Poetry notes

Edmund Spenser is the Elizabethan court poet of Unit 2. This lyric is sonnet 75 of Amoretti, his sequence to Elizabeth Boyle. Form: Spenserian sonnet — fourteen iambic pentameters, rhyme abab bcbc cdcd ee (see Unit 1). The speaker is a lover; the beloved answers in the middle; he answers her in turn. Read it in three movements, not as a blur of “love and fame.”

Strand is the sandy shore. He writes her name; water erases it; he writes again; the tide takes the labour as prey. The picture is simple and physical. Time, in the form of sea, wins the first round.

She speaks next. “Vain man,” she says: he tries in vain to immortalize a mortal thing. She herself will decay like the writing in sand, and her name will be wiped out likewise. Her argument is common sense: flesh dies; letters on a beach die. The chained rhyme (prey / assay / decay) keeps her speech sewn to his act.

He refuses. Let baser things die in dust; she shall live by fame. His verse will eternize her rare virtues and write her glorious name in the heavens. The last two lines close the claim: when Death subdues the whole world, “Our love shall live, and later life renew.” Sand is weak; printed or remembered verse, he says, is not. That faith in the poet’s line is the Elizabethan note. The volta is this turn from her doubt to his boast for poetry. Unit 1’s word “sonnet” is this poem in practice.

The set text is not the whole of Doctor Faustus. It is the Helen speech near the end of that tragedy, in blank verse. Faustus, a scholar, has sold his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of knowledge and pleasure. The years are almost spent. He asks to see Helen of Troy, the woman for whom Greece sailed to burn the city of Ilium (Troy). What you must explain is the speech, its metre, and why beauty here cannot save him.

“Topless towers” means towers so high they seem to have no top. One face is made large enough to launch a fleet and burn a city: that stretch is hyperbole (Unit 1). He asks a kiss to make him immortal, then feels her lips suck forth his soul and begs the soul back. He would build a thousand altars to her; heaven can wait. The line is Marlowe’s “mighty line”: unrhymed iambic pentameter that can swell like a wave.

The irony is the frame you are not asked to retell in full, but you must know it exists. Faustus is already contracted to hell. Helen on this stage is a spirit of desire, not a wife who can redeem him. The more beautiful the face, the clearer the damnation: he chooses the image instead of repentance. Hold four things: blank verse, hyperbole of the face, kiss and soul, beauty that does not save.

This is a song, not a sonnet: three stanzas of nine lines each, a spoken lyric of sceptical wit. The speaker is not telling a love-story. He is arguing, with a smile that cuts, that a woman both true and fair cannot be found — or cannot stay found. That arguing voice is the Metaphysical manner of Unit 1.

Stanza 1. He piles tasks no one can do: catch a falling star; get a child from a mandrake root (a plant once fabled to scream like a human); tell where all past years are; split the devil’s foot; teach him to hear mermaids singing; keep off envy’s sting. Each command is hyperbole. The hidden claim: finding a constant beautiful woman is as impossible as these.

Stanza 2. If such a man travels ten thousand days and nights till age snows his hair, he will return and swear that nowhere lives a woman true and fair. Time itself is stretched (another hyperbole) to make the search look thorough — and still empty.

Stanza 3. A small if: if you find one, let me know; I would go to see her. Then the turn: by the time the letter arrives, she will have been false to two or three. Constancy dies in the time it takes to write. Beside Spenser’s faith that verse can hold a name, Donne’s song trusts no duration. Do not treat the speaker as the poet’s whole creed; treat him as this lyric’s voice.

This is a fourteen-line sacred lyric from Donne’s Holy Sonnets. It is a sonnet of argument, closer to the Petrarchan turn (octave then a new attack) than to Spenser’s sand-and-fame story. Death is spoken to as a person: “Death, be not proud.” Some have called Death mighty and dreadful; the speaker says Death is not so. Those whom Death thinks he overthrows do not die in the Christian sense — the soul is not ended. Rest and sleep are pictures of Death, and they give pleasure; so Death itself should give more, not less. Good men go with Death soonest: rest of bones, delivery of the soul. That is still the first movement: Death is weaker than his reputation.

The volta (the turn) comes when Death is called slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men. Death lives with poison, war and sickness — ugly company for a king. Poppy (opium) or charms can make us sleep as well as Death’s stroke, and better. Why then swell with pride? The last couplet is the conceit of faith: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” If dying is only sleep, waking into eternity kills Death. The same blunt address as the falling-star song is now used in belief. Personification (Death as “thou”), metaphor (Death is a slave, Death is sleep), and conceit (sleep that ends Death) all sit in these fourteen lines.

Herbert, an Anglican priest, published The Temple in 1633, in Caroline England, before the civil war. “The Pulley” is a lyric of four stanzas of five lines — not a sonnet. The whole poem is one metaphysical conceit. Read the story of the blessings first, then the machine.

When God first made man, a glass of blessings stood by. “Let us pour on him all we can.” Strength made a way; then beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure flowed. When almost all was out, God stayed. At the bottom of the treasure lay rest. If He gave that jewel too, man would adore the gifts instead of God, and rest in Nature, not in the God of Nature. Both would be losers: man would stop too soon; God would lose the creature’s love.

So man may keep the other riches, but with “repining restlessness.” Let him be rich and weary, that if goodness does not lead him, weariness may toss him to God’s breast. Now the title. A pulley is a wheel with a rope. You pull down on one side; the load on the other side goes up. God withholds rest so that tiredness becomes the downward pull that lifts the soul. The soul is not a sack of grain. The poem yokes workshop and altar until the doctrine is exact. Quieter than Donne, equally exact. Anglican devotion, not Puritan attack on bishops.

Dryden’s ode was written for 22 November 1687, the feast of St Cecilia, patron of music. Unit 1’s named ages stop at 1660; this lyric is Restoration public music, not a Metaphysical conceit-poem and not blank-verse tragedy. Form: stanzas of unequal length plus a grand chorus — a ceremonial ode, which is still a kind of lyric (Unit 1).

The argument has three rooms. First, creation: “From harmony, from heavenly harmony / This universal frame began.” Nature lay under jarring atoms; music ordered them into cold, hot, moist, dry, and last into man. Jubal, the first musician in Genesis, is named so that music is as old as humankind. Second, the passions: each instrument moves a different feeling — trumpet for war, flute for lament, violin for love, organ for devotion. Cecilia is said to have invented the organ and drawn an angel down by that sacred sound. Third, the end of the world: the last chorus looks to the last trumpet, when the dead rise and “music shall untune the sky.” So music made the frame, music sways the heart, music will unmake the frame. That is the whole ode. Do not drag Donne’s conceit or Macbeth’s witches into it.