The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold’s pessimism in Dover Beach – understandable in school inspectors in any age and especially one whose father was a public school headmaster – was based on an unfortunate metaphor.
The tide will always come in. You can be sure of that: you only have to wait a matter of hours. If in October you were attempting to stand on the beach, not of Dover but at Dawlish in Devon, you will know that autumnal storms bring back the sea with a vengeance. That is not to say that what Arnold called the ‘certitude’ of religious faith (with ‘peace’ and ‘help for pain’) will return in the same way – with the exception, let us admit, of George W. Bush’s secondterm, born-again USA, or of most parts of the Islamic world, or the Hassidic quarters of Jerusalem, Stamford Hill and Brooklyn. We certainly cannot blame Arnold for them. Instead, let us address ourselves to the post-Enlightenment West, which is the community that usually finds a resonance in Dover Beach.
Actually, I was in Devon for a literary festival where I took part with other poets and singers in a presentation of seventeenthcentury religious poetry. It struck me then how much more instructive to our present age are Donne, Herbert, Milton, Traherne and Vaughan than Arnold and the Victorians. No seventeenth-century poet – or even soldier or politician – thought of God as a palliative for individual pain and private doubt. For them the deity was neither an object nor an ointment, but a participant in their lives and struggles. This was a truly revolutionary age when old ideas of religion and politics (little distinction was made between them) were being upended. Men of all persuasions were fashioning their own metaphors in a heady blend of Christian doctrine, platonic philosophy and personal experience. John Donne (in the spirit of the Song of Songs and perhaps his own life) had no compunction in writing about God as a lover:
Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, pleaded the case for popular use of common land before government officials like General Fairfax by invoking ‘the great Creator Reason’ and the ‘Spirit that made the Globe [and] dwells in man to govern the Globe’.
Winstanley’s faith may have embraced a Quaker absence of dogma, but the point is that he saw God as standing at his elbow not confined to private consolation. It’s reported that Cromwell’s Ironsides sang the Old Hundredth (‘O God our help in ages past’) as they went into battle. Then there was the Royalist Jacob Astley and his prayer before the Battle of Edgehill: ‘Oh Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget thee, do not thou forget me’. sof 69 January 2005 5 Matthew Arnold and the Seventeenth Century Standing on Dawlish Beach, David Perman reflects that the tide always comes in again, sometimes with a vengeance. In a world of harmful religious and ideological certitudes, as this surely is, can the returning tide also bring hope of something saner?
Donne The poet who portrayed most vividly the companionship of God, his everyday participation in daily living, was George Herbert. Almost anything – a key, the church floor, new windows (‘brittle crazie glasse’), a bunch of grapes (‘Who of the Law’s sour juice sweet wine did make’) – reminded the poet of the divine. ‘Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine’ may sound like easy piety but think, not of Victorian cleanliness, but of seventeenth-century dirt and dust and one appreciates its force. ‘Dust’ is one of Herbert’s favourite metaphors. But it is not in objects but in personal encounters that he most often celebrates the divine, as in his trio of poems on the theme of Love:
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lack’d anything.
What gives additional edge to Herbert’s religious verse is the knowledge that in earlier life he did not lack worldly ambition: he was an M.P. for a time and the Public Orator at Cambridge. His poetry influenced many other poets – Crashaw, Traherne, Vaughan – but the century as a whole made God an actor in its secular drama, even occasionally in its dramas.
Milton’s Paradise Lost is as much drama as epic and happily sets his Puritan beliefs within the great cosmological and classical narrative, comparable with the Iliad. As Milton wrote to his father: ‘Scorn not the poet’s song, a work divine, which more than anything else reveals our ethereal origin and heavenly race. Nothing so dignifies the human mind as its origin, and it possesses yet some sacred traces of Promethean fire.’ At the Restoration in 1660, Milton was excluded from public life. So too at first was another Puritan, Samuel Crossman, who like Donne finished his life as a cathedral dean. Crossman followed Herbert in celebrating his faith in terms of an intimate relationship – this time with Jesus:
He came from His blest throne, Salvation to bestow; But men made strange, and none The longed-for Christ would know:
But O, my Friend, my Friend indeed, Who at my need His life did spend!
Superficially, this poem (My Song is Love Unknown) looks like the emotional ‘witness’ of an Evangelical from one of the following centuries – and indeed, since it was made into a hymn, it has become popular with Evangelicals, particularly in the United States.
But Crossman intended it as a meditation for young men and it was published in the company of other poems of strong educational and doctrinal content.
Even so it is a happy poem. With a few exceptions (Crashaw for one), English poetry of the seventeenth century avoided the remorseful breast-beating of German contemporaries, like Paul Gerhardt. Our religious poets wrote in an atmosphere of light and colour, rather than sinful monochrome.
This mood of light is characteristic of two of the most individual of seventeenth-century religious poets.
Henry Vaughan appears to have been a Royalist who retired to his native Breconshire in despair after the Battle of Worcester and practised medicine.
His poetry wrestles with the problems of sickness and pain but also with the ideas, fairly new at the time, of infinity and space. Like Wordsworth, a century and a half later, he longs to return to the wonder and simple faith of his youth – the ‘certitude’ if you like, but there is none of Matthew Arnold’s gloom here.
Vaughan’s bright quest is finely expressed in his poem Vanity of Spirit:
Quite spent with thoughts, I left my cell, and lay Where a shrill spring tun’d to the early day.
I begg’d here long, and groan’d to know Who gave the clouds so brave a bow, Who bent the spheres, and circled in Corruption with this glorious ring; What is His name, and how I might Descry some part of His great light.
I summon’d Nature ; pierc’d through all her store; Broke up some seals, which none had touch’d before Her womb, her bosom, and her head, Where all her secrets lay abed, I rifled quite ; and having past Through all the creatures, came at last To search myself, where I did find Traces, and sounds of a strange kind.
Another of his poems, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s Prelude, is ‘The Retreat’: ‘Happy those early days, when I / Shin’d in my angel-infancy’ when he recalls his familiarity with the bright face of God and ‘When on some gilded cloud, or flow’r, / My gazing soul would dwell an hour’. sof 69 January 2005 6 Our seventeenth century religious poets wrote in an atmosphere of light and colour, rather than sinful monochrome.
Herbert sof 69 January 2005 Vaughan’s ‘angel-infancy’ leads one on to Thomas Traherne and his celebration of the act of being born – many readers will know it best from Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis, sung by Wilfred Brown. In the opening poem of his book, The Salutation, Traherne lays out his mood of wonder:
These little limbs, these eyes and hands which I here find This panting heart wherewith my heart begins Where have ye been?
Behind what curtain were ye hid from me so long?
It is a theme to which he returns with infectious joy in Wonder which I am almost tempted to quote in full, but it is eight stanzas long.
How like an angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among his works I did appear O how their glory me did crown!
The world resembled his eternity, In which my soul did walk; And ev’ry thing that I did see Did with me talk.
Traherne’s poems are as simple in structure as they are in theme. One of the most delightful is entitled Walking: ‘To walk abroad is, not with eyes, / But thoughts, the fields to see and prize.’ Many of his poems are about innocence: indeed there is one called Innocence. In another entitled Eden there are none of the tired aphorisms that exude from Gray’s Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College : ‘Where ignorance is bliss / ‘Tis folly to be wise’. Traherne sees childhood differently:
A learned and a happy ignorance Divided me From all the vanity, From all the sloth, care, pain, and sorrow that advance The madness and the misery Of men. No error, no distraction I Saw soil the earth, or overcloud the sky.
Yet Traherne was no simpleton. He spent his graduate years at Oxford writing his polemical Roman Forgeries and, after the Restoration, became chaplain to the Lord Privy Seal. As with George Herbert’s book, The Temple, this seemingly simple, pious poetry was written by a man whose fingers were as much on the pulse of his time as many a politician’s.
If this short tour around the seventeenth century inspires readers of SoF to sample the religious poetry of the period, it will have fulfilled its purpose. All of the writers mentioned are still in print and, if your library or bookshop is deficient, there is always the internet, well served by US university schools of English. But, in closing, let me offer a thought and a quotation. The thought is that in a world of harmful religious and ideological certitudes, as this surely is, it may be more useful to oppose the odious contagion with beliefs that spring from an optimistic view of religion and personal relationships (as did the seventeenth-century poets) rather than with philosophies that downsize belief in the divine.
Matthew Arnold (St. Paul and Protestantism, page 8) wrote that God is ‘the stream of tendency by which all things strive to fulfill the laws of their being’. His seventeenth-century predecessors would have found that statement preposterous in someone who called himself a poet.
My closing quotation is from John Donne’s sermon XXIII, preached in old St. Paul’s on Easter Day 1628:
For our sight of God here, our theatre, the place where we sit and see him, is the whole world, the whole house and frame of nature, and our medium, our glass, is the book of creatures, and our light, by which we see him, is the light of natural reason. And then for our knowledge of God here, our place, our academy, our university is the church, our medium is the ordinance of God in his church, preaching and sacraments; and our light is the light of faith.
David Perman used to work for the BBC and now runs the Rockingham Press,which publishes poetry and Hertfordshire local history.His biography of the 18th century social reformer Scott ofAmwell:Dr.Johnson’s Quaker Critic,was published in 2001 and his own poetry collection AWasp on the Stair in 2004.