse a tense and 'heavy' feel as so much seems to be calling out for emphasis.

Finally, the long period here is a demonstration of the 'Heroic' nature of poet and poem, as it shows one vast line of thought encompassing rural repasts, divine anger, Homeric epic, divine inspiration, and chivalric verse. Here is a mind thinking, planning, remembering, considering and claiming with a triumphant mental energy.

Further Reading
Brief History of Punctuation in Britannica
Stephen Reimer's course notes from University of Alberta

John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook
M B Parkes, Pause and Effect: Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Scolar Press, 1992)
Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves has a handy summary of the earlier system.

Corruption in Renaissance Literature

It is no doubt naive to refer to a unitary 'Renaissance world view' of human nature. (Though when I was researching Renaissance ideas the sheer energy some academics devoted to attacking Tillyard for his useful handbook came as a surprise.) The emphasis today is on studying the diversity of beliefs in the period - beliefs which were themselves shifting and not static, moving within and across different communities. In exploring anything along the lines of an 'Elizabethan World Picture' there is also the danger of identifying the official, authorised view with the inwardly felt convictions of a diverse people. Nonetheless, one notion that we find permeating much medieval and early modern culture, while varying in tone and pitch, is the fallen state of man. This more or less coherent belief - diversely construed and variously expressed -  is the subject of the brief note below. It is at the very least a useful contrast to some of the sunnier pictures of Christian humanism in circulation.

Renaissance writings frequently refer to moral corruption. Often, this is viewed as the defining characteristic of all human beings: to err is human; to be mortal is to be fallible and degenerate. The villains of tragedy are there not to reassure us that evil resides in only a few special cases, but to remind us that we are all naturally biased towards evil. Our essential moral character is flawed, and self-discipline is needed to resist the temptation to sin. In the medieval and Renaissance scheme of things, the barrel of mankind contains nothing but bad apples. The moral life is founded on an admission of our corrupt nature, and directed towards the search for improvement and redemption. We are not born good and then descend into wickedness. Rather we are inherently wicked, and only achieve good through conscious effort. Through this effort, man may realise some of his potential for nobility and dignity: God endowed humans with these qualities, but mankind generally smothers them with sin and error. The Faerie Queene, in which knights fight to uphold virtues, is one example of this philosophy in literary action.

Culturally, this conception of human nature is rooted in Christian doctrine. Catholics and Protestants did not disagree over man’s sinfulness, but over the instruments of salvation. In the Christian account, Adam - who stands for all mankind - was made in the image of God and enjoyed the highest state of human nobility, including the right use of reason and will. But when he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, he fell from grace with God, and brought the human state into moral darkness. This story gives narrative sense to the notion that weakness and disobedience are intrinsic to man’s nature.  We do not need to do anything to become bad, for we are bad already: this is the fact of original sin. The fault lies solely in man: God designed us perfectly, but we have spoiled the design. Man wrongly exercises his reason, which is divine in origin, and thus he mistakes the nature of things. We apply our will to the wrong ends.

Thus a chasm separates God, who is absolutely good, from man, who is depraved. The spiritual life is an attempt to cross this chasm, and in literary writings we frequently find an opposition drawn between mortal corruption and heavenly perfection. This division between mortal and immortal, depraved and perfect, also occurs within man himself, who is divine in origin and potential, but frequently bestial in his actions and desires. The soul looks to heaven, while the flesh drags us to the earth and earthly corruption. In Hamlet’s words, man crawls between earth and heaven. Medieval and Renaissance writings typically express the desire to go back to the prelapsarian state (before the Fall) to recover man’s original pristine condition.  Recognition of error is built into Christian discipline, in the form of confession and penitence. It is also integrated into the Church year, particularly in the season of Lent when all Christians were (and are) required to reflect contritely on their sins. 

Though he is biased towards what is bad, man can still recognise goodness through the soul, which is divine in origin. But the soul is imprisoned in the body, and confronted by the three enemies of man:  the world, the flesh and the devil. These temptations are not merely abstract notions. The devil is actively at work among men, thwarting their struggle to lead a good life. To take another example from Hamlet, when Hamlet addresses his father’s ghost, ‘Be thou a spirit of hell or goblin damned’, he appeals to a general belief that such diabolical agents were real beings, intent on taking the understanding prisoner and leading the will astray. The dark hours before daylight in which this encounter takes place suggest the darkness and confusion of the human state.

Beyond explicitly Christian doctrines, we find the assumption that man is innately corrupt expressed in other aspects of Renaissance culture. The geocentric universe might in one view give the earth an exaggerated importance as the centre of all things. Yet it also means that the earth is at the lowest point of the universe. It is the dregs at the bottom of the bottle, a sedimentary layer where all the muck of the cosmos has gathered.  From it, we can only look out on the heavens, from which we are excluded. In the sublunary space below the moon, the air is corrupted by vapours: spirits from hell can work here, but not angels, whose element is the ether above. Just as man is separated from God, so is the sublunary part of the universe divided from the harmony of the spheres. Weighed down by his sensual life, man is deaf to their music:

            Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

            Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

            There’s not the smallest orb, which thou behold’st,

            But in his motion like an angel sings,

            Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims, -

            Such harmony is in immortal souls;

            But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

            Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

            (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1, 58-65)

The human soul, though immortal, is stifled by the ‘muddy vesture’ of the body. It is further imprisoned by the earthly world which man has rendered corrupt by the wrong use of his will. And so the soul’s tendency is to gaze longingly at the perfection from which it has been expelled. In the Renaissance period, this idea also had a close parallel in the philosophy of Plato, which depicts man living in a state of ignorance and illusion, but motivated by his better instincts to search for the Good and the Beautiful.

Since Renaissance writing works so much through analogy, we see the notion of corruption extend well beyond individual human agents. To continue with our main textual illustration, Hamlet depicts original sin (the murder of a brother, a figure of Cain murdering Abel in Genesis) spreading like a virus within the enclosed body of the court: madness, incest, mistrust, spying, lying, betrayal, despair and further murder are all results of this corruption progressively destroying the human community. The court and the state are organisms like the body: ‘There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark’. Other works aim similarly at an anatomy of human depravity. An example is Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem, ‘The Soul’s Errand’ (‘Go, soul, the body’s guest’). Here the soul is sent to ‘give the lie’ to all examples of alleged worldly greatness and achievement, from the Court to Arts and Faith. The message is that they are all illusory, all rotted by vice:

            Go, tell the Court – it glows

               And shines like rotten wood;

            Go, tell the Church – it shows

               What’s good, and doth no good.

The poetic language of the period is correspondingly full of terms like those we have seen in our examples: rotten, gross, muddy, rank, foul, pestilential, sick, decayed, wasting, stale. Images of physical and bodily decay are outward signs of spiritual corruption. Hamlet complains of his morally sullied ‘solid flesh’, and declares that ‘The world’s an unweeded garden that grows to seed. / Things rank and gross in sense possess it merely’ (merely here means ‘completely’).  This vocabulary is answered by an equally rich set of images describing heavenly beauty, harmony and perfection.

The Medieval and Renaissance concern with general corruption can pose a challenge to the modern reader. We may find it all depressing and pessimistic. Indeed, some Renaissance works themselves explore this idea: those who develop a morbid obsession with sin, like Timon of Athens, do little good in the world, and spiral downward into melancholy and madness. There is a frequently stated suspicion about the advisability of the purely contemplative life. Yet the assumption that humans are fallible is in itself not viewed as a morbid fancy, but as self-evident truth, which must be accepted as a prelude to good action. 

We may still find empathising with this view difficult, since we have been exposed to different doctrines. The eighteenth-century enlightenment promoted the opposite idea that man is naturally good. This belief is still powerful today, and helps explain why in popular parlance violent criminals are referred to as monsters and animals: to be human is to be essentially good, and so those who do evil cannot be fully human. Films about serial killers advance the idea that evil is something only a few de-humanised beings do, reassuring the rest of us that wickedness is something out there, not in here. Subsequently, the Romantic movement redefined the inner life as a process of fulfilment through the realisation of creative energy, rather than a process of spiritual struggle.  

The older view of corruption is not, then, necessarily pessimistic, any more than it is pessimistic for us to accept we have some physical illness. An awareness of moral illness, of natural fallibility, is also an encouragement to improve. (Whereas, we might say, the premise that we are essentially good provides little incentive to attain goodness: we cannot aspire to what we already have.) From the bottom of the ladder, we naturally look up. Sidney argues in An Apologie for Poetry that works of the imagination can help to direct our attention upwards in this way:

Sith our erected wit, maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will, keepeth us from reaching unto it.

Wit and will are in a psychomachia (a struggle between different parts of the mind) similar to that between Reason and Passion. Wit lifts us towards higher truth, ‘infected will’ pulls us back down again. This internal conflict is something we can find in numerous texts: Macbeth’s will draws him towards terrible acts in the mistaken quest for power; while at the same time with his wit, or imaginative faculty, he can see with intense clarity that he is damned. As part divine, part animal, man has a dual nature. As a son of Adam, he is corrupt, but as God’s creation, he can use his free will to strive for perfection. Many theological disputes centred around the extent of man’s corruption, and texts of the time explore it in numerous ways. In writing like Sidney’s, an awareness of moral corruption leads inevitably to an intense imagining of what is good and true and beautiful: only the infected person actively desires to be healthy.  Thus we find in so much Renaissance poetry expressions of wonderment and love of some higher perfection. The flower struggles through the soil towards the heavens. It is from the shadows that we best discern the light.

An older book with interesting things to say on such matters is C S Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge UP, 1964),  in particular ‘The Human Soul’, 152-169.

Rhyme in Poetry

The following notes concern the uses of rhyme in poetry. As with all poetic devices, the purpose in commentary is not only to say what kind of rhyme is being employed, but to suggest some ideas on why and how it is used, and to what effect - that is, we aim to move from identification to interpretation.

1.   Rhyme is the coincidence of sounds. It is principally an aural effect, but it can often be swiftly spotted by the eye, and so can serve as a visual aid to the formal structure of a poem. Rhyme can be subdivided into various types.

Full (or perfect) rhyme: the last stressed vowel sound and the sounds following it are identical. There are two kinds:

Stressed (or masculine) rhyme occurs when the stressed vowel is on the last metrical beat of a line, as in the ent sound of the following:

Forget not yet the tried intent
Of such a truth as I have meant,
My great travail so gladly spent
      Forget not yet. 
                                            (Sir Thomas Wyatt)


Unstressed (or feminine) rhyme occurs when one or more unstressed syllables follow the final stressed syllable: clueless, shoeless; Hannibal the cannibal; starting, parting. The following quatrain alternates masculine and feminine rhymes:


The time is come, I must depart
    from thee, ah famous city;
I never yet to rue my smart,
    did find that thou had'st pity.  (Isabella Whitney)


Half rhyme (also known as slant rhyme): either vowel sound or consonants rhyme, but not both.

• Vowel rhyme (assonance): vowels rhyme, consonants don't: moon, food; sun, rut; cart, path.
• Pararhyme: vowel sounds differ, final consonants coincide.

Partial rhymes (yet another term for half rhymes) are particularly frequent in poetry from the earliest twentieth century onwards. They allow for a range of effects, building up a pattern of subtle echoes rather than the heavy and predictable repetitions which are always a risk in full rhyme. The First World War poet Wilfred Owen makes extensive use of pararhyme (see his 'Strange Meeting', for example). The opening lines from 'Insensibility' below also include a vowel rhyme (lines 3-4) an internal rhyme (before, sore) and other repetitions threaded across the lines (the 'a' sound in Happy, compassion and alleys). These acoustic effects heighten the verse to the level of a dignified incantation, in tension with the bitterness of the thought (it is better in war not to feel anything):

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers    [mocks

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers.

The first lines of W B Yeats's 'Easter 1916' play full rhyme and partial rhyme against each other. In line 4, the half rhyme works with a braking metrical effect to slow the short lines down to a meditative register of thought:


I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.


Eye Rhyme (or printer's rhyme). Rhyme is harder in English than, say, Italian, where words with masculine or feminine endings offer far more possibilities for end rhyme (and make the rhyme, when it comes, less of a sensation). Poetic license in English verse thus allows the poet to rhyme words which look as if they rhyme, even if the sound is different: bough, enough; power, lower; hour, four. To complicate matters, some words which look like eye rhymes now might have been perfect rhymes in the writer's time, or in the writer's particular accent. Shakespeare could rhyme past and waste, and Wordsworth famously rhymes water with matter (in 'The Leech Gatherer'). In 'Adonais', Shelley sets himself the task of a quadruple rhyme on the b sound, and we may consider the resulting variety as a mix of perfect rhyme, half rhyme and eye rhyme:


I weep for Adonais-he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"


Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death.


2.  The terms full rhyme, half rhyme and eye rhyme described above refer to the type of rhyme. We should also note the position of the rhyme: an end rhyme occurs, unsurprisingly, at the end of the line. When end rhyme appears in lines which are themselves end-stopped, there is a dramatic sense of closure (see lines 1 and 3 of the extract from Shelley above). an internal rhyme occurs when at least one of the rhyming words is in a medial position, rhyming with another medial word or an end word.


3. Rhyme normally falls into patterns which are classified as schemes. The most common are:


Couplet: lines rhyme aabb etc. Couplets are closed when they present self-contained statements,a nd open when we have to read on from the second line to complete the sense. Dryden and Pope made extensive and sophisticated use of couplets - called 'heroic couplets' in the late seventeenth century because they frequently appeared in heroic, that is, epic verse. Consider the opening of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel':

In pious times, e'r Priest-craft did begin,
Before Polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multiply'd his kind,
E'r one to one was, cursedly, confind:
When Nature prompted, and no law deny'd
Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride;
Then, Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart
To Wives and Slaves; and, wide as his command,
Scatter'd his maker's Image through the Land.

The poem is a political satire, our appreciation of which depends on recognition of figures from the poet's own time. Hence it makes little sense in a practical critical exercise, ripped away from its sense-making context. Still, on a purely formal level we can appreciate how the closed couplets form a tension with the syntax: the first six lines enclose three sub-clauses, and while we want to read on to see how the sentence will resolve into a main clause (which it does, on the word Then), at the same time the perfectly formed couplets arrest our attention and act as a counterpoint to this forward momentum. We notice, too, how the open couplet ending 'did variously impart / To wives and slaves' enacts the promiscuous sexual activity which is being euphemistically described here. The writing,  flows freely, so to speak,  from one line into the next, and the vigour of the action carries us into the caesura after 'Slaves'. In the last couplet, command sits at the end of the line, the comma enforcing a brief suspenseful moment before the verb 'Scatter'd' (emphasised by a the trochaic inversion) appears as a wonderful and bawdy comic relief. Other masters of the couplet form include including Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe and Jonathan Swift.

Cross-rhyme consists of patterns such as abab cdcd, and frequently appears in the form of quatrains:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.  (Blake, 'London')


Blake here typically picks up a form associated with hymn and nursery rhyme and uses it as the vehicle for intense and caustic castigation of moral corruption.

Arch-rhyme consists of the pattern abba, with the a sound acting like an arch enclosing the central couplet. Perhaps the most famous sustained example is Tennyson's In Memoriam:


I held it truth, with him who sings
   To one clear harp in divers tones,
   That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

Single rhyme schemes denote a form with only one set of rhyming lines: abac, aba cdc, abcb etc. Single rhymes are common in ballads and other verse in the folk tradition, like 'The Cuckoo':


Cuckoo, The

The cuckoo is a pretty bird,
She sings as she flies;
She bringeth good tidings,
She telleth no lies;
She sucketh sweet flowers
To keep her voice clear,
And when she sings Cuckoo,
The summer draweth near.

O meeting is a pleasure
And parting is a grief;
An inconstant lover
Is worse than a thief;
A thief can but rob me
Of all that I have,
But an inconstant lover,
Will bring me to the grave.

The grave it will receive me
And bring me to dust.
An inconstant lover
No maiden can trust;
He'll court you, cajole you
Poor maids to deceive;
There is not one in twenty
A maiden can believe.

Come all you sweet maidens
Wherever you be,
Your hearts - do not hang them
On a sycamore tree.
The leaf it will wither,
The root will decay;
Alack! I'm foresaken
And wasting away.

Because songs already have the unifying elements of music, they have less need for internal acoustic patterns. The lack of a secondary rhyme perhaps gives still more weight to the mono b rhyme in each stanza.


Rhyme and Reason


Each rhyming poem we read will give rise to particular questions. Those below illustrate the kinds of enquiry that careful reading may prompt:


Rhyme schemes like those above create different expectations in the reader: in an arch scheme, for example, the final a rhyme can even come as something of a surprise, as the a sound may have drifted out of view and a new idea taken over our attention. How does a writer exploit, satisfy, or subvert the psychological experience of the chosen rhyme scheme?


How emphatic are the rhyme words? Does the rhyming word carry the principal meaning of the line, or lead us towards / away from it? Is it made prominent by metre, syntax, punctuation?


Continuing from the last question, is the poet countering a sense of finality which a rhyme creates by stretching the syntax across lines, creating marked mid-line pauses etc.?


Has the poet tried to make the rhyme sounds less emphatic? If so, what diversionary tactics has she used?


Is the rhyme word predictable or surprising? Does it surprise or satisfy our expectations?


Rhyme is often present in notionally non-rhyming poetry, such as blank verse (Paradise Lost) or modern free verse. There is no obligation for rhyme to be regular: a poem by T S Eliot, for example, may dip in and out of rhyme as part of its story.


Further resources:


Online guide to rhyme in poetry


Alberto Rios, Glossary of Rhymes


Books which discuss rhyme with particular care include John Leonard, The Poetry Handbook and Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled. A glossary for reference is essential. Recommended: J A Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory; M H Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.