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UNDERSTANDING POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS
by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
New York: Henry Holt and Company (revised edition, 1950; original edition, 1938)
See general introduction to this anthology.
MARVELL'S "HORATIAN ODE"
The relationship of poetry to history is, needless to say, a most important one, though it is a relationship frequently confused. We know that poems arise out of the process of history - that they are written by men who live in that process - and the temptation is strong to see the poem merely as a historical document or to allow our reading of it as a historical document to settle for us the whole question of the failure or success of the poem. Moreover, if one protests against so simple a view, he may seem to be denying the importance of history and historical contexts altogether.
The editors are confident that it is necessary to distinguish between the poem as poem and the poem as historical document. For example, it may be an extremely useful historical document and yet have no value at all as a poem, or the reverse may be true. We promptly get into trouble if we say: "This is sound history, therefore it is good poetry." But the editors would be the last to deny the intimacy of the relationship between specifically critical studies and historical studies, and they would agree that for a great many poems, a knowledge of the historical references is a fundamental requirement.
But these problems are best discussed with reference to concrete examples. Marvell's "Horatian Ode" (p. 523) provides an excellent example. The title itself, "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," warns us that this poem deals with historical figures and comments on a historical occasion. The poem welcomes Cromwell home from his subjugation of Ireland and looks forward (see lines 105 - 112) to his campaign against the Scots. Since Cromwell returned from Ireland in May 1650 and entered Scotland on July 22 of that year, the poem was probably written in the early summer of 1650. The student may consult a life of Cromwell or a history of the English civil war for a full account of these campaigns and of the other events alluded to in the "Ode." But it may be serviceable to present a very brief summary here.
The long standing quarrel between Charles I and the Parliamentarians or Roundheads - a quarrel involving religious, political, and constitutional matters - broke out into open hostilities in August 1642. In the battles that followed, Oliver Cromwell soon proved himself to be the most vigorous and powerful general that the Roundheads had. He organized the New Model army which inflicted a crushing defeat upon the royal army at Naseby in 1645. Charles surrendered to his Scottish subjects, who later turned him over to the English in 1647.
Charles was kept in protective custody at Hampton Court, from which he fled to Carisbrooke Castle in November 1647. Many Englishmen, including many who fought against Charles, shrank from the prospect of executing him. They held the person of the king sacred and acknowledged him as the legal head of the state. But Charles kept dickering with the Scots and attempting to regain his lost power. Finally, a strong-minded group of men in the Parliamentary party, led by Cromwell, drove forcibly out of Parliament the members opposed to extreme measures, tried Charles for treason, condemned him, and executed him on the scaffold on January 30, 1649. In the next year, Cromwell crushed Ireland and, as Marvell predicted he would in the "Ode," speedily broke the Royalist forces in Scotland. As Lord Protector, Cromwell ruled England until his death in 1658. Today we would call him a "dictator," though he was in many ways a beneficent dictator, and though he attempted several times to find a parliamentary basis for his government. The year before his death he was offered the crown and refused it.
What was Marvell's attitude toward Cromwell in 1650? A few years later he was to write several poems full of eloquent praise of Cromwell, and he was to become the assistant of John Milton in his post as Latin Secretary to Cromwell. But two of Marvell's earlier poems (published in 1649) seem definitely pro-Royalist in sentiment, and the "Elegy upon the Death of Lord Villiers," which has been quite plausibly attributed to Marvell, is quite explicit in its Royalist bias. As H. M. Margoliouth puts it: "If [the 'Elegy on Villiers'] is Marvell's, it is his one unequivocal royalist utterance; it throws into strong relief the transitional character of An Horatian Ode where royalist principles and admiration for Cromwell the Great Man exist side by side. . ."
The puzzle of Marvell's attitude becomes more complicated still if we take into account two more facts having to do with Marvell's life in the year after he wrote the "Ode." Sometime after November 1650 (the date of May's death) he wrote "Tom May's Death ," in which he slurs at the Commander of the Parliamentary armies - either Essex or Fairfax is meant - as "Spartacus," and he lashes May as a partisan of the parliamentary party. Yet within a few months - Margoliouth suggests early in 1651 - Marvell was actually living under Fairfax's roof, acting as tutor to his little daughter Mary.
The poem, "Tom May's Death," suggests a further complication. It is the curious fact that the "Horatian Ode" in which Marvell seems to affirm the ancient rights of the monarchy -
Though Justice against Fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain -
(lines 37-38)
is full of echoes of the poetry of Tom May, the poet whom Marvell was to denounce a few months later for having failed poetry in the hour of crisis:
When the sword glitters o'er the judge's head,
And fear the coward churchman silenced,
Then is the poet's time, 'tis then he draws,
And single fights forsaken Virtue's cause.
He, when the wheel of empire, whirleth back,
And though the world's disjointed axle crack,
Sings still of ancient rights and better times,
Seeks wretched good, arraigns successful crimes.
The echoes of May's poetry, of course, may well have been unconscious: but it seems significant that they are from May's translation of Lucan's poem on the Roman civil wars. One is tempted to suppose that in the year or so that followed the execution of Charles, Marvell was obsessed with the problem of the poet's function in such a crisis; that the poet May was frequently in his mind through a double connection-(1) through the parallels between the English and the Roman civil wars, Lucan's poem on which May had translated, and (2) through May's conduct as a partisan of the Commonwealth; and that the "Horatian Ode" and "Tom May's Death," though so different in tone, are closely related and came out of the same general state of mind.
If Marvell censures May's attitude in this crisis of the English state, what is his own attitude? Marvell's biographer, Pierre Legouis, finds in the "Ode" a complete impartiality between the contestants and even an indifference as to forms of government. But Marvell, as we shall see, is far from indifferent.
Margoliouth, Marvell's editor, is much more specific and much nearer the point. He sums up as follows: "The ode is the utterance of a constitutional monarchist, whose sympathies have been with the King, but who yet believes more in men than in parties or principles, and whose hopes are fixed now on Cromwell, seeing in him both the civic ideal of a ruler without personal ambition, and the man of destiny moved by and yet himself driving a power which is above justice." But what sort of constitutional monarchist is it who "believes more in men than in . . . principles"? Or who can accept a "power which is above justice"? Margoliouth's statement raises as many problems as it solves. We have already referred to Margoliouth's description of the "Ode" as a poem "where royalist principles and admiration for Cromwell the Great Man exist side by side." The Royalist principles and admiration for Cromwell do exist side by side, but how are they related to each other? Do they exist in separate, contradictory layers; or are they somehow unified? Unified, in some sense, they must be if the "Ode" is a poem and not a heap of contradictory fragments.
With this last statement we raise the specific problem that we must try to solve: it is a problem of poetic organization, and it addresses itself properly to the critic. For important as the historical evidence is--and as concerned as we have been to assemble all the data that is relevant--this question is one that cannot be settled by historical evidence. We must try to read the poem as fully, as richly as possible. But if we do succeed in mastering the poem, we shall have the poem; and we may have gained some insight into the attitude of Marvell the man. For the poem was fashioned by him.
We may well begin our examination of the "Ode" by considering the ambiguity of the first compliments that the speaker pays to Cromwell. The ambiguity reveals itself as early as the second word of the poem. It is the "forward" youth whose attention the speaker directs to Cromwell's example. "Forward" may mean no more than "high-spirited," "ardent," "properly ambitious"; but the Oxford Dictionary sanctions the possibility that there lurks in the word the sense of "presumptuous," "pushing." The forward youth can no longer now "in the shadows sing / His numbers languishing." In the light of Cromwell's career, he must forsake the shadows and the Muses and become a man of action.
The speaker, one observes, does not identify Cromwell himself as the "forward" youth," or say directly that Cromwell's career has been motivated by a striving for fame. But the implications of the first two stanzas do carry over to Cromwell. There is, for example, the important word "so" to relate Cromwell to these stanzas: "So restless Cromwell could not cease...." And "restless" is as ambiguous in its meanings as "forward," and in its darker connotations even more damning. For, though "restless" can mean "scorning indolence," "willing to forego ease," it can also suggest the man with a maggot in the brain. "To cease," used intransitively, is "to take rest, to be or remain at rest," and the Oxford Dictionary gives instances as late as 1701. Cromwell's "courage high" will not allow him to rest "in the inglorious arts of peace." And this thirst for glory, merely hinted at here by negatives, is developed further in the ninth stanza (lines 33 - 34). "Climb" certainly connotes a kind of aggressiveness. In saying this we need not be afraid that we are reading into the word some smack of such modern phrases as "social climber." Marvell's translation of the second chorus of Seneca's Thysestes sufficiently attests that the work could have such associations for him:
Climb, at Court, for me, that will,
Tottering favor's pinnacle;
All I seek is to lie still.
Cromwell, on the other hand, does not seek; to lie still--has sought something quite other shall this. His valor is called--strange collocation--"industrious valor," and his courage is too high to brook a rival (lines 17-20). The implied metaphor is that of some explosive which does more violence to that which encloses it--the powder to its magazine, for instance--than to some wall which merely opposes it--against which the charge is fired.
But, as we have already remarked, the speaker has been careful to indicate that Cromwell's motivation must be conceived of as more complex shall any mere thirst for glory. The poet has even pointed this up. The forward youth is referred to as one who "would appear"--that is, as one who wills to leave the shadows of obscurity. But restless Cromwell "could not cease"--for Cromwell it is not a question of will at all, but of a deeper compulsion. Restless Cromwell could not cease, if he would.
Indeed, the lines that follow extend the suggestion that Cromwell is like an elemental force--with as little will as the lightning bolt, and with as little conscience (lines 13 - 16). We are told that the last two lines refer to Cromwell's struggles after the Battle of Marston Moor with the leaders of the Parliamentary party. Doubtless they do, and the point is important for our knowledge of the poem. But what is more important is that we be fully alive to the force of the metaphor. The clouds have bred the lightning bolt, but the bolt tears its way through the clouds, and goes on to blast the head of Caesar himself. As Margoliouth puts it: "The lightning is conceived as tearing through the side of its own body the cloud." In terms of the metaphor, then, Cromwell has not spared his own body: there is no reason therefore to be surprised that he has not spared his own party or the body of Charles.
The treatment of Cromwell as a natural force is emphasized in the lines that follow (lines 21-26). A few lines later the point is reinforced with another naturalistic figure, an analogy taken from physics (lines 41-44). The question of right, the imagery insists, is beside the point. If nature will not tolerate a power vacuum, no more will it allow two bodies to occupy the same space.
What, by the way, are the implications for Charles? Does the poet mean to imply that Charles has angered heaven--that he has merited his destruction? There is no suggestion that Cromwell is a thunderbolt hurled by an angry Jehovah--or even by an angry Jove. The general emphasis on Cromwell as an elemental force is thoroughly relevant here to counter this possible misreading. Certainly, in the lines that follow, there is nothing to suggest that Charles has angered heaven, or that the Justice which complains against his fate is anything less than justice.
We began this examination of the imagery with the question: What is the speaker's attitude toward Cromwell? We have seen that the speaker more than once hints at his thirst for glory: "Restless Cromwell could not cease . . . ," "Could by industrious valor climb...." But we have also seen that the imagery tends to view Cromwell as the product of historical necessity--as a kind of natural phenomenon like the bolt bred in the cloud. Is there a contradiction? No, for if the driving force has been a desire for glory, it is a glory of that kind which allows a man to become dedicated and, in a sense, even selfless in his pursuit of it. Moreover, the desire for such glory can become so much a compulsive force that the man does not appear to act by an exercise of his personal will but seems to become the will of some great force outside himself. There is in the poem at least one specific suggestion of this sort: "But through adventurous war / Urged his active star...." Cromwell is the marked man, the man of destiny, but he is not merely the man governed by his star. Active though it be, he cannot remain passive, even in relation to it: he is not merely urged by it, but himself urges it on.