Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet
Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet
Gary M. Bouchard
St. Augustine’s Press
234 pp., $25.00
ISBN: 978-1-58731-822-1
Reviewed by Stephanie A. Mann
After studying on the Continent, joining the Society of Jesus in Rome, and being ordained a priest, Englishman Robert Southwell came home secretly to offer Mass and give the other Sacraments to the underground Catholics of England. He also sought to encourage her poets to a better form of art, to turn from “the follies and fayninges of love” and instead “see how well verse and vertue sute together” as he admonished “His Loving Cousin” in the foreword to editions of “St. Peter’s Complaint”.
In Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet, Gary M. Bouchard traces the impact of that foreword and Southwell’s poems on contemporary and later English poets, noting that while Southwell had influence and even some fame—in spite or because of his execution for treason—in the Elizabethan era, his reputation has dwindled to the inclusion of “The Burning Babe” in anthologies. Responding to recent work of Anne R. Sweeney (Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia: Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape, 1586-95), Alison Shell (Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660), Gary Kuchar (The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England) and others, Bouchard wants to make his own contribution to exploring Southwell’s underappreciated influence on English literature.
As Bouchard summarizes, Southwell’s call to reform English poetry “instructed William Alabaster, provoked Edmund Spenser, prompted George Herbert, haunted John Donne, inspired Richard Crashaw and consoled Gerard [Manley] Hopkins.” He explores each author’s response to not only Southwell’s martyred Catholicism but his call to change the way they were writing poetry. Except for Spenser, these poets were clergymen. Alabaster converted to Catholicism and relapsed; Donne was raised a Catholic and apostatized; Crashaw and Hopkins were Catholic converts who remained faithful. Herbert and Spenser were Protestants.
Bouchard’s focus is on Southwell’s reforming poetic, citing Southwell’s poetry throughout the text in comparison with the other poets. Southwell arrived in England in 1586. He was arrested and imprisoned, tortured and questioned by Elizabeth I’s priest catcher and torturer-in-chief Richard Topcliffe in 1592 and finally tried and executed in 1595. As Bouchard emphasizes, Southwell’s poetry was published in many editions after his execution, and his reputation as a priest, a martyr, and a poet had the power to influence contemporary writers.
Bouchard first examines the response of two of the University Wits, Michael Drayton and William Alabaster. They and others of their group responded to Southwell’s emotional images in Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, published in 1591 with a license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Whitgift, depicting grief and remorse with their own “sudden burst of literary repentant tears”. William Alabaster (1567-1640), best known for his Sonnet 15, “My soul a world is by contraction . . .” converted to Catholicism at Easter in 1597, “wholly and perfectly Catholic in an instant”. From 1596 to 1598, Alabaster wrote several sonnets in his Divine Meditations tracing his repentance and conversion, bedewed with tears. But Alabaster’s conversion was not as whole and perfect as he thought it was and he relapsed in 1607, finding favor with King James I.
Bouchard notes that Michael Drayton (1563-1631) was a true Elizabethan poet in the mold of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Nevertheless, Drayton was a friend of Aston Cockayne and of other Catholics; he regretted the suppression of the religious orders and the destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII, and he admired Southwell’s poetry as poetry. Bouchard sees in Drayton “greater emotional proximity and . . . less apparent artifice” than in Spenser’s works and traces a “change in poetic task” brought about by Southwell’s call to reform.
Edmund Spenser perhaps faced the greatest challenge from Southwell. Bouchard explores the timing of the publication of “St. Peter’s Complaint” in the context of mainstream Elizabethan poetry: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry had just been published in 1595 and Spenser was returning from Ireland prepared to publish the second part of The Faerie Queen and his Amoretti and Epithalamion. He was confronted by a new demand for religious poetry. Bouchard sees Spenser’s Four Hymns (with two sets of hymns comparing and contrasting pagan and heavenly love and beauty) as his effort to lay “claim to the trend of religious poetry” and demonstrate that readers “need not turn to the dangerous musings of a dead papist to find divine verse”.
Unfortunately, Bouchard mistakes Mary, Queen of Scots for Queen Mary I in his explication of a scene in The Faerie Queen, saying that the weeping of Queen Mercilla was “conventionally read as a representation of Queen Elizabeth’s weeping at the execution of Mary Tudor”.
In his chapter on George Herbert’s religious poetry, Bouchard offers another model this Anglican divine could have followed: John Donne. Herbert and Donne shared the regard and patronage of Magdalene Herbert, George’s mother. The younger Herbert did not follow Donne’s model of love poetry. He wanted, like Southwell, to write religious poetry and was searching for a guide. Bouchard cannot prove that Herbert discovered Southwell’s verse or his calls for reform, but he cites other critics, among them Herbert’s editor, F.E. Hutchinson, to demonstrate connections between the poets and their works.
The chapter on John Donne is fascinating as Bouchard shows how Donne struggled with the legacy of his devoutly Catholic recusant family with all its connections to Thomas More and the Jesuits. Donne had seen priests executed; his brother Henry had died in prison because he had protected a priest. When he was Dean of St. Paul’s, Donne’s devoutly Catholic, steadfastly recusant mother lived with him. Donne rejected all this background but could not completely escape it: he still demonstrated an “inescapable Catholic habit of mind”, weaving “the language of Catholic devotion (miracles, adoration, martyrdom, idolatry, sainthood, incorruptibility, priests and bishops, cloisters, relics, funerals, and dismemberment onto the very Petrarchan loom that Southwell had used” to debase “the idolatrous customs of the Roman Catholic religion”. Idolatry and dismemberment are not forms of Catholic devotion of course, but in Donne’s mind they had become part of the Catholic milieu he wanted to reject.
Thus the sufferings of Catholics haunted John Donne. He referred to their pseudo-martyrdom at the same time he acknowledged that his family had suffered because they remained Catholic. When he writes religious poetry like “La Corona,” the “Holy Sonnets,” and the “Anniversaries”, Donne presents readers and scholars with issues for debate: did Donne sincerely change from Catholic to Calvinist? Is he expressing religious devotion or Petrarchan wit? Without Southwell’s model of integration, his poetry is unsettling—and therefore intriguing.
The last two poets Bouchard addresses are converts to Catholicism: Richard Crashaw in the seventeenth century and Gerard Manley Hopkins in the nineteenth. Crashaw’s poetry was published in London while he was in exile in Paris, having fled Puritan infiltrated Cambridge. Even though his poetry was written before he became Catholic, he had been preoccupied “with the sacramental, the saints, tearful conversions and mystical visions”; his poetry “was more explicitly Catholic than either Donne’s or Herbert’s” and he displays “unabashed devotion, baroque sensuality and floods of tears”—but does that demonstrate Southwell’s influence? Southwell’s mission as a priest in England makes the crucial difference between their poetic expressions of faith. In contrast to Crashaw’s “elaborate and sometimes shocking conceits” with so much “metaphysical layering” that the object or image in poem is almost lost, Southwell “seems always to recall the aim of his primary mission, to teach, console, and inspire the oppressed Catholics in his mission, to pull others back to the faith”. Southwell’s “poetic extravagance” is subservient to his dual mission; Crashaw has no such mission.
With Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ we finally have a poet who acknowledges Southwell as a poet and as a Jesuit. Hopkins calls Southwell “a minor poet but still a poet”. They had many things in common: the dual vocations as poet and priest; estrangement from family because of their conversions to Catholicism; their Jesuit formation; their sacramental, Incarnational vision. One great distinction between them is that Hopkins’ reputation as a poet has increased since his death while Southwell’s has decreased. In spite of all they shared, Bouchard can only suggest the possibility of influence, having no evidence that Hopkins intended to continue Southwell’s legacy.
St. Robert Southwell, SJ does deserve greater attention and appreciation for his poetry and for his courageous dual mission of saving souls and the literary culture of England. Bouchard proves an apt champion in that effort. For readers wanting more I highly recommend Anne R. Sweeney’s Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia: Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape, 1586-95 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011) for her evocative and masterful vision of a poet and his world—inadvertently left out of the Bibliography in spite of several citations—and the Collected Poems, edited by Anne R. Sweeney and Peter Davidson (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2007). As wonderful as “The Burning Babe” is, we should know more about Southwell; knowing more will only increase our admiration and devotion. At least, it has mine.
